The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2011) 22, 236–254 doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2011.00135.

‘I am helping them’: ‘Traffickers’,

‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith
Sverre Molland
Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University

For several years, aid programs in the Mekong region have taken an increasing interest in
cross-border mobility and human trafficking and its relationship with development. More
recently, there has been an increasing interest in the identification of trafficked victims and
the investigation, arrest and prosecution of traffickers. Whereas anti-trafficking programs
ubiquitously define themselves as being in a battle with traffickers, this article argues that
although they are not homologous social actors, both engage in acts of bad faith. The article
elaborates this argument by drawing attention to the recruitment process within the Lao sex
industry as well as to the way in which aid programs attempt to identify trafficked victims.
It concludes that imaginary aspects of development underpin a simultaneous disjuncture yet
enable the social reproduction of the life worlds of ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’ alike.

INTRODUCTION
Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very dif-
ferent means) the naturalisation of its arbitrariness.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977: 164)

Human trafficking has become an increasingly global concern within policy circles
relating to migration and prostitution. In 2000, the first international definition of
human trafficking was offered in the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish
Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter, the trafficking
protocol) (United Nations 2000). The protocol identifies three main elements as
constituting trafficking: action (the movement of a migrant); method (coercion or
deception) and purpose (labour exploitation). In other words, human trafficking
refers to the way in which a ‘trafficker’ intentionally places a migrant in an exploit-
ative labour-related situation by non-consensual means. As such, the trafficking def-
inition frames power not in terms of the subject, nor structural forces, but in terms
of an inter-subjective dyad of victim and perpetrator.
Although academic literature on trafficking is limited, one of the main com-
plaints to date from scholars writing about trafficking has been the tendency
amongst aid organisations, Governments and the media alike to focus squarely on
prostitution and the assumption of migrants’ and sex workers’ lack of agency, con-
sequently projecting a victim identity onto them (Doezema & Kempadoo 1998;
Kempadoo 2005; Agustı́n 2007; Doezema 2007). By the same token, it is also

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

common—though rarely commented upon—to elevate ‘traffickers’1 to a perfected

omnipresent and powerful entity resembling a shady Nietzchenian Übermench, such
that: ‘The traffickers’ web spans the whole planet’ (UNODC 2006b: 11) with ‘orga-
nized gangs’ (Phongpaichit 1999: 76) ‘dynamically [adjusting] to changing environ-
ments’ (UNIAP et al.: 6) and ‘diversifying their supply source’ (Phongpaichit 1999:
97), so that ‘should there be an investigation by a law enforcement agency, only
small units of the organisation are exposed’ (Schloenhardt 1999: 93). This imagery
of ‘traffickers’ is in no doubt furnished by the fact that the trafficking protocol was
developed under the auspices of the United Nations Transnational Organised Crime
Convention, which presumes trafficking to be primarily a product of organised
criminal activity. An important effect of this assumption is that trafficking is
depicted as a result of calculated and organised conduct.
In this way, the imagery of ‘traffickers’ takes on a superhuman and prescient
character resembling ideal types. In short, ‘the victim’ is portrayed as unaware, inno-
cent and weak, while ‘traffickers’ are imagined as evil, powerful, calculating and all-
knowing. And it is in these ideal type depictions that the trafficker–victim dyad is
tacitly expanded to a triad to also include organisations and individuals who com-
bat trafficking in persons. ‘Anti-traffickers’ commonly describe ‘traffickers’ in con-
trast to themselves, often in terms of a battle where ‘‘it may be said that ‘we’ are
losing and ‘they’ are winning’’ (Aye 2002: 3) This happens to the extent that
‘[m]any a good researcher has been wounded on that battleground and has retired
to pursue other, less dangerous subjects’ (Bales 2005: 89). I problematise the
victim–trafficker dyad elsewhere (Molland 2010). What concerns us here is the
relationship between ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’.
At first glance, ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’ appear to be radically different
social actors. However, a closer look reveals a more nuanced and surprising picture.
I am not going to make the audacious and conjectural claim that there are conspir-
acy-like alliances between ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’ (Hughes 2002). Instead,
I will argue that both ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’ engage in an economy of bad
faith. Beyond merely comparing social actors who are differently positioned spatially
and socially, I will also elucidate linkages between them (Hannerz 2003; Tsing 2005)
to show that a common denominator for bad faith is grounded in modernist aspi-
rations and a developmental desire which enables both their separation and social
reproduction.
Firstly, I will examine the concept of bad faith and suggest how it is a particu-
larly illuminating heuristic device for analysing social forms of domination and
transformation. Secondly, I will show how both recruiters and brothel owners along
the Thai-Lao border engage in a range of euphemising practices which allow self-
deception to occur.2 Hence, the analytical horizon for this article is not the revisit-
ing of feminist debates regarding agency of sex workers per se, but the coming to
terms with how recruiters and venue owners within the Lao sex industry rationalise
their own conduct. Third, I will juxtapose this rationalisation with an exploration
of how anti-trafficking programs contain a dispositional grammar which fashions

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the particular ways in which ‘anti-traffickers’ deny their own subjective engagement
with the social world they are ultimately attempting to alter. Here, I will focus
specifically on the politics of victim identification.

