Department of Anthropology

The California Series in Public Anthropology draws professional scholars from a wide range of disciplines to address major public issues in ways that help non-academic audiences to understand and address them. To date, the California Series in Public Anthropology has enjoyed significant success. Many prominent scholars—from Paul Farmer, Margaret Lock, and Aiwa Ong to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Philippe Bourgois, and Carolyn Nordstrom have or, will soon, be publishing in the Series. And some of the authors, such as Paul Farmer, have not only sold well beyond the academy but their writings have helped shape how particular public problems are addressed.

To reinforce this effort, the University of California Press in association with the Center for a Public Anthropology annually sponsors an international competition that awards a formal, publishing contract for the best book proposal submitted—independent of whether the author has completed (or even started) the proposed manuscript. The Series is open to working with winning authors as they wind their way toward completion. The winner will receive, in addition to a formal book contract from the University of California Press, a five thousand dollar advance.

2011 Competition Winner (a)
Victims No Longer: Trafficked Children into the United States by Elzbieta M. Gozdziak (Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University)

Human trafficking continues to capture the imagination of the global public. Particularly gut wrenching are narratives about trafficked children sold into domestic servitude or kept as sexual slaves. The imagined vulnerability of child victims, related to bio-physiological, social, behavioral, and cognitive phases of the maturity process, often results in portrayals of hopeless and hapless victims with not an ounce of resiliency or agency. Both the narratives about human trafficking as well as the efforts to address this phenomenon have centered on extreme images and stories of children’s sexual exploitation and slavery-like circumstances, eliciting emotional responses and measures that tend to focus on victim rescue and support, and punishment for offenders. The discourse about trafficked children is dominated by discussions of trauma, pathology, and vulnerability. The prominence of the discourse of ‘trauma’ as a major articulator of trafficked children’s suffering is based on the premise that just like ethnic cleansing, war, and ethnic strife, human trafficking constitutes mental health emergency and results in ‘post-traumatic stress.’ Trafficked children are therefore always victims and hardly ever survivors.

The system of care for trafficked children has been developed within a framework based on the Western conceptualization of childhood. This framework views universal concern for children as transcending political and social divides; assumes a universally applicable model of childhood; presupposes a consensus on what policies should be in place to realize the best interest of the child; assumes that child victims have universal needs, such as a need for rehabilitation; and promotes a therapeutic model of service provision. Using ethnographic data from a study of more than one hundred survivors of child trafficking, I juxtapose the survivors’ perceptions of their trafficking experiences with the programmatic responses of the federally funded network of programs aimed at assisting them in attaining economic and social self-sufficiency and integrate into the fabric of the American society. This book narrates the tensions between the local, culturally diverse, conceptualizations of childhoods, including children’s responsibilities vis-à-vis their families and livelihoods, and the legal and child welfare frameworks proscribing particular policy and programmatic responses towards survivors of child trafficking. Throughout the book I not only narrate the status quo but also set forth recommendations aimed at reconciling the gap between the survivors’ perceptions of their experiences and needs and the programmatic response of policy makers and service providers.

 www.publicanthropology.org/books-book-series/california-book-series/international-competition/