The Perfect Business?: Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong

Notes

Notes Chapter 1: Introduction 1. All informants’ names throughout the book are pseudonyms. 2. For some of the expositions on discourse and governmentality, see Foucault 1980, 1982, 1991. 3. For a study that relies on a Foucauldian view of power and provides detailed analysis of social agents, see Murray Li 2007. 4. Whether self-deception is possible has been subject to sustained debate. I follow Ronald Santoni, who argues that self-deception is possible in a qualified sense if one interprets bad faith to mean the acceptance of unpersuasive evidence, due to the translucent nature of consciousness. See Santoni 1995, 42–45. 5. For Sartre, bad faith is grounded in a particular view of agency that emphasizes human beings’ freedom to pursue alternative courses of action. In this view, freedom becomes inherently anxiety provoking. In fact, bad faith is in this sense a response to freedom. 6. In their interviews of returning migrants or family members of migrants, most reports appear not to reflect on the significance of temporality. A UNICEF report from Laos, for example, is astonishing (UNICEF and Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare 2004). It attempts to portray an alarming picture of child trafficking in Laos, but a close reading reveals that nearly all the trafficking cases included in the report were dated four to eleven years before the interviews were conducted. 7. Researchers spent approximately six weeks in each village they visited. This contrasts with other reports on trafficking in Laos, which are based on research by teams that commonly spend only one day in each village. 8. Because the anti-trafficking sector is relatively small in Laos, I personally knew most officials who worked with trafficking at the time of my research. Of course, several staff, as well as expatriates, were aware of local venues in Laos that catered to the commercial sex trade. However, when it came to the specific question of trafficking within the sex industry, none of my informants could provide clear answers. One reason for such a gap in knowledge is the political sensitivity of researching trafficking “at home.” Thus my 238 : notes to pages 22–49 anti-trafficking informants had extremely limited knowledge of Lao sex workers (whether voluntary or trafficked) in Thailand, even in border towns that were near one another, such as Nong Kai and Si Chiangmai. 9. As clients are transitory within these venue settings, developing rapport with them constitutes a challenge. Hence the focus on clients in this research is limited. Chapter 2: Do Traffickers Have Navels? 1. The New York Times online allows archive searches back to 1852. The search results described in this paragraph are derived from http://query.nytimes .com/search/query?query=%22human+trafficking%22&srchst=nyt. 2. The endemic regurgitation of trafficking estimates has led UNESCO’s Bangkok-based trafficking project to trace quoted statistics on trafficking numbers . See http://www.unescobkk.org/index.php?id=1022. 3. I have borrowed this rhetorical metaphor from Ernest Gellner and his debate with Anthony Smith regarding the historical emergence of nationalism (Gellner 1996). 4. Arguably, there are expectations, such as the systematic use of forced labor by the Burmese military junta (ILO 1998). 5. Diana Wong (2005) makes a similar observation, pointing out that anxieties about refugee flows, not prostitution, explain why many governments take an interest in human trafficking and broader patterns of irregular migration. 6. Although there are two separate protocols for people smuggling and trafficking in persons respectively, neither the Palermo Protocol nor the TOC Convention provides any guidelines for victim identification. In practice this omission allows each nation-state to determine whether a case is one of people smuggling or of trafficking, as it sees fit. See Gallagher 2001. 7. A draft project document produced by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID 2002) is particularly telling. It proposed setting up an “early warning system” in Lao villages under the auspices of a regional anti-trafficking project. Although the document does not explain what such a warning system might consist of, several other anti-trafficking programs raised concerns that such a system would involve increasing surveillance of potential migrants and could have severe punitive consequences within the context of an authoritarian state such as Laos. How an “early warning system” would have eventually played out in light of political agendas of social control and discipline is unknown, because this part of the project document was eventually omitted before project execution. 8. Numerous “trafficking movies” have been made in recent years...