BAD FAITH: COMING TO TERMS WITH DOMINATION AND

TRANSFORMATION
‘Traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’. These are two forms of power relationships we
are dealing with. On the one hand is the question of how ‘traffickers’ control their
victims: a question of domination. At the same time, this relationship of domina-
tion raises a broader problem of how ‘anti-traffickers’ seek to intervene and alter
this same relationship: a question of transformation. Whereas a lot of anthropologi-
cal literature tends to focus on the dominated and to use the language of ‘subal-
tern’, ‘resistance’ and ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1986; de Certeau 1988; Marcus
1995; Ortner 1995), this article focuses on the other side of the equation—that is,
the dominator(s). When exploring the dominator in power dyads, Jean Paul Sartre’s
existential analysis of bad faith is a particularly illuminating point of departure for
inquiry.
For Sartre, the essence of bad faith is the act of lying to oneself (Sartre 1957).3
It is a process whereby social agents are able to engage in an act of self-deception
by externalising their own complicity. This is possible, according to Sartre, because
of a ‘double property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcen-
dence’ (1957: 56). In other words, we are as social agents thing-like, yet at the same
time free from it. Sartre’s key point is that such dualisms allow for vacillation,
thereby furnishing bad faith. For example, we may emphasise our facticity (‘I had
no choice!’) thereby implying our transcendence as we are capable of choosing to
interpret ourselves in this way. Conversely, we may emphasise our transcendence
(‘I am not a sex tourist’), thereby implying our facticity through objectification.
This does not mean that the unconscious, or a highly calculating purposive form of
consciousness, governs social action (Indeed, Sartre’s analysis of bad faith is in part
a heuristic device in his critique of psychoanalysis.). As Sartre himself pointed out,
bad faith is faith (Sartre 1957: 67).
Although, for Sartre, bad faith was primarily a heuristic device for making an
existential analysis of ontology and the ‘mirror games’ of consciousness and self-
referential consciousness (Santoni 1995), his arguments have been more influential
in anthropology in an empirical sense. Bad faith has become popularised by Nancy
Scheper-Hughes (1992) via Bourdieu’s (1977) earlier appropriation of the term.
Whereas Bourdieu elucidated practices of bad faith ranging from gift giving (Bour-
dieu 1977: 5–7, 173; passim) to social production within academia (Bourdieu 1988)
and contested bureaucratic practices in penitentiary institutions (Bourdieu 1999),
Scheper-Hughes (1992) shows, in an analysis of hunger amongst squatters in Brazil,
how social actors, the poor and medical practitioners alike, act in an economy of
bad faith. Hence, instead of placing the focus on Sartre’s existential argument about

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

consciousness, bad faith in anthropology has been related to social processes, asym-
metrical relationships and institutional power. As Kleinman has pointed out, acts of
bad faith must be understood in their social, economic and political context (Klein-
man & Fitz-Henry 2007). Even in the case where social agents are authors of
extreme violence, ‘Our affect is always both internal and external to us—located as
much within the contours of our bodies as within the shifting parameters of our
socio-political worlds’ (Kleinman & Fitz-Henry 2007: 64). Furthermore, because bad
faith draws attention to the problematic of how social actors struggle to come to
terms with their own agentic latencies, the concept serves as a fruitful analytic tool
exploring power dyads from ‘above’. In this context, it must be pointed out that,
although bad faith is sometimes conflated with Marxist notions of ‘false conscious-
ness’, it is important to recognise that these two concepts imply very different
philosophical approaches to power. Whereas the latter refers to limits to freedom,
the former problematises agents’ freedom in itself. This distinction is crucial for what
follows as allusions to the false consciousness of sex workers4 must not be confused
with an ethnographically-based analysis of how ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’
explain their own conduct, which is our concern here.

THE ‘TRAFFICKERS’
I am helping them.
Lao Bar owner

The literature on commercial sex in Laos is almost absent, and contrasts with Thai-
land where the topic has been discussed at great length by numerous scholars (Van
Esterik 1991; Askew 1999; Lyttleton 2000; Montgomery 2001; Lyttleton & Amarapi-
bal 2002; Fordham 2004). While both countries have distinct social, political and
historical contexts, careful comparisons can be made because of the social, linguis-
tic and cultural similarities between the Thai and the Lao. Although government
officials and development aid literature tend to stress rural poverty as an explana-
tion for prostitution, academic literature explores how modernisation processes
intersect with Buddhist cultural norms. Numerous scholars point to how the
stigma associated with sex work can be mediated (to some extent) through material
gain. With increasing marketisation of rural livelihoods, providing material support
for kin through wage income has become a major way of gaining karmic merit.
Sex work provides daughters with access to a type of work that generates far more
income than other wage labour available to poor uneducated women. In addition
to fulfilling karmic virtues, it also allows poor and less educated women with access
to modern life experiences (Thai: chiwit thamsamay; Lao: siwit thamsamay) and
material wealth (Mills 1999). Hence, rural–urban migration allows for young
women to simultaneously enact both traditional notions of ‘good daughter’ and
‘modern woman’ through acts of gifts, remittances and display of modern status
symbols.

