Human Trafficking in Asia

Forcing Issues

Sallie Yea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138087057
• eBook ISBN: 9781317917298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

By analysing the complex issues surrounding internal and cross-border human trafficking in Asia, and asserting critical perspectives and methodologies, this book extends the range of sites for discussion and sectors in which human trafficking takes place.

The book re-centres human trafficking as an area of legitimate academic inquiry in a region that is often considered as an epicentre for human trafficking: East and Southeast Asia. It thus offers an in-depth analysis and up-to-date knowledge on research methodologies and engagements, patterns and forms of human trafficking, constructively critiquing anti-trafficking campaigns and discourses, and offering examples of good practice within the region that help us move beyond the impasse that currently hampers human trafficking as a field of inquiry in the social sciences.

Providing constructive avenues for human trafficking research to proceed methodologically, theoretically and ethically, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Politics, International Relations and Southeast Asian Studies.

1 Introduction

Forcing issues

Sallie Yea and Pattana Kitiarsa

The rise of (anti)trafficking research

In 2000, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) signed the Trafficking Protocol as part of the Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime. Three years later, on 31 December 2003, the Convention came into force internationally. This event has heralded a global flurry of interest and activity around the problem of human trafficking amongst governments, non-government organisations (NGOs), human rights activists, feminists (of various orientations), the popular media and, belatedly, academics in the social sciences and related disciplines. Nonetheless, perhaps more so than other seemingly related areas of social science research — such as development, HIV/AIDS and migration — we believe that trafficking research, with some notable ethnographic exceptions (for example Cheng 2010; Molland 2012; Parrenas 2011) is comparatively ‘thin’. Some scholars have already commented on the potential of some trafficking research — academic and commissioned — to perpetuate damaging trafficking ‘myths’ (Andrasvic 2007; see also Chapter 6). Others have noted the ways in which anti-trafficking stakeholders uncritically accept and reproduce certain ‘truths’ about human trafficking in their own work (Yea 2013; Molland 2010; Lindquist 2011).

To give an example, a recent volume on sex trafficking of women (Parrot and Cummings 2008), an already disproportionately researched subject, attempted to cover the global scope of, and explanation for, the rise of sex trafficking. The narrative of women’s and girls’ experiences of sexual enslavement and resulting physical, emotional and spiritual ‘torture’ are reproduced in spectacular fashion in the book. The United States Department of State estimates of global numbers of trafficked persons (mostly women and children) are cited without question, despite some questions as to the validity of these figures (see, for example, Feingold 2010) and important details of how (ethically, methodologically) the ‘stories of hundreds of women’ were collected for the book remain largely obscured. We believe that there is far too much research in human/sex trafficking currently making its way into circulation, which raises similar concerns of generalisation, uncritical reproduction of accepted narratives and statistics, and lack of explicit and detailed discussion of approach, methods, ethics and biases in research. Contextual specificities of local sites — and even entire countries — are lost within narratives that universalise victims’ experiences and the modus operandi of trafficking across diverse contexts and sectors. Geography appears to be levelled out and culture enters discussions only insofar as it provides useful support for suggestions about the contextual imperatives of ‘Third World’ parents selling their children to traffickers. Recognition of these types of concerns has inspired us to pen the current collection of papers.

How can the relative lack of rigour in much trafficking research be explained? There are several reasons that spring to mind but, foremost, we agree with the suggestion put forward a few years previously in a special issue of the journal International Migration (2005) that methodological and ethical difficulties play a particularly important role in contributing to the thinness of much current human trafficking research. Some of the chapters in this volume extend these earlier discussions by raising important questions not only about the methodological impediments to trafficking research but also by identifying possible routes through these. Nonetheless, it seems to us that there is also another possible explanation for the current state of trafficking research; namely, the unwitting and inexorable intertwining of research with what we refer to as the ‘sensationalism of trafficking’, by which we mean the evolving preoccupation of much of the anti-trafficking industry with worst case scenarios of trafficking, particularly in the sex industry (as in the Parrot and Cummings 2008 volume introduced above). We believe that this has led to particular biases and exclusions in research and in the way research is framed. Some of the chapters in this volume speak directly to the discursive production of biases in research (why, for example, does sexual slavery figure so prominently as a research subject? And how is it configured through particular moral or securitisation lenses?), whilst others engage with the task of bringing to light the salience and particularities of human trafficking in other sectors and, in doing so, attempting not only to challenge the hegemony of the sex slave discourse but also to challenge the particular configurations of knowledge of trafficking derived largely through a focus on commercial sexual exploitation. Trafficking in the long-haul fishing industry is one of the sectors considered by our contributors.

