Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is the Doris Stevens Professor in Women’s Studies and a professor of sociology and gender and sexuality studies. Her latest book “The Trafficker Next Door: How Household Employers Exploit Domestic Workers” was published in September 2025 by W. W. Norton & Company.
How did you get the idea for this project?
In 2017, The Atlantic published a cover story titled “My Family’s Slave,” in which the author revealed that his family in Seattle had kept a domestic worker from the Philippines unpaid for over 50 years. I was outraged by the casual admission of what was clearly modern-day slavery. But even more shocking was the lack of collective outrage. Some defended the situation, claiming it wasn’t really slavery, while others argued it couldn’t have been that bad since the woman never tried to escape. This collective rationalization disturbed me. I felt compelled to write a book that unpacks how exploitation is reframed as care, how abuse is mistaken for benevolence, and how employers can be blind to their own oppressive actions. My book confronts this dangerous distortion and reveals how easily systems of abuse become normalized, justified, and even seen as acts of kindness.
How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?
This book is the third in what has become a trilogy on human trafficking. The first was an ethnography in Tokyo of migrant workers labeled as sex trafficking victims by the U.S. Department of State. That book questioned the conflation of trafficking with sex work and demonstrated how this framing obscures the labor violations experienced by those in the industry. The second, based in Dubai, focused on migrant domestic workers whose legal status binds them to their visa sponsors—making them vulnerable to trafficking because they cannot quit their job or exit the country without permission. In it, I challenged the reduction of their experiences to trafficking by showing that while some employers exploit this power, others actively mitigate it. This third book turns the lens toward those we might call traffickers. I explore how people can engage in trafficking without realizing it—demonstrating that trafficking is not only the work of gangsters or organized crime, but also of ordinary individuals who reinterpret their exploitation of others as benevolence.
What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?
This book sparked my interest in exploring the concept of “vulnerability.” The Philippines facilitates the outmigration of people, often into highly risky situations where some may become victims of trafficking. I’m now curious about how the state manages these vulnerabilities, which has led me to pursue an ethnography of the state.
Why should people read this book?
This book is for anyone interested in understanding what human trafficking truly is. It clarifies the often-confused concepts of trafficking, slavery, and forced labor, which are frequently—but problematically—used interchangeably. It also challenges common assumptions, such as the disproportionate focus on sex trafficking, and highlights the often-overlooked reality that labor trafficking is far more widespread.
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