Duplicitous Freedom: Moral and Material Care Work in Anti-Trafficking Rescue and Rehabilitation

Genealogies of Care, Intimacy, and Sex

The expansive sociological literature on care work has largely excluded sex work. Focusing primarily on careers in teaching, nursing, and childcare, the analytic category of care work that emerged in the late 1990s demanded recognition of certain forms of invisible, underpaid, or non-paid forms of work, typically taken on by women. Sex work was unlikely to be conceptualized as a form of care work, because sexual commerce is understood within a highly contested emotional and moral terrain involving rights, legality, religion, women’s bodies, and their relationships to sex and the market. The lack of historical attention to sex work within scholarship on care work should lead us to take stock of the normative and morality-ridden undertones through which we understand care. It points to several questions that recur in debates over sex work and sex trafficking, as well as important questions raised in this special issue: Can care work be illegal? Can care work be exploitative? Can care work be contentious? Can care work be coercive? And finally, how is care work socially positioned and site-specific?

A generative framework of “intimate labor” advanced by Nicole Constable, Eileen Boris, Rhacel Parreñas, Elizabeth Bernstein, and others has called for attention to a varied continuum on which intimacy is commodified in marriage, sex, and reproductive labor (Constable, 2009; Boris and Parreñas, 2010). Sexual labor additionally, scholars argue, is a fruitful lens that attends to the economic processes that undergird one of the most prevalent commercial exchanges in the global marketplace (Boris et al., 2010; Bernstein, 2007c). The term “sex work” itself, devised by sex worker and activist Carol Leigh in 1979 to advocate for the labor rights of sex workers, offered new language to speak of sex workers in a way that conferred agency and choice as distinct from the more common, and reductive, labels of prostitutes, or prostituted women.

Megan Rivers-Moore’s recent ethnography of sex work in Costa Rica explains that “sex workers in the south are most frequently constructed in relation to the profound inequalities of race, nation, class, and gender at play between them and their clients, and less in terms of their caring work” (Rivers-Moore, 2016: 73). This reminder of the site-specific meanings of sex work as care work pays essential tribute to the long-standing critiques that emerged in the literature on domestic work in the US, in which scholars argued that white women benefit from the devaluation of black women and women of color when it comes to the sphere of reproductive labor. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1992) further elaborated that in the long-term, the gendered division of reproductive labor in the household stays in tact when white women reproduce the gender–race division of reproductive labors. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2001) work further contextualizes this within the case of Latina migrant domestic workers in the US, who leave behind families in their hometowns to provide the same care work in white households. These “transnational care chains” typify what Leisy Abrego (2013), Jessaca Leinaweaver (2012), and Kristen Yarris (2017) have written about as “transnational motherhood.” Lastly, writing about the newer context of global surrogacy programs, and new reproductive technologies, Sharmila Rudrappa’s (2015) work reminds us how reproductive labor is racialized under global regimes of care. Clarifying the relationship between sex work, care work, and globalized racial inequality underscores perennial tensions around what are considered legitimate and dignified forms of women’s work—mapping onto ongoing debates about sex work and prostitution within the anti-trafficking movement.

Trafficking Racialized Care Work

The racial politics of the human trafficking abolition movement erases the material inequalities and reproduces the unequal power relations that have made the earnings from sex work higher than that of factory work for working-class Thai and Chinese women. In particular the “whiteness” of Global North activists speaks both to the racial demographics of anti-trafficking activists, and the symbolic power of whiteness to confer global authority, moral superiority, and ethical consumption, affirming what Kamala Kempadoo has called the “White Wo(man’s) Burden” and what Teju Cole has called the “White Savior Industrial Complex” (2012). As an insightful analytic counterpart, Lyndsey Beutin (2017) and Tryon Woods (2013) have also described American anti-trafficking interventions as fundamentally anti-black for how the now ubiquitous “modern day slavery” moniker “appropriates black suffering by reducing the memory and image of slavery to objects that are compatible with the anti-trafficking narrative, without regard for the ongoing black liberation struggle” (Beutin 2017: 14).

