Paved With Good Intentions?: Human Trafficking And The Anti-trafficking Movement In Singapore 981133238X, 9789811332388, 9789811332395

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Acronyms......Page 10
List of Figures......Page 12
List of Tables......Page 13
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 14
Migrants, Victims, and the Anti-trafficking Movement in Singapore......Page 15
Southeast Asia: Emergence of a Human Trafficking Epicentre......Page 18
The Emergence of Anti-trafficking in Singapore......Page 22
The Study......Page 24
Approaching Human/Anti-trafficking......Page 29
Framing and Frames......Page 31
Spaces of Exclusion......Page 34
Organisation of the Book......Page 36
References......Page 39
Chapter 2: Mobilising the Child Victim: The Emergence of a Trafficking Master Narrative......Page 44
Introduction......Page 45
Framing and the Strategic Localisation of TBS’s Campaign in Singapore......Page 47
Forging a Network: Local and Regional Campaign Partners......Page 49
Framing the Child Victim......Page 51
Mobilising the Child Victim in Singapore’s Local Anti-trafficking Activism......Page 53
UN Women as Campaign Sub-contractors......Page 54
Student Initiatives: Traffick Light......Page 56
Springboarding from TBS’s Campaign: HOME’s Anti-trafficking Desk......Page 60
Conclusion......Page 64
References......Page 68
Chapter 3: Girls on Film: Framing Human Trafficking Through Film and the Cinema......Page 71
Introduction......Page 72
Intimate Publics and the Imag(in)ing of Children......Page 75
Film and the Global Anti-trafficking Movement......Page 78
Women at the Cinema......Page 84
Girls on Film......Page 87
Conclusion......Page 92
References......Page 95
Chapter 4: Elastic Victimhood: The State, NGOs, and Negotiating the Parameters of Anti-trafficking......Page 99
Introduction......Page 100
From Government Denial to Concession and Containment......Page 103
The Image Work of Anti-trafficking in Singapore......Page 105
Performing Anti-trafficking in Public Forums......Page 110
Migrant Rights, Non-governmental Organisations, and the Widening of Trafficking Victimhood......Page 113
The StopTraffickingSG Campaign and the Widening of Victimhood......Page 118
Conclusion......Page 122
References......Page 124
Chapter 5: (In)visible Women and (Anti)-trafficking......Page 127
Introduction......Page 128
Migrant Sexual Labourers in Singapore......Page 131
Foreign Domestic Workers......Page 138
Media and the Perpetuation of (In)visibility......Page 141
Representations of Maids as the Abused and the Abusers......Page 147
Conclusion......Page 151
References......Page 154
Chapter 6: (Un)identified Men and Labour Exploitation......Page 158
Introduction......Page 159
The Exploitation of Migrant Fishers......Page 161
South Asian Work Permit Holders......Page 172
Reconfiguring Migrant Workmen’s Exploitation......Page 179
Conclusion......Page 186
References......Page 188
Chapter 7: Spaces of Deflection and Deportability Beyond Anti-trafficking......Page 192
Introduction......Page 193
Geographies of Legal-Jurisdictional Exceptionalism......Page 195
Spaces of Deflection......Page 198
Spaces of Deportation......Page 203
Jurong Fisheries Port......Page 204
Shelters and Dormitories......Page 206
Shelters for Female Trafficking Victims......Page 210
Conclusion......Page 213
References......Page 216
Chapter 8: Discretion and Obfuscation in Exclusions from Anti-trafficking......Page 219
Introduction......Page 220
Discretion, Classification, and Disqualification from Trafficking Victimhood......Page 223
(Im)pure Debt Bondage......Page 225
Bureaucratic Obfuscation and Disillusionment......Page 232
Conclusion......Page 238
References......Page 240
A Tale of Two Vignettes......Page 242
The Road Less Travelled?......Page 248
References......Page 250
Index......Page 251

Citation preview

Paved with Good Intentions? Human Trafficking and the Anti-Trafficking Movement in Singapore Sallie Yea

Paved with Good Intentions?

Sallie Yea

Paved with Good Intentions? Human Trafficking and the Anti-trafficking Movement in Singapore

Sallie Yea Department of Social Inquiry La Trobe University Albury-Wodonga, Australia

ISBN 978-981-13-3238-8    ISBN 978-981-13-3239-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Dedicate to Lylah and Jericho

Preface

This book has been the result of the synthesis of a number of studies carried out over no less than five years. This includes a study of migrant women in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment industry, a study of migrant fishers trafficked through Singapore, and a study of male migrant workers in the construction, shipyard, and landscaping sectors in Singapore. Researching the book meant traversing a wide range of sites and sectors. In addition to research conducted in Singapore, the research took me to Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia’s Batam Island, and Bangladesh. There were many people involved along the way, individuals and organisations that provided important contextual and background information, introductions and access to participants, and assistance with referrals and supports for some participants. Foremost I am grateful to four individuals, without whose assistance I believe I could not have completed the research. Sister Mary Soh provided introductions to many women and girls in the Singapore sex and entertainment sector, as well as providing some financial support for that study. Neal Imperial, a diplomat formally of the Philippines Embassy in Singapore, also provided introductions to many participants—both migrant entertainers and migrant fishers—including contacting trafficked fishers once they return to the Philippines to facilitate interviews there. Debbie Fordyce allowed me to talk to men from Tamil Nadu in India and from Bangladesh who availed supports through TWC2’s free meal programme in Little India and allowed me to interview men there. Debbie also tirelessly explained to me the nuances and complexities of labour and injury claims for work permit holders in Singapore, vii

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including her experience of assisting men with these. Sumsul (full name withheld) not only translated for other Bangladeshi participants, but also, like Debbie, carefully unpacked and explained the interactions his compatriots had with the Singapore government and other agencies, including their companies. I am extremely grateful to all of them and thank them for their enormous contributions to my research. Other individuals were involved in various ways in the realisation of this book. Stephanie Chok read drafts of several papers that eventually made their way into the manuscript as chapters, including as co-author on one such chapter. Stephii is meticulous when it comes to accurately pinning down rules and regulations of MOM, MOH, and other organisations and in sending along papers that she felt would be useful for my research. Balambigai Balakrishnan was an incredible research assistant with the Tamil participants in the study. John Gee, Shelley Thio, and Noor Abdul Rahman were involved in providing information about various migrant worker issues in Singapore, and the organisation they represented—the NGO TWC2—provided funding to support the research project with the migrant fishers. Vanessa Ho and Nicolas Lainez provided important insights into the situations of sex workers in Singapore and correctives to the overly simplistic narratives of sexual slavery that often circulate around this group of women. My husband Ariel was an incredible source of support throughout the entire period in which the research was conducted and the writing continued. He also assisted with translations for many of the interviews with Filipino participants. I am ever grateful for all the supports he provides in my scholarly endeavours. Acknowledging here the women and men who participated in the research projects that inform discussion in this book can never suffice to thank them for their incredible trust in disclosing situations which are not only difficult to imagine, but incredibly challenging to discuss with someone who is a relative stranger. I am ever grateful to them, and it is my hope that this book, in some small way, will enable those charged with protecting and supporting trafficked persons in Singapore and elsewhere to reflect on how—and indeed whether—anti-trafficking can possibly be less remote from their experiences and lives. Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University, Albury-Wodonga, Australia

Sallie Yea

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Mobilising the Child Victim: The Emergence of a Trafficking Master Narrative 31 3 Girls on Film: Framing Human Trafficking Through Film and the Cinema 59 4 Elastic Victimhood: The State, NGOs, and Negotiating the Parameters of ­Anti-­trafficking 87 5 (In)visible Women and (Anti)-trafficking115 6 (Un)identified Men and Labour Exploitation147 7 Spaces of Deflection and Deportability Beyond Anti-trafficking181

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8 Discretion and Obfuscation in Exclusions from Anti-trafficking209 9 Conclusion: Paved with Good Intentions?233 Index243

Acronyms

ASEAN CSO ECPAT International  EEZ EFMA FDW FLW FOC GAATW HDB HOME ICA ILO IOM IPA IUU Fishing KTV LNGO MHA MOM MRT MWC NGO NUS PAP

Association of Southeast Asian Nations Civil Society Organisation End Child Prostitution and Trafficking International Exclusive Economic Zone Employment of Foreign Manpower Act Foreign Domestic Worker Foreign Worker’s Levy Flag of Convenience Global Alliance Against Trafficking of Women High Density Block (Singapore, public housing) Humanitarian Organisation for Migrant Economics (Singapore) Immigration and Customs Authority (Singapore) International Labour Organisation (United Nations) International Organisation for Migration In-Principle Approval (Singapore, Immigration) Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Karaoke Television Local NGO Ministry of Home Affairs (Singapore) Ministry of Manpower (Singapore Government) Mass Rapid Transit Migrant Workers Centre (Singaporean Government—NGO) Non-Government Organisation National University of Singapore People’s Action Party (Singapore) xi

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ACRONYMS

PHTA PNP SMU SOP SPA SPF SVP SWC TBS TiP TIP Taskforce TJS TNC TWC2 UN UNDP UN.GIFT UNODC US DoS

Prevention of Human Trafficking Act (Singapore) Philippines National Police Singapore Management University Standard Operating Procedure Singapore Ports Authority Singapore Police Force Social Visit Pass Seafarers Welfare Centre The Body Shop Trafficking in Persons Trafficking in Persons Taskforce (Singapore Government) Temporary Job Scheme (Singapore) Transnational Corporation Transient Workers Count Too (Singapore) United Nations United Nations Development Program United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Trafficking United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime United State Department of State

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1

Typical fisherman’s payment agreement and deductions receipts 154 Fig. 6.2 A contract paper presented to fishers in Singapore 155 Images 6.1 and 6.2 Common injuries of migrant fishers 158 Fig. 6.3 Illegal salary deductions paper introduced to JJ Metals workers165

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Films on human trafficking from the UN.GIFT website 68 Table 6.1 Mismatch between work conditions given pre-departure (Manila) and upon arrival (Singapore) 153

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Excerpt from Field Notes (22 April 2014): The title read, “Locked In, Tricked Out”. It was one of nineteen stories of ‘real’ trafficking victims—and the only one about trafficking in Singapore— exhibited on billboards in the centre of Singapore’s main thoroughfare of Orchard Road. The narrative read: “My job was to be an entertainer. But when I got to Singapore, they told me I have to entertain clients at this pub by providing sexual services. And I had to pass them all the money I made. After a few weeks, me and one friend tried to go home [to the Philippines]. But they had our immigration cards and documents. So, we went to the police and made a report. There were three of them [traffickers] and they were all arrested. Two were fined and one went to jail for four months. For me it’s like a lifetime”. This awareness-raising project was initiated by Singapore’s newly established anti-­ trafficking NGO, Emancipasia, and was produced in partnership with the Singaporean NGOs HOME, UN Women Singapore, and World Vision Singapore, as well as the Singapore government’s TiP (Trafficking in Persons) Taskforce. Of the nineteen stories drawn from across the globe, ten were unequivocally about ‘sex trafficking’, two were about the fishing industry and domestic work respectively, and the type of exploitation for the others was unclear, since the abuse and punishments were made the focal point of the stories. Only one story (trafficking of a migrant fisher) was about a male victim. In discussing the exhibition with a migrant rights activist in Singapore, I discovered that the Director of Emancipasia had inquired as to whether the activist may have dealt with a labour trafficking case involving a male worker in Singapore, possibly in the construction sector. Certainly, there were no shortage of such cases the activist had reflected, and Emancipasia was provided with the story of one such worker. But the story was never included in the exhibition, © The Author(s) 2020 S. Yea, Paved with Good Intentions?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_1

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since the TiP Taskforce had vetted all unsuitable content prior to its public launching. Emancipasia’s Director was simply told the case was “unsuitable” to exemplify trafficking in the Singapore context, and it was replaced with the Filipina entertainer’s story, provided by UN Women Singapore. The final and twentieth billboard confirmed the centrality of the child sex slave narrative as the most typical of human trafficking’s manifestations, both in Singapore and elsewhere. It read, “An estimated 250,000 women and children are trafficked for sex in Asia. With an unlimited demand for prostitutes, the numbers of humans enslaved in this activity is continuing to grow. Sex trafficking is arguably the cruellest form of human trafficking. Victims, some as young as three, suffer extreme psychological trauma and physical damage from enduring repeated rape, emotional manipulation and other physical abuse… It is not unusual for a girl trafficked into prostitution to be forced to service ten to twenty men a day”. With this exhibition, the rendering of human trafficking as (child) sex trafficking was now not only embedded in the social imaginary of the general public, NGOs and the state in Singapore as the most pervasive and barbarous of its forms globally, but the one to which Singaporeans needed to look in order to understand their own trafficking story.

Migrants, Victims, and the Anti-trafficking Movement in Singapore The above vignette illustrates the key argument of this book, namely, that there is often a significant disconnect between the experiences of individuals who are trafficked and the discursive construction and programmatic and policy responses to human trafficking. Discussing a similar kind of disconnect in the Bosnian context, Edward Snajdr (2013) suggests that a ‘master narrative’ of human trafficking operates at the discursive level, often despite emerging counter-discourses that challenge the specific type of victim story that forms such a master narrative. The discursive rendering of trafficking by the Singaporean government’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Taskforce in the opening vignette illustrates the role that the state and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can play in constructing master narratives about human trafficking. In the Singapore context, the government has effectively managed to reduce the numbers of prospective trafficking victims by narrowing the criteria for victim identification (the indicators of trafficking) to the most severe and unambiguous cases, particularly in the sex industry. Trafficking victims in Singapore are thus becoming constituted through essentialist gendered, aged, and sector-­

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specific renderings that make visible only a small number and type of victims. Consequently, female minors in the sex industry have received the most media coverage and are drawn on repeatedly in the government’s public proclamations about its efforts to fight human trafficking in Singapore. The display of Singapore’s ‘entry’ in the public photo exhibition on human trafficking is but one illustration of this discursive rendering of trafficking victims through the female Third World child. Although the interpretations of human trafficking in Singapore between NGOs and the government (and sometimes amongst NGOs themselves) are often at odds, they nonetheless engage with and respond to each other and, therefore, share a basic consensus over the discourse of (anti)human trafficking, as well as the framework by which it should be responded to. Further, both NGOs and the government engage in public performances and acts that demonstrate not just their ability to translate discourse into praxis and policy but also in managing the social realities of human ­trafficking and migrant exploitation in ways that do not significantly challenge these prevailing discursive formations. Such management enables organisations, including bureaucratic ones, to appear to be responding effectively to human trafficking, whilst simultaneously re-framing and, in the process, dismissing wider issues of migrant labour exploitation both within and beyond the sex industry. A multidisciplinary body of scholarship in the social sciences has levelled various critiques at the emerging global architecture and discourse of anti-trafficking, much of which is directed at the discursive rendering and circulation of narrow images of victimhood, usually involving female Third World minors (Lainez 2010; Doezema 2010; Frederick 2004). Feminist scholar Jo Doezema (2010: 11), for example, argues that critical perspectives on trafficking need to expose, ‘the relationships among those who shape meanings of “trafficking of women” and between these discourse masters and the objects of their concern; the “sex slaves”’. Any discussion of mobile global representations in (anti)-human trafficking discourses and the strategies behind their production and circulation through human rights activism is incomplete without also and necessarily attending to the ways such endeavours are reproduced and mobilised at a local scale. Although geographers have attended to such concerns where children are invoked as political subjects in other human rights issues, including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) (Ansell 2010) and child soldiers (Hyndman 2010), geographical scholarship on human trafficking’s discursive rendering of the child victim has been surprisingly absent.

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Critical scholarship on anti-trafficking engages with various aspects of trafficking policy and practice at state, inter-state, and non-governmental organisation scales, respectively, and provides perspectives on a range of interventions including rehabilitation and recovery (Frederick 2004; Gallagher and Pearson 2008), detection and identification of victims (Agustin 2007), repatriation and reintegration (Brunovoskis and Surtees 2012; Surtees 2017) and definitions of victims (O’Connell Davidson and Anderson 2002), amongst others. In this sense, there has been a discernible shift from the view of human trafficking itself as a human rights issue that needs to be recognised and responded to, to the emerging argument (though by no means consensus) that some anti-trafficking initiatives themselves can compromise the human rights of both victims and other vulnerably positioned migrants (GAATW 2007). This book traces the emergence of the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore from its inception in the early 2010s, until the time of writing in 2017–2018. The scope of the movement is perceived widely to include NGOs, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and groups, such as university student clubs, and government agencies and personnel. It contrasts the key tenets of this movement as a discursive policy and programmatic formation with the actual experiences of exploited labour migrants in the city-state. This task is not an entirely novel one, with an emergence of some critical scholarship on human trafficking campaigns (Sharma 2003; Kimm and Sauer 2010; Nieuwenhuys and Pécoud 2007), the multiple arenas through which anti-trafficking policy and practice have compromised the human and labour rights of migrants (GAATW 2007; Hathaway 2008; Bradley and Szablewska 2016), the various guises under which states utilise anti-trafficking policy and migrant governance as a means of reasserting restrictive immigration policies and enacting regimes of differential rights for migrants vis-à-vis citizens (Aradau 2004; Lobasz 2009), and the roles discourses and representations play in bolstering some of the above (Andrijasevic 2007; De Shalit et al. 2014; Gulati 2012; Jahic and Finckenauer 2005; Small 2012; Andrijasevic and Mai 2017; Weitzer 2007). The purpose of this book is to document the anti-trafficking movement in a particular geographical and political-economic context from its inception to the present time, and in the process to draw out the precise ways anti-trafficking as movement and policy/praxis may be remotely situated in relation to its subjects—namely, trafficked persons themselves. Singapore provides a novel context in which to undertake such an examination for two key reasons. Foremost, the anti-trafficking movement

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has a relatively recent history in the city-state, commencing only around nine years ago. This has enabled me to trace the movement from its inception until the present time. Because human trafficking as an issue does not have the protracted lineage that is evident in many neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, the last 9 years have seen a relatively intense and compact articulation of what has often spanned more than 20 years in many other contexts. But the recency and intensity of anti-human trafficking in Singapore is not the only, or even main, reason to cast a more critical in-­ depth gaze in its direction. Singapore is the major destination country for transient migrant workers, including sexual labourers, in Southeast Asia. Male and female transient workers in the construction, shipyard, landscaping, domestic service, and nightlife entertainment sectors together account for well over one-fifth of Singapore’s population of five and a half million at any one time. Singapore has come under international and local criticism for its treatment of transient migrant workers, including abuses of their labour and human rights (Yeoh 2006). This criticism has been reflected in Singapore’s ranking as a Tier 2 country in several of the US State Department’s Annual Trafficking in Person Report, including in 2017 (United States Department of State 2017: 355–357). Both the nature of these criticisms and the Singapore state’s responses to them and to human trafficking are discussed in more detail in this book.

