The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong by Sverre Molland (review)

Anthropologist Sverre Molland’s provocative, well-written and indepth monograph on the trafficking of women along the Thai-Lao border is a welcome contribution to the field of trafficking and development studies in Southeast Asia. The core argument of the book is that states and anti-trafficking organizations utilize market metaphors of supply and demand to frame an allegedly alluring and lucrative business, while the on-the-ground realities of cross-border migration and sexual commerce differ substantially from such a view.

Based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, the book comprises eight chapters and is divided into three sections, examining the idealized discourse on trafficking, on-the-ground realities and ambiguities, and anti-trafficking interventions. This approach — articulating global discourses, reporting field realities and evaluating anti-trafficking programmes, is novel in the current scholarship on human trafficking in Southeast Asia. In contrast to work on prostitution, few solid empirical works have been produced on this topic as it relates to the region despite the massive social attention that trafficking has garnered in the past fifteen years. The Perfect Business is thus a major contribution to its field.

The book opens with the following statement: “[R]ather than being a ‘perfect business’ human trafficking is characterized by imperfections that are not easily grasped through policy guidelines and bureaucratic maneuvers” (p. 10). Anti-trafficking organizations have ignored the complexities that surround human trafficking, in particular those relating to recruitment through informal channels and employment in the sex industry. Throughout the book, Molland deconstructs the “meta-language” (p. 221) that anti-trafficking organizations disseminate both globally and locally. While social reality is indeed “fluid”, “contradictory” and “ambivalent” (p. 19), the use of this language promotes an “atomized and decontextualized” (p. 11) view of migration and sex commerce. It makes intelligible poorly grounded knowledge in order to justify assistance projects as well as the very existence of the anti-trafficking industry. Provocatively, the author argues that “the goal of trafficking programs is not to find answers to the challenges of trafficking, but the reverse: they seek problems that fit their solutions, in the form of their own development programs” (p. 222). Both anti-traffickers and recruiters act in an economy of bad faith: the former ignore the complexities of on-the-ground reality in order to perpetuate programme activities, and the latter hide information from their clients to provide labour for the sex industry. It all makes for a stark reminder of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “bad faith” and illustrates how anti-traffickers and recruiters externalize their own complicity in events by deceiving themselves.

Molland conducted most of his investigation in a border area between Thailand and Laos (Vientiane, Nong Kai). His data come from observations in several types of sex establishments, and from interviews with sex workers, recruiters and officials from local and international NGOs as well as multilateral development agencies such as the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on human trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (UNIAP). The study’s finding that Lao sex workers migrate to Thailand, where prices in the sex industry are lower than those found in Vientiane, challenges one of the core premises of the trafficking discourse that migrants are primarily guided by profit maximization. Molland argues that prices are indeed lower in Thailand, but the number of clients higher, thus increasing the overall profit. This argument — while convincing — raises an additional question that the author does not consider. Why, for example, do Thai sex workers not migrate to Vientiane to maximize their profits? Beyond profits, the author also argues that Thailand evokes an ideal of modernity that acts as a pull factor for Lao migrants. In addition, working abroad is a strategy that allows Lao sex workers to control information regarding their deviant activity, and to reduce the risk of being recognized by friends and relatives.

The book presents many additional fascinating findings...