Modern Slavery and the Punitive–Humanitarian Complex

Abstract

This paper provides a critical analysis of modern slavery (MS) policy, legislation and discourse in the United Kingdom. Challenging the suggestion that recent attempts to dilute protections and guarantees in the original MS framework represent a fundamental shift from a more humanitarian to a more punitive orientation, it argues that these two moments ought to be understood as products of a single, underlying articulation, the ‘punitive–humanitarian complex’. We first explore the context and discourse of the MS agenda, exposing an ambivalence within its core tenets, primarily manifested through the dichotomy between victims (slaves) and offenders (slavers). The paper then examines how the punitive–humanitarian complex engenders moral and affective economies and reflects on how it reveals the vulnerability of contemporary state power.

INTRODUCTION

Modern slavery is an evil against which this Government are determined to take a stand. […]

We must not delay. Let us act now—together—and send a powerful message to all traffickers and slave drivers that they will not get away with their crimes: we will track them down, prosecute, and lock them up, and ensure that the victims of their appalling crimes are returned to freedom. (Theresa May MP, Home Secretary, 8 July 2014b, introducing the Modern Slavery Bill)

***

When our world-leading Modern Slavery Act 2015 was passed, the impact assessment envisaged 3,500 referrals a year […] But last year there were 17,000 referrals, which took on average 543 days to consider […] In 2021, 73% of people detained for removal put forward a modern slavery claim, which compares with a figure of just 3% for those not in detention. We have also seen a number of foreign national offenders who, after serving their sentences for some of the most despicable crimes, such as murder and rape, have, on the point of removal, put in a last-minute claim of modern slavery to thwart their deportation. The fact is that our modern slavery laws are being abused. (Suella Braverman MP, Home Secretary, 13 March 2023, introducing the Illegal Migration Bill)

Since its introduction, the UK’s modern slavery (MS) charter—the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA)—has assumed a life of its own, being appropriated in the service of wildly varying ends and commanding bipartisan consensus. Its apparent hegemonic character is reflected in how, at its inception, the MS policy and legislative framework—crystalized by the Modern Slavery Strategy document in 2014 (Strategy Document) and the subsequent MSA—were ‘met with almost no direct political opposition’ (Gadd and Broad 2018: 1441), receiving cross-party endorsement in the House of Commons. The then-Home Secretary Theresa May in introducing the MS Bill presented MS as a universally acknowledged global problem of our times, the new ‘folk devil’ of the 21st century: a pressing and urgent threat to the modern social order, a ghost returned from the primitive past and in need of eradication.

The MSA became May’s trademark policy once she became Prime Minister (Machura et al. 2019). However, the ‘modern slavery problem’ now seems to have come of age. Suella Braverman’s opening remarks to the legislative passage of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 (IMA) during her tenure as Home Secretary have prompted strident opposition, dovetailing with an earlier backlash against the Government’s introduction of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (NBA). Anti-slavery and human rights groups have accused the United Kingdom of ‘rolling back’ its earlier commitments enshrined in the MSA, particularly the removal of MS from the Government’s safeguarding remit and its reclassification as an illegal immigration and asylum issue under the NBA (Anti-Slavery International 2022; 2023; Siddique 2022). The IMA chipped away at those protections further. Its section 22 disqualifies potential victims of trafficking who arrived in the United Kingdom irregularly from a recovery period (a temporary prohibition on removal) and leave to remain, and imposes a legal duty on the Home Secretary to remove them from the United Kingdom. Narrow exceptions exist where the potential victim of trafficking cooperates with authorities in criminal investigations relating to the relevant exploitation. While having a specific impact on MS protections, the IMA goes even further, by dictating that all asylum claims made by those who enter the United Kingdom ‘irregularly’ will be declared inadmissible, effectively removing the right to asylum for the majority of the world’s refugees. Following the Government’s continuous efforts to implement its ‘Rwanda plan’ to ‘remove’ people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom to Rwanda—its latest iteration being the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 which overrides the Supreme Court’s ruling that the plan is unlawful, there is a shift in emphasis in the politics and policy of MS. The apparent consensus concerning Britain’s avowed role in fighting exploitation, of which MS was a central component, seems to have become engulfed by a profound tension between a focus on safeguarding victims on the one hand, and the need to protect the nation’s borders and integrity against perceived threats—most prominently, that of small boats crossing the English Channel—on the other.

At first glance, ‘modern slaves’ were defined by different Conservative Home Secretaries to pursue distinct and conflicting aims: one to advocate for the compassionate protection of innocent victims and the alleviation of their suffering (May), the other to cast doubt on their victim status and justify their deportation (Braverman). Indeed, critics of recent developments, including May herself, see them as downplaying a serious problem and side-lining some of the core responsibilities of the British state. At the heart of these concerns lies a sense that the original MS framework promoted an important humanitarian orientation, which is not only a formally recognized duty, but also part of Britain’s ‘mission’ as a global civilizing force. Even for the more critical voices, the original MS policy at least recognized the need for the state to adequately acknowledge the vulnerability of MS victims (Mantouvalou 2018). From this perspective, the subsequent changes represent a shift from humanitarianism to a more punitive stance focussed predominantly on the need to prevent and assertively address perceived threats to safety and security. These two orientations—humanitarian and punitive—are often construed as not only competing in a zero-sum game, but also as largely irreconcilable: a humanitarian approach inherently limits and challenges punitive measures, while a punitive agenda eschews or at least significantly weakens humanitarian guarantees and efforts.