Southeast Asia: Emergence of a Human Trafficking Epicentre Southeast Asia is a region where human trafficking is prolific and the anti-­ trafficking movement equally as elaborate and complex in its responses. When the United Nations (UN) Protocol on Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter the Trafficking Protocol), was signed and then ratified in 2000, there was little in the way of national legislation or policy responses to it anywhere. Countries that have recognised human trafficking legally generally did so according to much earlier and largely outdated legislation based on the 1926 Slavery Convention and its 1956 supplement. The Protocol de-coupled slavery from this earlier characterisation as an institution predominantly associated with chattel slavery (the ownership and right of sale of another human being) and replaced it with a definition more relevant to the contemporary period. Article 3 of the Trafficking Protocol thus read:

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(a) ‘Trafficking in persons’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs; (b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) has been used; (c) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered ‘trafficking in persons’ even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article; (d) ‘Child’ shall mean any person under 18 years of age. The three main elements of the definition of human trafficking put forward by in the Protocol are therefore movement (including acts such as transportation or harbouring), the means by which this is secured (such as deception, force, or threats), and the purpose (exploitation). A large corpus of literature now exists critiquing the Trafficking Protocol, particularly for its lack of clarity in defining key terms, such as exploitation, forced labour, and so on. Others have suggested that its wholesale orientation towards criminal justice responses to trafficking compromises and devalues human and labour rights issues. Those advancing this critique have further argued that criminal justice responses to human trafficking can often undermine the rights and agency of people who are trafficked, for example, by detaining them (GAATW 2007). It is not the purpose of this book to advance these critiques further—at least in the abstract—but rather to recognise that we may see the Trafficking Protocol as a catalyst for an enormous amount of activity at the international, regional, national, and local scales to punish human trafficking and, ostensibly, support trafficked persons. Further, and of much relevance to discussion in this book, the lack of clarity over key terms in the Protocol has produced what we might call a context for ambiguity, where meanings

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attached to ‘exploitation’, ‘forced labour’, slavery’, and ‘abuse of power’ can be manipulated, moulded, and reshaped to suit particular agendas, interests, or situations. In no other region has the effort generated in the wake of the Protocol been arguably more visible or more intensely productive of responses than in Southeast Asia, so much so that we may well suggest the region has emerged not just as an epicentre of human trafficking, but of anti-­ trafficking as well. Scholarly works, policy reports, media accounts, conferences, workshops and meetings, and belatedly fictionalised film and print narratives comprise a formidable and elaborate architecture of anti-­ trafficking. There are three key foundational tenets which anchor this body of anti-trafficking knowledge and activity together in Southeast Asia and provide its claims to epicentre status: the porousness of borders; the high levels of mobility (particularly undocumented); and growing inequalities within the region, at both an inter- and intra-state level. Statistics (even where their credibility is suspect and they may better be considered as ‘guestimates’) to support these tenets of human trafficking have been widely circulated to reinforce the severity and indeed urgency of addressing the ‘plague’ of human trafficking that has swept the region. The International Labour Organization (ILO) statistics on forced labour are oft-cited by those wishing to justify the intensive anti-trafficking efforts that have appeared in the region over the past decade with their suggestion that Asia has ‘the highest number of forced labourers globally with 56 per cent, or just over 11.7 million victims’ (ILO n.d.). Similarly, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that, ‘the trafficking flow from Southeast Asia remains the most prominent transnational flow globally. Southeast Asian victims were detected in many countries worldwide’ (UNODC n.d.). Indeed, the human trafficking narrative exhibition introduced at the outset of this book drew on these statistics with the suggestion that: ‘Seventy-nine percent of victims are sexually exploited; forty-six percent know their trafficker, and sixty-six percent are women and girls’. Institutions, policies, and programmes to combat trafficking followed quickly in the stead of these developments. Bangkok, in particular, became the focal point for anti-trafficking throughout the region in the early 2000s, as international organisations such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM); United Nations agencies such as the ILO, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UNODC, and a unique anti-trafficking unit call the United Nations Action for

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Cooperation Against Trafficking in persons (UN-ACT); and government-sponsored organisations such as Australia’s Australia Asia Partnership against Trafficking in Persons (AAPTIP) all located their head offices there. In addition, existing regional mechanisms, such as Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have developed detailed responses to human trafficking particularly at the scale of intergovernmental agreements to co-­operate and mutual commitments to address trafficking in persons. A burgeoning array of initiatives have followed, with most focusing on the framework of the ‘3-Ps’ of anti-trafficking—prevention, protection, and prosecution. Over the past few years, this focus has expanded to include two additional ‘Ps’, namely, policy and partnerships—language which has also been belatedly adopted in the Singapore context. Whilst recognising the breadth and diversity of responses to trafficking in Southeast Asia, there are four broad trends that are of relevance to discussion in this book. First, in practice, there has been a twofold focus on criminal justice and international development as the twin programmatic pillars that underscore responses to trafficking in the region. Criminal justice responses in particular have been pursued with vigour, and it is fair to say they now dominate the landscape of anti-trafficking, though not uncontentiously. Second, partnerships between government bodies, between and within states in Southeast Asia, and with the facilitation of organisations such as UN-ACT and AAPTIP have been promoted as a key mechanism to bring all states into line in their capacity to respond to trafficking and ability to co-operate across borders. Third, all Southeast Asian states, apart from Laos, have all developed—and subsequently revised— dedicated anti-trafficking legislation, and whilst these legal and policy instruments vary, they all base their understanding of human trafficking and how it is best to be tackled on the Trafficking Protocol. Each state in Southeast Asia has formed an inter-agency taskforce against human trafficking where different ministries are involved and, in some states such as The Philippines, local NGOs are also invited as full members. The ‘5 Ps’ has become the standard framework for responding to trafficking throughout the region, as it has globally. Finally, the number of NGOs working on trafficking-related issues throughout the region has burgeoned. There are now well over 1000 dedicated anti-trafficking NGOs in Southeast Asia and many more that include anti-trafficking in a broader range of services.

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The Emergence of Anti-trafficking in Singapore Within the context of the momentum generated in the broader Southeast Asian region around anti-trafficking since the early 2000s, Singapore sits as somewhat of an anomaly. The city-state did not sign or ratify the Trafficking Protocol until 2015 and did not develop dedicated anti-­ trafficking legislation until 2015, so making it the second-to-last state in Asia to do so (North Korea is still to sign and ratify the Protocol). It ratified the ASEAN Convention Against Trafficking in Persons (ACTIP) a few months later in January 2016. The reasons for the lag in signing the Protocol are open to speculation, but the Singapore government itself argued that it was not prepared to sign the Trafficking Protocol until it was also ready to ratify it, by which it meant that it wished to develop a full policy and legislative response to trafficking first and in reverse fashion to the process followed by its regional neighbours. This line of argument was first vocalised in 2010, but prior to this, the argument was a much simpler one; the government maintained that there was no human trafficking in Singapore as there was no evidence to support some NGO and academic claims that there was. It was this denial that set the tone for the fledgling anti-trafficking movement in Singapore that followed. The Body Shop’s child sex-trafficking campaign, launched globally in 2009 (see Chap. 2) may be considered the event that initiated the anti-­ trafficking movement in Singapore. Singapore was one of 75 countries globally that were selected by The Body Shop for the campaign, given the perceived need to pressure the Singaporean state to recognise this issue as one affecting the city-state. The perception of Singapore as reticent where human trafficking is concerned was surmised from a critical reading of the government’s apparent inaction on the issue at the time. This inaction included the Singaporean government’s failure to sign and ratify the UN Trafficking Protocol of 2000, and outspoken and repeated denials of the existence of trafficking in the city-state by government representatives, particularly in response to suggestions made about Singapore in the Annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report published by the US State Department. The campaign produced a number of country reports on the state of child sex trafficking, including one for Singapore since there had been little documentation of this issue previously and in light of the government’s deflection of the issue due to ‘lack of evidence’. The report, which I co-authored, documented over a hundred cases of trafficking of children and young people into Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertain-

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ment industry. As co-author, I was concerned that this rendering of human trafficking, whilst significant and worthy of further attention, did not capture several important dimensions of trafficking in this sector that were emerging from my own independent research on the subject. Consequently, I penned a second report with the permission of The Body Shop and UN Women Singapore (who were assisting in the campaign). The aim of this second report was to explore the nature of exploitation and specific problems of migrant women, including young women, labouring in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment sector. We had a launch, supported by UN Women, and an ethnographer conducting indepth research with Vietnamese sex workers in Singapore and the Director of Singapore’s only sex worker outreach organisation, Project X, spoke along with me. I dropped the term ‘sex trafficking’ from the title of my second report, and with the inclusion of the other two speakers, aimed to demonstrate that there are nuances and shades of grey in migrant women’s experiences of sexual labouring in Singapore that needed to also be considered in any advocacy around human/sex trafficking (see also Yea 2013). The campaign is discussed in further detail in Chap. 2, but at this point, it is important to note that the location of the anti-trafficking movement in a global campaign against child sex trafficking set the tone for the discursive construction of the problem in Singapore that followed and, despite my efforts to provide a more balanced—and possibly realistic—portrayal of the issue, the child sex slave was beginning to capture the social imaginary of anti-trafficking stakeholders and general public alike in the city-state. In March 2012, and in part driven by the impetus provided by the publication of the two reports, the Singaporean government released its National Action Plan Against Human Trafficking, so finally acknowledging that trafficking is a problem in the city-state and dedicating resources to its alleviation. A few months earlier, the president of the local NGO HOME was conferred with the award of ‘TIP Hero’ by the US State Department’s TIP Office. In conversation with the US Embassy in Singapore’s Political Officer, I learned that this was a political move and did not actually reflect the (lack of) work that HOME did on trafficking at the time. A civil society face of anti-trafficking was, I was told by the Officer, needed in Singapore. HOME has since gained considerable funding from various sources for research and victim support in the area of anti-trafficking.

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The Study This book draws on data from four inter-related projects, three with migrant workers in the sex and nightlife entertainment sector, construction, landscaping and shipyard sector, and offshore fishing industry, respectively, and a fourth study of the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore. Sverre Molland (2013) has labelled this approach to studying human trafficking ‘tandem ethnography’, which he suggests allows, ‘a methodological oscillation between the policy domain of anti-trafficking and the social world of mobility, sex commerce and the recruitment within it’. Tandem ethnography enabled me to approach the experiences of migrant men and women labouring in Singapore through their embeddedness within—and oftentimes exclusion from—the emerging anti-­ trafficking apparatus. It allowed me to critically examine the discourses, practices, performances, and interests in the emerging anti-trafficking movement and how these intersected with the experiences of migrant labourers themselves. Academic commentators on human trafficking have repeatedly argued that trafficked persons are difficult to access and ‘know’ because their situations preclude deep relations and disclosures. Arguably, their situations of bondage, surveillance, and tight physical controls on their movements, as well as the fear they may harbour towards speaking openly about their circumstances all converge to leave them largely inaccessible as research participants. As a result, much of what little academic work exists on human trafficking, and vulnerable migrant workers’ lives more generally, tends to rely on research methodologies that involve one-off interactions; fleeting encounters that yield few insights into migrants’ own critical stances towards regimes of governance and manoeuvrability within them in light of exploitative labour sojourns. To illuminate such a project required a rather different approach, one which called for ethnographic treatment. Ethnography has been a relatively neglected methodology in human geography and in studies of human trafficking, including political geography (Herbert 2000), but one which has the ability to move beyond critique centred on discourse alone. Nick Megoran (2006: 622) has argued that an emphasis only on the constitutive power of discourse can have the effect of, ‘regulating or even erasing people’s experiences and understandings of the phenomenon under question’. Following this, documenting only the discursive production of the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore runs the risk of assuming, rather than exploring, migrants’

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positions within these formations. Ethnography thus enables us as researchers to highlight, ‘discrepancies between elite and everyday geopolitical imaginations… [that] informs a critique of state violence that is parallel to, but not a replacement of, textual analyses informed by critical social theory’. The ‘everyday’ in the sense that Megoran is proposing is itself profoundly political because of its potential to critique elitist/statist formations. Interviews, informal interactions, participant observation, and ‘deep hanging out’ (Wogan 2004) were variously drawn upon with individual or groups of migrant sexual labourers, fishermen, and South Asian male workers in Singapore. Despite a commitment to ethnographic treatment, the specific combinations of methods for any informant depended largely on their immigration circumstances, particularly whether they were soon to be deported, already ‘back home’, or languishing in a shelter or on a Special Pass (SP) visa in Singapore.1 For informants with no clear timeline for their departure from Singapore, there were naturally far greater opportunities for ethnographic encounters, and interactions with some groups of Bangladeshi workmen and Filipina entertainers in particular lent themselves to longer term relationships. Despite this, and for migrant workmen in particular, following their ‘everyday’ lives in Singapore was a challenging task, since I could not practically accompany them everywhere or, to be sure, live with them. With South Asian migrant workmen, an additional method was adopted to illuminate the mundane routines of exploited workers as they manoeuvred Singapore’s migrant worker/anti-trafficking regimes. In 2013, not long after commencing fieldwork with the migrant workmen, I began asking my informants if they would like to keep a diary of their sojourns in Singapore. Diaries of more than 100 workmen were eventually collected, and such enthusiasm for the activity was evident amongst the workers that it was decided to publish some of the stories in edited volumes (Yea et al. 2013, 2015, 2018). Alan Latham (2003) has argued that whilst human geography, particularly under the influence of ‘the cultural turn’, has radicalised its agenda and ontology, ‘its impact on ways that geographers actually do empirical research has been in certain respects relatively limited’. The diaries revealed novel dimensions of these men’s experiences and elicited a culturally centred critique of migrant worker exploitation in Singapore, underscoring Latham’s (2003) injunction that, ‘human geography needs to be more imaginative, pluralistic, and pragmatic in its attitude towards both (a) methodology and (b) the kinds of final research accounts it produces’.

