Cinderella deceived. Analyzing a Brazilian myth regarding trafficking in persons. This article provides an overview of how trafficking in persons has come to be imagined in Brazil. We stipulate that a mythical narrative has become central to discourses about trafficking used to guide policy-makers and educate civil society. We perform a structural analysis of this myth arguing that its acceptance, combined with the persistence of laws that define trafficking solely as the migration of prostitutes, has shifted public discussion towards a paradigm of passivity and law enforcement where members of certain social categories must be "educated to understand that they are victims" and their movements must be curtailed.
Keywords: Trafficking in persons, prostitution, Brazil, myths. The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. It has now become common sense knowledge that trafficking in persons is supposedly the second most lucrative crime in the world after drug trafficking, involving some 2. Among the bits of received wisdom regarding trafficking which have been reproduced across the global mediascape is that the majority of these victims are women and children recruited for sexual slavery.
What exactly constitutes trafficking in persons and how its victims should be identified, counted and aided, however, are questions that are still open today, nine years after the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons the Palermo Protocol went into effect 3.
Multiple and contested criteria have been employed by actors within a series of fields 4 the prostitutes' and immigrants' rights movements, abolitionism 5 , the struggles against child labor and sexual exploitation, nationalist anti-sexual tourism campaigns, etc. A diverse series of activities that have long been part of the global scenario and which have generally been recognized and repressed as illegal at least among the nations of Europe, South and North America are today being swept under the rubric of "trafficking in persons", including sexual exploitation variously defined , forced labor, organ removal, forced marriages, illegal adoption, begging and forced participation in armed conflicts UNODC, Within each national context what is and what is not considered to be trafficking in persons is being actively constructedagainst the general backdrop of the stipulations of the Palermo Protocol following the correlation of forces, conceptual disputes, historical demands and legal dispositions present in each society.
Trafficking in persons thus isn't so much an "unrecognized crime" as it is a glocalized 6 conceptual reorganization of existing criminal and semi-legal activities within the boundaries of the nascent and burgeoning political field of international law enforcement.
