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

Sverre Molland

Sverre Molland

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

In: Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory, 52

Edited by: David P. Chandler and Rita Smith Kipp

University of Hawaii Press | 2012

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824865825

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About this book

For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organizations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral-political dimensions of a business involving trade, labor, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But how apt are they? Is the sex trade really the perfect business? This provocative new book examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao border. It explores local efforts to reconcile international legal concepts, the bureaucratic prescriptions of aid organizations, and global development ideologies with on-the-ground realities of sexual commerce.

Author Sverre Molland provides an insider’s view of recruitment and sex commerce gleaned from countless conversations and interviews in bars and brothels—a view that complicates popular stereotypes of women forced or duped into prostitution by organized crime. Molland’s fine-grained ethnography shows a much more varied picture of friends recruiting friends, and families helping relatives. A recruiter rationalizes her act as a benefit or favor to a village friend; relationships between prostitutes and bar owners are cloaked in kin terms and familial metaphors. Sex work in the Mekong region follows patron-client cultural scripts about mutual help and obligation, which makes distinguishing the victims from the traffickers difficult. Molland’s research illuminates the methods and motivations of recruiters as well as the economic incentives and predicaments of victims.

The Perfect Business? is the first book to go beyond the usual focus on migrants and sex commerce to explore the institutional context of anti-trafficking. Its author, himself a former advisor for a United Nations anti-trafficking project, raises crucial questions about how an increasingly globalized development aid sector responds to what might more accurately be described as an extraterritorial development challenge of human mobility. His book will offer insights to students and scholars in anthropology, gender studies, and human geography, as well as anyone interested in one of the most controversial issues of development policy.

Frontmatter Free access PDF PDF	i
Contents Free access PDF PDF	v
Acknowledgments Free access PDF PDF	vii
1. Introduction The Perfect Business? Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	1
part I: GLOBAL PERFECTIONS The Idealized Discourse of Trafficking
2. Do Traffickers Have Navels? Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	33
3. The Market Metaphor Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	50
part II: LOCAL IMPERFECTIONS: On-the-Ground Realities and Ambiguities
4. Teens Trading Teens Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	73
5. Hot Spots and Flows Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	110
6. Profitable Bodies? Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	142
part III: BETWIXT AND BETWEEN: The Anti-traffickers
7. Combating Trafficking, Mekong Style: Tales of Fishponds and Mushrooms Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	179
8. The Drifters: Anti-traffickers in Practice Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	204
Conclusion: The Tenacity of the Market Metaphor Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	228
Notes Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	237
Bibliography Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	249
Index Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	271
About the Author Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	277
OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	278

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

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