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This is not to say that there is no social stigma attached to prostitution in Thai-
land and Laos. Suspicion of sex work may lead to gossip and jeopardise marriage
alliances (Mills 1999). Yet at the same time, in the Thai and Lao socio-cultural
worlds, ‘surfaces are transformable, temporary and aesthetically pleasing, while the
self—who he ⁄ she really is—remains hidden and ultimately unknowable’ (Van
Esterik 2000: 203). Hence, social practices that may transgress public morals can be
tolerated as long as they remain disarticulated. As will become evident, this leaves
methods of recruitment into sex work highly ambivalent.5
In this context, it must be pointed out that the difference in stigma between sex
work and premarital sex can converge. Whereas both premarital sex and prostitu-
tion may carry stigma, the latter allows for income which can result in partial
karmic redemption as well as a means to access modern status symbols. Such a sen-
timent is expressed by sex workers, lay persons and even some monks (see Muecke
1992). Hence, it is no coincidence that several studies on prostitution have pointed
to how it is commonplace for sex workers to make their debut into selling sex after
a break up with a boyfriend (Askew 1999). This is not to say that adolescents act in
tandem with public morality. Studies from both Laos (Sene-Asa 2007) and Thailand
(Fordham 2004) point to what is taking place in many other parts of the world: the
commonplace nature of premarital sexual experimentation. The important point is
that norms relating to both sexual practice and prostitution are in flux because of
broader societal changes. On the one hand, sex work is condemned and feared, yet
it is accepted as a means for young rural women to access what is valued (merit,
remittances, modern life experiences, financial autonomy). Hence, it is within such
ambiguous moral parameters that the stigma of sex work must be understood.

Commercial sex in Laos

The Lao sex industry is varied and has expanded over the last decade because of a
combination of increasing disposable income and gradual lessening of restrictive
government policies. Although Lao prostitution does not take on the kind of expli-
cit spectacle apparent in Bangkok, one can observe discreet indirect prostitution in
both rural areas and main towns such as Vientiane. Although there is a nascent
presence of ‘classic brothels’, most venues cater only for indirect sex, which is avail-
able in entertainment venues ranging from dance halls, karaoke lounges to restau-
rant-style clubs. However, the most common type of venue where remunerated
intimacy can be obtained is in a han bia (beer shop).
Beer shops are often run by one person called ‘Mother’ (mae) or ‘Father’ (pho),
depending on their gender, and in some cases, it constitutes a family business.
A beer shop commonly employs from three to ten young Lao women. Sex workers
are commonly ethnically Lao, but there is also a disproportionate number of ethnic
Khmu sex workers. Although many women migrate from other provinces in Laos,
it must be noted that a large number of sex workers migrate from rural and semi-
rural parts of Vientiane province itself. Although rural poverty is undoubtedly a
reason for sex work in Vientiane, it must also be noted that many sex workers do

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

not necessarily come from destitute families.6 It is predominantly Lao men of differ-
ent ages and socio-economic backgrounds who frequent beer shops. Although
remunerated intimacy is available in such beer shops, sex is by no means a guaran-
teed outcome of such encounters. As is evident in many other parts of Asia,
commercial sex entails a prelude of flirtatious and inebriated company with a sao
borigan (‘service woman’, a euphemism for sex worker), which may lead to a
negotiated sum for sexual service to take place elsewhere (commonly a nearby
guesthouse).
Just as the interactions between customers and sex workers take on an open-
ended and unpredictable character, recruitment of sex workers does not adhere to a
straightforward pecuniary logic. As the trafficking protocol places great emphasis on
the nature of how a person is recruited into an allegedly exploitative situation, I will
now explore recruitment within Lao beer shops in more detail.

Recruitment: teens trading teens

At times, venue owners go out and recruit young women, commonly from local
communities they are acquainted with. Agents are sometimes used to facilitate
recruitment, whether this is for working across the border in Thailand or within the
borders of Laos. However, the most common means of recruitment is facilitated by
existing sex workers.
‘Thia’,7 ‘Phone’ and ‘Sei’ are three young women in their late teens who all
come from the same village in Vientiane province. They all work in a small beer
shop located in one of Vientiane’s suburbs. In addition to Thia, Phone and Sei,
approximately five other women work here. The Mamasan rarely goes out to recruit
women to work in the shop. Nor does she use professional ‘agents’. Instead,
employment in the venue relies entirely on the ability of currently employed sex
workers to recruit friends and acquaintances in their home communities, when they
are oscillating between the bar (for work) and their home village (for recreation,
remittances and gift giving). Thia was introduced to bar work through a friend.
After working for a little while, she took part in introducing Phone to the bar, and
Phone in turn introduced Sei. Thia told Phone about the real work she was sup-
posed to perform when she was recruited, and Phone in turn told the same to Sei.
All explain their debut into sex work as because of ‘poverty’ and difficult family sit-
uations and not in terms of force or deceit by a third party.
The way Sei, Thia and Phone were introduced to sex work conforms with what
has been observed by others (Askew 1999; Lyttleton 2000; Montgomery 2001; Wil-
son 2004) and is common in Vientiane and elsewhere in Laos (UNICEF & Ministry
of Labour and Social Welfare 2001; Lyttleton 2008) Yet other sex workers in the
Factory provide a different picture.
‘Gop’ comes from the same district as Sei, Thia and Phone, albeit from a differ-
ent village. A friend told her that she knew of a good job for her. ‘She told me that
I was going to work in a noodle shop and that I would get good pay’, Gop
explained. ‘I was very surprised when I realised it was a beer shop, I did not want

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to sell sex’. Responding to Gops despondency, the Mamasan suggested to her that
she did not have to sell sex, or go out with customers. Instead she could do chores
around the bar and sit and drink with customers only. In explaining how she ended
up selling sex, Gop said, ‘I saw how much more money the other women earned.
And some customers are not that bad, some of them are handsome [laughter]’.
It took about one month from the moment Gop arrived in the bar until she went
out with her first customer.8