Since the passing of the 2000 UN Palermo Protocol, the global anti-trafficking movement has been defined by a crucial impasse: between so-called modern-day abolitionists who believe that all sex work is inherently exploitative and must universally be abolished, and those who argue sex work should be understood as just one type of work available to workers in the global south. The conservative posture towards what Elizabeth Bernstein (2007b) terms “the sexual politics of new abolition” has come to define the American response to human trafficking, which tends to focus exclusively on sex trafficking while excluding a consideration of labor trafficking more generally. Anti-trafficking programs throughout the world have honed in on the “rehabilitation” scheme as part of a “Three R’s” approach to human trafficking victim protections in global anti-trafficking governance and policy including rescue, rehabilitation, and reintegration. As a term of rehabilitation, rescued sex workers in two rehabilitation programs in China and Thailand are recruited from different kinds of sex work and are taught jewelry making skills. As jewelry makers, they earn the minimum wage equivalent of other low wage service and manufacturing jobs, which is 1/3–1/5 of what they formerly earned as sex workers.

At the Freedom Footprints rescue and rehabilitation project in Beijing, China, jewelry workers are promised annual bonuses based on their performance each Chinese New Year. In February 2011, one by one, workers were called into the manager’s office to receive their specific bonus amounts. I spoke with Ling, who had just exited her meeting with the manager. As the oldest participant and one of the earliest participants in the program, Ling was shocked to receive only USD 45, which was not enough to pay for a round trip train ticket to her home province of Fujian for the Chinese New Year celebration. As with other employees, the manager instructed Ling not to tell other workers about the amount that she had received, so as not to create envy or greed. However, rumors naturally circulated amongst the small staff and it soon became known that many of the newer participants had received bonuses of up to RMB 600 (USD 100). Ling’s bonus was surprising to her because she had learned that the newer workers had received bonuses of up to double that amount, a similar amount that Ling had received when she arrived at Freedom Footprints (FF) four years prior. Ling speculated that her bonus had nothing to do with her production or performance, but rather her lack of mobility and other alternatives now as a veteran worker. She expressed frustration with a coercive bonus system that was responsible for “luring” newer workers to stay at Freedom Footprints while refusing to similarly reward older employees who had fewer employment alternatives.

With only USD 45 in hand—which is less than the cost of one bracelet that she makes, and she can make about four such bracelets in an hour—she made a quick mental calculation that rather than return home for the new year, she would remit all the money back to her son, age 9, who she has left behind since his infancy—a choice that many Chinese and migrant laborers globally make (Biao, 2008; Ye et al., 2013).

Decisions like these are typical of the onerous calculations choices workers make, and almost all workers in these rehabilitation programs contest the definition of trafficking, articulating instead that they are proud that earnings from sex work helped care for families in immeasurable ways—reflecting their understanding of material care work. While many commercial sex workers recognize sex work as “hard work,” with its own set of complicated opportunities and constraints—they see their new position as jewelry makers as just another low-wage job within the limited economy. In fact, many consider the job of lesser status as well, finding the rote character of wage labor and the consistent monitoring of social behavior of considerably less dignity and autonomy than characterized their experiences with sex work.

Ironically, financial remittances to family, as depicted in the epigraphs at the start of the article, are frequently deployed as an explanation of one of the root symptoms of trafficking by transnational activists. Labeling material care work “economic coercion,” this argument seeks to equate all sex work as sex trafficking by aligning it with the legal definitions of “force, fraud, and coercion” as outlined in the UN Palermo Protocol (UN General Assembly, 2000). Thus, the choice to be a sex worker is never recognized, but rather is framed as a false consciousness created by global poverty and cultural values that place pressure on women to provide for families in different ways.