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In practice, tandem ethnography in the field of (anti)-human trafficking presents some challenges, but not, with some exceptions, for want of better access to exploited migrant labourers. Once I began spending more time with a number of migrant women and girls in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment sector in 2010, my position as a researcher became simultaneously compromised and enhanced. My introduction to many of my participants was initially through an extraordinary Catholic sister, Mary. Around two years prior to the commencement of my research with migrant sexual labourers, Mary had initiated her mission of assisting and supporting migrant women and girls in brothels, on the streets, and in nightclubs and KTV bars in Singapore. She had provided information, counselling, material support like money and food, and a means of exit to those who wished to leave their situations. Mary conducted these activities through outreach, and by the time I had met her, she had gained the trust of many of the pimps in Singapore’s notorious prostitution district of Geylang, allowing her access to an unprecedented number of women and girls working there. Once I began interviewing some of the women she assisted, I became a somewhat unwitting participant in Mary’s mission. I accompanied women to appointments; made case files that would be legible for Mary to take to Immigration, Police, and Home Affairs officers in Singapore; and provided information about support organisations women could contact upon their inevitable return to their home countries. Importantly, this involvement enabled far richer insights into the experiences of these women than a one-off interview about their situations would ever have allowed. Mary herself was a pragmatic and courageous advocate for the women, departing from the oft-imposed view of religious figures in the anti-trafficking movement as driven by the hope of moral redemption and the wholesale admonishment of sex work. She, like the women she assisted, weighed up the choices available to her, including the immigration and policing context that determined how women would be treated if they were to come forward about their circumstances. The studies of male migrant workers in/ through Singapore commenced in a much more serendipitous manner than my original study of migrant sexual labourers. Migrant men from the Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, and to a lesser extent Vietnam and Myanmar have been passing through Singapore since at least the early 2000s to work on long-haul fishing vessels operated primarily by Taiwanese-owned fishing fleets. The issue of their possible trafficking was almost entirely under the radar in Singapore. This began to change in 2011 when the Philippines Embassy

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in Singapore started recording increasing numbers of Filipino men presenting themselves to the Assistance to Nationals Attaché having deserted their fishing vessels after they docked in Singapore’s Jurong Fisheries Port. The Attaché, with whom I was familiar for his work assisting Filipinas deployed in KTV bars and pubs as entertainers, expressed concern about this trend and was unable to comprehend the circumstances the men were facing or, indeed, how they were recruited and deployed. Did I know any researcher who might interview the men and document the issue? Although I approached more than a dozen colleagues, none were remotely interested in the topic and so it fell to me. The stories shocked and moved me greatly, and the physical appearance of the men disturbed any preconceptions I held about the resilience of men to hyper-exploitation in their labour migrations. I decided to continue the study beyond the expectations of the Philippines Embassy and worked with the local NGO Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) to produce two reports that could be drawn upon in advocating the rights of migrant fishers and, as discussed in Chap. 7, their recognition as deserving the protection afforded to victims of trafficking by the Singapore government. The study involved in-depth interviews with Filipino migrant fishers in Singapore initially and follow-up interviews with several of these initial participants in the Philippines. New interviews were also conducted with other men whom we met through word of mouth or their referral by TWC2, including several Filipino men involved as witnesses/ plaintiffs in a human trafficking case in the Central Philippines. Given the prevalence of Cambodian men in the sector, I conducted a second phase of the study with Cambodian men who had returned home after their stints in the fishing vessels. Some of these men, like some of their Filipino counterparts, were involved in legal proceedings for human trafficking against the agency that recruited and deployed them. The study with Bangladeshi and Tamil Indian migrant workmen in Singapore began in 2013 in much the same manner as that with the fishermen, by chance rather than design. In fact, during my research with migrant sexual labourers, I became increasingly aware of the presence and particular vulnerabilities Bangladeshi women appeared to be facing during their sojourns in Singapore. Extremely tight controls on their movements, constant surveillance, and lack of control over their income appeared commonplace. Coupled with their lack of English, there was very little opportunity for support to be provided to these women and very little known about their lives in Singapore.2 With the help of a Bangladeshi friend and migrant worker advocate, I tried and failed repeatedly to access these

1 INTRODUCTION 

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women. Finally, my Bangladeshi friend suggested I look at the situations of the male migrant workers instead, as they were more easily approachable and, according to him, were equally as prone to exploitative practices in their labour migration. The lack of justice for these workers and regulatory framework under which their grievances were heard, as I quickly discovered during the course of this study, was woefully inadequate and, like the migrant fishers, raised disturbing questions about why so many of these men returned home with nothing but injuries, trauma, debts, and stigma, despite their experiences of hyper-exploitation in Singapore. In this book, the experiences of all these migrant labourers are placed within the context of the emerging anti-trafficking apparatus and existing migrant labour regime, which enable insights into how migrants manoeuvre not only situations of exploitation but also immigration and policing classifications. Victoria Lawson (2007) argued that geographers have an ‘ethical responsibility to care’, which she suggests, ‘focuses our attention on the social and how it is constructed through unequal power relationships, but it also moves us beyond critique and toward the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions, and action that enhance mutuality and well-­ being’. Thus, our responsibility as academics is to take up social responsibility in our professional practice. The debate about whether and in what precise ways critical geographical research should ‘become activists seeking to promote political and social change’ (Kitchin and Hubbard 1999: 195) has provoked considerable reflection in my own research and ultimately led to my involvement in case work and other forms of support across a range of migrant worker sectors. It also prompted my collaboration with NGOs to produce reports for advocacy and awareness-raising about migrant worker issues for both fishermen and migrant sexual labourers. Ethnographic inquiry is also a means of understanding both state and civil society anti-trafficking performances in Singapore. This methodological choice was driven by the difficulty in explicitly questioning organisations, including state organisations about their work on human trafficking. To this end, I participated in several events that are part of recent sex trafficking advocacy campaigns in Singapore—particularly those associated with The Body Shop’s (TBS) campaign—and engaged in informal discussions and formal interviews with a range of actors involved in the production of these campaigns, as well as local migrant worker NGOs and service providers who work on the issue of human trafficking outside the contours of this move-

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ment. My analysis in the book should in no way be read a slight on the existence and severity of human trafficking in Singapore, or of some of my participants’ own experiences of this. My concern, rather, is with the local circulation of a particular reading and rendering of human trafficking within the realm of commercial sexual exploitation and the process of its validation, normalisation, and, ultimately, local mobilisation. The book therefore departs from the prevailing preoccupation of much recent research in human trafficking, which focuses on understanding ‘the problem’ of trafficking itself, including its nature, scale, severity, and modus operandi in favour of an exploration of the politics of anti-trafficking in the realm of global activism. Pursuing a similar focus in Indonesia, Johan Lindquist (2010) puts it this way: ‘At the centre of the production of human trafficking as a market... are not scrupulous middlemen who sell women and children, but rather a broad range of activists, journalists, organisations, and government agencies that work along a broad spectrum of humanitarianism, activism, and reporting in which human trafficking has gained a particular relevance’.

Approaching Human/Anti-trafficking This book draws foremost on Michel Foucault’s (1975) conceptualisation of regimes of truth, particularly his arguments concerning the production of truths through various technologies associated with power. For the purposes of discussion in this book, such technologies could include the media and film, public forums and discourses produced within and circulated through them, policies and legislation and the ways they are adopted and operationalised by state agents and others who participate in them, and so on. Foucault first conceptualised a regime of truth in relation to his treatise on the emergence of the modern penal system in the nineteenth century. A new ‘regime of truth’, he argued, involved the formation of a ‘corpus of knowledge, techniques, and “scientific” discourses that became entangled with the practice of the power to punish’ (p.  30). In a later treatise, Foucault elaborated that a regime of truth consists of five key elements: ‘the types of discourse [society] harbours and causes to function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements; the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures which are valorized for obtaining truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true’ (Foucault 1984: 112–113). Therefore, ‘truth’ is, ‘a system of ordered procedures for the

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production, regulation, distribution, circulation and functioning of statements’; it is linked ‘by a circular relation to systems of power which produce it and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which redirect it’. Circularity is foregrounded as an essential element of any regime of truth since it enables the reinforcement and validation of truths. In this book, it is suggested that anti-human trafficking operates as a palpable regime of truth within Singapore—and indeed elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Regimes of truth produce what Foucault refers to as ‘truth effects’. As he writes (1984), ‘truth isn’t outside power, or deprived of power… [it] is produced by virtue of multiple constraints and it induces regulated effects of power’. The truths emerging from NGOs and the Singaporean state in relation to human trafficking are subject to scrutiny in the chapters that follow. These suggestions are particularly relevant to the book, as it ­examines the production of truths about human trafficking in Singapore and the technologies through which truths are produced and regimes and practices through which they come to be perpetuated. Foremost, this would include who counts (or is classified) as a trafficked person (and who is not); what other labels inhere to those not deemed trafficked (but may nonetheless be exploited migrant labourers); what legal recourse, social protections, and other anti-trafficking measures are available to trafficked persons and how these may vary according to the type of trafficking (e.g. ‘sex’ or ‘labour’, or male or female); and so on. Importantly, and following Foucault, discussion in the book does not take these anti-trafficking classifications, responses, or exclusions as given or necessarily following the international norms laid down by the United Nations. Rather, anti-­ trafficking as a corpus of knowledge, practices, and discourses is self-­ referential and self-perpetuating. The key reason for drawing attention to this exercise of power is because its self-referential nature means that it does not necessarily respond or relate to the experiences of trafficked persons themselves, or it does so in a highly selective manner in which experiences are distilled and reproduced to illustrate and validate particular narratives of trafficking, anti-trafficking, and, equally as significantly, what we might refer to as ‘non-trafficking’. Following Foucault’s ideas about regimes of truth and their effects then, the arguments in this book are made by drawing on two further inter-related conceptual domains—framing as a representational strategy, especially as this occurs within new social movements and through the state’s use of media, and geographies of exclusion. The interstices of these

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approaches enable us to see anti-trafficking in Singapore not just as a response to the ‘heinous global crime of sexual slavery’, but as effects of ideological, strategic, political, and moral interests by different anti-­ trafficking stakeholders that are created, circulated, and perpetuated within anti-trafficking’s regime of truth. The heuristic value of each of these conceptual frames is briefly introduced here. Framing and Frames Framing processes and their outcomes are relevant in two senses in this book. The first draws on scholarly interventions on activist networks, particularly Annalise Riles (2001) seminal work, whilst the second draws on Judith Butler’s (2009) treatise on ‘frames of war’. Annalise Riles (2001: 3) views the activist network as, ‘a set of institutions, knowledge practices, and artefacts thereof that internally generate the effects of their own reality by reflecting on themselves’. As such, activist networks are created to, ‘generate realities by studying, analysing, or communicating about them’ (p.  6). In this understanding, the collective activity that defines activist networks—conferences, media engagements, advocacy-oriented research, film screening, and so on—are both enacted by the network and reproduce its frames as valid—both to itself and to others. Performances publicly validate and emotively constitute these framing processes. In this sense, the (activist) network and its activities constitute a distinct and cohesive regime of truth. The shaping of anti-trafficking in Singapore also requires that we direct our analytical gaze towards the role of emotion and morality in producing discourses about human trafficking. It is here where critical approaches in human geography and anthropology to social/ human rights movements, including the work of Riles (2001), illuminate the development of symbolic and emotive frames in the emergence of the anti-trafficking movement. A ‘politics of visibility’ (Casper and Moore 2009; cf. Foucault 1980), in which certain subjects—in this case those constructed as legitimate or ‘deserving’ trafficking victims—are hyper-exposed at the expense of other potential victims, such as male labour migrants and voluntary migrant sex workers, has therefore emerged in Singapore. This finding stands in contrast to that of many other studies of human trafficking in Asia, which tend to argue that trafficking classifications cast a wide net to include migrant women in the sex industry who may in fact not be victims. The effects of the narrowing (rather than widening) of victimhood in Singapore are clear

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when one considers that the highest number of reports into trafficking (53) in 2013 was in the sex industry. As Casper and Moore (2009) suggest, raising the visibility of some subjects of human rights abuses also makes invisible other subjects, many of whom may also possibly have valid claims to redress and justice. One is not trafficked enough if one is deceptively recruited, and deliberately deployed in an exploitative working arrangement, including where debt bondage constitutes economic duress. It might be argued that these wider injustices are constituted as ‘banal exploitation’ (following Katz 2007) in the sense that they are normalised and rendered routine rather than exceptionalised and rendered severe enough to be deserving of redress. These are the ‘truth effects’ of trafficking victimhood for a range of migrant worker populations whose employment is increasingly subject to the logics of precarity but, and let us be clear, unequivocally not the protections of anti-trafficking. Such truth effects are worth further exploration that would require geographers to engage not just with the contemporary dynamics attached to unfree labour, precarious work, and human trafficking but also with the ways technologies of government reproduce these categories in ways that do not undermine or challenge new economic configurations of precarious work amongst migrants. An image politics acts to produce missing bodies who are disqualified from the protections of anti-trafficking classifications. This alerts geographers to the possible benefits of extending considerations of modes of classification of vulnerable mobile populations according only to moral or emotive constructions of innocence and childhood, or to the ways ‘geopolitical imagination shapes the application of law, protection, and rights’ (Hyndman 2010: 248; cf. Butler 2009). Whilst such imaginations no doubt do shape subjectivity—and the notional possibilities of recognition and redress—within the domain of human rights, I have attempted here to expose the role that state configurations of competitiveness and the labour arrangements that underscore these configurations also assume in such processes. Casting a scrutinising gaze at the role of trafficking victim identification in Singapore exposes the ways the state attempts to produce high-profile, legible victims whose visibility correlates with exceptionally severe and violent exploitation, principally in the sex industry and, to a lesser extent, amongst legal migrant workers. Simultaneously then, other victims remain as bare life—‘hidden, missing, and vanquished’ (Casper and Moore 2009)—and, at least in Singapore, not trafficked enough.

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Much scholarship on transnational (particularly anti-neoliberalism) social movements belies issues of power, conflict, and authorship in their operations in favour of celebratory treatise on their potential to resist neoliberal globalisation (e.g. McDonald 2002; Mertes 2002). Leslie Sklair’s (1995) work is exemplary, arguing that the oppressive forces of globalisation are best fought at the local level. Sklair suggests that, ‘Although capitalism increasingly organizes globally, the resistances to global capitalism can be effective only where they can disrupt its smooth running (accumulation of private profits) locally and can find ways of globalizing these disruptions’ (1995: 305). This reading of the role of local actors within resistance movements presumes that they possess some prefigured autonomy, that they are able to retain this autonomy even when they extrapolate outwards and connect with a wider movement, and that they gain their key strengths from such connections (Reid and Taylor 2000). The anti-­ trafficking movement in Singapore has imported and creatively ­reproduced particular frames of human trafficking (particularly the female child victim of ‘sex trafficking’) that have come to circulate globally within popular culture, amongst many NGOs, the media, and the general public as valid within that context. However, as human trafficking became legitimised as a ‘problem’ in Singapore, the hegemonic discourse of victimhood and truth claims evolved in a rather elastic sense. Yet Cumbers et  al. (2008: 188) suggest that such ‘local disruptions’ should be scrutinised in favour of the need for ‘a spatially sensitive analysis [of movements] that recognises issues of power and information control within networks, problematising a horizontalist perspective’ (2008: 188). Juris’ (2004, 2005) study of anti-globalisation movement(s) goes some way towards addressing this research lacuna in exploring issues of emplacement and power in social movements. Unlike much recent scholarship on the geographies of social movements which focuses on the terrains of resistance of various local actors engaging across (horizontal) networked space, Juris’ work highlights the significance of power and authorship of the discourses and practices that define understandings of global human rights and social justice problems. Recognising the operation of power within social movement networks can lead to new understandings of relationships amongst network actors (Routledge 2003; Cumbers 2005; Juris 2004, 2005), including where they are characterised by conflict and where they may lead to the opening up of new ‘autonomous spaces’ (cf. Juris 2005) for some movement actors as they consciously negotiate issues of voice, integrity, and inclusion. In

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drawing on and extending this work, I suggest that power can pervade activist networks with other consequences besides producing conflict or opening new spaces of autonomy. Specifically, the operations of power without the production of conflict or in the absence of new autonomous spaces by some network actors are other consequences of connection. The mobilisation of activism in specific places, such as Singapore, can thus alternately produce an imposed consensus, reduce the autonomous space of local non-governmental organisation (LNGO) actors in their advocacy work, and accentuate the agenda of transnational movement actors, including their framing of an issue. By critically exploring the creation of an anti-trafficking activist network in Singapore and the activities its actors undertake, one can see how power in transnational activist networks can produce local anti-trafficking actors and reproduce global frames of mobilising human rights issues through their activities. Spaces of Exclusion An emerging body of critical scholarship on vulnerable mobile subjects in the contemporary era discusses the ways international human rights discourses are increasingly being replaced by state-centric security imperatives in framing responses to these subjects, particularly asylum-seeking refugees. This has been largely in response to heightened concern about the withdrawal of protection and asylum responsibilities for refugees and the re-framing of refugee issues through state-centric security discourses to the detriment of human rights protections (Mountz and Hiemstra 2012, 2014; Hyndman and Mountz 2008; Tazreiter 2015; Gorman 2017; Mountz 2011; Walters 2008). Drawing on a range of discrete geographical and legislative contexts, this work illustrates the ways destination states are rendered impenetrable to asylum seekers through deliberate and carefully crafted strategies of exclusion aimed at, ‘evad[ing] the provisions of international covenants’ (Mountz and Hiemstra 2012: 456), such as the refugee convention. As Mountz and Hiemstra (2012: 464) argue, ‘These practices aim to prevent migrant arrivals on sovereign territory in order to preclude access to the range of legal rights, social services and economic possibilities such entry triggers’. Preclusion through bordering and related legal-bureaucratic processes acts as a key mode of exclusion from anti-trafficking protections and provisions in Singapore and, arguably, elsewhere.

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Agamben’s (1998) homo sacer frames a great deal of this work in geography on spatial tactics to exclude refugees and asylum seekers. Working from Agamben’s argument that the exceptionalised homo sacer is violently included in the judicial order by virtue of her/his legal exclusion, scholars have explored a range of exclusionary practices by states. Alison Mountz’s (2004, 2010, 2011) work is particularly illustrative of these practices where exclusion is spatialised through stretching and manipulating jurisdictional boundaries (2011). Despite the incredibly low numbers of identified trafficking victims in destination (and transit) states of trafficking, including Singapore, there has been virtually no attention by geographers to the question of whether states deliberately and actively exclude potential victims through similar sorts of processes as we see discussed in relation to asylum seekers. In such a situation, the rights of exploited migrant workers in Singapore are not guaranteed and may well be further compromised. The subjects of these determinations can become constituted as bare life if they are excluded from rights and protections of the state. Indeed, geographers have drawn extensively on Giorgio Agamben’s work here to emphasise the conditio inhumana exemplified by the concentration camp where ‘[w]hat happened in the camps so exceeds [is outside of] the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration’ (1998: 27). With conceptual underpinnings in Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics, Agamben has demonstrated the ability of states to manipulate judicial power to mark bodies as bare life through their exceptionalisation. The truth effects (cf. Foucault 1980) of these strategies are the creation of a large subgroup of migrant workers who may be exploited, may experience debt bondage or forced labour, and whose experiences may contain some elements/indicators of trafficking but whose migrant labouring circumstances are rendered mundane and banal as they are not deemed to be ‘trafficked enough’ (see Yea 2015). In Agamben’s characterisation then, such groups constitute bare life due to their exploitation but exclusion from state human rights protections. Two key ways states, including the Singaporean state, exclude potentially trafficked migrants from human trafficking determinations involving the intersection between space and the law are discussed in Chaps. 7 and 8. The first involves the invocation of the limits to territorial responsibility (what we might refer to as ‘spaces of deflection’) and, second, by creating spaces of non-territory (what we might refer to as ‘spaces of deportabil-

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ity’). The first of these strategies reiterates and magnifies the existing territorial boundaries and limits of the state, whilst the second works by creatively reconfiguring existing territorial spaces, such as the port, the dormitory, or, in some cases, the shelter itself to more readily facilitate removal. Other legal-bureaucratic processes of exclusion are also evident in Singapore, and processes of discretionary classification and bureaucratic obfuscation are also discussed in Chap. 8.