Cascading deception
The recruitment I describe here contrasts with common depictions in the media
that portray trafficking as the misdeeds of transnational crime syndicates. This being
said, recruitment is not always consensual even when it is a friend who is recruiting.
Recruitment involves a notable cascading process from (i) initial invitation to
migrate, (ii) upon arrival, the shock of realising the actual nature of the work,
to (iii) a gradual socialisation process in the bar environment preceding the debut
into selling sex.9 Women are arguably only deceived into working in a bar serving
drinks, but within this equation is the presumption that, once in the bar, the likeli-
hood of the woman deciding to sell sex will be high. This temporal slippage has
important consequences for how recruiters, recruits, as well as ‘anti-traffickers’ per-
ceive employment trajectories and agency. Unsurprisingly, it allows a venue owner
to claim no force is being used, as well as recruiters to tell themselves that ulti-
mately, the recruit made her own decision to sell sex. And it is this cascading
deceptive recruitment process where bad faith comes most clearly to light, as it
allows a denial of complicity in transforming promises of serving noodles into the
sale of one’s own body. However, such distancing of one’s own complicity does not
occur in a vacuum. There are specific socio-cultural processes which furnish such
misrecognition which I will now explore. As will become evident, the act of exter-
nalising ones’ engagement is also very much part of how recruiters see themselves
as taking part in a transcendental endeavour.

Patronage and the politics of helping

There is a swelling literature on patron–client relationships in Thailand and Laos,
where seeking, rather than fleeing, a patron underpins social relations (Hanks 1977;
Lande 1977; Scott & Kerkliet 1977; Turton 1980; Reid 1983). Consequently, asym-
metrical relationships are not necessarily understood as unjust or exploitative.
Although patron–client relationships have changed historically, it is important to
note their endurance, which has been elucidated in studies on Thai bureaucracies
and village settings (Hanks 1977; Lande 1977; Scott 1977; Scott & Kerkliet 1977), as
well as more recent studies on Lao entrepreneurialism (Rehbein 2007). It is within
these broader reciprocal norms that we need to grasp how social relationships are
formed within Lao beer shops.
Within venues catering for sex commerce, fictive kin-terms are evoked in every-
day speech. As already noted, female managers or owners of venues are commonly

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

referred to as ‘Mother’ (Mae), and male managers as ‘Father’ (Pho). Venue manag-
ers often talk about sex workers in an empathetic way, referring to them as their
own children (Luk). Sex workers often reside on the premises which, in many cases,
are adjacent to the owners’ family home. Here, venue owners and sex workers live
together over extended periods of time. At times, sex workers take part in house-
hold chores which extend beyond the bar environment, such as assisting with the
harvest. A fictive family ethic is further reinforced by the incorporation of venue
owners’ own families into daily interactions and socialisation within the bar envi-
ronment (see also Lyttleton 2008). In Lao beer shops, one can, at times, observe
children of bar owners playing on the floor and sex workers taking on the role of
nanny when not entertaining customers. Sex workers are also incorporated into the
household’s religious practices, such as Bacci ceremonies during the Lao New Year
celebrations, and Boun Visakhabousa, a candlelight procession to the local temple
to celebrate the birth of Buddha.
Sometimes the Mamasan pays a commission for recruitment. It must be noted
that the practice of charging a commission, even within kinship networks, is not
uncommon in Lao society in general (Evans 1998; Rehbein 2007; Molland 2010)
and reflects a gradual monetisation of Lao sociality. However, there is often no
monetary transaction between the Mamasan and the recruiter. While at times sex
workers simply bring other friends along, it is also common that the Mamasan
entices sex workers to bring other girls upon their return home by enacting recipro-
cal moral obligations. This trend is also found in a recent study from Northern Laos
(Lyttleton 2008).
At times venue owners take part in helping sex workers, most notably with
access to health services. For example, when Phone first sold her virginity she
started to bleed badly. The Mamasan subsequently took Phone to a private health
clinic where they were able to stop the bleeding. At other times, venue owners
may assist sex workers in negotiating with difficult clients and even draw on sup-
port from local village security officials when dealing with violent customers.
These everyday practices simulate family sociality. A fictive family ethos allows a
blurring of emotional indebtedness (being part of the family) with financial
indebtedness to the bar. It is therefore not surprising that sex workers often
express positive views of Mamasan. Trafficking literature tends to read such soli-
darity in pathological terms often with reference to post-traumatic stress disorder
(Zimmerman 2003).
I am not denying that some sex workers may be subject to traumatic experi-
ences. However, the main problem with anti-trafficking literature that emphasises
post-traumatic stress disorder is that it depicts trafficking as a pure form of power
expressed in a victim–perpetrator dyad. In doing so, there is a particular calcula-
tive subjectivity which infiltrates policy when depicting ‘traffickers’ and exploiters.
But the presumption that the ‘perpetrator’ engages in subjugating practices in
a reflexive and calculating manner is substantively wanting. As Patterson has
pointed out:

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Human beings have always found naked force or coercion a rather messy, if not down-
right ugly, business, however necessary. As Niccolò Machiavelli observed, it is the
‘beastly’ part of power. The problem has always been to find some way to clothe its
beastliness, some idiom through which it can be made immediately palatable to those
who exercise it. (Patterson 1982: 18)

The idiom of power within Lao beer shops and entertainment clubs is not
primarily one of coercion. Instead, recruitment is rationalised as something very
different, i.e., ‘helping’ (soi).

