Ms Sanja Milivojevic

Ms Sanja Milivojevic
(Monash University)

Women’s Bodies, the Moral Panic, and the State: Anti-trafficking Initiatives and its Implications to Women’s Lives – All too Familiar?

Abstract:

Estimates that thousands, even millions of women have been kept as sex slaves (Raymond at al. 2002) dominate the trafficking debate since the late 1990s. Although scarcely corroborated with data and empirical research, these estimates have been widely used by peculiar coalition of western governments, religious, international, and non-governmental organizations, and feminist abolitionist scholarship, united to protect innocent women from the Global South, and prevent organized crime networks to lure them into sex industry. As a result, the contemporary trafficking moral panic has emerged. In this paper I will argue that 'protective measures' imposed by nation states and international community to prevent "disastrous human right abuses" (Crouse 2006) of ‘modern slavery’ (Bales 1999, Bertone 2000, Doezema 2000, Hughes 2001, Jeffreys 2002, US Department of State 2006) have further limited women’s already narrow options.

Biographical note:

Sanja Milivojevic is a PhD candidate at Monash University in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, School of Political and Social Inquiry. Her research is in the field of sex trafficking in Serbia and Australia, with a particular focus on how victims of trafficking have been constructed in Serbian and Australian culture, and what are its implications to women’s status inside the criminal justice system and anti-trafficking initiatives in both countries. Sanja holds a BA and MA from Belgrade University Law School, and has worked as a researcher on various projects with the Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research in Belgrade. In 2000, as a part of an American Bar Association project, she conducted pilot-research and developed/tested a research/assessment tool for the implementation of CEDAW. Sanja has also been a member of several human rights and women’s rights non-governmental organizations. She was also one of the founders of the Victimology Society of Serbia, and was instrumental in establishing the first Victim Support Service in the Balkan region. In 2001-2002, Sanja was a Public Interest Law Fellow at Columbia University Law School in New York City, USA, where she studied and worked on several projects and internships. In 2003, she completed a World Society of Victimology postgraduate course in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Finally, Sanja has participated in several international and domestic conferences and has published a number of articles in both Serbian and English. Her most recent publication is a book titled “Trafficking in People in Serbia” for where she was one of the co-authors.

return to Conference program