Research Report 1 - Prostitution Mobility and Representations: The Case of Vietnamese Prostitutes going to Cambodia (original) (raw)
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Development and change, 2010
Over the past few years some governments and development organizations have increasingly articulated cross-border mobility as ‘trafficking in persons’. The notion of a market where traffickers prey on the ‘supply’ of migrants that flows across international borders to meet the ‘demand’ for labour has become a central trope among anti-trafficking development organizations. This article problematizes such economism by drawing attention to the oscillating cross- border migration of Lao sex workers within a border zone between Laos and Thailand. It illuminates the incongruity between the recruitment of women into the sex industry along the Lao–Thai border and the market models that are employed by the anti-trafficking sector. It discusses the ways in which these cross-border markets are conceived in a context where aid programming is taking on an increasingly important role in the politics of borders. The author concludes that allusions to ideal forms of knowledge (in the guise of classic economic theory) and an emphasis on borders become necessary for anti- trafficking programmes in order to make their object of intervention legible as well as providing post-hoc rationalizations for their continuing operation.
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the Canadian Council of Southeast Asian Studies’ Newsletter, 2018
Cambodia has met with a stable economic recovery in recent years. Its GDP reached 7 % in 2016 and it was given the symbolic recognition of Asia’s New Tiger Economy (ADB, 2016). The growth lies in various factors, one of which is labor migration. From 2000 to 2015, the number of Cambodian emigrants increased from 3.7 % out of a total population of 12 million to 7.6 % out of a total population of 15.5 million (OECD/CDRI, 2010). Migration studies have traditionally focused on the push-pull factors of migration. Push factors include poverty, lack of employment and alternative sources of income, debt, natural disasters, and landlessness, whereas pull factors have to do with wage differentials and uneven economies in the region. A distinctive aspect of pull factors relates to social networks in the sense that Cambodian migrants receive help from relatives, friends, villagers, and brokers for their migration journey. Pioneer migrants who have good connections with employers are key players in bringing new migrants to work in host countries. Approximately, half of Cambodian migrants go to work in Thailand with the help of a broker, 29% with the help of relatives, 4% via friends, and 3% via recruitment agencies (OECD/CDRI, 2010). However, there is a gap of knowledge in this report’s analysis, because social networks have not been examined as a “push factor”. We know how migrants get access to jobs in a destination country through social networks, but we know almost nothing about how social networks in their home village, surprisingly, push them to emigrate in search of economic relief. According to empirical data from interviews and observations in Kandal village, Preah Netre Preah commune, and Banteay Meanchey village, Cambodia, this study attempts to point out the relationship between social networks and push-factor of migration to Thailand in particular.
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