Redemption of social status

Phone and Thia occasionally bring acquaintances from their home community to
their bar, in some cases for the purpose of selling their virginity.10 Often younger
girls in the village ask them about selling their virginity. Phone claims that she
advises them to ‘think carefully’ about doing this. Yet, this has not stopped her
from accompanying other young women and girls to the bar (sometimes as young
as fourteen). Although some girls are aware that they are expected to work as sao
boligan, this is not always the case. On one occasion, Phone brought three girls to
the bar to ‘help’ them sell their virginity. When it turned out that none of the girls
wanted to be in the bar in the first place, Phone thus asserted:
In the village, it is difficult to imagine what a job like this is like. Many girls are
scared. When I am home I am also scared when I think about working in the bar. But
when I get back here, then it is ok again. It is so different and you get used to it.

Phone added that young women in her village see the nice clothes and mate-
rial wealth she possesses, so they want to try. But when they arrive at the bar,
they do not like it and return home. Phone explains her involvement in bringing
other women and girls to the bar with reference to her own trajectory as a sex
worker. Young women who make their debut into working in entertainment
venues often reveal an impoverished rural background which contrasts with other,
more experienced, women who have earned money and can afford to wear fash-
ionable clothes and makeup. It is common for sex workers to comment on their
adjustment to sex work with reference to their ability to gain material status.
Ironically, sex work becomes both the source and the remedy of one’s social inad-
equacy. Simultaneously, the recruiter embodies what she invites others into,
thereby contributing to a social reproduction of sex work.11 It is therefore not
surprising that both recruiters and venue owners articulate their invitations as
helping. Phone claimed to be doing fellow villagers a favour. Similarly, a Mamasan
in a larger venue in Laos commented upon the recruitment of a fourteen-year-old
girl thus: ‘She is so poor, I had to help her.’ And, across the border in Thailand,
an agent affiliated with a string of brothel venues dominated by Lao sex workers
argued that occasional deception was, after all, not a problem because ‘in the end,
they will get used to it and earn much more money than staying home in the
village’.

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

Hence, there are several elements which come together. A reproduction of a

family ethos combined with the fact that recruitment is commonly carried out by
sex workers who embody both what is feared (sex work) and desired (modernity)
has the effect of recruitment taking the form of helping. This is further euphemised
by the cascading recruitment trajectory which allows both the recruiter and the
venue owner to tell themselves they are ultimately not responsible for the recruit’s
despondency. In other words, Lao sex workers-cum-recruiters engage in a Sarterian
play between facticity and transcendence. On the one hand, they see themselves as
vanguards in a transcendental endeavour by bringing opportunities to recruits in
engaging chitiwt thamsamay (Mills 1999), but along this path a cascading recruit-
ment process allows them to externalise their complicity. And the family ethos is
itself an act of bad faith where sex workers and venue managers alike tell themselves
that what is really a workplace is a family home. Hence, the niceties of what exactly
is outright deception, sweet-talk, or sincerity falls into the background. This brings
us to the question of how anti-trafficking programmes engage with alleged traffick-
ing cases and their methods for determining victimhood status.

THE ‘ANTI-TRAFFICKERS’
We need clear guidelines to identify victims.
Senior Lao government official

Over the last few years, development aid programs have taken an increasing interest
in combating trafficking in persons worldwide. This is also the case in Laos where
there has been a considerable increase in cross-border migration to Thailand result-
ing from a mixture of socio-economic disparities and cultural, linguistic and social
affinities. In response to this situation, several development aid programs have
expressed concerns about the outcomes for some of these migrants, which has been
reflected in the launch of several anti-trafficking projects. The acceleration of atten-
tion to trafficking is telling. The first anti-trafficking program in Laos was launched
in 1999. Five years later, there were no less than twelve development programs
involving UN agencies, international non-governmental organisations and numerous
government bodies.12 There has also been an increasing concern with underage
prostitution, reflected in the development of a National Plan of Action to combat
the commercial sexual exploitation of children, which has strong links to the anti-
trafficking programs.
Anti-trafficking activities must be understood in the context of development aid.
As numerous anthropologists have pointed out, development is often expressed
through modernist ideologies which produce dichotomies of ‘developed’ and ‘devel-
oping’ modalities which, in turn, legitimate perpetual development interventions
(Stirrat 2000; Mosse & Lewis 2005; de Sardan 2005; de Vries 2007). Similarly, anti-
trafficking programs adhere to unstated objectives of moulding the social world into
a particular way of being. Hence, whereas the notion of ‘development’ presupposes

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a tacit adherence to ideals of a ‘developed’ state, the focus of ‘anti-traffickers’ on,

say, the reintegration of trafficked victims, presupposes unstated desires for ‘inte-
grated’ social subjects. In other words, helping victims of trafficking is an important
underlying goal for many anti-trafficking programmes, whether this takes the form
of rural development (to remove incentives from migration, thereby ‘preventing’
possible trafficking), arresting traffickers, improving legal status for migrants or
providing socio-psychological support for trafficked victims.