Organisation of the Book The book is organised into the follow chapters. Chapter 2 examines the local mobilisation of the dominant global framing of the problem of human trafficking through ‘the female child victim’ in child sex trafficking advocacy campaigns. The child victim is a symbolic and emotive frame embodied in the Third World female child and enacted through her helplessness and experiences of extreme violence and (sexual) abuse in trafficking situations across diverse contexts globally. I use The Body ­ Shop’s (TBS) 2009–2012 global campaign against child sex trafficking as my main site for discussion of the way frames in global human rights activism move into local contexts, often coming to define the ways contemporary human rights problems are understood and reproduced locally. The chapter explores the ways in which the child victim frame is mobilised in a specific locale through the involvement of a local non-government organisation (NGO) and university student actors as part of TBS’s campaign strategy. Chapter 3 examines the interstices between film and politics in anti-­ trafficking campaigns. The focus of existing work on this subject has been on the ways film both frames issues and establishes relations between viewers and filmic subjects/characters. Such processes often utilise affective referents to create ‘intimate publics’. This chapter focuses on the relations human trafficking films establish between viewers, victims, and anti-­ trafficking stakeholders in creating an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore. I argue that the ‘Third World girl’ is rendered the moral object of sympathy through both trafficking film and performances by anti-­ trafficking stakeholders at the cinema. However, in comparison to both film viewers and anti-trafficking stakeholders, she is cast as muted and lacking agency. Intimate anti-trafficking publics can emerge through the harnessing of negative emotions that, in this case, privilege the plight, but

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not the agency, of the female child trafficking victim and are inculcated through film storylines and cinematic performances. Chapter 4 examines the entry of migrant worker NGOs and the Singapore government into an anti-trafficking movement in Singapore which had so far focused on the female child victim frame. Some quarters of civil society see human trafficking as a problem which extends well beyond the sex and entertainment industry and the female child victim to embrace migrant worker exploitation and rights. This chapter explores the role of some key migrant worker rights NGOs, such as HOME, TWC2, and Health Serve, in advocating for a more inclusive definition of trafficking victimhood. In their work, these NGOs attempt to re-frame existing migrant worker problems, such as wage theft, excessive overtime, unsafe working conditions, and threats and abuse as indicators of human trafficking. The chapter engages with the question of why NGOs would undertake this re-framing. The analysis indicates the important role played by the belief that in anti-trafficking interventions, the promise of realising migrant worker rights and justice may be better fulfilled than under ­previous advocacy discourses. This belief is based on considerable NGO experience over the past decade of failure to achieve large-scale policy shifts in the governance of migrant workers in Singapore, including their access to rights and justice, and the failure to achieve small-scale wins for exploited migrant workers in their pursuit of claims. Chapter 4 also traces the evolution of the Singapore government’s approach to human trafficking. Three stages in this approach are outlined in the chapter. First is a denial phase commencing in 2010 in which the Singapore government reiterated its denial that human trafficking was a significant problem in Singapore. Second was a concessionary phase in which the government backtracked on its original claims that human trafficking did not exist to any significant extent in the city-state in light of growing evidence (particularly research reports) of human trafficking, and in response to political pressures emerging from Singapore’s planned location as regional headquarters of Interpol. This phase saw the establishment of the Singapore government’s TIP Taskforce in 2012. Finally, the current containment phase is characterised by the continuation and expansion of the initiatives of 2012 but simultaneously by an effort to control the parameters of victimhood in ways that reinforce some of the early civil society tropes, such as the female/child victim and the predominance of the sex and entertainment industry as the epicentre of Singapore’s human trafficking problem. The government has used many public speaking occa-

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sions and media reporting to simultaneously reiterate its commitment to eliminating human trafficking in Singapore, whilst being careful to limit understandings of who might ‘qualify’ as a victim in the city-state. The discussion in this chapter emphasises the use of visibility and performance to create an aura of legitimacy around anti-trafficking responses by the State. Chapters 5 and 6, respectively, provide an overview of the circumstances of vulnerable female and male migrant labourers in Singapore. Chapter 5 examines the experiences of migrant women and girls in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment industry, with the situations of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) also discussed. Chapter 6 examines migrant workmen in Singapore’s construction, shipyard and landscaping sector, and migrant fishers who transit through Singapore. The chapters embrace the suggestion by many NGOs that migrant labour issues in many cases do contain significant elements of human trafficking and that the ways migrant labourers experience trafficking is often through intersecting and mutually reinforcing elements (see also Yea and Chok 2018). In other words, trafficking is never singular in nature or necessarily reducible to individual indicators or often forms. Arguably, the complexity of individual trafficking situations acts as a significant barrier to arriving at trafficking determinations. These two chapters also analyse state discourses surrounding migrant worker ‘problems’, and the findings of a content analysis of media articles in each chapter show that migrant worker issues are nearly always re-framed as issues that do not relate to human trafficking. For example, moral and political discourses intersect to produce narratives of many migrant women in the sex and nightlife entertainment sector as ‘illegal foreign prostitutes’, resulting in policies which legitimise punitive responses. Arguably, this helps consolidate a regime of truth in anti-trafficking where female (minors) in the sex and nightlife industry remain the penultimate victims and privileged legal subjects. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the various strategies by which migrant labourers are excluded from anti-trafficking protections and supports. Chapter 7 examines the legal-spatial processes by which many of the migrant labourers discussed in Chaps. 5 and 6 are disqualified from victimhood and how this affects the possibilities open to them for redress, justice, and support. The two registers of exclusion discussed in the chapter are ‘spaces of deflection’ and ‘spaces of deportability’. Chapter 8 continues this focus on exclusion and examines two legal-bureaucratic processes: exclusion through (discretionary) classifications and through

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what I term ‘bureaucratic obfuscation’. Thus, building on Foucault’s suggestions that regimes of truth produce ‘truth effects’, these two chapters unpack some of the effects of anti-trafficking’s truths in the Singapore context. Overall, the book raises a relatively neglected issue in the study of human/anti-trafficking, but one arguably of importance in Singapore and elsewhere. This concerns the need to examine the hegemonic discourse of human trafficking in total as a discursive and practical formation. Whilst some inroads have been made to such a project, this book suggests that contextually specific, in-depth analyses are required to elucidate the ways this discourse intersects with structural, political, moral, and ideological interests in precise and nuanced ways and in particular places. Such an examination yields the quite astounding insight that the vast majority of severely exploited migrant labourers in Singapore, subject to variegations of trafficking and forced labour, go either undetected and/or unsupported. The intense fervour and activity of anti-trafficking, in other words, sits largely at odds with the migrant labour exploitation and, indeed, migrant workers’ lives, needs, and desires more broadly.

Notes 1. A Special Pass is a visa type issued to migrants in Singapore who are involved in a legal case, civil claim, or police investigation. A Special Pass does not, however, allow the bearer legal working rights in Singapore apart from in a few special cases. 2. Director of Singapore’s only sex worker outreach organisation, Project X, also lamented to me in an interview that Bangladeshi women were ‘almost impossible to reach because of language barriers and the isolation and surveillance that is commonplace during their sojourns in Singapore’ (Vanessa Ho, personal communication, 14 November 2015). The story of one Bangladeshi woman’s experience being trafficking into the sex industry in Singapore is recounted in A Thousand and One Days: Stories of Migrant Worker Hardship in Singapore (Vol. I). Dhaka: Bangla Kanther Publications.

References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agustin, L. (2007). Sex at the margins: Migration, labour markets and the rescue industry. London: Zed Books.

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Andrijasevic, R. (2007). Beautiful dead bodies: Gender, migration and representation in anti-trafficking campaigns. Feminist Review, 86, 24–44. Andrijasevic, R., & Mai, N. (2017). Trafficking in representations: Understanding the recurring appeal of victimhood and slavery in neoliberal times. Anti-­ Trafficking Review, No. 7. https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.20121771. Ansell, N. (2010). The discursive construction of childhood and youth in AIDS interventions in Lesotho’s education sector: Beyond local-global dichotomies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(5), 791–810. Aradau, C. (2004). The perverse politics of four-letter words: Risk and pity in the securitisation of human trafficking. Millennium, 33(2), 251–277. Bradley, C., & Szablewska, N. (2016). Anti-trafficking (ill-)efforts: The legal regulation of women’s bodies and relationships in Cambodia. Social and Legal Studies, 25(4), 461–488. Brunovoskis, A., & Surtees, R. (2012). Out of sight? Approaches and challenges to the identification of trafficked persons. Olso: FAFO. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso. Casper, M.  J., & Moore, L.  J. (2009). Missing bodies: The politics of visibility. New York and London: New York University Press. Cumbers, A. (2005). Genuine renewal or pyrrhic victory? The scale politics of trade union recognition in the UK. Antipode, 37, 116–138. Cumbers, A., Routledge, P., & Natival, C. (2008). The entangled geographies of global justice networks. Progress in Human Geography, 32, 183–201. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0309132507084818. De Shalit, A., Heynen, R., & van der Meulen, E. (2014). Human trafficking and media myths: Federal funding, communication strategies, and Canadian anti-­ trafficking programs. Canadian Journal of Communication, 39(3), 385–412. Doezema, J. (2010). Sex slaves and discourse masters: The construction of trafficking. London: Zed Books. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon. Frederick, J. (2004). The myth of Nepal-to-India sex trafficking: Its creation, its maintenance, and its influence on anti-trafficking interventions. In K. Kempadoo et  al. (Eds.), Trafficking and prostitution reconsidered: New perspectives on migration, sex work and human rights. London: Routledge. GAATW. (2007). Collateral damage. Bangkok: GAATW. Gallagher, A., & Pearson, E. (2008). Detention of trafficked persons in shelters: A legal and policy analysis. La Strada International. https://doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.1239745.

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Gorman, C. S. (2017). Redefining refugees: Interpretive control and the bordering work of legal categorisation in U.S.  Asylum law. Political Geography, 58, 36–45. Gulati, G. J. (2012). Representing trafficking: Media in the United States, Great Britain and Canada. In A. Brysk & Y. Choi-Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Human trafficking and human rights: Rethinking contemporary slavery. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hathaway, J.  C. (2008). The human rights quagmire of human trafficking. Virginia Journal of International Law, 49, 1. Herbert, S. (2000). For ethnography. Progress in Human Geography, 24(4), 550–568. Hyndman, J. (2010). The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’. Political Geography, 29(5), 247–255. Hyndman, J., & Mountz, A. (2008). Another brick in the wall? Neo-refoulement and the externalisation of asylum in Australia and Europe. Government and Opposition, 43(2), 249–269. International Labour Organisation. (n.d.). Forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking. Geneva: ILO. Retrieved from May 22, 2018, from http:// www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm Jahic, G., & Finckenauer, J. (2005). Representations and misrepresentations of human trafficking. Trends in Organized Crime, 8(3), 24–40. Juris, J.  S. (2004). Networked social movements: Global movements for global justice. In M.  Castells (Ed.), The network society: Cross-cultural perspective. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Juris, J.  S. (2005). The new digital media and activist networking within anticorporate social movements. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1, 143–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716204270338. Katz, C. (2007). Banal terrorism: Spatial fetishism and everyday insecurity. In D. Gregory & A. Pred (Eds.), Violent geographies: Fear, terror, and political violence (pp. 349–361). Routledge. Kimm, S., & Sauer, B. (2010). Discourses on forced prostitution, trafficking in women, and football: A comparison of anti-trafficking campaigns during the World Cup 2006 and the European Championship 2008. Soccer and Society, 11(6), 815–828. Kitchin, R., & Hubbard, P. J. (1999). Guest editorial: Research, action and ‘critical’ geographies. Area, 31, 195–198. Lainez, N. (2010). Representing sex trafficking in Southeast Asia. In T.  Zheng (Ed.), Sex trafficking, human rights and social justice. London: Routledge. Latham, A. (2003). Urbanity, lifestyle and making sense of the new cultural urban economy: Notes from Auckland, New Zealand. Urban Studies, 40, P1699– P1724. https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098032000106564.

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Lawson, V. (2007). Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(1), 1–11. Lindquist, J. (2010). Images and evidence: Human trafficking, auditing, and the production of illicit markets in Southeast Asia. Public Culture, 22(2), 223–236. Lobasz, J. K. (2009). Beyond border security: Feminist approaches to human trafficking. Security Studies, 18(2), 319–344. McDonald, K. (2002). From solidarity to fluidity: Social movements beyond ‘collective identity’—The case of globalisation conflicts. Social Movement Studies, 1, 109–128. Megoran, N. (2006). For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and imagining Ferghana Valley boundary closures. Political Geography, 25(6), 622–640. Mertes. (2002). Grassroots globalism. New Left Review, 17, 101–110. Molland, S. (2013). Tandem ethnography: On researching ‘trafficking’ and ­‘anti-trafficking’. Ethnography, 14, 300–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1466138113491671. Mountz, A. (2004). Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling. Political Geography, 23(3), 323–345. Mountz, A. (2010). Seeking asylum. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mountz, A. (2011). Where asylum-seekers wait: Feminist counter-topographies of sites between states. Gender, Place & Culture, 18(3), 381–399. Mountz, A., & Hiemstra, N. (2012). Spatial strategies for rebordering human migration at sea. In T. M. Wilson & H. Donman (Eds.), A companion to border studies (pp. 455–472). London: Blackwell. Mountz, A., & Hiemstra, N. (2014). Chaos and crisis: Dissecting the spatiotemporal logics of contemporary migrations and state practices. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), 382–390. Nieuwenhuys, C., & Pécoud, A. (2007). Human trafficking, information campaigns, and strategies of migration control. American Behavioral Scientist, 50(12), 1674–1695. O’Connell Davidson, J., & Anderson, B. (2002). Trafficking—A demand-led problem? Part I: Review of evidence and debates. Stockholm, Sweden: Save the Children. Reid, H., & Taylor, B. (2000). Embodying ecological citizenship: Rethinking the politics of grassroots globalisation in the United States. Alternatives, 25, 439–449. Riles, A. (2001). The network inside out. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Routledge, P. (2003). Convergence space: Process geographies of grassroots globalisation networks. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(3), 333–349.

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Sharma, N. (2003). Travel agency: A critique of anti-trafficking campaigns. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 21(3), 53–65. Sklair, L. (1995). Social movements and global capitalism. Sociology, 29, 495–512. Small, J. L. (2012). Trafficking in truth: Media, sexuality, and human rights evidence. Feminist Studies, 38(2), 415–533. Snajdr, E. (2013). Beneath the master narrative: Human trafficking, myths of sexual slavery and ethnographic realities. Dialectical Anthropology, 37(2), 229–256. Surtees, R. (2017). Moving on: Family and community reintegration amongst Indonesian trafficking victims. Washington, DC: NEXUS Institute. Tazreiter, C. (2015). Lifeboat politics in the Pacific: Affect and the ripples and shimmers of a migrant saturated future. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 99–107. United States Department of State. (2017). Annual trafficking in persons report. Washington, DC: US DoS. UNODC. (n.d.). On trafficking of persons and smuggling of migrants. Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/index.html?ref= menuside. Walters, W. (2008). Bordering the sea: Shipping industries and the policing of stowaways. Borderlands, 7(3), 1–25. Wogan, P. (2004). Deep hanging out: Reflections on fieldwork and multi-sited Andean ethnography. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11(1), 129–139. Yea, S. (2013). Social visits and special passes: The exploitation of migrant women in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment sector. Singapore: Franciscan Sisters of Mary. Yea, S. (2015). Trafficked enough? Missing bodies, migrant labour exploitation and the classification of trafficking victims in Singapore. Antipode, 47, 1080– 1100. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12144. Yea, S., & Chok, S. (2018). Unfreedom unbound: Contingency and co-production in migrant worker exploitation in Singapore. Work, Employment and Society, 32(5), 925–941. Yea, S., Balakrishnan, B., & Fordyce, D. (2018). A thousand and one days: Stories of migrant worker hardship in Singapore. Dhaka: Banglar Kanther Publications. Yea, S., Haque, R., & Fordyce, D. (2015). A thousand and one days: Stories of migrant worker hardship in Singapore. Dhaka: Banglar Kanther Publications. Yea, S., Mohsin, A. K. M., & Fordyce, D. (2013). A thousand and one days: Stories of migrant worker hardship in Singapore. Dhaka: Banglar Katha Publications. Yeoh, B. S. (2006). Bifurcated labour: The unequal incorporation of transmigrants in Singapore. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 97(1), 26–37.