Rather than seeing these two moments as binary opposites, which represent the shift from a more humanitarian governance of MS to a more punitive, hostile one, this paper argues that they need to be understood as products of a single, underlying conjuncture, which we term the ‘punitive–humanitarian complex’. We suggest that there is no radical rupture between the founding MS framework and the more recent emphasis on immigration controls fuelled by the populist anxiety concerning Channel crossings. This is because the latter moment was made possible by an ambivalence between compassion and hostility, care and control, which was already embedded, in a more latent form, in the original MS framework.

This ambivalence has a longer history; it can be traced back to a core ‘ambiguity in the state’s effort to manage human mobility across international borders’, which was formally enshrined by the 1951 Refugee Convention (Watson 2015: 40). Most scholars characterize this ambiguity as a problem for state power, which criminalizing efforts then seek to control and minimize. The most paradigmatic examples of such efforts can be found in two protocols supplementing the 2000 United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime: the 2000 Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air (the Smuggling Protocol) and the 2000 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (The Palermo Protocol). On the Smuggling Protocol, Watson (2015: 41) argues:

The criminalization of smuggling attempts to remove all ambiguity associated with cross border movement and insists on purity or iconic representations of both asylum seekers and smugglers to reassert categories, to make legible these liminal groups, and ultimately to reauthorize the state’s “ultimately unauthorized authority” to control human mobility.

While this purifying effort is undoubtedly part of the processes underpinning the MS framework, to focus on it exclusively arguably downplays the productive character of this ambivalence—i.e. the extent to which state power relies on the imbrication between punitiveness and humanitarianism to manage its inherent tensions.

We thus use the notion of a ‘complex’ in a cultural and psychoanalytic sense to refer to the binding together of seemingly contradictory forces within a single formation (see Kris 1984; Hook and Truscott 2013). As such, a complex is inherently underpinned by ambivalences, tensions between competing ways of thinking and feeling about issues, as well as by efforts to resolve, manage or repress conflicted feelings to preserve the complex’s overall sense of integrity and validity. The punitive–humanitarian complex is a multifaceted articulation of distinct and often contradictory logics and dispositions, which nevertheless operate together to shape our social imagination around specific notions of order, identity and belonging. The MS framework is a prime example of this dynamic: it transitions, constantly and seamlessly, between the suffering and vulnerability of victims and the depravity and heinousness of the actions of traffickers and slave drivers. Compassionate recognition of victims’ toil (when deemed legitimate) is offered on the condition that the responsibility for such suffering can be allocated to a specific class of perpetrators. In this framework, compassion and hostility are at the same time antagonistic and mutually reinforcing.

Seeing the MS framework as characterized by such a complex offers unique ways of exploring its dynamics and understanding shifts in emphasis and approach, such as the recent legislative and political developments. To do so, we rely on a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2013a; 2013b; Wodak and Meyer 2016) of MS policy and legislation, with a particular focus on the Strategy Document, the text of the MSA itself, and Hansard transcripts of the second reading and committee stage of the Modern Slavery Bill.¹ We pursue a ‘dialectical–relational’ (Fairclough 2016) approach to analysing how discourse is produced through structural, ideological and cultural tensions in the examined texts. This way, we trace semiotic elements in these texts in a situated manner, which is sensitive not only to the more explicit terms and inferences being used, but also to their symptomatic (Althusser 2016 [1965]) character, as manifestations of more deeply embedded affective structures.

The paper develops its analysis in three main sections. The first delves into the context and discourse of the MS agenda in the United Kingdom. It explores how, underneath a semblance of clarity and coherence, ambivalence pervades the MS framework, which is beset with chronic indecision and uncertainty with regard to some of its central tenets and positions. We trace these tensions to a core dichotomy in the MS framework: between victims (slaves) and offenders (slavers).² The MS agenda is caught between expressing a clear distinction between victim and offender on the one hand—characterizing victimhood and criminality in MS as respectively comprising exceptional vulnerability and exceptional dangerousness, which set the two apart from each other—and simultaneously questioning this distinction on the other, by placing the ‘genuine’ status of victims under constant suspicion and by acknowledging that offenders can themselves often be victims of exploitation. The second section discusses how this imbrication of victimhood and offending reflects the punitive–humanitarian complex and serves an ideological function: to produce and secure a culturally specific idea of order. From this perspective, the tensions identified in MS are linked to how both victims and offenders are constructed as Others and outsiders to the ‘community of value’ (Anderson 2013) at the heart of Britain’s ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]).

The third section of the paper examines how the punitive–humanitarian complex at the heart of the MS framework engenders specific moral (Fassin 2009) and affective (Ahmed 2004; 2014) economies which limit solidarity towards both sets of identities constructed in MS discourse, presenting them primarily as objects of hostility. The paper concludes by reflecting on how attending to these dynamics in MS policy reveals broader core dynamics of contemporary state power, namely its own vulnerable and paradoxical character.