Maternal Logics of Moral Care

Activists frame savior narratives as care work, often deploying maternalist language to indicate that sex workers are somehow either needing family or lacking family values. It is crucially important for those narratives to center on how individuals turn to sex work because of a fundamental lack of “care” from their own families, rather than systemic issues stemming from uneven global development, persistent rural-urban inequality, and myriad factors and vulnerabilities related to the feminization of migration. As human trafficking is increasingly viewed as a problem of bad families, rehabilitation programs focus on correcting not only economic needs, but also the larger swath of individual issues that are considered “life skills training”, or “spiritual rehabilitation.” In sum, by erasing these stories of material care work with a larger global moral imperative to stop sex trafficking.

Shelter is one of the most crucial parts of rehabilitation schemes, though prior research on shelters has found a troubling connection between shelters and government detention centers (Empower Foundation, 2012; Brunovskis and Surtees, 2007; Gallagher and Pearson, 2010). This tension emerges when the different social conditions and expectations of care work collide with the material realities of minimum wage jewelry making. While workers in Bangkok’s Cowboy Rescue rehabilitation program rent independent apartments, housing in China’s Freedom Footprints shelter is mandatory, which to workers seems like standard procedure for Chinese businesses—they typically provide meals and housing as is characteristic of China’s post-socialist “iron rice bowl” provisions for workers. Freedom Footprints workers are required to live in dormitories on-site, are prohibited from having male visitors, have a nightly 10 p.m. curfew, and are penalized RMB 1 (USD 0.15) for each minute they are late. The on-site dorms hire “housemoms” to enforce “shelter harmony,” which invokes the Chinese communist party’s slogan of maintaining “social harmony” as a rhetorical platform for managing deviance. Workers must sign a contract to live in the mandatory shelter that includes basic rules about non-violent behavior, cleanliness, vigilance about turning off the gas valve after cooking, in addition to agreeing not to engage in pre-marital sex, or abortion. All infractions come with monetary fines, and the infractions of social behavior are punishable by termination from the program.

“Housemoms” are Chinese Christians with at least a high school education; however, they are paid only several hundred RMB above the former sex workers they are hired to patrol, a low salary that they accept as a testament to their sacrifice and the limited numbers of jobs for Christian workers under China’s intolerant religious environment. In both Beijing and Bangkok, Christian missionary volunteers and staff who accepted a lower salary saw this as indication of their care work. Here, their own financial sacrifices as volunteer or low-paid workers, or personal sacrifices, to leave “home” and live abroad in a service capacity, were equally important affective resonance of care work.

Maternalist language likening activists and bosses to “mothers,” and all sex workers to “girls,” no matter what their age, pervaded both organizations as a means of justifying coercive protection and close surveillance. In addition to labeling shelter managers as “housemoms,” anti-trafficking activists in both organizations referred to jewelry producers as “our girls.” This infantilizing and possessive label often seemed out of place because some of the workers were upwards of 50 years old, and regarded jewelry making as a retirement strategy. Maternalist language nonetheless was a daily tool of dominance, strategically invoked to delegitimize the family decision-making strategies of such workers, and to deny them any right as care workers of their own. It is with these new arrangements around social entrepreneurship that Global North activists enact their own versions of care work.

Other scholars have begun to theorize volunteer work, particularly of elites, as a type of care work. Leslie Wang’s (2013) articulation of the “unequal logics of care” between wealthy expats in China and their charitable subjects in orphanages notably employs the care work lens to understand gendered humanitarian efforts. Further scholarship on the affective economies of global voluntourism is helpful to illustrate that humanitarianism has emerged as a different version of care work (see, e.g., Vrasti, 2013; Bernstein and Shih, 2014). By its nature, this work is often unpaid, yet paradoxically, part of highly profitable networks of global capital through private, public, and state sponsored funding streams. The global anti-trafficking movement is a prime example of how the benevolent intentions of rescue work have been supported by the circulation of hundreds of millions of dollars in the rescue industry (Agustìn, 2007) throughout the globe.

