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3 this Is What trafficking looks like grace chang In the twelve years since the passage of the landmark Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000,1 U.S. journalists, policymakers, heads of state, and celebrities have been greatly preoccupied with the issue identified in both popular and policy discourses as “sex trafficking.” This phenomenon is defined under U.S. federal law as “migration achieved through force or deception for the purpose of coerced prostitution or sex slavery” (TVPA 2000). Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in September 2003, U.S. president George W. Bush identified sex trafficking as “a special evil” and declared that “those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished.” He went on to say that “those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery” (Allen 2003). Similarly, one U.S. columnist, Nicholas Kristof, virtually made his career for years out of his journalistic exploits with two Cambodian girls working in brothels , beginning his New York Times series with an article called “Girls for Sale” (2004a). Kristof bought time with two girls to interview them on film. He paid off their debts to the brothel owners and returned the girls to their families, giving each of them one hundred U.S. dollars to start small businesses. He then did follow-up visits and stories on each of the girls the following year.2 One, Srey Neth, had “successfully” reintegrated into her village and become a hairstylist through training provided by a foreign nongovernmental organization (NGO). Kristof (2004c) lamented that the other girl he “freed,” Srey Mom, had returned to the brothel from which he had helped her escape. Throughout the series, Kristof portrayed the plight of the girls as stemming from defects of Cambodian culture and the low valuation of girls within it rather than as having systemic roots in the global economy that led to the girls’ vulner- thIs Is WhAt trAffICkING looks lIke · 57 ability to trafficking or exploitative labor in the first place. In one column (2004b), he observed, “It is precisely this low status of peasant girls in so many countries that makes the trafficking possible. For trafficking to be wiped out, the low status of girls needs to be addressed through literacy and job programs and other efforts .” When Kristof was flooded with letters from American do-gooders asking if he could “free one for me too” if they were to send him one hundred dollars, he admonished readers that this is not the solution (2004d). Instead, he praised the Bush administration for “leading the way” on trafficking and proposed that trafficking could only be eradicated when the low social value and self-esteem of girls in Cambodian society is changed through literacy and job programs. Students and others who have responded to my critiques of Kristof have suggested that he at least saved these two girls from this terrible plight. Yet this rescue ideology is precisely the problem with Kristof’s and the U.S. government’s approach to the issue, framing trafficking as a problem stemming from Third World people’s backward cultures and need for U.S. influence, instruction, and intervention. The dominant framework conveniently and commonly propagated by media, government, and celebrities casts the United States and figures such as Kristof as saviors and Third World girls and women as helpless, ignorant, and sometimes ungrateful victims saved by these U.S. heroes.3 These rescue narratives completely obscure the real roots of human trafficking as a direct result of the forces of globalization. Analyses of trafficking as a consequence of the deliberate underdevelopment of Third World nations and the destruction of their subsistence economies and social service structures through neoliberal policies imposed by First World institutions are largely lost in these oversimplified, sensationalized, and sexualized accounts.4 Thus, in U.S. media and public policy discourses alike, the term human trafficking has become synonymous with sex trafficking, which in turn has been equated with sexual slavery and prostitution.5 Human trafficking, while primarily an issue of coerced labor— and only sometimes involving coerced movement—is rarely seen as a labor issue and instead has been framed almost exclusively as an issue of “violence against women” or “sexual violence.” Yet in human trafficking cases, the labor involved is not predominantly sexual labor, nor does the violence encompassed in trafficking always involve sexual violence. The many forms of...

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