THE MS FRAMEWORK AND ITS AMBIVALENCES

The MSA was brought into force with the aim of making Britain a world leader in tackling the global problem of MS—an umbrella, elastic (Kenway 2021) term that encompasses, among other wrongs, human trafficking and slavery, servitude, forced or compulsory labour, and sexual and other forms of exploitation. It consolidated existing related legislative provisions into a framework of robust enforcement, tougher sentencing and enhanced victim support. The Bill was introduced to Parliament in 2014 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May following a report estimating that there were 10,000–13,000 potential victims of MS in the United Kingdom (Silverman 2014), and a paper by the Centre for Social Justice, a right-wing think tank, advocating for a more coherent legislative framework that would facilitate better victim protection (Centre for Social Justice 2013). Since the MSA was passed, the number of potential victims reported to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) has increased year-on-year. In 2022, there were 16,938 referrals to the Home Office, representing a 33 per cent increase compared to the previous year, and the highest annual number since the NRM began in 2009 (Home Office 2023a). The increase has been largely applauded as evidence that the Government’s policy has enabled a greater proportion of these ‘hidden’ crimes to be identified and prosecuted (Haughey 2016; Home Office 2023a). Yet, some scholars (e.g. O’Connell Davidson 2015; Hodkinson et al. 2021) have linked such an increase to the impact of hostile environment policies towards irregular migrants, and the rise of exploitative and forced labour targeting them. The MS policy framework relies on the coordinated efforts of the state, its agents and a wide range of domestic and international ‘partners’ (HM Government 2014). To this end, the Home Office has published extensive guidance and promotional materials to mobilize different sectors of society against MS³ (see also, Reed et al. 2018).

The Bill was introduced in Parliament directly between two major Immigration Acts (Immigration Act 2014; Immigration Act 2016). These acts consolidated the ‘hostile environment’ policy architecture aimed at curtailing access to basic services for irregular migrants, pushing them out of the United Kingdom, and deterring others from coming. Linking illegal immigration, labour exploitation and organized crime, these distinctively contemporary laws illustrate the moral and political dilemmas of governance (Aliverti 2020) and can be read as a delicate exercise in apportioning guilt and care. The contemporaneous introduction of MS and hostile environment legislation is thus a manifestation of a tendency which, while invested in creating order through moral categorizations, is constantly haunted by the tensions and ambivalences of governance.

One such ambivalence relates to MS’s central binary: that of victim (slave) and offender (slaver). Although, in many ways, this binary resembles that which is found in criminal justice, in the MS framework it is mobilized in peculiar ways. While victims are important characters in contemporary criminal justice (Manikis 2019), they are still secondary to offenders and offenders’ relationship to the state. The victim, however, takes centre-stage in humanitarian discourse—a role reprised in the ‘victim-centric’ approach of the MS framework, while at the same time, as previously discussed, this victimhood is directly constituted in relation to offending, so that the two are indissociable; one category not only presupposes but actively necessitates the other.

This co-dependency is aptly illustrated by May’s foreword to the Strategy Document, which constantly brings the two subjectivities together, and conjoins punitive and humanitarian concerns. A few examples:

That is why I have introduced a Modern Slavery Bill – the first of its kind in Europe – to ensure tough penalties are in place, alongside important protection and support for victims […]

It puts victims at the heart of everything that we do. And it is built upon the successful frameworks we use to counter terrorism and fight organised crime […]

Together, we must send a powerful message to all traffickers and slave drivers that they will not get away with their crimes. And we must do all we can to protect, support and help victims, and ensure that they can be returned to freedom. (May 2014a: 5–6)

Last year we identified more victims and secured more convictions for crimes relating to modern slavery than ever before. (Bradley 2014: 7)

The MS framework further enshrines this duality by magnifying the exceptional aspect of each of these two positions, placing them as polar opposites of an antagonistic relationship that characterizes both parties to such an extent that this polarized exceptionality is presented as a primary element of their respective subjectivities. Thus, modern slaves are characterized not only by their vulnerability and innocence, but by how they ‘endure experiences that are horrifying in their inhumanity’ (HM Government 2014: 9).

Young girls are raped, beaten, passed from abuser to abuser and sexually exploited for profit. Vulnerable men are tricked into long hours of hard labour before being locked away in cold sheds or rundown caravans. People are made to work in fields, in factories, and on fishing vessels. Women are forced into prostitution, and children systematically exploited. Domestic workers are imprisoned and made to work all hours of the day and night for little to no pay. (May 2014a: 5)

Slavers, in turn, are characterized by their ‘heinous crime[s]’ (HM Government 2014: 46), where ‘human beings [are] used as commodities over and over again for the profit of others’ (HM Government 2014: 9)—a motive which is presented as a unique feature of the MS relation. Thus understood, both victimhood and offending in MS are taken outside of the realm of ‘common’ harm and wrongdoing, giving these subjectivities a veneer of ‘normative otherness’ (Lianos 2013) that sets them apart and makes them appear distinctive, both from ‘normal’ criminality and from each other.

This normative subjectification of victims and offenders within MS works to stoke anxiety by giving MS an aura of emergency, thus promoting a moral imperative to actively seek to identify, prevent and redress its occurrence, a duty which is imposed on state agents, its civil society ‘partners’ and the public. The validity of this imperative largely relies not only on the idea that MS is a coherent, easily intelligible phenomenon, but also on the construction of ideal images of victim and offender, which predominantly rely on gendered, racialized and classed tropes (see Christie 1986; Schwöbel-Patel 2018). This framing dramatically juxtaposes the vulnerability of slaves and the wickedness of slavers as inversed reflections of one another. This, in turn, gives rise to the assumption that instances of MS are clear-cut, a perception i.e. encouraged by the ‘case studies’ of the Strategy Document, which provide largely uncontroversial (and over-simplified) examples of the four main ‘types’ of MS exploitation: labour, sexual, criminal and domestic servitude.