Activists deploy a maternalist posture that encourages the creation of new “family dynamics” to replace the Thai and Chinese family conditions that have been villified as the root causes of trafficking. As was frequently repeated in anti-trafficking trainings in the US, one American activist shared her experiences managing women in the Cowboy Rescue program in Bangkok: “girls often act out [in rehabilitation programs] because they become stuck at the age in which they entered prostitution.” Pathologizing the links between trauma endured during sex work and its connections to poor-decision making, both organizations strongly discouraged workers from building relationships with men, and in China, where mobility was largely monitored by the fact that workers lived in dormitories on-site, meeting people outside of the rescue organization was often difficult. In Beijing, shelter rules prohibited Chinese men from visiting out of a professed concern that “residents have already endured significant trauma at the hands of a man.” Dating was explicitly discouraged as a priority of life under rehabilitation because of the pervasive belief that former sex workers had pathologically deviant relationships with men. For participants in both programs, even those who had endured physical and emotional violence at the hands of male clients or lovers still sought friendships and romantic relationships. This narrative of monolithic sexual victimization demonizes third world men, and upholds chastity as one of the key objectives of freedom and salvation. Expatriate male visitors, however, who frequently toured the rehabilitation facility as a part of their global travels from North America and Europe, were allowed on site through awareness raising tours offered by both facilities.

Such maternalist language, though recurrent for women and girl victims of trafficking, also occurs with young boys. Using the slogan “Boys cannot be baht” (the baht is the Thai currency), Urban Light, another American NGO working in Northern Thailand, refers to men over the age of 18 as “boys” because sex work presumably robs one of their innocence. Upon speaking at more length with the organization, we learn that the participants are all young men above the age of 18, but referring to them as boys confers a certain victim identity, which would be more ambiguous if they were referred to as adult male workers.

These references to the morality of humanitarian care work establish regimes of authority on the jewelry shop floor. However, these contemporary efforts have well-documented predecessors, as historians have written extensively about “imperialist motherhood” in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. For example, Angelina Chin’s (2013) work on colonial charity and social control in Hong Kong in the 1930s, discusses the work of the Po Leung Kuk (PLK), a rescue institution and women and children’s shelter founded by local Chinese middle- and upper-class men. By producing categories of disempowered and dangerous women, the PLK became an institutional tool for the colonial state in dealing with the contradictions between emancipation and immorality. Similarly, Nancy Rose Hunt’s (1988) work on Belgian women’s colonial intervention in Belgian Congo into the practices of breastfeeding and milk distribution in the 1910s examines colonial interventions of reproductive and care work. Hunt writes that “these colonial initiatives were linked to a discourse which viewed African birth spacing customs insidious and saw a solution in European women” (Hunt, 1988: 402). In light of previous work by historians focusing on the “tensions” between women in the metropolis and colonies, these new dichotomous markets of care highlight how development-based inequalities underscore new opportunities for care to be manipulated in the name of more recent global humanitarianism. Alternatively, they provide an important framework for how contemporary humanitarianism, particularly as it responds to problems of gender, migration, and development, reinstalls new rescue regimes that mirror the civilizing objectives of colonial empire. Lastly, they not only map global difference between the Global North and South, or colonial relationships between the colony and metropolis, but also repeat recurrent racial scripts about white saviors and Asian sex slaves who need rescue not only from the brutal conditions of sexual exploitation, but intractably backwards family values.

Sex Work as Care Work

In response to the heightened anti-sex trafficking panics of the past decade, sex worker rights organizations have organized and advocated under the slogan that “Sex Work is Work,” demanding that sex work must be understood for its varied labor processes that include a continuum of both empowering and exploitative work—also acknowledging that both categories are incredibly fraught by moral meanings, and that they are not mutually exclusive categories. In Northern Thailand, the Empower Foundation, a Thai sex worker rights organization, founded in 1989 long before anti-trafficking organizations arrived in Thailand, recently introduced a game called “7 hours and 55 minutes” that illustrates to the global community the labor rights of sex workers by framing their work within the time of an 8-hour working day—understood as regular formal employment in the industrialized world. As players advance through the game, we see that paid sexual intercourse forms just a small fraction of a sex worker’s negotiations with familial obligations, financial constraints, immigration policy, personal health and safety, police harassment, and relationships with clients and employers. As you play the game, you advance a certain number of steps if you find a regular well-paying client, or you may be penalized one turn if you become the target of an anti-trafficking raid. Along the way, different points are assigned for psychological, emotional, and sexual negotiations of power and intimacy, as sex workers see their jobs as therapists, friends, lovers, and even travel agents.