We also believe that questions driving empirical studies that have constituted the mainstay of trafficking research to date — scale and scope (how many victims are present in particular country? how widespread is the problem?), the modus operandi of human trafficking (what are the characteristics of recruitment, movement and exploitation of trafficked persons? how do they exit these situations?), profiles of traffickers and ‘victims’ (are they poor? disproportionately from minority of other marginalised groups?) and so on — are often not particularly well answered. The reasons for this may be traced to the fact that international anti-trafficking organisations (who commission large amounts of the research) often want quick and simple answers to complex issues, which generally require long periods of time to adequately research. This is lamentable, since counter-trafficking practice is consequently often not informed by an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon, especially at the state level, whilst critical in-depth and longitudinal studies with trafficked persons, traffickers, sites of trafficking and other migrant labourers who face vulnerabilities outside of trafficking, have been generally sacrificed in favour of the need for quick information based, in many cases, on sensationalised media accounts (reproduced as truths in some academic research) or ‘intelligence gathering’ activities, oftentimes by police. We further believe that this tendency in some commissioned research has been frequently replicated in academic research.

As a field of academic inquiry, we surmise that human trafficking has exhibited a strong bias towards three topics, none of which actually necessitates interaction with trafficked persons, vulnerable populations, marginally situated migrants or those labelled as traffickers. These topics are: reviewing legal frameworks of counter-trafficking for various countries; describing/debating trafficking for prostitution; and understanding and critiquing the United Nations (UN) Trafficking Protocol (2000). Thus, although there are multiple possible frames through which human trafficking could be considered, the focus on these three topics has reinforced a tendency to discuss human trafficking as an issue of transnational crime, international law or feminism. These frameworks, although valuable, often regard trafficking as a criminal problem that can best be resolved through more effective criminal justice processes or dedicated legislation (as in the first two frameworks) or as a means to promote particular agendas in the thorny but tired debate over prostitution as legitimate work or violence against women (as in feminist engagements). The contributors to this volume work from a range of participatory, ethnographic, qualitative and feminist research approaches that collectively eschew a priori moral or political agendas or policy dictates that often characterise these three research foci.

Our concerns with the state of current scholarship on human trafficking may seem overly negative. However, we are encouraged by the fact that a decade after the signing of the UN Protocol has seen the emergence of a more critical body of scholarship engaging with trafficking and anti-trafficking. Whilst diverse in its disciplinary and organisational locations and its points of contention, this literature has nonetheless formed itself into a relatively cohesive narrative, at the centre of which lie two interrelated suggestions. The first of these may be posed as a simple but remarkably disregarded question: has anti-trafficking, as policy and practice, led to positive outcomes for its objects, namely victims of trafficking and those vulnerable to being trafficked? This question was raised in a report published by prominent anti-trafficking feminist organisation Global Alliance Against Trafficking of Women (GAATW) in 2009. Other studies have added momentum to this critique by proposing that anti-trafficking can heighten (rather than reduce) the abuses and human rights violations that trafficked persons experience (most vocally in discussions of the sex industry) (for example, detention centres/shelters, see Gallagher and Pearson 2008), or that anti-trafficking may have the largely (un)intended effects of heightening border controls for other migrants, who mistakenly come under its purview (Ford, Lyons and Van Schendel 2012). The second suggestion emerging from this loose body of scholarship is that trafficking is an extremely powerful global discourse that can be located in narrow constructions of (variously) moral, state security-centric concerns. Those proffering this second suggestion seek to expose the discursive production of human trafficking as a problem, focusing as much on its truth effects (cf. Foucault 1991; see Yea 2013) as on its exclusions and omissions (as suggested by Doezema 2010).

The aim of the book

This volume has emerged from discussions at a conference of the same name, held in October 2010 at the National University of Singapore. The idea behind the conference was to address these two critical and related concerns about anti-trafficking as practice and discourse. We wished to do so by following two routes. Firstly, we attempted to redress the disciplinary imbalance that has come to characterise human trafficking research by drawing together social science researchers and practitioners working on human trafficking issues, many of whom work from qualitative, feminist and ethnographic approaches, and who had been doing so in many cases before trafficking became either fashionable to research or researched because of its heightened links to funding circuits. Secondly, in doing so, we wished to expand both knowledge and ways of knowing, including theorising, researching and debating human trafficking. As part of this goal, we wished to provide a platform not only for those academically situated but also for those operating as part of the anti-trafficking industry itself to voice concerns and articulate approaches and analyses based on often incredibly rich field experiences.