However, in very few cases do circumstances adhere to these ideal types and scenarios, instead revealing a more complex picture in which victimhood and criminality are hard to define and to distinguish. There are hints of this complex reality in aspects of MS policy: from the very imprecision of what constitutes MS, to the recognition that there is a plethora of types of exploitation and that MS constitutes a ‘hidden crime’. To that, we can add anxieties about the state and the public’s capacity to correctly recognize and report instances of MS, especially due to victims’ failure or unwillingness to identify themselves as ‘slaves’, and to the fact that MS can often overlap and be confused with other crimes (Short and Lloyd 2016; Machura et al. 2019). Above all, the professed certainty and clarity of the MS framework is betrayed by anxieties concerning the very identities of victim and offender, grounded on the realization that offenders might themselves be victims of exploitation, and on fear and suspicion that those claiming to be victims might in fact be attempting to sidestep border controls, or potentially criminals seeking to avoid punishment by claiming coercion. These anxieties are further enhanced by a culture of mistrust around migration and asylum, which has been fomented by successive UK administrations through ‘hostile environment’ policies (Aliverti 2015; Hynes 2022).

There is a sense in which these insecurities can undermine the clarity and ‘effectiveness’ of instruments such as the MSA (Mantouvalou 2018; Balch 2019). However, there is also a capacity in which these ambivalences are productive, as they can be used to feed into fictions (Aliverti 2023) and phantasies (Reeves 2019), of which the state is a key producer, that bypass political economies of violence and exploitation and thus reinforce specific images of order and state authority. For instance, uncertainty around the boundaries of victimhood and criminality can incentivize the adoption of selective approaches which focus on specifically constructed figures, such as the ‘trafficked sex slave’, to promote conservative moral agendas and restrictive immigration policies (O’Connell Davidson 2010; 2015; 2017; Barrientos et al. 2013; Brace and O’Connell Davidson 2018; Balch 2019; Koch 2020; Hodkinson et al. 2021; Pesterfield 2021). Likewise, the ambivalences regarding the scope and nature of MS can serve to ‘stok[e] anxiety’ (APPG 2017) around issues of national integrity and security, which can be channelled towards specific individuals and communities.

Thus, what might initially appear as imprecision and ‘messiness’ can, upon analysis, be revealed as functional, if not entirely purposive. While ambivalences in the MS framework do compromise its sense of coherence, and are thereby something which must be negated and omitted in official discourse, they are simultaneously necessitated by the very image of order on which MS is grounded, and which it seeks to legitimize and secure.

THE PUNITIVE–HUMANITARIAN COMPLEX AND THE LIMINALITY OF VICTIMHOOD

Following the victim–offender duality at the centre of the MS framework, the moral imperatives that it compels are channelled through two main discursive formations—punitive (offender-focussed) and humanitarian (victim-focussed)—which are manifested in policy and legislative forms. These two formations superficially appear clearly defined and distinct; closer analysis, however, reveals that they are heavily imbricated and intermeshed.

Despite its avowed ‘victim-centric’ humanitarian ethos, many aspects of the MS framework appear predominantly punitive—including the MSA itself. Most of the substance of the MSA is dedicated to criminalization: Part 1 enacts two substantive offences (‘slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour’ and ‘human trafficking’) which carry severe punishment (life imprisonment, increased from 14 years) and a provision to increase the severity of any offence which is carried out with the intent of committing the two aforementioned substantive offences (with a penalty of up to 10 years of imprisonment). Part 2 creates two sets of preventive measures: the Slavery and Trafficking Prevention Orders, targeting those who have been convicted of an offence, and the Slavery and Trafficking Risk Orders, targeting anyone who ‘acted in a way which means that … there is a risk that [they] will commit a slavery or human trafficking offence’. These orders effectively impose restrictions on individuals, breach of which constitutes a criminal offence. While an essential aspect of these measures is to protect MS victims, they are nonetheless constituted as punitive in the sense that their main emphasis is on hostility (Carvalho and Chamberlen 2018) and dangerousness (Carvalho 2017; 2023): they orient action and perception through a focus on the danger of slavers and the need to act aggressively and decisively against them. A more humanitarian orientation only appears in the MSA in Part 5, which is dedicated to the ‘protection of victims’.

And yet, despite these categorizations, the very first provision in that Part of the Act, section 45 (s45), effectively blurs the line between victimhood and offending by providing a statutory defence for slavery or trafficking victims who are compelled to commit certain types of offences⁴ by reason of their exploitation. While this section enshrines the international principle of non-punishment (ICAT 2020) and recognizes that forms of exploitation often involve conduct i.e. considered illegal, such recognition undermines the common full-throated claim that offender and victim are mutually exclusive human kinds (Hacking 1986). This, in turn, concedes that victimhood and offending are not easily identifiable and distinguishable; the s45 defence raises the serious problem that what looks like dangerous, criminal behaviour, deserving of condemnation and hostility, maybe a marker of vulnerability and exploitation, and therefore demanding compassion and protection (for an analysis of the opposite dynamic, see Carvalho 2020; 2023).

The imbrication of MS victim and offender thus goes beyond the nexus of exploitation which is required to define both identities; it pervades them to such an extent that it destabilizes them. The s45 defence is perhaps the most prominent sign in the MSA of the ambivalence undermining the MS framework’s primary categories. It is no wonder, then, that the defence has been viewed with suspicion by many, and its effectiveness has been narrowed by court decisions such as R v DS [2020] EWCA Crim 285 and R v Brecani [2021] EWCA Crim 731.