Victim identification
Until recently, most anti-trafficking programs in Laos have tended to focus on
awareness-raising and income-generating activities in rural areas with a mixed (and
perplexed) purpose of deterring migrants from, as well as empowering would be
migrants in, making informed decisions regarding out-migration. However, over the
last few years, in part because of political liberalisation, there is now an increasing
focus on the need for services for victims. In tandem with this development, inter-
national agencies focus on law enforcement, which is exemplified by the provision
of training for the Lao and Thai law enforcement agencies to strengthen the crimi-
nal justice process relating to trafficking. Or, to put it simply, there has been an
increasing focus on identifying both traffickers and victims. In this context, victim
identification guidelines take on particular importance. This is reflected by the fact
that there is a specific emphasis on victim identification guidelines in the draft Lao
National Plan of Action to combat trafficking.
During my fieldwork, several officials working for trafficking programs expressed
the need for ‘clear guidelines’ to identify trafficking, yet were confused about what
such guidelines might entail. Some agencies, such as the International Organization
for Migration (IOM), have produced victim identification guidelines. They com-
monly include the definition of trafficking in the UN protocol, albeit in a form
where victim identification is articulated as an unproblematic linear checklist, and
which operates according to a binary—either ⁄ or—logic. None of the terms are
problematised, and how one ought to interpret—as well as ask in an interview
setting—about terms such as ‘coerced’, ‘forced’ and ‘exploited’, is not addressed.
Training manuals which target law enforcement agencies tend to be far more
detailed, in part because of the importance of victim identification in relation to the
investigation and prosecution of ‘traffickers’. Investigations of ‘traffickers’ have
important implications for the role of victims because witness testimony, in many
cases, becomes the main source of evidence that can be used in court cases. It is there-
fore not surprising that training manuals for Thai and Lao police place great emphasis
on the importance of victims as potential witnesses. A slogan for a trafficking police-
training workshop I attended in Vientiane stated: ‘the victim is the witness’. So how
are Lao and Thai police officers trained to identify a trafficked victim?
Training manuals for police officers follow a similar logic to that of the afore-
mentioned IOM guideline. The ‘three elements of trafficking’ (movement, force ⁄
deceit and exploitation) inform both interview questions to identify victims (to grant

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

their rights), as well as in procedures for gathering evidence (to arrest and prosecute
‘traffickers’) (ACIL & AusAID n.d.: 20–4). Although this training manual is detailed
and includes numerous interview questions, it tends to engage in what may be
labelled ‘naive empiricism’ in the way it canvasses trafficking trends:
Sex trafficking predominantly affects females because heterosexual prostitution remains
the most profitable and visible form of exploitation. Nevertheless, male trafficking for
the purposes of prostitution, particularly of teenage and younger boys, is beginning to
increase and should not be excluded. (ACIL & AusAID n.d.: 9)

What I want to draw attention to here is that such training manuals engage in a
process of objectification of social categories where typologies are canvassed
(see also Salt & Stein 1997 passim). However, they are so general that they barely
provide any cues at all. After all, how helpful is it for a police officer to know that
a victim of ‘sex trafficking’ is likely to be a woman? However, such obvious
challenges are not addressed in these training manuals. Along with such typologies,
formulaic binaries are offered which leave no ambiguities in terms of victimhood:
In simple terms, the condition occurs when a victim lives through an experience or
series of experiences that are so extreme that she ⁄ he is unable to comprehend the nat-
ure of it or accept that it has happened to her ⁄ him. In most cases, the trigger for the
condition involves the use of violence that is so extreme that it falls outside of the vic-
tim’s own system of values of human behaviour to such an extent that she ⁄ he cannot
rationalise it and may even deny that it ever happened to her ⁄ him.
As an example, to cite evidence from recent case histories involving South Eastern
European victims, incidences of abuse have been inflicted by traffickers upon victims
that have involved acts of extreme violence or abuse such as multiple or ‘gang’ rape,
the severing of fingers as punishment for disobedience or the removal of teeth to
improve a victims ability to provide sexual services. (ACIL & AusAID n.d.: 11–12)

I do not wish to argue against the claim that victims of trafficking may suffer
from post-traumatic stress disorder, nor the possibility of a trafficked victim show-
ing empathy and support for their captor, a phenomenon known as the Stockholm
Syndrome, which is emphasised in this training manual (ACIL & AusAID n.d.) and
other trafficking literature (UNODC 2006a). But I do want to question the premise
that this is a central and, indeed, a typical reality which Lao and Thai police officers
will encounter in their trafficking work. Without denying the possible horrific expe-
riences to which women and girls (as well as men and boys) in the sex industry
might be subject, the effect of such training manuals is that the identification of a
victim of trafficking insists on clear-cut polarised cases where the victims’ and per-
petrators’ statuses are beyond question. Anything that points to ambiguity is not
addressed and there is little consideration of the social relationships in which the
alleged trafficked victim is involved. In fact, the more emphasis on the horrific situ-
ation to which trafficked victims are subject, the less possible it becomes to imagine
any forms of social relationship between a ‘trafficker’ and a trafficked victim.
The types of recruitment which I discussed earlier are incomprehensible within the

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S. Molland

pedagogical narrative produced by these trafficking training manuals. This raises the
obvious question of how the recruitment of Gop, Phone and Sei fits into the peda-
gogy proclaimed by trafficking manuals, workshops and training on victim identifi-
cation.

The case study

It is early morning. I am sitting with a group of project officers in a small office
in Vientiane. All the participants work in aid programs that seek to combat traf-
ficking in persons in Laos. I had previously suggested that one project manager,
‘Tom’, should arrange an informal workshop where I could share some case
studies from my own research. I explained that I was curious to learn how anti-
trafficking programs would perceive cases from my own fieldwork. ‘Tom’ was
enthusiastic about the idea, suggesting that not only could this be an opportunity
for me to get data for my PhD thesis, but that we could treat the meeting as a
training exercise for program officers. Hence, the purpose of this meeting was
twofold: to strengthen skills amongst project staff on victim identification and pro-
tection and to allow me to gain better insight into how anti-trafficking programs
implement their victim support programs. I brought along nine case studies to the
meeting. We now read ‘Case study 5’ which is based on Gop’s debut into the sex
industry:

A bar owner tells a girl called Nok, who has worked as a sex worker in the bar for a
while, that she needs more girls to sell sex. The owner promises Nok that she will get
10,000 baht if she can bring back a girl from her village to sell sex. Nok goes back to
her village, she tells another girl that she can offer her a good job but does not tell her
what the work is about. When the girl comes to the bar, the owner tells her that she
has to sell sex and that she owes her 10,000 baht for the recruitment. The girl does not
want to. The owner suggests that she can work in the bar, selling drinks but not sell
sex. The girl agrees. After two months, the girl sees how much money the other girls
earn when they sell sex, and she decides she will do this too.

