Anti-Trafficking Campaign and Karaoke Bar Hostesses in China

Zheng, Tiantian

doi:10.1037/e648292011-001

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Some welcomed the opportunity to leave the sex trade, while others preferred to continue sex work. This range of accounts resonates with the findings of feminist ethnographers who have shown how sex work involves diverse work conditions that public policies do not recognize (Dewey and Kelly 2011), and that sex workers make complex agentive choices to sell sex under structural constraints, from among limited employment choices, income-generating activities and migration strategies (Agustin 2007;Brennan 2005;Cheng 2010;Kempadoo 1998;Parrenas 2011;Zheng 2008). Recent ethnographic work in India has illuminated the diverse conditions and modes of organization of the sex trade (Kotiswaran 2011), sex workers' transformative relationships to potential pleasures and dangers (Walters 2016), and sex work's imbrications with strategies of migrant labor (Shah 2014), caste and kinship ties (Agrawal 2008), and reproductive labor (Vijayakumar 2022).…”

Section: Approach and Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 61%

“These Girls Never Give Statements”: Anti-Trafficking Interventions and “Victim-Witness Testimony” in India

Ramachandran

2022

Social Sciences

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Framing sex trafficking as primarily a law enforcement and criminal justice issue, the U.S. State Department funds global South NGOs to work with the Indian legal system to strengthen prosecutions of sex trafficking cases. Though rescuing sex workers and training them to testify against alleged traffickers is key to these interventions, and though rescued sex workers do sometimes testify, my ethnographic research and interviews with NGOs, legal actors, and sex workers in India revealed that this is a rare occurrence. This article explores the reasons behind this reported pattern, as well as the challenges faced by those who do testify. Through these findings, it critically examines the possibilities and limitations of the prosecutorial focus of U.S.-driven, NGO-mediated anti-trafficking interventions. It situates anti-trafficking interventions centered on “victim-witness testimony” in the Indian socio-legal context, demonstrating how prosecution is shaped by a range of factors, circumstances, and contingencies involving foreign-funded NGOs, the procedures, political economy and culture of the Indian legal system, individual legal actors’ motivations, and rescued sex workers’ complex subjectivities, experiences, choices, and perceptions of justice. It draws upon and contextualizes these findings to challenge prevalent assumptions about the victimhood of global South sex workers, about global South legal systems necessarily lacking resources and commitment, and about anti-trafficking solutions rooted in criminal justice incontrovertibly benefiting trafficked sex workers.

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Section: Approach and Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 61%

“These Girls Never Give Statements”: Anti-Trafficking Interventions and “Victim-Witness Testimony” in India

Ramachandran

2022

Social Sciences

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“…The Chinese government initiated a campaign to address that problem in 2009. It successfully freed 18,000 children and 34,000 women, but the problems remain deep-seated and difficult (see also Zheng, 2010).…”

Section: Human Trafficking In Northeast Asia: Bridging the Organizatimentioning

confidence: 96%

Human Trafficking in East Asia: Trends and Counter-Measures

Nakamura¹

2014

Globalization, Development and Security in Asia

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Anti-Trafficking Campaign and Karaoke Bar Hostesses in China

Cited by 2 publications

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“These Girls Never Give Statements”: Anti-Trafficking Interventions and “Victim-Witness Testimony” in India

“These Girls Never Give Statements”: Anti-Trafficking Interventions and “Victim-Witness Testimony” in India

Human Trafficking in East Asia: Trends and Counter-Measures

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