CHAPTER 2

Mobilising the Child Victim: The Emergence of a Trafficking Master Narrative

Excerpt from Field Notes (21 March 2010): Dede1 [lit. ‘little sister’] enters the room with a cap and scarf covering her head and is led by a staff member from the non-government organisation (NGO) HOME to a chair in the centre front of the large meeting room. Around a hundred pairs of eyes are focused on her as she takes her seat facing away from the audience and towards the translator from HOME who will convey her narrative to the audience. She is, we are told, a victim of the most heinous and fastest growing transnational crime in the world; sex trafficking. HOME’s President continues, “It is important for you to hear the voice of a victim, it is important for you to hear her suffering. Open your heart to this child who cries for justice”. Silence falls over the audience as she begins her story, a sordid tale of forced marriage as a pre-pubescent minor, followed by internal trafficking for prostitution after she ran away from her “husband” who would rape her regularly and well before she reached puberty. Forced to service up to thirty clients a day, seven days a week and for no remuneration during her internal trafficking in Indonesia, she was, we are told truly the epitome of a sex slave. But there is more. The audience gasps; the collective consciousness of the room whispering “More? How can it get worse than this”? Some women sitting to my front and then on my immediate left begin weeping. The President of HOME pauses and looks around the room, clearly satisfied with the heightened emotional state of the audience. She asks Dede if she is sure she wants to continue; she can stop if the disclosure is too painful for her. “No”, Dede defiantly exclaims, “I want to tell my story”. Dede proceeds to narrate the next stage of her journey into the abyss of sexual slavery. “One of my clients offered me work in Batam2, doing a job outside the sex industry”, she explains. But when she arrives in Batam she is sold for a second time into prostitution. She is placed in © The Author(s) 2020 S. Yea, Paved with Good Intentions?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_2

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a KTV bar3 where she is again forced to see clients, even, we are told, during menstruation, and work for a paltry remuneration comprised largely of tips from clients. We reach the penultimate point of her story, and the reason she has been brought to Singapore to give testimony. She reveals that she was lured from the KTV bar in Batam by a supposed “friend” to Singapore for a “shopping trip”. Upon arrival, she is taken to a hotel in Singapore’s infamous red-light district of Geylang where is kept under surveillance while her friend-cum-pimp goes out to the street and solicits clients who are brought to the hotel room for intercourse with her. She begs her friend to let her go back to Batam; this is not the reason she came to Singapore. The woman refuses and while she sleeps Dede steals money from her purse and recovers her own (false) passport. The tale ends with her making her way to the Harbourfront Ferry Terminal in Singapore where she boards a ferry bound for Batam Island, Indonesia. By now most of the audience is weeping and I put my head in my hands to disguise my lack of tears that would otherwise confirm the success of this emotive frame on my own affective state.

Introduction The story of Dede, as told by the local NGO, HOME, illustrates the constitutive power of the master narrative of human trafficking when social movement actors mobilise the problem of human trafficking locally through particular framing processes and amongst local actors, in this case, drawing on female child trafficking victims such as Dede, who appeared in the anti-trafficking event in Singapore. Drawing on recent interventions in the field of geographies of global activism, this chapter explores the constitutive power of framing processes in understanding the anti-human trafficking movement in Singapore. Dede is the epitome of this child victim framing. The staging of her story by the Singaporean local NGO (LNGO) HOME is illustrative of the ways an LNGO can endorse and reproduce a rendering of human trafficking as principally a ‘child sex’ issue in their own work, even where it is yet to be demonstrated that this interpretation approximates Singapore’s human trafficking landscape accurately. In this sense, the mobilisation of anti-trafficking activism in Singapore draws on the child victim to construct a ‘terrain of resistance’ (Routledge 2003). TBS’s campaign strategy (discussed in further detail below) involved the development of strategic partnerships with local organisations in all project countries (75 countries in total). In Singapore, UN Women was sub-contracted to manage the campaign locally and

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HOME was identified as the main LNGO partner. Springboarding off the momentum and crystallising funding opportunities for anti-trafficking work generated by involvement in TBS’s campaign, HOME subsequently launched its own anti-trafficking desk and programme (launched at the event where Dede gave testimony). In addition, university students were incorporated into TBS’s campaign as conduits for the dissemination of awareness-raising activities amongst youth in Singapore. UN Women, HOME, and university student coalitions thus became ‘intermediaries’ (cf. Latour 2005) in translating human trafficking and its framing as the (female) child victim locally, both through their activities in connection with TBS’s campaign and—in the case of HOME at least—through their own independent advocacy that followed. The chapter draws on relational and networked approaches to activism within geography and cognate disciplines, especially Featherstone’s ­injunction that ‘Understanding the connections that they have produced, articulated and crafted opens up important questions about forms of political identity and agency generated through their activity’ (2008: 3). Understanding the connections between non-local (i.e. those in/operating across numerous geographic contexts) and local (i.e. situated and operating principally in a particular place and around place-specific concerns) actors in TBS’s anti-trafficking campaign in Singapore—and possibly other places where the campaign is unfolding—does indeed raise important questions about political identity and agency in activism, such as how are subaltern subjects (in this case, victims) constituted politically through activism around human trafficking? How do the geographies of connection between those working on anti-human trafficking at an international scale influence—and even (re)produce—local anti-trafficking actors and their agendas? And, how precisely is the child victim mobilised to achieve prominence in characterising an anti-trafficking ‘terrain of resistance’ in Singapore? Much recent work on the geographies of global activism has opted for a network approach. David Featherstone’s (2003, 2008) illuminating work on the ‘spatialities of activism’4 has, for example, advanced earlier work on geographies of resistance (primarily, Pile and Keith 1997) by exploring ‘the geographies of connection that have shaped forms of opposition to dominant forms of globalised practices’ (2008: 2). The relational approach embedded in Featherstone’s discussion of ‘counter-global networks’ of activism alerts us to the limitations of reductive binaries between global and local resistance in favour of an exploration of these ‘geogra-

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phies of connection’ (2008: 2). These spatially extenuated and networked geographies of social movements that involve actors within/across different spatial contexts and scales are also power laden (Cumbers et al. 2008; Juris 2004, 2005). I focus on the global-to-local articulation of the (female) child trafficking victim frame through connections between campaign actors in and beyond Singapore concerning the production (particularly through film) of the ‘mobile child victim’ as a key frame of the global anti-trafficking movement. The goal of this chapter is to examine how a global rendering of the contemporary human rights ‘problem’ of human trafficking becomes emplaced and validated by local movement actors, even coming to create or (re)define their work; this is perhaps where the politics of contemporary anti-human trafficking activism in part begins. In other words, the local mobilisation of global renditions of ­contemporary problems within activism is the necessary flip side of any examination of their broader framing. With this in mind, the first section of the chapter locates the discussion of TBS’s campaign in Singapore in literature on the geographies of social movements. Next, I describe how TBS’s campaign strategies and the nature of local actors’ connection to TBS’s campaign relate to processes of social movement framing, networks, and the role of local actors in this process. The following part of the chapter discusses the mediums through which the symbolic frame at the centre of TBS’s global anti-child sex trafficking campaign—the female Third World child victim—becomes mobilised in Singapore. Here I focus on local NGO HOME’s own work (as in the example of the event involving Dede, briefly described above) and on events run by local university students against sex trafficking.

Framing and the Strategic Localisation of TBS’s Campaign in Singapore TBS is a pioneer of corporate social responsibility (CSR), operating according to the maxim ‘profit with principles’. Anita Roddick, founder of TBS was well aware of the problem of human trafficking prior to the launch of TBS’s global campaign in 2009, foregrounding the issue of sex trafficking in her book Take It Personally (2001) as one of the contemporary global human rights problems in need to urgent redress. With her untimely death in 2007, TBS management decided to campaign on the issue of child sex trafficking in the wake of Roddick’s particular concern about the problem. Transnational corporations (TNCs), such as TBS, are

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thought by some to be especially capable of orchestrating global activism because their operations are already global in scope and scale (Blowfield and Frynas 2005; Blowfield 2005). Increasingly TNCs, including TBS, are establishing units dedicated entirely to corporate social responsibility, so perpetuating the ‘professionalisation of activism’ (Bondi and Laurie 2005). TBS itself has over 2500 retail outlets in 64 countries and through this medium aims to ‘speak to millions of customers and to make our collective voice heard where we will have the greatest impact’ (TBS 2009: 4). TBS’s child sex–trafficking campaign was consequently launched globally in 2009 with three interrelated aims: first, inspiring long-term change and creating a world that is taking ‘real action’ against child sex trafficking; second, ensuring the public’s voice is heard by those with power to make the changes needed to protect children and young people around the world (primarily through a public petition available for signing at TBS retail outlets in Singapore and other campaign countries); and third, using money raised to fund prevention and awareness-raising programmes for children at risk and relief programmes for those currently affected by sex trafficking (TBS 2009). Raising the money occurred through the sale of ‘Soft Hands Kind Heart’ hand cream available at TBS retail outlets. As of late 2010, the sale of the hand cream in Singapore specifically was so successful that it exceeded all expectations and generated additional funding for the other parts of the campaign (personal communication UN Women representative Singapore, June 2010). These funds have been directed predominantly towards awareness-raising, since in Singapore, to date, the issue of human trafficking has not been a particularly significant concern in activism or direct support work centred on human rights. Singapore is one of 75 countries globally that was selected by TBS for the campaign, a choice informed largely by the perceived need to pressure Singapore to recognise this issue as one affecting the city-state. The perception of Singapore as a reticent State where human trafficking was concerned can be surmised from a critical reading of the government’s seeming inaction on the issue, despite some evidence that it is a significant trafficking destination. This inaction included the Singaporean government’s failure to sign and ratify the UN Trafficking Protocol (2000), and outspoken and repeated denials of the existence of trafficking in the city-­ state by government representatives, particularly in response to suggestions made about Singapore in the Annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, published by the US State Department.5 The decision to include Singapore in TBS’s campaign was also bolstered by anecdotal evidence

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emerging from an earlier 2005 campaign in Singapore by United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM; renamed UN Women in 2010) in partnership with the American-based (conservative) anti-­ trafficking research institute, Polaris Project, on child sex tourism in Southeast Asia. That earlier campaign concluded that the related problem of child sex tourism in Southeast Asia had, in large part, a Singaporean flavour, with Singaporean men accused of patronising child prostitution venues in nearby Batam Island (Indonesian territory) and further afield in the region—a suggestion supported by findings from some academic research (Williams et al. 2008). Given the decision to include Singapore as a campaign country then, how exactly was TBS to mobilise support for its campaign in that context? Two interrelated conduits through which the campaign proceeded in Singapore—as elsewhere—are discussed in this part of the chapter: the advocacy partnerships it created and the symbolic frame of the female Third World child through which its message was framed. The role of social movement framing of an issue is particularly important insofar as frames act as devices for achieving consensus within movements and, indeed, of extending their geographical reach. Forging a Network: Local and Regional Campaign Partners Early work on transnational activism and social movements attempted to answer the thorny question of how movements achieve their ‘global reach’ since local concerns and the ‘particularities of place’ can mitigate against connections between actors across diverse contexts. Cumbers et al. (2008: 193), for example, suggest that ‘the particularities of place may also vitiate against broader spatial mobilisation and pose important problems for GJNs [global justice networks]’. This question also vexed TBS’s campaign managers, with the Singaporean campaign manager at TBS reflecting, for example, that ‘Every campaign country is different. This is a problem for the campaign because trafficking needs to be understood as a global issue. It affects every country in some way, but often different ways. But in Singapore the problem actually the reverse; people here don’t see it [trafficking] as something relevant to Singapore or because we are a developed country, and so not like many of the other countries in the campaign [which are low-income countries]. How can we make people sympathise with the issue here?’ (personal communication, April 2010). In examining the emergence of the global women’s movement, Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) work in particular explores the linkages with groups

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at various scales and sites in advancing that movement’s agenda. Their study identified the importance of transnational advocacy networks as ultimately affecting policy change by mobilising people locally. Because of the global scope of TBS’s campaign, forging a network of campaign actors in Singapore (as well as in other campaign countries) was also identified by campaign managers as key to the success of the campaign. In other words, for TBS, diverse local contexts presented a challenge to the success of the campaign, with the forging of networks of local actors aimed at achieving transnational activism’s key goal of geographically extenuative mobilisation. In all countries chosen as campaign sites, the involvement of two partners—an international NGO (INGO) and an LNGO—was sought. The former role was assigned to ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children), with its regional headquarters in Bangkok. ECPAT’s mandate is to advocate globally for the protection of children, particularly those who are vulnerable to or have experienced sexual abuse and/or commercial sexual exploitation (see Lainez 2010 for a critical perspective on ECPAT International). However, ECPAT International was unable to play a direct role in the localisation of the campaign in Singapore because—unlike in most other campaign countries—there is no local ECPAT office in Singapore. ECPAT International consequently ‘sub-contracted’ UN Women Singapore to coordinate the campaign locally because of the latter’s knowledge of advocacy in the Singaporean context. UN Women’s expertise in local advocacy was evidenced by their prior experience in conducting the 2005 campaign against child sex tourism (mentioned above), eventually culminating in the development of new legislation in Singapore to address this issue. UN Women Singapore was also seen as having important local knowledge of the Singaporean political context and understanding of (the sensitivity of) state-society relations, which would enable them to more effectively engage in activism on the issue of trafficking with the government. This is important because governments can constrain activist agendas (Grugel 2004), especially in soft authoritarian contexts like Singapore where mobilising states to support issues must proceed with much caution (Piper and Uhlin 2004). Indeed, Singapore has a recent history of ‘off-shoring’ activism (Bunnell 2007). Because TBS’s mandate for the campaign also included partnering with a local NGO, HOME was invited to fulfil this role for Singapore. In fact, there were few other contenders since there was no dedicated anti-­ trafficking NGO in Singapore with campaign orchestrators from ECPAT

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confiding to me that HOME was not an ideal choice, but that there was really ‘no better option’ (personal communication, June 2010). The local NGO in each campaign country was supposed to represent an immediate avenue through which to channel funds generated through the campaign to provide direct support to sex trafficked minors. It is little wonder then that HOME became incited to raise its profile as an organisation dedicated to sex trafficked girls in Singapore, such as Dede, given that it was supposed to be a repository for campaign funds dedicated to this purpose. But HOME’s work and expertise in fact lay elsewhere: it is an outspoken organisation championing the rights of adult migrant workers in Singapore and had never addressed either human trafficking or sexually abused minors (or those at the interface of these problems) in its own work prior to its involvement in TBS’s campaign. Framing the Child Victim Forging local and regional partnerships with HOME and ECPAT International, respectively, certainly enabled TBS to ensure that its key campaign message—that human trafficking is a global problem and that the figurative epicentre of this problem is the female Third World child— would be locally reiterated. But simply suggesting that trafficking was a problem in Singapore, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, would not necessarily elicit public or government sympathy or support for the issue. In order to persuade Singaporeans of the urgency of the issue ‘well framed arguments and interpretations’ (Gerhards 1995: 228) were needed to convey the legitimacy and urgency of the problem. Snow’s (2004) and Snow and Benford’s (1988) work on frame analysis suggests that simple devices or ‘frames’ that represent problems are strategically invoked in social movements to achieve this mobilisation. The ‘sex trafficked female Third World child’ is one device commonly utilised by the anti-human trafficking ­movement to align with popular interests and impact emotive registers of the general public. This ‘framing alignment’ process has been described by David Snow et  al. (1986: 467) as ‘the linkages of individual and social movement organisations interpretive frameworks’. In short, frame alignment is the strategic effort on the part of global movement actors to ­mobilise local interests and potential adherents to their campaign (Benford and Snow 2000: 624).6 For TBS’s campaign, this would mean not only diffusing the suggestion that the female Third World child is the

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­enultimate victim globally, but that Singapore must look to her for p understanding its own human trafficking problem. The device of the child victim was invoked by campaign organisers at TBS to ‘highlight the urgency of the problem of trafficking internationally and show people the plight of the most tragic victims’ (personal communication, TBS campaign manager for Singapore, August 2010). This statement is significant insofar as it contains the suggestion that tragedy is an important strategic impulse that courses through frame of the child victim (as opposed perhaps to other populations of trafficked persons). Höijer (2003) similarly identifies compassion as a successful emotive register for the anti-trafficking movement, whilst Schaeffer-Grabiel (2010) suggests that the child sex–trafficked victim invokes morality because of her location as a sexually exploited child (recall, e.g. the weeping audience during Dede’s testimony at HOME’s advocacy event). The identification of emotions as important in anti-human trafficking activism by these scholars is not specific to this human rights issue. As Brown and Pickerill (2009) note, there are important links between emotion and activism, whilst Henderson (2008) further suggests that some emotions are better at motivating certain political action than others. In TBS’s campaign, sympathy and sadness (at the victim’s plight) and anger (at the injustice of her situation) were deemed by TBS and ECPAT campaign orchestrators to be expedient emotional registers through which the campaign could be extended into Singapore. In this way, TBS’s child sex–trafficking campaign in Singapore could aim to align with local network actors and the broader public specifically through frame-bridging processes in which people may share similar views, sentiments—and, in this case, probably moral stances on the sexual exploitation of children—but participants may lack the organisational basis for articulating these views: ‘frame bridging involves linkages of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem [where some actors are] unmobilised sentiment pools or public opinion preference clusters’ (Snow et al. 1986: 467). Three tools for the circulation of the child victim frame formed the nexus of TBS’s global campaign in Singapore. These included a wallet-­ sized information booklet containing ‘facts’ on child sex–trafficking and ‘real’ stories of victims; the screening of fictional films and docudramas dealing with the subject of female—and where possible child—sex trafficking (see Chap. 3 for further discussion on the films); and a dedicated campaign website ‘Sound Out’.7 The booklet is circulated by local cam-

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paign partners in all countries where TBS is conducting its campaign (in this case, at TBS outlets, at UN Women, and at university student advocacy events and through HOME’s advocacy activities). A campaign information booklet is an important device as it introduces (in abridged form) stories of four ‘real’ child victims, none of whom notably are trafficked to Singapore. The respective ages of the children, their countries of origin (apart from one), and trafficking destination countries are all excluded from their profiles in the booklet, which works to dislocate them geographically to the benefit of their generalisation; they could be from anywhere and be trafficked to anywhere, representing every victim and no victim simultaneously. These stories are also an important medium through which the typical child victim begins to crystallise in the public imaginary in Singapore since the booklet is more widely viewed than the films. ‘Sasha’ in the first story is offered a modelling job in another country, with a chaperone accompanying her and her companions to the destination. The reader is told: The photographer was waiting for them in the attic of a house and they were told to strip. The girls were confused and tried to tell them there had been a mistake but the chaperone became angry and started threatening them. What followed was a week-long nightmare for the girls. Held against their will, they were forced to prostitute themselves and had pornographic photography and film taken of them.