The Court of Appeal held in R v DS that determining facts to establish the status of ‘victim’ for the purpose of relying on the s45 defence is solely a matter for the jury, and that potential victims cannot pursue an abuse of process remedy for ongoing prosecution of crimes. Subsequently, in R v Brecani, the court clarified that Conclusive Grounds decisions by the NRM (see below) are not admissible as expert evidence to establish victimhood. Both decisions operate to limit the availability of the defence and significantly increase the likelihood of victims of slavery and trafficking being convicted of criminal offences. Familiar ‘rule of law’ arguments justifying tight regulations of criminal defences—such as duress and necessity (Norrie 2014)—are compounded here with a deep mistrust towards the outsider identity of the offender-cum-victim. By restricting s45’s scope, the courts sought to strengthen the expectation that the defence should be admissible only in a few exceptional cases. While aimed at minimizing the ambivalence of the offender identity, such reading of the defence in practice directs the ambivalence more squarely towards the figure of the victim—who is already infused with considerable insecurity.

We can see a similar underlying mistrust, and hence ambivalence, towards the slavery victim in the regulation of the NRM, the main instrument for victim identification and protection in the MS framework (CPS 2020). MS policy identifies a list of ‘First Responder’ agencies and organizations who can refer someone to the NRM; the case is then handed either to the ‘Single Competent Authority’ (SCA) or to the ‘Immigration Enforcement Competent Authority’ (IECA), who are charged with evaluating whether the referred person merits recognition as an MS victim (Home Office 2023b). The first significant stage of this process for adults is an entry point decision called ‘Reasonable Grounds’ which, if positive, recognizes the person as a ‘potential victim of modern slavery’. This entitles a ‘potential victim’ to receive limited support provided by the Salvation Army and its partners, which includes food, accommodation, some limited aid and the possibility of access to a key worker (Salvation Army 2020). This is a precarious position, meant to provide an opportunity for ‘reflection’ and ‘recovery’ (Salvation Army 2020) while the referred person waits for a ‘Conclusive Grounds’ decision, which would identify them as a ‘confirmed victim of modern slavery’. Even if this status is acquired, the support provided is mostly temporary, its main aspect being the possibility of being given a ‘discretionary leave to remain’ of up to 3 years, with ‘no ‘durable solution’ or right to remain available as a result (Hynes 2022). The largely provisional recognition and support of victims in the MS framework are further undermined by the fact that victim status is shrouded in suspicion as an avenue for potential abuse. This is evidenced by language such as ‘genuine’ or ‘legitimate’ when ascertaining whether someone is a victim in the context of an NRM referral, and by how, historically, the majority of referred individuals fail to receive a positive Conclusive Grounds decision in the process (see HM Government 2014; Hynes 2022).⁵ The victim identity in the MS framework is thus profoundly liminal, precarious and uncertain—even though the recognition of victims is the basic premise of the MS charter.

The liminality of victimhood in MS is magnified by the fact that this identity is given, both in policy and discourse, an ostensive outsider status. MS victims are mostly assumed to be of foreign origin, and to have entered the country illegally, even though ‘vernacular slaves’ (particularly drug runners or carriers within the so-called ‘county lines’ network) account for a substantial number of slavery victims (see Koch 2020; 2024). The assumed foreignness of the slave juxtaposes immigration and asylum with criminal justice, as discussed above, adding another dimension to the punitive–humanitarian complex in which MS is inserted (Hodkinson et al. 2021; Hynes 2022).

In humanitarian discourse, the ‘victim’ label has been denounced as depoliticizing as well as depersonalizing, advancing a hard bargain whereby to receive the limited protection offered to victims one must be disqualified as a political subject, since victims do not act but need others to act on their behalf (O’Connell Davidson 2010; Ticktin 2011). This stigmatizing, objectifying aspect of victimhood is heightened in the MS context; besides making the status of the victim even more undesirable and complicating the identification of victims by skewing perceptions of victimhood and offending (see Machura et al. 2019), the ‘slave’ identity also functions as a cultural symbol, embodying general fears of objectification, infantilization, feminization, exclusion and dishonour. Furthermore, the image of the slave acts as an instrument of boundary maintenance (Durkheim 1964; Smith 2008; Carvalho and Chamberlen 2024), as this symbolic figure offers a stark contrast to that of the modern, civilized, autonomous, masculine liberal subject, reinforcing the latter’s virtue. Since a slave is defined by their lack of control over their destiny, the liberal subject can take a position of unreserved pity in relation to the slave, and thus discover themselves as reasonable and compassionate. The slave is the ultimate, suffering, pre-modern Other, against which civility can be measured (see O’Connell Davidson 2010).

As previously mentioned, both victimhood and offending in MS are engulfed by normative otherness, as slavers and slaves are both constituted as paradigmatic outsiders, in time and space, to the modern and liberal social imagination. This normativity not only essentializes these identities, but also (paradoxically) confuses them, as the victim/offender duality seems to collapse under the ostensible otherness that they share. This reflection on boundary maintenance brings to the fore another central aspect of the imbrication within the punitive–humanitarian complex: both tendencies contained within it are embedded in and perform a role in securing a specific social imaginary (Taylor 2003; Carvalho 2017). The ‘fraught politics of victimhood’ (Koch 2020) and offending which are at the heart of the MS framework enmesh logics and imperatives of care and control, hostility and compassion, because both are necessitated by the fragile moral order which lies at the core of this imaginary, itself torn between nationalist and post-imperial ambitions and desires.

