Southeast Asia – Politics, Meaning, and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. viii, 276 pp. (Table.) US$26.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3653-5.
Four years ago I had the opportunity to visit Phnom Penh in the context of an academic research project evaluating the efficiency of anti-trafficking programs in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region (GMS). Largely out of curiosity I arranged for myself and the law professor I was working with at the time to undertake a poverty tour of Phnom Penh that was run by a local non-government organization (NGO). Despite my initial skepticism, the tour was informative, moving and not at all patronizing in its presentation of issues concerning street children, slums and prostitution in streets and massage parlors catering to locals … until the final stop: a bar oriented to Western expats and tourists in central Phnom Penh’s “foreigners’ district.” Our tour guide informed us that many women working in “these sorts of bars” did not really want to be there, and that they only really earned money if they “entertained” clients upstairs or in a nearby hotel. As if to confirm her point, at that very moment one of the women disappeared into a concealed back area with a male customer. My colleague raised her eyebrows and asked, “You mean they are trafficked?,” to which our guide replied with an air of authority, “Yes. They would have been tricked into this work in the beginning.” My colleague shook her head at the apparently tragic circumstances of the women who were so close by, yet hopelessly distant in their unredeemable positions as victims of sex trafficking.
It is in examining the meaning and prevalence of scenarios of the sort suggested in the above vignette that Sverre Molland’s ethnography represents a breath of fresh air in an increasingly stifling and repetitious academic literature on trafficking and anti-trafficking. Rather than detailing the contours of “the problem of sex trafficking” in a particular country, Molland explores how trafficking in persons has become a self-actualizing and impervious discourse, and how this trafficking imaginary is enacted, repeated and legitimized as truth in a variety of domains, including amongst NGOs of the sort mentioned above. This imaginary then encourages (perhaps even dictates) a sorting of places and persons into those that fit the discursive parameters of the anti-trafficking industry and those that don’t. In this sorting process the Phnom Penh NGO’s bar girls would be viewed as classic victims and clear objects of anti-trafficking interventions, while other women, such as those selling sex on the streets of Phnom Penh and whose entry into sex work is mediated through social networks and peer inducement in Phnom Penh’s squatter areas, would raise far more objections as victims amongst anti-traffickers.
Molland makes this very same point in his book: those who present as “clear victims” are constituted as objects of interventions in particular ways and via particular processes. Those whose positionings in sex work are “murky” in terms of recruitment, knowledge of what their impending work entails, and the (lack of) involvement of clearly demarcated criminal groups of traffickers, and are perhaps “trafficked” only a short distance or outside areas identified as trafficking “hotspots,” are problematic for anti-traffickers. Molland’s ethnography is multi-sited in its analysis of traffickers, victims and anti-traffickers, which teases out in minute detail the disjuncture between those charged with envisioning and designing anti-trafficking policy and programs and the subjects of these interventions: namely the victims and the vulnerable. Molland’s key argument is that the anti-trafficking imaginary operates on the basis of a “market metaphor.” Anti-trafficking actors operating at a global, regional and local scale, according to Molland, construct their objects of intervention according to a business model of supply and demand in which the “market metaphor” emerges as ascendant. As Molland states, trafficking is often portrayed by anti-traffickers as a “perfect business,” “governed by laws of supply and demand and operating as a seamless organic whole” (9). His book is devoted to understanding the operationalization of this market metaphor and considers the ways “anti-traffickers imagine trafficking to ‘function’ and how these ideas compare with recruitment practices within the sex industry” (9).
The book is set in the so-called trafficking epicenter of the Greater Mekong Sub-Region (GMS) in mainland Southeast Asia, and within this broader region casts a scrutinizing gaze towards the Thai-Lao border area near the Lao capital of Vientiane and the Thai border town of Nong Kai. The ethnography is organized in three parts. Part 1 focuses on the emergence of a global discourse of trafficking which constructs trafficking according to particular tropes which are idealized versions of trafficking. The second part of the book moves from this idealized version to “local imperfections”—or on-the-ground departures from this ideal—through ethnographic encounters with sex workers and their employers and maintainers in bars and brothels within the field site. The final part of the book describes the ways anti-traffickers reconcile ideals and practice in anti-trafficking through their own work.
The book yields important insights not only into trafficking and anti-trafficking in a particular context, but also into the disjuncture between “myths” and “realities” of trafficking and the ways those charged with anti-trafficking reconcile these myths. Whilst other researchers have commented on these disjunctures and the negative impacts on human rights that inappropriate and misguided anti-trafficking efforts can have on both victim and non-victim populations, Molland takes this premise much further than his contemporaries in this book. For me the most significant element of the book concerns Molland’s insistence on the importance of social networks, relations and the socio-cultural embeddedness of “trafficking” in his field site.
Despite its novelty and insights there were nonetheless a few areas that begged answers upon finishing the book. What of Molland’s research assistant? Obviously this fellow played a pivotal role in the research process, yet he is mentioned as an accompanying/ translating/ drinking partner figure only. And what of the enactment of social relations when sex workers return home? Molland assumes so much here but never accompanies any of his informants home, despite this tracing being conducted by other researchers focusing on the lives of migrant sex workers. Finally, for me it is difficult to sustain the claim that the book is a multi-sited ethnography, particularly in relation to anti-traffickers. Interviews with anti-traffickers and participant observations in anti-trafficking functions are not convincing ethnographic material and this part of the book was by far the least rigorous. How exactly do individuals learn, reproduce and perpetuate anti-trafficking myths? How do they deal with ruptures to these myths in their programmatic and practical work? It would be expected that an ethnographic treatment of anti-traffickers would address these important questions more directly. Returning to the NGO “tour guide’s” comments at the outset of this review, it would be useful to not only look at who is identified as trafficked and who is not (the bar girl versus the street prostitute), but also the remarkable ease with which these interpretations are reproduced and accepted by others. The book fell short of the mark in this regard, although it has clearly broken new ground as far as who we might think about as constituting a “trafficking problem.”
Sallie Yea
Nanyang Technological University, Jurong, Singapore
pp. 382-385