Details of the girls escape and their loneliness and fear in a foreign city with no identification are narrated in brief. Despite not being about victims in Singapore, this booklet was available everywhere as the local campaign unfolded, with related localised renditions of the child victim by local campaign actors available to reinforce its key frame.

Mobilising the Child Victim in Singapore’s Local Anti-trafficking Activism Whilst the child victim supplied the frame for TBS’s campaign message, it was the local movement actors who were responsible for its circulation in Singapore through the film screenings, ‘Sound Out’ website, and advocacy events, some of which involved TBS paraphernalia (particularly the booklet of stories of real victims) and some materials developed by local partners themselves. In this part of the chapter, I focus on the ways the

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local civil society actors who came into the fold of TBS’s campaign validated and in turn mobilised the female child sex–trafficking victim in their advocacy and awareness-raising activities in Singapore (either within or subsequent to TBS’s campaign). The activities of UN Women, HOME, and local university student coalition ‘Traffick Light’ are discussed here. I should point out that I am not concerned with interventions in the form of support work (such as legal and migration advice, provision of health services, shelter) in this chapter as much as activism through awareness-­ raising to targeted audiences or the general public. UN Women as Campaign Sub-contractors As was befitting of their role as local sub-contractor for ECPAT International in Singapore, UN Women Singapore developed a comprehensive plan for the local articulation of TBS’s campaign that included film nights, school talks, mobilisation of university student groups (the latter is discussed further below), establishing a website containing news and information about sex trafficking, engaging the media on the issue, and supervising the production of a research documentation exercise and report on the subject of child sex trafficking in Singapore (ECPAT International 2010). The manager of UN Women Singapore drafted a local campaign strategy in which these local campaign activities appeared under three headings: events, student initiatives, and media (UN Women 2009). Apart from film screenings, other events planned by UN Women included awareness-raising talks planned on International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, respectively, as well as a media workshop. The Mother’s Day event was particularly interesting because it not only aimed to provide information on sex trafficking but wished to do so through the perspective of a mother who is a ‘sex trafficking social worker’, where discussion would revolve around ‘sex trafficking from a mother’s point of view and what mothers should know about sex trafficking of young girls’. This event, open to the public, was an exemplary site for frame bridging since it drew on the sentiments of mothers for the protection of their daughters and was consistent with TBS’s campaign motto of ‘Their protection is in our hands’. Whilst feminists have long argued for recognition of the political potential of the personal and intimate, this event’s suggestion that child victims lack agency perhaps reinforces a different politics which may cast

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shadows on the considerable agency of young girls may have already expressed in their situations. UN Women held a media workshop which targeted all the major dailies (Indian, Chinese, Malay, and English) in Singapore. The workshop was to ‘provide… an overview of sex trafficking issues in Singapore and possible angles for stories’. Yet the exclusion of other forms of trafficking that may well be present in Singapore was left out of this media liaison. As a result, the media began to take more interest in sex trafficking in Singapore as TBS’s campaign gained momentum. The extension of the media coverage of the issue to television was novel in Singapore. Particularly notable was the airing of Channel 5’s ‘Get Real’ television docudrama on child sex ­trafficking in Singapore. Following several articles in the local media in Singapore in the wake of the country’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report ranking, in January 2011, Singapore’s Channel 5 media group aired an episode of their (by Singaporean standards) outspoken critical documentary series ‘Get Real’. Dealing with a broad range of disconcerting issues, the series is cutting edge for conservative Singaporean viewers in many respects. The January 2011 episode focused on the topic of child sex trafficking in Singapore. Bereft of victims to provide testimony (and so confirmation through numbers), the episode narrated the story of a singular victim, ‘Chat’, from the Philippines who recounts her experience following her return home to Manila from Singapore. Like HOME’s inclusion of Dede’s narrative, the story of Chat helped to confirm the relevance of the child sex–trafficking victim as the key subject in Singapore’s human trafficking landscape. Thus, although altered in her racialisation (as Filipino), her profile and experiences of sexual exploitation are remarkably consistent with Sasha’s story presented in TBS’s booklet (discussed above). UN Women’s media for the campaign was primarily located in the Sound Out website, which includes information about the scale and meaning of the problem of sex trafficking and ways locals in Singapore can support it. Student groups are one of the primary targets for awareness-raising about trafficking, and students are directed to the website for further information. Given that UN Women’s school talk volunteers visited dozens of schools, this constitutes a not inconsiderable audience for this interpretation of human trafficking. Student groups were involved in the campaign not just as recipients of awareness-raising talks but also as conduits for the further advocacy themselves. This was particularly the case for university students, as we shall now see.

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Student Initiatives: Traffick Light Students are deemed to be important social movement actors because they are usually not yet full participants in the formal labour market and often possess important resources such as available time, high education levels, and access to broader networks (Snow et al. 1980). Student groups from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore Management University (SMU) carried out their own campaigns on sex trafficking with the support and guidance of UN Women Singapore and, indirectly, TBS. The NUS student group, known as ‘Traffick Light’ and located notably in the School of Business (and specifically in the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy) produced the most comprehensive student campaign, including an interactive exhibition/‘game’, film screenings (selected from the UN Women’s list of films screened as part of TBS’s campaign, see Chap. 3), and a mini-conference on sex trafficking. Given the inseparability of the NUS students’ campaign from TBS’s campaign, it was not surprising that UN Women Singapore, TBS, and Singaporean headquartered (but Cambodian-based) NGO Riverkids were all partners to the student initiative, with their logos placed prominently on the flyers advertising Traffick Light events. Here, I focus on two components of the NUS students’ campaign—the conference and the interactive exhibition—critically examining the ways the child victim became circulated to university students, academics, and members of the general public who attended Traffick Light’s events. The conference, which was held on NUS’s main campus and advertised widely to students, was well attended, with approximately 100 students and several academic staff present. The volunteer from UN Women Singapore who conducts school talks on human trafficking spoke first, followed by the President of HOME, and with the Founder and Director of Riverkids concluding the formal presentations. The UN Women’s speaker reiterated truths that form part of the UN interpretation of human trafficking, including the definition, the factors that purportedly make victims vulnerable (young, women, and impoverished), the countries of origin and destination within Asia, and the men who fuel demand as clients. Surprisingly, Indonesia was absent from the list of countries of origin within Asia, despite the fact that my own research and in some anecdotal evidence appeared to reveal the particular significance of Indonesia as a country of origin for Singapore. The elision of this specific—but clearly important—information about the Singaporean context bespeaks of both

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the lack of local knowledge of ‘local’ groups involved in the campaign about trafficking in Singapore itself and the ways a globally accepted narrative concerning the geographies of human trafficking travel down to Singapore with little, if any, modification. The UN Women speaker also presented a photograph which was supposed to embody ‘the victims’, since it was shown during the speaker’s narration of victim profiles. Already familiar with this photograph and its caption (both of which were excluded by the speaker at this event), I knew the group of young women were from Kalimantan, Indonesia, and were meant to represent potential vulnerability (rather than victimhood), since the community in question had never had women or girls trafficked previously. The audience was told neither of their country/region of origin or circumstances and the narration at the conference belied the intent behind the photograph. De-contextualised, circulating images of children, such as this one, are powerful emotion constructs in advocacy within development more broadly (Lidchi 1999; Manzo 2008; Bosco 2008) and human trafficking specifically. The second speaker was HOME’s President, who notably began with a personal account of the impact the film ‘A Silent Scream’ had on her when she had viewed it at 18 years of age. Depicting the story of a young girl sold to a brothel in Thailand, MIGRANT’s President told the audience that she had ‘hoped one day to set up a factory so girls would not be trafficked’. Good intentions do not necessarily make good preventative programmes, however, as many of women trafficked to Singapore had been employed in factory work and other low-skilled jobs prior to entry into the sex industry. HOME’s speaker went on to tell the story of a young Thai woman, ‘Nan’, who, the audience was told, was ‘definitely not a prostitute. She was a captive’. In my own encounters with Nan through my research, it was clear she was a voluntary sex worker but nonetheless subject to vulnerabilities when working in Singapore. However, by rendering her a ‘captive’ HOME’s speaker was able to establish her victimhood and simultaneously reject prostitution as a legitimate form of work (a view repeated in the narration of Nan’s story on HOME’s website). The debate on prostitution as legitimate work has cast a deep divide amongst those working on the issue of trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation (see Caraway 2008 for an overview of these positions). With HOME rapidly taking self-appointed centre stage as the support NGO for sex trafficked women and girls in Singapore, sex work was again being delegitimised and stigmatised, despite the fact that, in actuality, a large proportion of migrant

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women in Singapore’s sex industry—including Nan—came to Singapore as voluntary sex workers. The reconstruction of Nan’s experience within the hegemonic discourse of sex trafficking that excludes voluntary entry into the sex industry renders her vulnerabilities and experiences as a sex worker invisible and her claims to redress on these grounds dismissed. ‘Nan’s’ story was followed with the now familiar rendition of Dede’s trafficking experience with her testimony displayed to the audience in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. Riverkids speaker—who also made an appearance at a film screened as part of UN Women Singapore’s campaign activities for TBS—was able to provide the audience with a sense of the scope of the problem of child sex trafficking regionally by introducing her work in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (as she did at the film screening). The speaker dispelled some myths of sex trafficking for the audience in a speech that was by far the most informed of the three. The significance of Riverkids’ narrative for our purposes is to be found in its levelling effects. The audience was told, ‘In Singapore it happens behind closed door; in Cambodia it happens in your face. Why don’t we have a protection visa [for victims of trafficking]? We don’t track them because we don’t want to. We are the same as Cambodia. We are Tier Two like Cambodia; we turn a blind eye. Look at Batam—we turn a blind eye and its right offshore’ (my emphasis). Singapore was equated with Cambodia in its responses to human trafficking, especially its treatment of victims, and in the acknowledgement that the phenomenon is widespread in Singapore, as it is in Cambodia. The Annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, which ranks countries globally according to how serious their trafficking problem is and how respective governments are responding to the problem, helps bolster claims to parallel or at least comparable experiences. It does this by providing a framework for global comparison under which countries’ performances are judged according to their progress in prevention, protection, and prosecution, the three areas delineated previously under the UN Protocol as the linchpin of successful anti-­ trafficking efforts. Despite extensive critique of the annual TIP reports as politically motivated and disciplining of countries’ responses to trafficking (e.g. Schaeffer-Grabiel 2010; Soderlund 2005), Riverkids nonetheless used this framework to broadly infer that Singapore’s responses were not significantly different from those of her much poorer regional neighbours. The Riverkids’ speech was also significant from an advocacy perspective since ‘blame’ for the situation in Singapore was laid squarely at the feet of the government that ‘turns a blind eye’. Many members of the audience

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were thus incited to sign TBS’s petition to the Singapore government, which was strategically placed outside the exit as participants left the conference venue. The speeches at the conference were cohesive in both their circulation and reinforcement of a particular rendering of human trafficking and by the inclusion of three speakers who could claim expertise in particular areas of anti-human trafficking that together constituted a comprehensive portrait; NGO work in Singapore (HOME), on-the-ground knowledge in the wider region (Riverkids), and transnational governance from the organisation that developed the Protocol (the United Nations). The ascendency of the child victim in Singapore was assured and her broader regional rendition established, albeit with significant elisions concerning the Singaporean context and the treatment of sex work. The second component of the NUS student campaign was an interactive exhibition, at the centre of which was a ‘human trafficking game’. Like film, the use of games encourages the participation of individuals in movements through non-confronting media. In this vein, the game was designed as a maze described in the following way by a Traffick Light representative (personal communication, April 2010): [P]articipants will be introduced to a character, whom they will assume throughout the maze. The characters are usually girls from poor families living in villages and at each stage of their lives, the participants will have to make major decisions for the character. Such decisions include whether to continue studying or start working, and to either find a job in the city or stay in the village. As participants make decisions for the character, they will find that under the desperate conditions these girls are usually in, it is very easy for them to fall into the traps of human trafficking. If ‘safe’ choices are made (continuing studying, staying put in the village), the character will end up exiting the vicious cycle of poverty.

The game is an important medium through which ideas about vulnerability in human trafficking are constructed and in which the child victim becomes fixed as the key victim of human trafficking. Exclusively represented as ‘girls’, the characters in the maze are also geographically locatable (as from/in the village) and economically locatable (as poor/from poor families). Although shown to be largely inaccurate as a general scenario (e.g. Yea 2008), despite its relevance in understanding some trafficking experiences, the poor village girl and her trajectory appears as an

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unshakable construct of the anti-trafficking industry. What it suggests, however, is that immobility is a viable solution to trafficking, despite this suggestion being subject to prolific and repeated questioning (e.g. Agustin 2003). Long (2004: 25, my emphasis) summarises these concerns aptly: ‘When trafficking becomes an issue, it may be used to control women’s and girls’ bodies—and is often based on a politics of fear rather than empowerment. The threat of trafficking is used to remind all women and girls that if they do not behave in certain socially acceptable ways and particularly if they are too mobile, they place themselves at great risk’. The game also establishes the importance of children staying at school as a risk minimisation strategy echoing Vanderbeck’s (2005: 72) concerns about gypsy children in Britain where ‘One of the most potent spatial discourses of childhood relates to the importance of schools as sites of learning, socialisation and development’, with those who depart from these norms being cast as deviant. In trafficking discourses, children outside school (usually ‘dropouts’ or from ‘minority groups’, and in this event personified by Nan and Dede) are rendered as more vulnerable and a potential social/migration problem who apparently expose themselves to such risks by having made ‘bad decisions’. What is also notable about the local campaign is the exclusion of trafficked persons from the production of narratives about themselves and the rendering of the victim subject according to her characterisation through the parameters laid down by UN Women Singapore, ECPAT International, and, ultimately, TBS. Although I had offered advice to the student group about some of the stereotypes they seemed to be producing through their campaign, for example, ultimately, these concerns did not result in any modification to their presentation of trafficking in the game or the conference. Indeed, hegemonic discourses achieve their potency precisely through their immutability. Springboarding from TBS’s Campaign: HOME’s Anti-trafficking Desk HOME’s work has in the past been primarily oriented to addressing adult migrant workers’ human rights in Singapore. To this end, they provide case support, run both a men’s and a women’s shelter, conduct advocacy and awareness-raising work, and, more recently, have begun to undertake data collection for the purpose of publishing their own research reports. Indeed, HOME does incredibly valuable work for migrant workers in

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Singapore, especially paid domestic workers who comprise the majority of their cases, and it is not my intention in this chapter to call this into question. Rather, I wish to examine how an NGO adopts (particular construction of) a problem externally rather than on the basis of gaps and needs identified through their existing work. Buoyed by their involvement in TBS’s campaign as the chosen LNGO partner and the momentum generated by increasing media exposure, the issue of sex trafficking was generating in Singapore, and in March 2010, HOME subsequently launched their own anti-trafficking desk. The desk was launched in the event described at the outset of the chapter, at the centre of which was Dede. Dede had been provided with assistance from HOME’s shelter on neighbouring Batam Island ­ (Indonesia). Dede related to me that she had not in fact sought the assistance of the shelter on Batam Island. Rather, she had discovered that she was pregnant after her experience of being sold for prostitution in Singapore three months earlier and had gone to an abortion clinic on Batam Island run by a local hospital to undergo a termination of pregnancy. The attending gynaecologist would not allow Dede to proceed with the termination since she was already in her second trimester. The nurse had phoned HOME’s shelter to ask if they could take Dede in and assist her through the remainder of her pregnancy. She was the ‘perfect victim’ for the launch as her fit with the construction of the victim through TBS’s campaign was uncannily close to exact. Most significantly, at the point when Dede arrived in Singapore, she was still a minor at age—the age of 16—and had never received any formal schooling. At the launch of their anti-trafficking desk, HOME was able to reproduce the child victim as the personification of the problem of human trafficking in Singapore through the inclusion of Dede. Equally, HOME was also able to situate the child sex–trafficking victim as central to the organisation’s own anti-trafficking efforts through Dede’s testimony at the launch. This was important as at the time HOME was attempting to expand the scope of their work to include anti-trafficking in order to pick up on the considerable funding opportunities (primarily from the United States and some international philanthropic organisations) that were beginning to emerge in anti-trafficking with the onset of the recognition more broadly that Singapore may indeed be an ‘epicentre’ for the problem in Southeast Asia. To bolster its likelihood of benefitting from these funding opportunities, the narratives of HOME’s involvement in rescue and/

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or support of the few child sex–trafficking victims it had encountered were accorded discursive prominence in both HOME’s website and in talks given by HOME’s President and founder. One example where HOME attempted to align itself with anti-­ trafficking work was in the narration of the story of ‘Nan’, a young Thai woman who was sheltered by HOME during her nine-month stay in Singapore when she was involved in a court case. HOME featured Nan’s story on their website. Nan had migrated from the northern Isan region of Thailand to Bangkok as a teenager and supported herself to study through working at a hardware shop. She found it extremely difficult financially and socially and turned to bar and sex work as a more attractive lifestyle when she was 17 years old. By the time Nan migrated to Singapore at the age of 20, she was a voluntary sex worker. It was during her fourth sojourn to the city-state that she was caught by the police in a raid of the jungle brothel where she was working. What followed resulted in a high-­ prolife case of police corruption in Singapore: Nan was asked to provide a ‘free service’ to the policeman who caught her in the raid, in return for her release. She agreed, but after intercourse, the policeman reneged and arrested Nan. She exposed the officer, who was subsequently charged with, and found guilty of, corruption. Nan herself was eventually fined for soliciting and deported from Singapore (HOME paid her fine). After Nan’s deportation, her ‘story’, as written by herself but edited by HOME, emerged in the public domain. Towards the end of the narrative, the reader is told: Fortunately, HOME came to my defence with posting bail, arranging for a pro bono lawyer and providing me every support I needed, as I was being prepared for trial.... Sr. B, President of HOME finally attained my freedom by paying my penalty fine of SGD 700, so that I could smile again and free to return to my country (sic). I really did not want her to pay my penalty, but she insisted because she could understand how much I have suffered as a victim in my lifetime.