As such, the aim of this volume is not simply to add resonance to already circulating critical perspectives on human trafficking, although this does form a significant element of discussion in many of the chapters. Rather, we see our contribution as lying in broadening the sites, possibilities and contributors to research on the subject of human trafficking. We are interested in providing some constructive avenues for human trafficking research to proceed, methodologically, theoretically and ethically. At a minimum, we concur that this would mean not reducing countless people’s experiences of vulnerable mobility to the tired monologue of horrendous exploitation and suffering (of women and girls) with its attendant responses, whilst simultaneously not wishing to dismiss the disempowering structural and biopolitical effects of living as a migrant in the current global milieu. But our hope is that the contributions will achieve much more than this modest goal to truly advance the field of human trafficking research without defaulting to the impossible position of its abandonment altogether. This is the least we can hope to offer to marginalised peoples who often appear as muted and ‘othered’ in research as they do in their aspirations for and experiences of mobility.

Contributors to the conference were deliberately a mixture of researchers holding academic positions, practitioners who conduct research and design policy and programmatic interventions within both NGOs and international organisations and consultants who often carry out commissioned research to inform policy and practice. This was a deliberate strategy, as one of the concerns with the state of trafficking research identified by the organisers was the lack of productive and sustained dialogues between academics involved in researching trafficking and those working directly to effect change on the ground. In addition to the participants at the conference, we invited several other colleagues to join the book project as we learned about their work through anti-trafficking networks in the Asian region. The United Nations Inter-Agency Project (UNIAP), GAATW and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) were particularly instrumental in facilitating these introductions through various meetings and workshops, although the perspectives presented in the volume do not necessarily reflect the views of these organisations.

Through conference papers and discussions that followed, four issues emerged to preoccupy participants. Before outlining the organisation of the volume, we felt it important to reiterate these concerns here. These are briefly outlined in the next section of this introduction and are reiterated -either explicitly or more implicitly — many of the chapter that follow.

Issues that need forcing

As indicated above, the title of the book is intended as a response to our collective disillusionment with the state of much human trafficking research. We believe that there are several issues that need to be ‘forced’ out of marginality to claim a more central place within research on human trafficking. Critiques of anti-trafficking policy and practice and of the state of research in the field continue to operate at the margins, with those who are fearless enough to put them forward often dismissed as too radical, too critical or simply too disengaged from the ‘problem’ of resolving trafficking itself. Gathering such critical perspectives together in one volume is perhaps a way of realising this force. It is also a way of making the suggestion, as we do, that our concerns, although critical, are not disengaged at all from the central corpus of the architecture of anti-trafficking. Our discussions at the conference yielded four issues that we felt constituted the nub of our collective concerns in this volume.

Who does research on human trafficking and why?

Perhaps more than other related areas of academic inquiry in the social sciences — with the possible exception of child sex tourism — research into human trafficking is plagued by emotive, moralising and other ‘agenda driven’ concerns. This means that research is often driven by the advocacy needs of the organisation — for example, to push a pro-or anti-prostitution agenda — and research findings are therefore constructed in a particular way, which may not necessarily be an accurate portrayal of the complex dimensions of the issue, including its ambiguities and silences.

We believe that related to this is a bias in terms of who carries out much of the ‘on the ground’ research which informs understandings of human trafficking, with the vast majority of studies that document victim experiences or the modus operandi of trafficking being carried out through filtering by NGOs, largely because of their greater access to, and therefore ability to document, the situations of ‘victims’. The few academic studies that have attempted to provide a more in-depth picture of the texture of human trafficking within and across different sites are plagued by problems of access (to participants and sites), ethical dilemmas, methodological quandaries and the incessant expectation that research always act as a prelude to problem solving or advancing particular institutional agendas. This begs the questions: can NGOs carry out critical research that is not swayed by an activist agenda or advocacy platform which defines much of their work on this issue? How might fruitful collaborative partnerships between academics and NGOs be realised i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Anti-trafficking reconsidered
• Part II Methodological issues in researching human trafficking
• Part III Complicating human trafficking
• Part IV Moving forward
• Index