The value of dignity
In late 2023, as I came across the announcement of the Wilberforce Institute on the Subedi Essay Prize on Modern Slavery or the Protection of Human Dignity, I was not sure I would have time to pull the thoughts together. After all, I was wary of choosing between these two equally worthy topics. Then, I went to spend Christmas with family. Absent from too many distractions, apart from air raid alarms piercing the frozen air of my Ukrainian hometown every other hour, a formula for the essay was found. I would examine the value of human dignity to anti-slavery efforts.
Having touched upon the concept of dignity in the course of my doctoral research on domestic human trafficking, I felt writing the essay was a chance to assess the functions of dignity within the system of legal, policy and discursive frameworks I define as the “anti-trafficking regime”. Soon, contradictions surfaced.
To start with, the key relationship between dignity and anti-trafficking efforts was evident and simple. Severe exploitation imposed on trafficking victims is assumed to stem from their loss of freedom to choose and leave employment. One might be free without dignity, but dignity demands one be free. And dignity is an essential human right. Major human rights treaties, such as the UN International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights, recognise this relationship. The incompatibility of trafficking experiences with the maintenance of human dignity places trafficking within the remit of human rights law and establishes unconditional entitlements of its victims irrespective of their citizenship status.
And yet, it was equally apparent that the role performed by the concept of dignity on the anti-trafficking/anti-slavery agendas could not but extend beyond this indisputable rationale. Very few actual policies are guided by the objective of protecting human dignity (which is why this essay prize is important). Equally few are those committed to advancing human freedom. Anti-trafficking/anti-slavery agendas are no exception. As a vast critical literature demonstrates, international and national anti-trafficking regimes are better at controlling labour migration and keeping exploited people at bay as “modern slaves” or grateful “survivors”, than at eradicating exploitation and securing rights. Could it mean dignity was merely a fig leaf, a consensus-weaving veil for further disciplining and coercion? Either explanation, on its own, seemed unsatisfactory.
Human dignity, indeed, could be a conduit for neo-liberal approaches to managing social injustice. It could legitimise indifference to exploitation and condone insufferable compromises, camouflaged as respect for personal choice. It could paint social and state support as humiliating, and thus prevent meaningful solidarity. Dignity in this reading tapped into the narratives of “resilience” whereby the exploited subject is expected to “adapt to, rather than resist” the ordeal, so as to “reach her full potential when exposed to danger”.
Yet, dignity might also be an antidote to the very humiliating mode of too many anti-trafficking efforts. Slavery, symbolic and real, excludes its victims from their community. Anti-slavery efforts, inadvertently or on purpose, often enact and entrench this exclusion: for instance, in Spanish judicial practice, “uprooting” of a victim is considered critical to evidencing trafficking. That said, an appeal to human dignity has the potential to undo it. Dignity is premised on equal respect; thus, it is incompatible with the patronising and condescending attitudes to victims of exploitation.
The state, interested in its exclusive power to mandate belonging and deprive persons in its jurisdiction of personal freedom, cannot let traffickers usurp this monopoly, hence the explicit onus on protection of human dignity in domestic criminal law provisions against trafficking. The offence of trafficking is placed among “crimes against personal will, dignity and honour” in the Ukrainian Criminal Code, for example, and after “crimes against moral integrity” in the Spanish one. Dignity as negation of slavery is critical to upholding cohesion in national societies. Although dignity does not endow one with belonging to a specific community, it foregrounds the right to it.
Dignity, it turned out upon this analysis, was crucial insofar as it was taken in earnest. Dignity demanded a minimum of equality – and so disabled slavery. Dignity was a pre-requisite for emancipation – but all too easy to manipulate and misuse. What emerged was a sloppy path between making use of the mainstream paradigm without embracing it wholeheartedly or throwing it away unnecessarily radically. The essay ended up reiterating the questions I keep encountering in my research.
Dignity and freedom are more than research questions. On the eve of the day when I planned to submit the essay, I was awakened by the Russian attack on my city. A missile hit the maternity ward where my mother was head of the newborn children’s department. Her office burned down, and the building sustained damage beyond reconstruction. Owing to a miracle, my mother had stayed home that morning. Owing to her insistence on arranging a bomb shelter and training the staff, no patients got injured. As I was, several hours later, finishing off the essay, I was thinking about the dignity of the people who, like my mother, protect the freedom to be alive when it is under attack. And of how important it is not to let anyone take away our freedom – to live, work, and love in dignity.