Apart from locating the capacity and agency for resolving Nan’s situation in HOME, the story concludes with the delegitimisation of sex work, in Nan’s own words: My experience and the support of those who helped me along the way, have given me the resolve to begin my new life in Thailand. I do not wish to be a

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sex worker and have come to understand that at 23 years old, I should continue to study and to work with my newly acquired skills in other trades. I am now employed in a pharmaceutical retail outlet in Bangkok.

As John Frederick (1998: 135) notes in relation to the mythical trafficking victim of ‘Gita’ in Nepal, ‘The repairing of damaged Gita has become a powerful fundraising tool, and the rehabilitation sector of anti-trafficking programming has now become nearly as large as the prevention sector’. HOME’s involvement in TBS’s campaign and their independent circulation of the stories of young women and girls—such as Dede and Nan—that followed from this raises important issues about the advancement of particular agendas within local organisations that are served by—and indeed perpetuate—the mobilisation of the child victim frame. HOME is continually seeking funding for its activities and works under the same funding constraints as many of its counterpart NGOs across the Southeast Asian region. At the present juncture, trafficking represents a significant funding opportunity in this constrained environment, but one which must be crafted through a particular image of trafficking and the location of NGOs within anti-trafficking work. Frederick (1998: 129) suggests this comprises ‘a sequence of “scenarios”, which generally correspond to situations and events in a real trafficking episode. These scenarios also correspond to what are today considered most of the basic areas of direct anti-trafficking intervention’, which include socio-economic status prior to trafficking, the trafficking process, her transportation or movement, the destination and withdrawal, her rehabilitation, and, finally, her return to society. The iteration of both Nan’s and Dede’s stories by HOME are notably structured according to this sequence. Following the (self)-establishment of HOME as the key NGO involved in anti-trafficking work in Singapore, the NGO’s President was invited to speak about the issue at various forums, the most important of which for our purposes was a sex trafficking awareness-raising campaign organised by students at NUS.  In this way, the rendition of the child victim and the authority of HOME were both validated by the intertwining of HOME’s inclusion in other awarenessraising initiatives such as those by university students in Singapore, as discussed above.

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Conclusion The anti-trafficking movement had no substantive local expression in Singapore prior to the ingression of TBS’s global campaign, although some local actors have been providing support to trafficked persons without taking on an activist role. This lack of pre-existing movement means Singapore is a rather interesting place to be exploring the local emplacement and mobilisation of anti-trafficking activism and its key frame of the child victim through TBS’s campaign since it has landed on a ‘blank canvas’ as far as an anti-trafficking movement is concerned. The relative local void in human trafficking activism in Singapore can allow us to broaden geographical discussions of transnational social movements and human rights activism by considering the ways agendas and activities of local actors’ figure when global human rights issues are played out in particular places, as well as the possible implications this has for understanding and defining Singapore’s emergent human trafficking landscape. TBS was able to expand its trafficking campaign into Singapore through the crafting of connections with actors situated regionally (ECPAT International) and locally (HOME, UN Women, University Students group). This strategic localisation enabled the frame of the child victim to be translated into Singapore with little or no distortion. From discussion in this chapter, it appears that global activism around the issue of human trafficking at least has the potential to erase rather than extend the specificities of place-based human rights issues and renderings of them as Dede and her contemporaries become the privileged subject of human trafficking there. It has been noted elsewhere that researching humans can be difficult because trafficked people are generally considered ‘hidden populations’ (Lazcko 2005). But the absence of research opens the space for myths of trafficking to take hold of the popular imaginary. Because there was little suggestion that trafficking was an issue in Singapore prior to TBS’s campaign, there was no pre-existing understanding of the ‘problem’ with which the campaign needed to negotiate. Reflecting on the role of local actors in such transnational movements, it might be suggested that, in some cases, local advocacy emerges from and can best be understood in relation to its orchestration by globally effusive regimes of activism, rather than having any significant a priori existence. This was certainly the case in Singapore as HOME began to situate itself as the face of anti-trafficking work amongst NGOs there. Their involvement in TBS’s campaign was the catalyst for this initiative,

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and it also established the contours of their own discursive construction of the issue as one principally involving the sex industry and female minors. Future geographical research on the spatialities of activism, including its strategies, agendas, and representations in framing and defining global human rights problems, could do well to elucidate the potential for transnational corporate and non-governmental actors’ agendas to dilute, reconfigure, discipline, and create its local equivalents. Attention to the ‘knowledge practices and artefacts’ (cf. Riles 2001) that support this local mobilisation can extend understandings of the power relations that operate within terrains of resistance. Following this, other concerns about the localisation of symbolic frames in activism also surface. What, for example, are the ethical risks involved in un/re-grounded activism? The remarkably robust engagement by geographers with professionalisation, NGOs, and global activism recently suggests that ethical questions are important to consider in understanding the agendas of local NGOs in adopting issues and the implications this has for their own work. Some recent geographical scholarship concerning activism of local social movements and NGOs, particularly in the Global South, has articulated concerns over the professionalisation of these actors as they are influenced by the constitutive and disciplining logic of neoliberal globalisation. Bondi and Laurie (2005: 395), for example, suggest, ‘neoliberalism incorporates, co-opts, constrains and depletes activism’. Specifically, in relation to discussion in this chapter, we might further ask, what are the risks for trafficked and non-trafficked migrant women in Singapore’s sex industry of local actors importing a globally accepted scenario of trafficking into a space where it is not established as locally valid? HOME has purported to expand its orientation to address sex trafficking and has established discursively that is it already has the capacity to address the needs of sex trafficked women and girls in Singapore, with actual supports following, rather than pre-dating these suggestions. Returning to Featherstone’s (2003, 2008) injunction to explore the politics of identity and agency in/through networked activism, the examples of a local migrant worker NGO and student group in Singapore also demonstrate the ways local actors validate and reproduce a particular construction of the problem of human trafficking within Singapore through their involvement as part of TBS’s broader global campaign against child sex trafficking. Neither of these two groups (HOME or the NUS students) were previously engaged in anti-trafficking work of any sort and, with the exception of HOME’s two over-invoked victims (Dede and Nan),

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neither group actually interacted with persons trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation in the context of their own prior work. This means that those who are coming to claim expert knowledge on this issue in Singapore have little or no interaction with the women or girls they are purporting to serve, or sex workers more generally, thus echoing Heather Montgomery’s (2001) lament for anti-trafficking NGOs in the Thai context about ‘how few of them actually work with child prostitutes’. The Riverkids speaker at the NUS student conference clearly did have the authority of first-hand knowledge, but this was not attained through work on the issue in Singapore. As a result, trafficking ‘myths’ are perpetuated through an array of performative movement strategies that included talks, games, and film viewings/commentaries. Some of these myths include that girls are the main victims, that girls are geographically and economically locatable, that migration makes girls unsafe (and conversely ‘staying put’ renders them no longer at risk), and that the Asian region as a whole exhibits similar dimensions and modus operandi of the problem of trafficking. A final question remains unsatisfactorily answered in this chapter and is taken up in the chapters that follow: what is the productive potential of the key trope of the damaged (child) body in the global-to-local articulation of child sex trafficking? Arguably, such a construction produces ‘truth effects’ (cf. Foucault 1975) in terms of delimiting the range of possibilities for NGO and government action on this issue. In particular, the discursive rendering of the victim through an ‘injured identity’ (Doezema 2001; following Brown 1995; see also Butler 2006) produces an investment in the use of suffering as a tactic for framing the problem of (anti)-trafficking in Singapore. Damage or injury—of sexuality, innocence, youth, the physical body—as a frame becomes a source of power to intervene (for local organisations) as much has it does to influence and align with local actors (for TBS): ‘It fixes the identity of the injured and the injuring as social positions and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification and repositioning’ (Brown 1995: 27; in Doezema 2001: 21). Apart from Ansell’s (2010) recent study of AIDS orphans in South Africa, there is a distinct lack of focus on the movement of symbolic frames that are central to (the success of) transnational activism around human trafficking as it connects (with) particular places, despite the fact that the effects of such problem constructions are often deeply felt, especially where children are concerned (see also Vanderbeck 2005; Hyndman 2010).

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An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Mobilising the Child Victim: the localisation of human trafficking in Singapore through global activism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 988–1003 (2013).

Notes 1. All migrant participants in this study are referred to by pseudonyms. Anti-­ trafficking organisations and individuals within them are referred to by their real names, unless otherwise indicated. 2. Batam is an island in Indonesia that forms part of the Riau Islands archipelago. Due to Batam’s proximity to Singapore and its fledgling labour-­ intensive manufacturing sector involving a large number of internal migrants, Batam has developed a large and multifaceted sex and nightlife entertainment industry where conditions are generally deplorable. 3. A Karaoke Television (KTV) Bar is a common destination for women deployed in the sex and nightlife entertainment industry throughout Southeast and East Asia. Many women deployed in these venues undertake hostessing work in which sexual intercourse is optional. 4. Activism is taken to include any activity by actors in social movements that aims to produce positive change for/by marginalised groups. Awareness-­ raising, research, protest, and direct advocacy would all fall within such an understanding. 5. The US Department of State (DoS) ranks countries into three Tier groups each year on the basis of each country’s commitment to anti-trafficking in the three key areas of prevention of trafficking, protection of victims, and prosecution of traffickers. Each June, the Annual TIP Report is released, and countries which receive the worst rating (Tier 3) may be subject to economic sanctions imposed by the US government. 6. Snow and Benford (1988) suggest that frame alignment between social movement actors is necessary for a successful movement. They consequently identify four different types of framing processes: frame bridging, framing application, frame extension, and frame transformation. Each of these operates in a different manner to achieve the alignment of frame projected by a movement with their participants. 7. TBS also produced a larger booklet which provides a more comprehensive overview of child sex trafficking globally. The intended audience for this booklet is the NGO partners and local activist groups who can help ‘spread the word’ through the knowledge and information contained in the booklet. Despite suspect claims to authoritative information and ‘fact’ (including, e.g. to the number of victims of sex trafficking globally), the booklet is intended to serve as a resource for campaign countries to disseminate information about child sex trafficking.

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Featherstone, D. (2008). Resistance, space and political identities: The making of counter-global networks. Chichester, Sussex: John Wiley. Foucault, M. (1975). Film and popular memory: An interview with Michel Foucault. Radical Philosophy, 11(11), 24–29. Frederick, J. (1998). The myth of Nepal-to-India sex trafficking: Its creation, its maintenance and its influence on anti-trafficking interventions. In K. Kempadoo (Ed.), Trafficking and prostitution re-considered (Chap. 7). Routledge: London. Gerhards, J. (1995). Framing dimensions and framing strategies: Contrasting ideal- and real-type frames. Social Science Information, 34(2), 225–248. Grugel, J. (2004). State power and transnational activism in Asia. In N. Piper & A. Uhlin (Eds.), Transnational activism in Asia: Problems of power and democracy. New York: Routledge. Henderson, V. L. (2008). Is there hope for anger? The politics of spatialising and reproducing emotion. Emotion, Space and Society, 1(1), 28–37. Höijer, B. (2003). The discourse of global compassion: The audience and media reporting of human suffering. Media, Culture and Society, 26, 513–531. Hyndman, J. (2010). The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the war on terror. Political Geography, 29, 247–255. Juris, J. (2004). Networked social movements: Global movements for global justice. In M.  Castells (Ed.), The network society: A cross-cultural perspective (pp. 341–362). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Juris, J. (2005). Social forums and their margins: Networking logics and the cultural politics of autonomous space. Ephemera, 5, 253–272. Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lainez, N. (2010). Representing sex trafficking in Southeast Asia? The victim staged. In T.  Zheng (Ed.), Sex trafficking, human rights and social justice (pp. 144–149). New York: Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lazcko, F. (2005). Data and research on human trafficking. International Migration, 43(1–2), 5–16. Lidchi, H. (1999). Finding the right image: British development NGOs and the regulation of imagery. In T.  Skelton & T.  Allen (Eds.), Culture and global change (pp. 87–101). London: Routledge. Long, L. D. (2004). Anthropological perspectives on the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation. International Migration, 42(1), 5–31. Manzo, K. (2008). Imaging humanitarianism: NGO identity and the iconography of childhood. Antipode, 40, 632–657. Montgomery, H. (2001). Modern Babylon? Prostituting children in Thailand. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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CHAPTER 3

Girls on Film: Framing Human Trafficking Through Film and the Cinema

Excerpt from Field Notes (17 April 2010): The audience is seated and the lights dimmed. The fictional film Holly begins with the central character, Holly, a twelve years old Vietnamese girl seen frantically running through backstreets, pursued by two shadowy male figures. They eventually catch her and she is loaded roughly onto a covered truck and driven back to the brothel from where she escaped. As the film progresses we learn that the girl, Holly, was sold by her desperately poor mother to a recruiter who moved her across the Vietnamese–Cambodian border where she was sold to a mammy [brothel owner] in the notorious child prostitution district of Svey Pek (also known as Kilometre 11, or K11), an outlying district of Phnom Penh. She is a virgin and is being kept in the brothel as a house servant until she reaches a suitable age at which her virginity may be sold to the highest bidder. A minor character later informs us that virginity sales command a high price in Cambodia’s prostitution industry and Vietnamese girls are commonly perceived to be especially sought after for their fair complexions and good looks. Holly encounters Patrick, an American antique dealer, who attempts to rescue her after he meets her by chance and learns of her plight. The film follows the story of Patrick searching for and finding Holly after she successfully escapes the brothel in a later attempt. Not knowing what to do with his rescued charge, he eventually deposits her in a shelter for sex trafficking victims in Phnom Penh (a real shelter, in fact). The film reaches a dramatic climax with Holly running away from the shelter and Patrick being captured by the Cambodian police for assaulting the man who eventually bought Holly’s virginity. As the lights go up and the credits role, I turn my head to the sea of red eyes seated behind me.

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After the film two chairs are placed in front of the screen, facing the audience. Founder and President of the Cambodian-based, but Singapore headquartered non-governmental organisation (NGO), River Kids, and the Education Co-ordinator for UN Women Singapore are invited to take questions about the film. The speaker from River Kids clearly has the authority of ‘on the ground knowledge’ and captivates the audience with her impassioned and expert reading of the film: “No, the men from the brothel wouldn’t chase after Holly—it would be so easy to replace her that they probably wouldn’t be looking too hard for her at all …. Yes, most of the other parts of the film are pretty accurate, including the police corruption, the selling of girls by their parents, and the difficulty of reintegrating into society if one eventually manages to get out of the brothel”. The question and answer session continues for another hour. Tea is served and the audience leave the cinema with a newfound sense of the importance of helping these poor victims. These anticipated acts of benevolent helping are undergirded by an uncomplicated and unchallenged picture of the principle object of human trafficking intervention as she figuratively moves from Vietnam/Cambodia to Singapore; namely, the poor, female, third world child.