The game advocates players to understand sex work as care work—inclusive of both sexual labor as well as other forms of emotional and intimate work. As described by Malee, a 40-something sex worker, sex worker rights activists, and one of the co-creators of the game:

If you look at sex work within an eight-hour day, only about five minutes is actually spent on sexual intercourse, the rest of the seven hours and 55 minutes, is about all the different kinds of work that we do—caring for everyone from our clients, to our families.

The message that 7 hours and 55 minutes communicates is one that research on sex work has extensively explored. Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik’s early, groundbreaking volume Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered (2005), demonstrated the complexity of sex work within the global anti-trafficking movement. Others have explored how sex work involves multiple acts of care beyond the specific moment of sexual intercourse. For instance, Elizabeth Bernstein’s (2007c) writing on the “girlfriend experience” in the San Francisco Bay area demonstrates the range and fluidity of intimate labor, while Kimberly Hoang (2015) demonstrates that Vietnamese sex workers need to not only provide sexual exchange but also the experience of “third world poverty” to allow western men to achieve a sense of benevolent masculinity.

Significantly, care work now is a framework that sex worker activists themselves have increasingly adapted to demand rights in the face of anti-trafficking efforts that prioritize their rescue, rehabilitation, and exit from sex work over their rights to work with occupational health and safety, and free from state violence, and free to seek retribution or remediation from violence caused by clients (Empower Foundation, 2016). Because sexual intercourse, and the commercial exchange of sex appears to cause the greatest affront, sex worker rights activists have turned to logics of care to explain that it is not just the sex, but a host of other care-related activities. It asks us to consider a range of other work that is necessary for commercial sex—nursing, friend, therapist, girlfriend, travel companion, Thai or Chinese language teacher—all forms of work that repeat readily-accepted versions of care work in the United States. Certainly, versions of care work that are already dispatched to poor, non-white, working-class women.

Conclusion

American sex worker rescue and rehabilitation programs in Thailand and China reveal new dichotomous categories of global care work. Foremost, family remittances are the primary way in which migrants articulate their agency across a range or working situations, which includes both their work as sex workers, and as “rehabilitated” low-wage manual laborers. These familial responsibilities fuel the rehabilitative care work that US activists undertake, especially when they frame their humanitarian investments in terms of maternalist discipline and care for broken women who are culturally indebted to provide for their families. Such rescue scripts have created a new category of care work that recognizes sexual commerce as the antithesis of care, and has readily supplanted sexual labor with maternalist volunteer humanitarian care work. To contend with this emergent group of first world rehabilitation and rescue care workers, sex workers and sex worker activists advocate for recognition of sex work as a range of intimate labor arrangements that encompass shifting arrangements of care work in the global economy. Understanding sex work within those constraints and opportunities—including understanding the ways in which it may be understood as care work—shift discourse on commercial sex work away from one of rescue and rehabilitation, to rights.

In conclusion, this paper argues that it is important to read anti-trafficking narratives alongside those created by the very populations that first world modern-day abolitionists are trying to rescue. Within these new transnational processes, spanning Asia and the US, these co-constituted engagements with care work under global capitalism are facilitated by parallel global processes: at once the military imperialist legacies of global sex commerce and manufacturing legacies of low-wage work in Asia (Shih, 2017), alongside the hypermobility of sexual humanitarianism (Mai 2014) that provides social legitimacy and financial support for transnational activists in the wake of the anti-trafficking movement. These come into direct conflict, when the type of work that is regarded as a dignified alternative to the material care work of sex work, is a form of manual labor that doesn’t afford workers the autonomy or financial stability to actually take care of their families.