Discourse, Rape, and Servitude

A Metalinguistic Analysis of a Case of International Trafficking of Paraguayan Adolescents to Brazil

Abstract

(Inter)national human trafficking constitutes a historical, economic, and discursive phenomenon that, in contemporary times, renews relations of domination inherited from colonial and slaveholding matrices. From this perspective, this article aims to analyze, through a Metalinguistic approach, the discourse of a case of international trafficking involving Paraguayan adolescents brought to Brazil, in order to understand the hierarchical relations and social evaluations materialized between traffickers and trafficked victims. The theoretical framework is grounded in Metalinguistics, especially in the dialogic conception of the utterance as a concrete historical phenomenon inseparable from the ideological horizon that produces it (Bakhtin, 2016, 2018; Medviédev, 2016; Volóchinov, 2018, 2019). Methodologically, a 2024 decision of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) was selected based on three criteria: (1) the presence of servitude and sexual exploitation as purposes of trafficking; (2) the social relevance of the case, evidenced by the harmfulness of the phenomenon, which may affect vulnerable subjects; and (3) its analytical-interpretive potential for investigating hierarchical relations and social evaluations expressed in the utterance. The findings indicate that when the decision mobilizes signs such as “working […] for more than eleven hours a day,” “without pay,” “exhausting conditions,” “sexual abuse,” “imposition,” “threats suffered,” “without permission to go out at night,” and “forbidden to have contact with others,” the judicial utterance materializes hierarchical relations in which traffickers occupy positions of command – administering labor, body, movement, and speech – while the adolescents are positioned as subjects subjected to regimes of economic and sexual exploitation, thereby concretizing a dynamic of material and evaluative domination that sustains trafficking.