Brown University doctoral student, Stacey L. Vanderhurst, under the supervision of Dr. Daniel J. Smith, will undertake research on the intertwined phenomena of migration and human trafficking, including how the two may be presented as humanitarian problems, regulated by states, and experienced by the people who move. The researcher will conduct 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nigeria, a source site for both trafficking and migration. The research will focus on returned trafficking victims, including studying the content of rehabilitation programs, vocational training, and prevention efforts, particularly at shelters fo returned victims, through participant observation, interviews, and textual analysis. She also will use participant observation, interviews and creative writing exercises to explore how women identified as human trafficking victims understand, experience, and navigate these programs. Finally, she will trace the connections between these everyday practices and larger state policies, through key informants with officials, collaborating NGOs, and bilateral sponsor institutions.
This research is important because while most social science work on trafficking and migration focuses on destinations, this project will situate the research within the broader social, cultural, and institutional context of the sending nation. Thus, it considers how migration may be managed by a migrant-sending state like Nigeria, as well as how individual migrants navigate those policies. This project also contributes to the education of a social scientist.
For this research project, Brown University doctoral candidate Stacey Vanderhurst, supervised by Dr. Daniel Jordan Smith, conducted 12 months of fieldwork in Lagos, Nigeria, at a rehabilitation shelter for women identified as victims of human trafficking. Over the past ten years, thousands of women have been intercepted as trafficking victims while trying to migrate out of Nigeria. Many of these women have initiated their own travel but are stopped before reaching their final destination. Nigerian officials proudly describe this form of intervention as preemptive, having successfully captured the women before they enter foreign sex industries. Yet, whether or not these women would consent to this kind of work, most of the so-called victims don’t see their experiences in these terms. This study explores the tensions between the goals of these migrant women and those of the government officials ostensibly trying to help them. Preliminary findings suggest that both shelter staff and residents remain ambivalent about the terms of the rehabilitation program, although most ultimately seek to make the most of the modest resources available there by encouraging women to pursue other careers at home. This is interesting because most scholarly work does not consider how migrant-sending states might discourage migrants from leaving, while also suggesting new practices of citizenship and governance by shifting the terms citizens can use to make claims on the state. While some women take these new opportunities in stride, others remain determined to travel out and disregard all advice and warnings offered by shelter staff. This continued resistance suggests that counter-trafficking programs can best help and protect migrant women by aiming to prevent all kinds of migrant exploitation, rather than just preventing migration alone.