Silence. Then, one participant says, ‘The owner knows that with soft pressure
she [the recruited girl] will do this’. ‘Tom’ adds: ‘it is trafficking because we have
here displacement and indirect force, or pushing’. ‘Phetsamorn’, a third participant,
disagrees and says this is mere prostitution and not trafficking. ‘Tom’ objects,
pointing out this is trafficking for labour, and that ‘she arrives with debt. She has
been displaced, lured and exploited, it’s trafficking.’ ‘Phetsamorn’ responds ‘but she
can go home, nothing holds her back!’ ‘Tom’ says, ‘No, she has debt to the bar’.
So far, only a few participants have dominated the discussion, but now others
are becoming involved. There is disagreement about how to ‘read’ ‘Nok’. Is she a
‘trafficker’, or not? And what should aid programs and the police do about cases
like this? One informant points out that ‘we need clear guidelines’. Another infor-
mant suggests we write down the ‘three elements of trafficking’ on the whiteboard:
movement, deception ⁄ force and exploitation. As in so many other workshops, the

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

definition from the United Nations Protocol on Trafficking in Persons is referred to

when analysing trafficking cases.
The discussion drifts into considerations of whether the girl in the case study
can leave the premises in any meaningful way, and to what extent the debt ‘bonds’
her to the premises. And they discuss Nok. Is she a ‘trafficker’, considering that she
herself is subject to the same work conditions that might be seen as exploitative?
The discussion remains inconclusive and most of the participants agree that ‘more
information’ is needed to judge whether this is a trafficking case.

The anguish of choice

In stark contrast to clear-cut training manuals, ‘anti-traffickers’ have great difficul-
ties determining cases that are commonplace in the local Lao sex industry. ‘We need
to go back and get more information’ was a recurring phrase during the workshop.
Yet participants were unclear about exactly what information was needed. In fact,
in the workshop described earlier, participants were paralysed about what to do and
eventually gave up! And neither the participants nor the case study represented is
atypical in this regard. A total of nine separate case studies were given to a range of
anti-trafficking officials during interviews. It is astonishing that in all but one case,
there were heterogeneous views regarding both victim and perpetrator status.
In practice, the way ‘anti-traffickers’ make decisions about victim identification
contrasts with training manuals such as the IOM guidelines. For them, determining
victimhood status is not merely a ‘check box’ approach. Instead, ‘anti-traffickers’
interpret trafficking with reference to a range of parameters.13
Despite these ambiguities, none of the informants reflected on their own multi-
valent assessment of victim identification. Instead, several informants appeared to
have internalised an essentialised understanding of trafficking, assuming there was
one correct answer to each case study. One informant even asked whether it was
possible to obtain the right answers to the case studies after the interview. This
should come as no surprise, as victim identification refers to both legal rights
(in the case of victims) and criminal law (in terms of prosecution). And, as Cowan
et al. (2001): 6 has aptly pointed out, legal discourse ‘is usually grounded in a posi-
tivist view of truth, law essentialises social categories and identities’. The effect is
that informants tended to immerse themselves in the cases studies, perceiving them
as ‘riddles’ with real ontological answers, rather than stepping back and questioning
the very act of projecting trafficking onto the social reality of migration and sex
commerce.
Thus, representing victim identification as a checklist has the effect of externalis-
ing the act of victim identification away from the social worker onto an objectified
‘guideline’. In this way, it is up to the guideline, not the caseworker, as to whether
someone is deemed to be a trafficked victim, and the need for interpretation of
cases is not directly addressed. So, when ‘anti-traffickers’ tell themselves they are
using objective and clear-cut guidelines, they are in fact engaging in an institutiona-
lised form of bad faith (Bourdieu 1999). Guidelines are misrecognised as objective

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S. Molland

instruments for victim identification when, in fact, they camouflage ‘anti-traffickers’

inescapable engagement with making subjective choices about who is and who is not
a trafficked victim. This does not mean ‘anti-traffickers’ are oblivious to the local
context of trafficking. Indeed, ‘Tom’ once told me that my cases were ‘classical Lao
trafficking cases’. Yet, guidelines create a sense of coherence and meaning and serve
as a safe anchor to manage the ambiguity and flux of the local world ‘anti-traffick-
ers’ seek to alter. This is why, in part, one finds ‘anti-traffickers’ tenacious adher-
ence to ideal type forms of knowledge promulgated through guidelines and reports.

