Framing the Mother Tac: The Racialised, Sexualised and Gendered Politics of Modern Slavery in Australia

Abstract

Centred on the slavery trial “Crown vs. Rungnapha Kanbut” heard in Sydney, New South Wales, between 10 April and 15 May 2019, this article seeks to frame the figure of the “Mother Tac” or the “mother of contract”, also called “mama tac” or “mae tac”—a term used amongst Thai migrants to describe a woman who hosts, collects debts from, and organises work for Thai migrant sex workers in their destination country. It proposes that this largely unexplored figure has come to assume a disproportionate role in the “modern slavery” approach to human trafficking, with its emphasis on absolute victims and individual offenders. The harms suffered by Kanbut’s victims are put into context by referring to existing literature on women accused of trafficking; interviews with Thai migrant sex workers, including Kanbut’s primary victim, and with members from the Australian Federal Police Human Trafficking Unit; and ethnographic field notes. The article unveils how constructions of both victim and offender, as well as definitions of slavery, are racialised, gendered, and sexualised and rely on the victims’ subjective accounts of bounded exploitation. By documenting these and other limitations involved in a criminal justice approach, the authors reveal its shortfalls. For instance, while harsh sentences are meant as a deterrence to others, the complex and structural roots of migrant labour exploitation remain unaffected. This research finds that improved legal migration pathways, the decriminalisation of the sex industry, and improved access to information and support for migrant sex workers are key to reducing heavier forms of labour exploitation, including human trafficking, in the Australian sex industry.

Good Tech, Bad Tech: Policing Sex Trafficking with Big Data

“…However, this fails to acknowledge that many willingly engaging in sexual labour may nonetheless be severely exploited by working long hours for little compensation or have limited control over their working environment. In this context, the experiences of sex workers may more closely resemble labour or economic exploitation (Macioti et al 2020). It is also possible that sexual exploitation and other forms of exploitation are intertwined to create an overarching experience of exploitation.…”

Unfinished Decriminalization: The Impact of Section 19 of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 on Migrant Sex Workers’ Rights and Lives in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…At the center of our study are both the acknowledgement and the analysis of the enduring role of whiteness and racialization in the implementation of anti-trafficking policies and interventions (Kempadoo 2001;Doezema 2010). These considerations are reflected in the fact that Asian cis women tend to be represented as passive victims and as such targeted by law enforcement and immigration controls (Lam and Lepp 2019;Ham 2017;Dalton and Jung 2019;Hoefinger et al 2020;Mai et al 2021) through their explicit and implicit racial profiling in Australia (Selvey et al 2018;Macioti et al 2020) New Zealand (Ting 2018;Tichenor 2019) and the US (Cheng and Kim 2014).…”

“…As Macioti et al recently documented, in New South Wales Australia, where migrant sex workers are included in the state's 1995 decriminalization of sex work and access to work visas recently became easier for sections of the migrant population, trafficking in the sex industry decreased dramatically and migrant sex workers are considerably less bound to exploitative bosses (Macioti et al 2020). Indeed, our overall global findings indicate that, given the scale of involvement of migrant sex workers in sex work worldwide, any policy and social intervention on sex work can only have a chance of succeeding if it also includes prospective and actual migrants' legal right to access the international labor market, which would reduce their exploitability by the people who facilitate their labor migration (Bravo 2009).…”

“…These concerns are particularly relevant for the study of migrant sex work. The fact that that the definition of trafficking contained in the 2000 UN Palermo is informed by a neo-abolitionist sensibility (Ditmore and Wijers 2003) and lacks a clear definition of exploitation allows a considerable degree of arbitrary discretion, which often translates into repressive anti-migrant and anti-sex-work interventions and policies in the name of the fight against trafficking (O'Connell Davidson 2005, p. 73;Fehrenbacher et al 2020;Musto et al 2021). A typical example is London Metropolitan Police anti-trafficking Operation Lanhydrock on 20 October 2016, which targeted six massage parlors in Soho and Chinatown in Central London and resulted in seven arrests for "controlling prostitution for gain," while seventeen sex workers were arrested for breaking immigration law and detained by the UK Border Agency (Mai 2018, p. 114).…”