The rhetoric and justifications at the heart of the MS framework invoke and conjure an imagined community with identifiable boundaries, positioning MS as a diagnostic of the moral fabric of British society. Parliamentary debates on the MS Bill featured an almost obsessive reiteration of Britain’s civilizing mission on the global stage, with recurrent references to the Bill sending ‘a clear signal, not just at home but abroad’ of Britain’s anti-slavery resolve and the nation’s desire to ‘live up to’ William Wilberforce’s abolitionist ‘legacy’ (e.g. Spelman 2014). This ‘clear signal’ ultimately serves to signpost the existence of a community of value (Anderson 2013) within the imaginary of the British state, which shapes and conditions the borders of belonging by contrasting the image of ‘good citizens’ against that of Others—be it those who are identified as ‘non-citizens’, such as foreign traffickers and their trafficked victims, or those who are characterized as ‘failed’ citizens by falling outside the community of value via their illiberal actions, such as drug dealers and their enslaved county line ‘runners’.

These historical evocations of Britain’s reprisal of its role as a ‘global leader’ are a fixture in MS discourse. A complex of post-colonial amnesia (Gilroy 2004), grief and guilt, these remarks evidence what Gadd and Broad (2018: 1444) call Britain’s cultural ‘compulsive obsession with moral superiority on the world stage’. The British Government’s stated goal of leading the world in the fight against MS lies in stark contrast with the predominantly domestic scope and orientation of MS policy, evidently reflected in the MS framework being housed in the Home Office and its enforcement being centred around the UK territorial borders. During the second reading of the MS Bill in the House of Commons, these contradictions surfaced in tense Parliamentary exchanges about the irrelevance of the Bill to global supply chains, occasionally undermining its otherwise largely uncontested cross-party appeal. In the wake of the draft Bill’s appraisal by a Joint Committee, leading Parliamentarians from across the political spectrum bemoaned the Bill’s omission to require UK-based businesses to address the prevalence of transnational forced labour in products that reach the British market, with some even hinting at the suitability of imposing corporate criminal liability for failures to prevent supply chain slavery (following the Bribery Act 2010 model). These concerns were ultimately only addressed in diluted form—a corporate requirement to publish a transparency statement—which differs significantly from the harsh penalties mandated by the MSA in domestic cases. The MS framework thus encodes vulnerability to exploitation (MSA s3) as a human quality that can only be concretely possessed inside the border.

This contrast between individualizing harshness and corporate leniency highlights a further ambivalence within the MS framework. The economic and relational harms that comprise MS represent a threat to the values and integrity of liberal, capitalist society (O’Connell Davidson 2010; Machura et al. 2019)—but so does the suggestion that this society and its markets contribute to, and in many ways produce, the forms of exploitation at the heart of MS (Hodkinson et al. 2021; Pesterfield 2021). The imbrication within the punitive–humanitarian complex contributes to reinforcing an individualized notion of exploitation encapsulated by the victim–offender duality. In presenting these normative identities as intermeshed aberrations confronting British society—rather than the result of complexities and problems within it—this complex works to sanitize the community of value maintained by the British state, at the same time as it enables a politics of exceptionalism that justifies state control and intervention over those placed outside the boundaries of this community.

MORAL AND AFFECTIVE ECONOMIES OF MODERN SLAVERY

It can thus be argued that the competing and often contradictory rationales and motives that the punitive–humanitarian complex entangles, reproduces and reinforces are manifestations of an inherent ambivalence within the civil order (Farmer 2016; Carvalho 2017; 2023) at the heart of the social imaginary of the British state. To secure such order and manage its tensions—between global, post-imperial ambitions and local fragmentation and provincialism; between egalitarian ideals and realities of structural violence, marginalization and oppression—the state (as a field of cultural and ideological action) necessitates significant symbolic and affective work. We argue that the MS policy field is part of a key apparatus to ‘smoothen out’ these tensions and mobilize them in a way that preserves the sense of validity and integrity of the British state’s ‘colonially constructed’ social order (El-Enany 2020), by articulating a set of moral and affective economies.

According to Didier Fassin (2009: 37), a ‘moral economy’ can be defined as ‘the production, distribution, circulation, and use of moral sentiments, emotions and values, and norms and obligations in social space’. The term suggests an economic character to the moral domain: values, norms and emotions are produced, they are (asymmetrically) distributed, they circulate and are put to specific uses. At the same time, it also presses the need to recognize an important moral dimension to the organization of the social world; i.e. in a similar vein to the notion of ‘political economy’, from which it partly derives (see Thompson 1971; 1991; Fassin 2009), it highlights how modes of production and structures of power are significantly conditioned by values, norms and emotions. In this sense, Fassin (2009: 50) suggests that moral economies always ought to be examined in the plural, emphasizing how they always involve an element of competition, a cultural struggle for the hegemony of meaning, for what and who can define the content and contours of the community of value at the heart of the state. This concept thus enables us to consider ‘historically situated moral configurations and to analyze the related political issues’ (Fassin 2009: 43).