CONCLUSION
‘Traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’. Unlikely cousins. Strange bedfellows. In this arti-
cle, I have argued that they are, in certain respects, similar. They both claim to help,
and by doing so take part in bad faith. They do so with reference to the very same
social event: the cascading recruitment of Lao sex workers depicted in the case stud-
ies in this article. And the way they do this is not homologous. For ‘anti-traffickers’,
an insistence on ideal types, reflected through training manuals, allows their
personal engagement to be denied. For ‘traffickers’, it is precisely their personal
engagement which allows recruitment to take the form of helping. Where does this
leave us?
There are two paradoxes at play here. On the one hand, we have the reproduc-
tion of aid programs (in this case anti-trafficking projects) despite their obvious dif-
ficulty in marrying ideal forms of knowledge with field realities. On the other, we
have the Lao sex workers, who were once themselves recruits and who engage
in the social reproduction of an ethically precarious recruitment practice where
deception and helping coalesce. Following Pieter de Vries (2007), I argue that what
perpetuates these tandem deleterious contradictions is found in the imaginary aspect
of development and modernist ideals. I referred earlier to the way in which unful-
filled desires of modernity is not only an important motivator for young Lao
women to migrate, but also furnishes how recruiters rationalise their conduct,
thereby contributing to the perpetual nature of such recruitment practices.
Similarly, aid programs depend on desires they cannot fulfil. De Vries writes:

‘Rather than being a rational and legal – bureaucratic and hierarchical order – the
development apparatus functions as a crazy, expansive machine, driven by its capacity
to incorporate, refigure and reinvent all sorts of desires for development. It cannot be
emphasised enough that the logic of this machine is not that of organic functional
differentiation but that it operates through the construction of a smooth institutional
space in which buzzwords, forms of expertise and methodologies can be replicated
over and over.’ (de Vries 2007: 37)

Hence, anti-trafficking programs do not merely make legible (Scott 1998) what is
allowed for by the internal discursive logic of trafficking programs (Ferguson 1990).
The ‘shifting parameters of our socio-political worlds’ (Kleinman & Fitz-Henry 2007:

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 ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti-traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

64) which furnish ‘anti-traffickers’’ bad faith is precisely this imaginary aspect of
development which evades complexity and privileges ideal type models for develop-
ment planning. This has the paradoxical effect of distancing anti-trafficking pro-
grams from what they attempt to transform. As we have seen, the ‘anti-traffickers’
gave up on determining victimhood status in the case study. Yet, this does not result
in a halt of anti-trafficking initiatives. In this sense, ‘anti-traffickers’ are mistaken
when they define themselves as being ‘in a battle’ with ‘traffickers’. This is so,
because ‘anti-traffickers’’ engagement in bad faith allows a perpetual game of chasing
horizons which simultaneously secures a disjuncture from those whom they claim to
combat as well as their own programmatic reproduction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for excellent and
critical comments on a previous version of this article. I would also like to thank
Sarinda Singh and Samorn Sanixay who have provided thoughtful criticisms of this
paper as well as the Anthropology Department, Macquarie University that has
provided me with an Associate Lecturer ⁄ Postdoctoral Research fellowship to write
up considerable parts of my research.

NOTES
1 I use inverted commas for the terms ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti-traffickers’ to indicate that
they are highly ambiguous labels and that I do not imply an essentialist reading of such
terms.
2 This article is based on fieldwork (2005–2006) for my PhD thesis which was primarily
carried out in the border towns of Nong Khai (Thailand) and Vientiane (Laos), with the
help of both male and female research assistants. Rapport with informants was gained
by a combination of revisiting the same entertainment venues as well as through infor-
mal contact developed during fieldwork. Key informants include sex workers, recruiters,
venue managers and clients. The author also conducted participant observation amongst
anti-trafficking programs based in Laos.
3 Sartre’s claim of the possibility of self-deception has been subject to critique. Here, I
follow Ronald Santoni (1995) who argues that the act of lying to oneself is possible in a
modified sense within Sartre’s philosophy. As consciousness is evanescent, the act of
lying to oneself is more a question of ‘minimal persuasion of evidence’ rather than self-
deception in an absolute sense. As such, within Sartre’s conception of consciousness,
bad faith is rather a question faith as opposed to certainty. For an elaborate discussion,
see Ronald Santoni (1996: 34–46).
4 As Laura Agustin (2007) and many others have pointed out, policy makers who take an
abolitionist stance on prostitution often have a tendency to explain sex workers’ self-
professed voluntarism in terms of false consciousness.
5 Even within the same venue, one finds some sex workers who attempt to hide their
source of income from extended kin by claiming they work ‘in a restaurant’ and others

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S. Molland

who make no secret about their actual occupation. For a more detailed discussion on
this see (Molland, forthcoming).
6 As other studies of Thailand have observed, commercial sex provides rural women with
far higher income compared with other forms of employment. Although income varies,
it is not uncommon for sex workers to earn 8000 Baht per month, which is well above
double the income paid in garment factories (Sene-Asa 2007).
7 All informants names’ are pseudonyms.
8 Although such claims can reflect post hoc rationalisation, this is not always to case. See
Molland 2010; Lyttleton 2008.
9 While women are not forced to stay, they rarely see any alternatives. Their rural back-
grounds mean they are cut off from supportive networks and if they return without
accumulated savings they may be stigmatized at home.
10 For a detailed discussion of the commodification of virginity in the Lao context, see
Molland 2011.
11 It is also common for female venue managers to have previously worked as a sex worker
and then to have ‘moved up the ladder’ by arranging the prostitution of others. For a
specific discussion on this in relation to child prostitution, see Montgomery 2001.
12 Programs include ILO IPEC, UNICEF, UNESCO, and Save the Children. These
programs are funded through a complex network of bilateral and multilateral donors on
both a national and regional level. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to elab-
orate the intercession of funding and anti-trafficking programs, it is worth of noting that
the anti-trafficking sector straddles political divides regarding both migration (border
control vs. regulation) and prostitution (abolition vs. legalisation).
13 This includes considerations of whether the trafficker’s intent was to exploit the victim;
whether the trafficker benefited financially; whether the intent of the trafficker was to
exploit the victim; whether debt bondage had taken place, etc.

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