Abstract
This book is the result of an ambitious National Institute of Justice–funded study that sought to explore the extent and dimensions of the traffic in Chinese women for the purposes of sexual exploitation. The authors rightly argue that much published research on the topic constitutes ‘a concerted effort to simplify and to promulgate a particular point of view’ (p. 185). Research on sex trafficking suffers from extreme politicization that compromises evidence-based knowledge collection, and most methodological frames have focused upon perspectives gleaned from law enforcement, social service providers, or women housed in shelters or custody.
The authors should be commended for the work to address this significant gap in the literature, which included 350 interviews with sex workers (including trafficked sex workers), law enforcement, or other government officials charged with combating trafficking, victim service providers, and ancillary sex industry actors, in eight East Asian and two US cities. Yet, despite its title, this book is about migrant sexual labor – not trafficking – a fact that perhaps says less about the authors than it does about the false dichotomy and restrictive funding environment that currently characterizes research about sex work and trafficking. Indeed, the authors would most likely not have received National Institute of Justice funding for their research had they explicitly framed it as a study of sexual labor, which the US government does not recognize as a legitimate form of work.
The book’s nine chapters each address different facets of the research. Chapter 1, ‘What Is Sex Trafficking?’ presents a useful overview of prevailing trafficking paradigms and debates regarding the role of organized crime in sex trafficking. Chapter 2, ‘Going Down to the Sea’ contextualizes women’s experiences within the broader context of economic migration from China, a fitting choice given that the women they interviewed viewed sex work as their best opportunity for income generation. Chapter 3, ‘The Women’, presents an overview of the women’s lives, including their gendered decision-making processes with respect to sex work. Contextualizing sex work as the best of women’s limited labor options, the authors use the concept of ‘bounded rationality’, whereby women’s ‘decision making is bounded – constrained or restricted – by their social, physical, and situational contexts, and their perceptions of those contexts’ (p. 63).
Chapter 4, ‘The Destinations’, explores the cultural specificities of the sex trade contexts that made them attractive labor sites for Chinese sex workers. As part of a pattern documented throughout the book, a majority of women indicated that they had engaged in sex work prior to leaving China. Indeed, among several of the women who migrated to the United States and ending up selling sex, the most exploitative and painful aspect of their ordeal stemmed from exclusionary US migration policy. Chapter 5, ‘The Sex Markets’ mirrors most of the recent anthropological work on sex work in its exploration of the social organization characterizing this form of labor, including sex workers who solicit clients independently, those who work in partnership with a third party, and those employed by an establishment in which they engage in sexual labor.
Chapter 6, ‘The Traffickers’, describes the individuals who facilitate women’s international migration from China and affirms anthropological scholarship indicating that ‘trafficking’ situations are rarely as clear-cut as popular cultural (and even some scholarly) understandings indicate. Other researchers, activists, and practitioners could benefit from the author’s finding that ‘the roles of the facilitators or intermediaries in the sex trade are extremely fluid and most of the participants in the business can perform most of these roles if needed’ (p. 158). This represents a much more complex (and realistic) understanding of the nuanced nature of exchange and understandings that take place between women and those who profit from women’s earnings. Likewise, Chapter 7, ‘Supply and Demand’ argues that sexual labor is a business like any other which maximizes benefits to all concerned, a finding that also confirms most of the in-depth studies that have been undertaken in sex work labor environments. This chapter also describes women’s interactions with clients, including the formation of affective bonds, and importantly notes that violence does not govern interactions between women and their clients. Even more importantly, Chapter 9, ‘The Reality and the Myths’, which follows a chapter documenting the researchers’ interviews with police, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government workers, compares the experiences of the women interviewed to UN and US definitions of trafficking, concluding that none of the women had experienced anything like these legal definitions. This, in itself, likely constitutes the book’s most significant contribution to the literature on the subject.
The book’s greatest strengths lie in its prioritization of sex workers’ own descriptions of their migration experiences, its multi-country methodological approach, and its refreshingly apolitical approach to the subject matter. The authors resemble anthropologists in their observation that ‘the best sources of information about prostitution and sex trafficking are the very people who are most directly involved in it’ (p. 13). Numerous extended quotes from the women to help illustrate the nuanced realities of their lives and sex work experiences, thereby contextualizing women’s sex work and migration activities within a livelihood framework that helps to underscore that most forms of exploitation stems from gendered economic vulnerability.
Another strength is its focus on multiple actors concerned with international migration and sex work in some capacity, which makes it a pioneering example of scholarship in this respect. An additional contribution to the burgeoning literature on this subject is its apolitical approach to the issue, a refreshing change from research embedded within decades-old polemics between often polarized camps that refuse to engage in dialogue with one another. By viewing sex work as a choice that women make, albeit from a sometimes very limited menu of life options, the authors subvert these debates entirely.
Yet, like any lengthy published work on a controversial topic, the book also has areas that will puzzle or even frustrate experts in this field. The authors’ mobilization of interdisciplinary literature in support of their claims may confuse readers given their repeated assertion of the need to focus on presenting unbiased findings. Work by journalists and academic researchers seem to be accorded equal par in many instances, such that on one page, a Canadian reporter’s rather salacious book (entitled The Natashas) is cited as evidence and on the next several well-researched academic books (including this reviewer’s) are criticized as unrepresentative, poorly researched, or otherwise biased.
Likewise, the authors seem to have avoided engaging with the extensive social science (particularly anthropological) research on the subject, which increasingly interrogates the blurry lines between migrant sex work and sex trafficking. For instance, anthropologist Tiantian Zheng, who has worked with Chinese sex workers in the labor environment of hostess bars for more than a decade, is minimally cited despite the fact that her work could have been of great use to the researchers. At times, in their quest to achieve the worthy goal of evidence-based law and policy, the authors stray dangerously close to minimizing the work of scholars who have embedded themselves for lengthy periods of time in cultural and institutional contexts that shed great light on sex work.
The researchers, in their quest to engage in empirical work, sometimes neglect how it may be problematic to generalize based upon their small sample sizes (just 15 sex workers in each country), which seems impressive when tallied together with the other interviews conducted in the 10 countries featured in the study. There is very limited critical inquiry into the authors’ gendered positionality with respect to the research participants. Such exploration is common in female researchers’ publications about their work and would have helped to assuage some readers’ inevitable concerns about the authors’ recruitment practices, in which they posed as clients over the phone and, after obtaining the sex workers’ addresses, announced that they would like to conduct an interview. It remains unclear how the authors felt certain, given the sex workers’ varieties of experiences and their presumably guarded persona, that the women provided them with accurate information, particularly given that disclosing information about one’s migration route and other personal information can be a far more intimate an act than sex.
Despite such weaknesses, this book constitutes an important contribution to the literature. Its findings point toward the expediency of collapsing the distinction between labor and sex trafficking as part of a broader push toward recognizing sexual labor as work. It is only by listening to the voices of sex workers, as the authors did in the course of their work, that legislators and public policymakers can have access to the kind of research that will result in evidence-based approaches to this enduring social issue.