From this perspective, the punitive–humanitarian complex can be explored as a moral configuration which articulates specific economies of values, norms and emotions. This articulation undoubtedly has a legitimating, reassuring function, enabling state officials ‘to shore up popular consent beyond a politics of “law and order” where decades of neo-liberal policy have brought their democratic mandates under attack’ (Koch 2020: n.p.). The highly moralized discourse contained in MS also has a strong ideological dimension, as in ‘mixing the language of law and policy with moral pronouncement, state and non-state actors posture themselves as defenders of rights and keepers of the public interest as they push their agendas and stake out distinct positions’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016: 77). But this ideological aspect of MS discourse should not be essentialized; rather, the very ambivalence within the framework suggests that MS hosts a complex moral field and a political arena ‘where different sets of actors communicatively compete and deliberate over its framing and assign moral legitimacy to their frames; calling upon modern values and principles, they define the problem, assign responsibility to specific parties, and devise potential solutions’ (Gutierrez-Huerter et al. 2021: 36). The complexities and shifts within the MS framework attest to the complex’s ethical malleability; they also arguably reflect how specific ethical issues tend to be subsumed under power dynamics and the need to preserve an underpinning idea of order. Such preservation extends to moralizing (and often criminalizing) the behaviour of ‘dysfunctional Others’ who might obstruct this order (Mukherjee 2003), while simultaneously using humanitarian reason to ‘govern precarious lives’ by directing compassion ‘from above to below, from the more powerful to the weaker, the more fragile, the more vulnerable’ (Fassin 2011: 4). The punitive–humanitarian complex thus operates within MS discourse to manage moral imperatives and moral sentiments through constructions of victimhood in the face of profound inequality. The complex has been strategically operationalized to ‘activate a host of technical and legal mechanisms of control in the name of saving the vulnerable’ (Koch 2020: n.p.), and to mimic solidarity while reinforcing hierarchical structures of domination and fuelling popular punitivism.

While Fassin’s reworking of the concept of moral economy emphasizes that ‘emotions are not separate from values or norms’ (Fassin 2009: 37), and that moral economies therefore have an undeniable affective character, this aspect is somewhat underdeveloped within his framework. In contrast, emotions are at the core of Sara Ahmed’s (2004; 2014) concept of affective economies. For Ahmed, emotions are formed precisely in the space ‘in-between’—i.e. in the contact, relation and interaction ‘between bodies and signs’ (Ahmed 2004: 117). Thus understood, emotions are a kind of embodied force which binds, attracts and repels; they condition the way that relations between bodies and signs are perceived, and thus ‘create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds’ (Ahmed 2004). This perspective alerts us to the emotionality of discourse, not only in the sense of discourse that uses emotive language, but also to how even seemingly ‘dry’ and ‘unemotional’ legal discourse has affective underpinnings and becomes affective once it is ‘encountered’ by bodies, as in the mobilization of political rhetoric, institutional practices and public debates. Emotions such as fear, loss and belonging are central to understanding the ‘nation’; they produce spaces of likeness and unlikeness, creating the ‘boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an outside’ (Ahmed 2014: 45). To understand MS policies and discourse, then, we need to grasp the moral and affective economies that they activate, mobilize and forge.

At the heart of the moral and affective economies of MS lies dynamics of boundary maintenance which set both victims and offenders apart from the imaginary community of value of the nation, positioning them as Others who invade and disturb the civil order of the British state. This is scarcely recent; already at the Committee stage of the passage of the MS Bill, racialized sentiments were central to key arguments in support of the MSA. Members of Parliament presumed that MS victims were almost always foreign nationals, whose ‘bonds stretch back to the home country’ (e.g. Stunnell 2014). At the same stage of the Bill’s passage, several examples were raised of racialized people whom the pre-MSA legal regime railed to recognize as victims, such as:

I met a gentleman from China who has been trafficked around the country for 11 years as a chef in various restaurants […] There was also a good exposé of the trade for curry houses in London. Many people are brought here and told that they will be trained, so they think they will be able to stay on as a chef, but then find that they have a one-year visa. They cannot go back home, because they have often borrowed a lot of money from the people who brought them here and who are connected to the restaurants in which they are working. The gentleman from China said to me, “I do not want to go back to mainland China; also, I can’t go back because it would bring shame on my family, because I would have failed.” That is exactly the story of people trapped in London in Asian restaurants […] ( Connarty 2014).

Similarly, perpetrators were identified as outsiders by definition, an undesired ‘import’: ‘the UK does not welcome anybody who is involved in this crime […] this is not a place they can come to and they will suffer if they do’ (Karen Bradley MP, MS Bill Deb 2 September 2014 col 89). These dynamics reflect a familiar history of racialized moral panics in the United Kingdom, such as the presumed blackness of ‘muggers’ (Hall et al. 1978), or the panic around South Asian ‘child grooming rings’ (Gill and Harrison 2015). The MS framework reproduces these racialized sentiments while simultaneously imbricating such ‘panic’ and hostility with more seemingly compassionate impulses of ‘pity’ (Gadd and Broad 2018; Sirriyeh 2018). Thus, victims and offenders are shrouded in an aspect of estrangement (Sparks 2008), both ultimately unbelonging and undesirable. Compassion towards the victim is posed as a duty, a display of tolerance fuelled by pity. The unfiltered estrangement of the offender, in turn, allows for assertive hostility: they are ‘not welcome’ and ‘will suffer’ if they ‘come’—for they must come from somewhere else, and wherever they are from, it is certain in this framework that they do not belong. The rhetoric embedded in MS—the whitewashing of Britain’s role in slavery and the white saviourism that underpins contemporary discourses—reminds us of the centrality of race in humanitarianism (Pallister-Wilkins 2022).

