Fear and Human Trafficking

Abstract In this article I analyse the connections between fear and policies directed towards fighting human trafficking, considering the multi-sited ethnographic work carried since 2004, up to 2015 in Spain and up to the present moment in Brazil. In both countries the fieldwork involved observation in diverse places, situations and meetings and the interlocution with sex workers, migrants working in different labour sectors, sex industry entrepreneurs and agents connected with diverse governmentality domains. I analyse how people who should be protected by theses regimes feel fear of their effects because they provoke situations perceived as violence and consider how fear is a central emotion mobilized element in the dissemination of the anti-trafficking regimes. Finally, I show how the objects that incite fear have changed along the years, exploring the relations between these alterations and the political fields that these regimes integrate.