Saving Our Sisters: The Politics of Anti-Trafficking and Sex Work in the Philippines

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Human trafficking is widely understood as a serious crime and a grave violation of human dignity. Trafficking, which is defined by the UN Trafficking Protocol (2000) as the "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit", has become a popular framework through which many governments address prostitution. The dominant view within anti-trafficking circles is that prostitution is uniquely victimising compared to other precarious work, which has given rise to common interventions targeted at women who sell sex such as raids, rescue operations, and "rehabilitation programs". Millions of dollars are spent on anti-trafficking programmes such as these with the aim of protecting vulnerable individuals. However, these programs generally lack rigorous evaluation and are designed without the meaningful involvement of target populations.My proposed book manuscript is based on my PhD thesis, Saving Our Sisters: The Politics of Anti-Trafficking and Prostitution in the Philippines, in which I examine the Philippines as a case study for understanding how care and control are enacted in anti-trafficking policies on sex work. The Philippines is a global model for anti-trafficking. It was the first Asia-Pacific country to ratify the UN Trafficking Protocol and the only Southeast Asian country to receive the highest ranking in the US Trafficking in Persons Report, which makes it a key case study, especially as anti-trafficking is gaining traction in other Southeast Asian countries. Filipino feminists took advantage of the momentum from the UN Anti-Trafficking Protocol to redefine prostitution as sexual exploitation under national anti-trafficking legislation. My research is the first systematic inquiry into the relationship between anti-trafficking and sex work in the Philippines. It provides an original history of anti-trafficking 'from below' that unsettles the dominant portrayal of anti-trafficking laws as anunequivocal human rights victory.Using ethnographic research with street and bar-based sex workers as my primary source of data, my project shows how anti-trafficking has reproduced and worsened some inequalities. It demonstrates how raids, rescue operations, and rehabilitation heightened the precarity of sex workers by reducing their control over their working conditions, increasing the police's power over them, and making assistance conditional on their cooperation in the prosecution of clients and third parties. The emphasis on victimhood also legitimises violence against sex workers who did not provide a credible performance of innocence. I challenge dominant understanding of sex work as trafficking by providing an alternative reading of agency that is grounded in how sex workers took pride in using their resourcefulness and entrepreneurship to contest their displacement in the labour market and resist gendered low-paid and labour-intensive jobs such as sewing and domestic work. I also discuss how they challenged social scripts by citing their work as a moral project through which best fulfilled their roles as mothers by improving their children's lives. While there are extensive debates in academic and policy circles on whether treating all prostitution as trafficking addresses the economic coercion and male violence in prostitution or entrenches the sexual surveillance of women and anti-immigrant agendas, there is far less interrogation of how sex workers themselves engage with and experience anti-trafficking interventions. This data is hard to obtain both because of the illicit nature of sex work and the opaque character of anti-trafficking interventions, but is crucial in establishing whether anti-trafficking laws, policies, and practices ensure the safety and well-being of target populations and open up gender-equal futures.