Human trafficking has generated intense global concern, with stories of sex slavery and images of women forced into prostitution so persuasive that states have raced to respond ahead of empirical data and clear definitions of the crime. In Trafficking Rhetoric, Annie Hill analyzes the entanglement of state veneration and state violence by tracking how the United Kingdom points to the alleged crimes of others in order to celebrate itself and conceal its own aggression. Hill compares the UK’s acclaimed rescue approach to human trafficking with its hostile approach to migration, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin—one that relies on rhetorical constructions of “trafficked women” and “illegal migrants” to materialize the UK as an Anglo-white space.
Drawing from official estimates, policy papers, NGO reports, news stories, and awareness campaigns and situating them in the broader EU context, Hill accounts for why the UK’s antitrafficking agenda emerged with such rhetorical force in the early twenty-first century. Trafficking Rhetoric reframes controversies over labor, citizenship, and migration while challenging the continued traction of race-baiting and gender bias in determining who has the right to live, work, and belong in the nation.
The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.
In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.
Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.
Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.
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