Moreover, this Othering further complicates idea(l)s of innocence i.e. required of ‘genuine’ MS victims. For Miriam Ticktin (2017: 579), such ideals ‘regulate’ and ‘produce’ the proper boundaries of being human and therefore of deservingness: they are central to determining what kinds of suffering merit recognition (see also Christie 1986). However, in being inherently Othered, the idealized MS victim is always tainted with suspicion and distrust, at best characterized by traits such as ‘docility’, ‘passivity’ and ‘guilelessness’. One primary reflection of this in MS Parliamentary debates lies in the problematization of consent, framed as ‘a very grey concept’ (MS Bill Deb 2 September 2014 col 64), reflecting the issue that MS victims are often taken to be complicit in some way with their own enslavement. The need to safeguard victims was thus often predicated on presenting them as infantilized, naive (e.g. Nandy 2014), fearful or ‘tricked’ (May 2014c) into their predicaments. Consequently, the MS victim is constructed as irremediably ‘implicated in her own situation of exploitation, and her status quickly shifts from endangered to dangerous, innocent to delinquent. We lose her as an exemplar of innocence and must look for someone new’ (Ticktin 2017: 583). As such, although there is a significant investment in the ‘purity or iconic representation’ (Watson 2015: 41) of MS victims, such idealized victims are always far from ideal, in the sense that their innocence is never ‘pure’, never unconditional. Consequently, identification with and sympathy for such victims is always tentative and precarious.

Thus, the liminal status of victimhood in the MS framework serves to demarcate and produce the boundaries of a community of value to which such victims cannot fully belong; at best, they are ‘failed’ (Anderson 2013) subjectivities whose very status as a victim puts their potential to be a ‘good’ member of the community into question. This liminality is an inherent aspect of the imbrication between compassion and hostility in the MS framework. Humanitarianism as a mode of action has been traditionally characterized by its capacity to defer and displace questions of responsibility for suffering (Fassin 2011; Ticktin 2017). But the precarious compassion engendered by MS victimhood is unable to morally and affectively lead to any apparent resolution or satisfaction; instead, it only ‘works’ as part of an apparatus i.e. ultimately geared to hostility towards MS and its perpetrators: ‘The bar to fighting human trafficking and modern slavery is the identification of victims’ (Latham 2014). While concern for victims remains central to the economic dynamics of MS, it is a concern that can only be properly addressed through punitive logics: there is no compassion without hostility. Likewise, there is no hostility without compassion; victimhood is an essential component of the Otherness attributed to slavers. But the affective position of the victim is precarious, unstable; we cannot settle on concern for victims, just as victimhood itself is persistently unsettled in the MS framework: always under review, temporary, under suspicion, oscillating between pity and distrust. As such, it is easy to see how enhanced insecurity and political expediency can feed into the punitive–humanitarian complex to enable a reappropriation of the MS agenda in recent legislative and political developments.

CONCLUSION: AMBIVALENT FEELINGS IN A VULNERABLE STATE

The punitive–humanitarian complex sets in motion moral and affective economies in which compassion and hostility feed off each other, albeit in diverse and multifaceted ways: sometimes antagonizing, sometimes mutually reinforcing, but always interrelated. Through this push and pull, these economies engender a ‘production of the ordinary’ (Ahmed 2004: 118; see also Das 2007) which, in this case, is predicated on the exceptionality of MS and the Otherness of its related subjectivities. This production, in turn, shapes and frames the socio-political imagination, suggesting both necessities and limits for action, and significantly conditioning the distribution of sympathy—who or what ought to be considered a legitimate subject/object of concern. In these economies, there are mechanics of solidarity involved: MS discourse highlights conditions of exploitation and exclusion, often extreme, and establishes them as important issues to be addressed by ‘us’ collectively. However, rather than a concrete, expansive form of solidarity that could accurately reflect the more cosmopolitan aspirations in the idealized notion of a global ‘fight’ against MS, what primarily appears is a restrictive, repressive conception of solidarity, which is defensive, inward-looking and predominantly hostile.

It is particularly important for these dynamics of solidarity that MS victims are also ‘them’. Modern slaves are both idealized and negated as victims, in a way that functions primarily to help define the boundaries of the community of value, reinforcing the image of who ‘we’ are. In this sense, it is important to note how ‘our’ imagined community was from the outset characterized also as a victim—perhaps the main, ‘real’ victim—of MS, an alien danger that ‘has no place in Britain’ (Theresa May MP, HC Deb 8 July 2014 vol 584 col 166). The entirety of the MS agenda in the United Kingdom is predicated on this sense of vulnerability embedded in the British state’s characterization of and responses to the problem: a sense of emergency premised on the vulnerable autonomy of British citizens and society (Ramsay 2012).

The conjuncture that hosts the punitive–humanitarian complex thus ultimately reflects a crisis of authority in the attempts of a vulnerable state to hold on to a constructed notion of civil order and to the myths and fictions that are necessary to maintain it. It is the vulnerable, insecure character of this social imaginary that grounds the ambivalences within the MS framework, and requires their repression through fictions of certainty and virtue. Recent developments, rather than suggesting a rupture with these processes, represent their amplification, a heightening of suspicion that acts as a kind of ‘doubling-down’ against the increasingly vulnerable authority of the British state.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their feedback and critical engagement with the paper. We are also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support in funding the Vulnerable State project. The opinions and any errors are our own.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [RPG-2022-218].

Footnotes

1

These texts amounted to over 200 pages of discursive data that we coded and analysed for the purposes of this paper.

2

The terms ‘slave(s)’ and ‘slaver(s)’ are notoriously contentious, given their historical context and connotations. However, we decided to continue to deploy these terms precisely because they allude to the cultural construction of the identities of victims and perpetrators of modern slavery, whose images and representations continue to be influenced by historical biases, as expressed in victims’ reluctance to identify with the ‘slave’ label.

3

See, e.g. www.gov.uk/government/collections/modern-slavery.

4

Schedule 4 of the MSA sets out numerous criminal offences to which the section 45 defence does not apply.

5

There is no formal right to appeal a Reasonable or Conclusive Grounds decision. In the absence of a prescribed appeals process, the only possible avenue to contest such decisions is therefore the general law of judicial review.