Prefiguring stigma in post‐trafficking lives: Relational geographies of return and reintegration

Central to the welfare of survivors of human trafficking and reduction of post‐trafficking vulnerabilities are the restoration of dignity, building of resilience, and, ideally, facilitating of strategies for empowerment. While ostensibly the delivery of post‐trafficking supports propose to address these concerns, particularly in the context of return and reintegration programmes, critical scholarship on anti‐trafficking has identified a range of problems with the ability of existing interventions to achieve these outcomes. Building on these critiques, this paper examines the effects of stigma on post‐trafficking lives, particularly as they stymie the possibilities for victims to move on. Discussion in the paper centres on the ways stigma is prefigured during the process and act of leaving. The home country and the destination are considered as key sites of departure where leaving establishes bases for stigmatised returns from trafficking. Three modalities of departure are discussed in the paper: the “theatre of celebratory departure” from the home country; the financial processes in the home country that facilitate and organise migration; and the biopolitical classification of migrants/victims in the trafficking destination. The paper draws on a relational approach to framing discussion, with such an approach allowing for a view of trafficking as characterised by multiple intersections and flows, temporally and geographically. Experiences of trafficked male and female migrant labourers from the Philippines sojourning in or transiting through Singapore are drawn on to illustrate the arguments in the paper.