Introduction I open this chapter with the above vignette because it illustrates rather precisely the relationship between film, anti-trafficking activism, and affect/emotion. In Singapore, the filmic production and cinematic performance of the girl trafficking victim in the realm of human trafficking activism is the principal mobilising device of anti-trafficking solidarity and intervention. This mobilisation is very deliberately cultivated by its NGO orchestrators to create an intimate anti-trafficking public (cf. Berlant 2008) amongst the predominantly female viewers. The chapter therefore engages with scholarship on the geographies of justice and activism, especially its recent forays with emotion and affect (Wright 2009, 2010; Bosco 2006, 2007; Brown and Pickerill 2009) and the political potential of affect more broadly (Mackenzie and Dalby 2003; Thrift 2004, 2009). These interventions explore how affect and emotion are often invoked to realise collective political goals, including forming and sustaining social movements. In this vein, Melissa Wright (2010) has urged geographers to explore the links between emotion and social justice, especially the question of whether geographies of emotion and affect have a role to play in social justice movements. Bosco (2007: 549) similarly suggests, ‘there is a need to investigate how emotions relate to the way in which activists build

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networks that help organise, mobilise and sustain social movements in places and across space’. Wright (2010: 818) thus asks, ‘How can feminist and emotional geographies tighten their connections, fuel their shared passions and generate a synergy of scholarship oriented to activism and progressive change? How can geographies of feeling broaden the path for justice that feminism endeavours to plough?’ This chapter takes up Wright’s injunction to explore such connections and the possibilities offered by affect in anti-trafficking activism specifically. But, as the opening vignette hints, these connections are often laden with as many pitfalls as possibilities for ‘progressive change’. There is sometimes a paradox of (dis)empowerment to (anti-trafficking) activism where the girl victim is politicised through relations established between her and her saviours (NGOs, rescuers, etc.) in the storylines of the films and between her and the film viewers-cum-volunteers/activists. The content of anti-trafficking films and the collective viewing by the audience at the cinema thus offer a further site for the consideration of the linkages between affect and activism, specifically in relation to film. Although both affect and emotion have been discussed by geographers interested in activism, this chapter engages more directly with affect, which, in this context, might be taken to mean the embodied responses to films and cinematic performances prior to their articulation as emotions. These affective responses create empathy amongst viewers/activists when they see each other responding in similar ways as themselves to the filmic content and experience. There has been some academic attention to the ascendency of the child/girl victim in anti-trafficking activism in general (Lainez 2010) and to the political potential of the ‘Third World child’ more widely (Lidchi 1999; Pain 2004; Ruddick 2003) and, as Chap. 1 illustrated, the ways the girl victim began to be constituted as an anti-trafficking frame in Singapore. However, there has been virtually no concomitant attention to the role of film or the space of the cinema in mobilising this child victim for awareness-­ raising or activist purposes or to the political effects of this mobilisation in terms of relations established and enacted between different stakeholders. Relatedly, some have noted the intersection between film and anti-­ trafficking work (e.g. Bernstein 2007; Brown et al. 2010; Lindquist 2010), but there is yet to be any in-depth analysis of these relations. In exploring relations between film, affect, and activism in another global movement, Meredith Raimondo (2010) has documented the filmic production of HIV/AIDS-affected persons where the agency of the ‘ideal’ viewer is

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realised at the cost of the ‘visual colonisation’ of the HIV/AIDS sufferers. This chapter therefore builds on strands of Raimondo’s arguments about relations of agency, sympathy, benevolence, and intervention established through film as a mobilising project within activism and awareness-raising. What are the roles of the film and the cinematic space as arenas for mobilising viewers in advancing activism around human trafficking? How have these processes converged to produce an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore? And where exactly is the child victim positioned within this intimate public vis-a-vis other anti-trafficking actors? Popular media, especially film, has become a conduit through which politics are conducted (Dalby 2008; Dodds 2008; Gandy 2003; Hughes 2007; Raimondo 2010). Roseti’s (2007: 997) recent review of media geographies stresses that ‘The production and circulation of … images are part of this hegemonic “naturalness” of particular ways of seeing, consenting to, or resisting existing social relations. It is here that the politics of images begins’. Following this, I explore the ways Holly and her contemporaries in films of a similar genre become the embodiment and enactment of human trafficking subjectivity and what this means in terms of her own position within the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore. This task supports an earlier elaboration by Creswell and Dixon (2002) on the relationship between film and mobility, in which ‘Far from being considered a fact of real life, in film … mobility can be thought of as an element in the play of power and meaning within social and cultural networks of signification’ (p. 4). Following this, Holly and her situation of exploitation can be seen not as the authentic or principal subject/scenario of human trafficking (or even of sex trafficking) but as a ‘set of accepted and relevant concepts related to trafficking which have become socially legitimised as knowledge and truth within society’ (Desyllas 2007: 58). It is in the disclosure of the contingent but inveterate production of these truths and positioning of the child victim within them that the politics of film in human trafficking activism begins. The primary sites for my discussion in the chapter are TBS’s global anti-­ child sex trafficking campaign introduced in Chap. 2 and the Singaporean anti-slavery advocacy organisation Emancipasia’s similar campaign (2012– current). In Singapore, film has emerged as a key mode through which advocacy and awareness-raising about human trafficking has occurred. This differs from many other neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia where public awareness-raising of human trafficking has not been pursued with such vigour or with film playing such a key role.

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I begin by describing the production of the Third World child as a key affective device in development and, recently, in the ‘problem’ of human trafficking. This device is key to the production of an intimate anti-­ trafficking public in Singapore’s activism landscape. Next, I describe the emergence of film as a significant arena for the dissemination of knowledge about human trafficking globally and the important role that global governance institutions and local organisations play in realising this filmic strategy for activism and awareness-raising. I discuss how the female child victim as the core emotive device of this strategy is narrated through film. Following this, I move on to the two main substantive parts of the chapter. The first redresses the relative absence of attention to audiences, staging, and viewing spaces in the relations between film, anti-trafficking activism, and affect. The second considers the content of the main films shown as part of TBS’s and Emancipasia’s campaigns in Singapore, particularly the commonalities in portrayals of the girl victim, the modus ­operandi of ‘the crime’, and the sanctioned scenario and actors for interventions (recovery and reintegration).

Intimate Publics and the Imag(in)ing of Children Affect is mobilised in two interconnected ways in human trafficking film screenings in Singapore. First, the selected films depict characters, events, and trafficking scenarios that are violent and shocking. Suicide, rape, kidnapping, physical violence, and incarceration inflicted by traffickers and buyers of sexual services are depicted in these films in ways that supposedly stand in for the realities of trafficking. Although viewers may not verbalise their reactions to this suffering, their responses are felt in bodily articulations (e.g. the sea of red eyes when I turned my head) mobilised into desires to act for the anti-trafficking cause. Second, the cinema is an important space for the inculcation of a shared affective politics. It is in the audience as a collective witness to this suffering and pain that the foundations of an intimate anti-trafficking public are arguably built. Anu Koivunen (2010: 20) posits that the politics of affect has recently turned towards a consideration of ‘negative emotions’ (including shame, stigma, loss, trauma, pain, and fear). Writers who focus on these emotions identify their productive and political potential and the ways they are articulated through particular subjects. Koivunen labels this the ‘melodramatic mode’ which ‘uses tropes of scandalous vice and virtuous victims to make its moral argument’ (p. 20). Significantly, these emotions have the poten-

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tial to evoke and harness compassion. Lauren Berlant (2008) in particular has drawn attention to the production of ‘intimate publics’ that coalesce around shared morality and ways of expressing emotion that centre on particular forms of sentimentality, such as compassion, outrage, and pity. Nonetheless, as she argues, this politics is fraught because of its location in colonising relations where ‘in operation, compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there’ (2004: 4); a point Meredith Raimondo (2010) also makes in relation to the suffering HIV/AIDS victim. As she states, HIV/AIDS documentaries, despite their intention to ‘politicise viewers’ understandings of their place in the global pandemic’, ultimately they ‘fail to dislodge colonial narratives and optics’ (p. 112). This view is reminiscent of Wendy Brown’s (1995: 71) earlier argument that ‘the notion of compassion sidesteps discussion of structural inequalities, foregrounding instead a discussion of moral obligation’. Obligation, undergird by compassion towards the victims’ tragedy, provides a compelling basis by which an anti-trafficking public may be mobilised. Nonetheless, as both Berlant and Brown would have it, the relationship between compassion and moral obligation not only leaves the structural imperatives that produce ‘virtuous victims’ such as the female, Third World child in anti-­ trafficking in the first place but also results in a particular type of politics that stymies the agency of the ‘victim’, whilst simultaneously privileging that of the compassionate volunteer/viewer, activist, and expert. Human rights activism clearly renders political the subject position of the latter over the former and pits them in a social relationship marked by inequitable capacity to act. Development provides a particularly evocative domain for the production of compassion and the evisceration of victim agency—one that draws significantly on the trope of the ‘Third World child’. The discursive production and staging of development problems by NGOs, both local and international, through an explosive combination of emotive tropes and dramatic images has been a hallmark of the development industry over the past four decades. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in the use of child images to convey messages about the urgency of tackling the global malaise of poverty (Lidchi 1999), with ‘child-savers’ driven by concerns emanating from a ‘nostalgic reimagining of the idyllic qualities of the rural, pre-modern youth and childhood’ (Ruddick 2003: 343–344) in the Southern child. Third World children are judged according to ideological and moral parameters of Northern-based constructions of childhood and youth, in which they emerge as ‘at risk’ (Pain 2004). Child

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prostitutes in the Third World, as Heather Montgomery (2001: 133) notes, are particularly ‘problematic because they challenge many notions about childhood itself, especially what is considered to be appropriate behaviour for children’. This ‘iconography of childhood’ (Manzo 2008) has recently become unfastened from its moorings in development and begun to drift into the murky waters of the anti-trafficking industry. ‘Staging the victim’, which Lainez (2010) defines as the production of ‘a standard portrait of the sexually exploited child’ has become a key feature of the global anti-­ trafficking industry over the past few years. When the issue of trafficking first appeared within the register of significant global (crime) problems in the early 2000s, there was little common understanding of how it was defined and an overriding perception that the issue was of low relevance to many countries, particularly those of the developed world. Within this general frame of public and governmental apathy, a dramatic device to generate interest and sympathy was required. Thus, the ultimate aim of the staging of the child in sex trafficking advocacy campaigns has been to garner emotive responses in audiences (usually a previously disinterested or neutral general public) to support NGO agendas aimed at eliciting ‘global compassion’ (Hoijer 2003), despite the onset of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller 1999) contemporaneously within other arenas of development intervention. In countries like Singapore, where human trafficking is still little understood and not widely recognised as a concern until 2012, advocacy efforts are oriented more broadly to public awareness-­ raising and civic education, in the hope that the ‘tone of outrage and panic’ that Laura Agustin (2003: 84) also documented with the coming of trafficking as an issue to the UK would find its way to Singapore. Children—and especially girls—are deemed a particularly germane focal point in eliciting public responses to human trafficking, as they are in development because of their figurative (though not unscrutinised) location in the global (Western) imaginary as innocents in need of protection and their unparalleled ability to strike at the chord of the West’s bleeding hearts of lost idealised childhoods drowned in the wake of global modernity and neoliberal violence. An incipient but increasingly influential body of multidisciplinary research now focuses on problematising the staging of the girl victim in human trafficking, identifying the discursive techniques and physical/figurative sites that form the emotive schema that binds this production together. This scholarship identifies compassion (Hoijer 2003) and morality (Schaeffer-Grabiel 2010) as prominent emotive registers

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through which sex trafficking is staged. Shah (2006) and Andrijasevic (2007) further suggest that spectacle works in concert with these emotions to ensure the public prominence of human trafficking as an issue. Spectacle might be produced through links to other global problems such as HIV/AIDS or invocations of ‘modern-day slavery’. Films, documentaries, anti-trafficking events, NGO pamphlets, and websites provide rich sites for such a critical textual analysis. In sum, summoning affect and invoking compassion amongst target audiences in anti-trafficking campaigns rely on a combination of strategies that reproduce idealised and stylised notions of the vulnerable and innocent Third World female child, drawing their poignancy from techniques of visual intimacy and affective proximity through film, documentaries, and other media. The Third World female child thus becomes the key reference point for broader constructions of both human trafficking generally and sex trafficking specifically. In order to understand how this child victim is simultaneously invoked and muted in anti-trafficking activism and awareness-raising, we need to explore both the affective mobilisation of viewers in the formation of an intimate anti-trafficking public and the ways power relations between this public and trafficked girls are established through film content and cinematic performances. But first, a brief background of film’s invocation in the ‘fight against human trafficking’ at an international scale, and subsequently in Singapore, is warranted.

Film and the Global Anti-trafficking Movement The largest global stakeholders in the anti-trafficking industry—the United Nations (specifically the UNODC and UN.GIFT) and the US Department of State (US DoS)—have clearly seen the potential in extending the reach of awareness-raising and advocacy on human trafficking through popular media. In 2004, MTV launched its ‘MTV EXIT’—End Exploitation and Trafficking—campaign in Europe, which was extended to Asia in 2007. The Asian component is self-described as ‘a pan-asian (sic) multi-media campaign and is part of MTV’s global effort to educate youth on social issues that affect the world today … MTV EXIT aims to increase awareness and prevention of human trafficking through television programs, online content, live events, and partnerships with anti-­trafficking organisations’ (MTV EXIT booklet n.d.). The 2007 advance of MTV EXIT into Asia was carried out with the financial and organisational support of USAID (United States Agency for International Development).

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Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine the media content promoted in this campaign, which are various, the significance lies in the US government’s endorsement and active promotion of popular media, including film, as an important component of their anti-trafficking prevention and awareness-raising work globally through partnerships with organisations such as MTV EXIT. Shortly following this, in March 2007, the UN.GIFT (United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Trafficking) was established, proclaiming to work ‘with all stakeholders—governments, business, academia, civil society and the media—to support each other’s work, create new partnerships and develop effective tools to fight human trafficking’ (UN.GIFT website n.d.). The UN.GIFT’s website contains a list of useful films on human trafficking which are deemed suitable for screening by those interested in human trafficking advocacy and awareness-raising. Table 3.1 reproduces this list, inclusive of additional details such as each film’s geographical ­setting (e.g. in Third World trafficking hotspots) and focus (who are the victims and which sector are they deployed in), and whether anti-­trafficking organisations, experts, or prominent media personalities are involved in the film (either as advisors, partners, or narrators). The resulting locus of anti-trafficking film is starkly singular; of the 23 films listed, all focus on trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation and all but one focuses on female minors (the one exception focuses on female adults). Significantly, in searching for appropriate films to screen as part of both TBS’s and Emancipasia’s campaigns, the UN.GIFT website was seen by campaign managers as the key resource for films on which to draw. Revealingly, eight of the nine films shown as part of TBS’s campaign in Singapore and all of those shown as part of Emancipasia’s campaign are listed in the UN. GIFT’s website. There are four notable features of the increasing prominence of film discernible from Table 3.1. First is the involvement of international non-­ governmental and governmental organisations in supporting and promoting the role of the media in anti-human trafficking work, and beyond this in their roles as co-producers of trafficking narratives in film. Thus, whilst the film Trade, for example, was far from an international box office success, grossing only USD 214,000 in the United States and receiving overwhelmingly negative reviews, Entertainment Weekly amongst others were moved to look beyond the film’s entertainment value in compelling prospective audiences to viewing; ‘As a movie, Trade is so-so, but as an expose of how the new globalised industry of sex trafficking really works, it’s a

Red Light Call þ ResponseTaken Virgin Harvest Trapped

Sacrifice TRADE Cargo Innocence Lost Modern Slavery Not for Sale Lives for Sale Sold Children Human Trafficking Trafficked

Svetlana’s Journey Fields of Mudan Sex Traffic

2009 20092008

2007 2007 2007

2004

2004

2004

2005

2007 2007 2006 2005

2007

2008 2007

Title

Year Made

Moldova/ London

China

Australia/ Thailand Bulgaria

Indonesia Mexico/USA Albania USA/Russia

Philippines

Global USA/ GlobalParis Cambodia Nigeria/ Denmark Burma Mexico/USA Mexico/USA

Geographical Location

F

F

F

D

F D D F

D

D F D

D D

D DF

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes Yes Yes

Yes

Yes Yes Yes

Yes No

Yes YesYes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes Yes Yes

Yes

Yes Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Yes YesYes

Fictional Film (F)/ Focuses on Focuses on Documentary (D) Female Children Trafficking for (Yes or No) CSE (Yes or No)

Table 3.1  Films on human trafficking from the UN.GIFT website

N/A

N/A

N/A

Yes

Yes Yes N/A No

N/A

Yes No Yes

N/A N/A

Yes YesNo

(continued)

Involvement of Anti-trafficking Organisations, Experts, or Media Personalities (Yes or No)

2001

2002

2002

2003 2003

Promised Land Russia/Middle East Tin Girls Nepal/India The Day My Bombay God Died Lilja 4 e Ever Russia/ Sweden Anonymously Burma Yours Bucharest Bucharest Express

2004

Geographical Location

Title

Year Made

Table 3.1 (continued)

F

D

F

D D

F

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

Fictional Film (F)/ Focuses on Focuses on Documentary (D) Female Children Trafficking for (Yes or No) CSE (Yes or No)

N/A

N/A

Yes

Yes Yes

N/A

Involvement of Anti-trafficking Organisations, Experts, or Media Personalities (Yes or No)

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disquieting, eye-opening bulletin’ (EW website, my emphasis). Second, is the reducibility of the phenomenon of human trafficking to trafficking of female minors in the sex industry, thus rendering Entertainment Weekly’s pronouncement particularly disquieting; one can understand the phenomenon of human trafficking in general simply by watching this film. Third is the way the filmic representations transgress contextual specificities to produce a coherent global narrative of human trafficking—the geographies of ‘everywhere and nowhere’ in human trafficking. Finally, the distinction between fictional film and documentary often becomes blurred in trafficking films, thus creating a new genre; the docudrama or melomentary, which utilises fictionalised representations of reality to portray contemporary social problems (see Lindquist 2010). The use of experts to craft fictional narratives and the reproduction of real stories in exaggerated and fictionalised films, have become commonplace in trafficking films, and have the effect of blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, so that the viewing audience can legitimise its understanding of human trafficking through media intended to reach far beyond entertainment value. The film Holly, introduced in the opening vignette of this chapter, is absent from the UN.GIFT list, and this absence bespeaks of the sensitivities that can emerge when this filmic politics successfully realises its advocacy goals. To elaborate, UN.GIFT and other international organisations are reluctant to promote Holly too ardently due to negative reactions from the Cambodian government to the film. In fact, it was the negative international attention that followed in the wake of the making of Holly (and a rather damning news story by Al Jazeera news) that prompted the Cambodian government to raid and close down Svay Pak, where the film was largely based, in 2008 (although arguably a lack of sincere political pressure has meant that many of its pre-closure child prostitution activities have re-emerged today). What is also interesting about this film is not just that it has had a direct awareness-raising/advocacy effect internationally that incited pressure within Cambodia but that this affect/effect was actively and deliberately crafted by the producers of the film and was a key motivation in its making. Holly is part of a ‘K-11 Project’, in which three films (Holly and two documentaries, the Virgin Harvest and the K-11 Story) ‘utilise mass media to raise awareness of the global child trafficking epidemic’ (K-11 Project website). The producers are working in concert with the non-profit organisation, RedLight Children’s Campaign and draw support from a range of high-profile celebrities, who are also listed on the K-11 Project website. RedLight is a grassroots initiative aimed at

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generating ‘conscious concern and inspiring immediate action against child sexploitation’ (RedLight Children campaign web site). Each time the film is shown publicly, a percentage of profits are directed towards supporting the RedLight campaign. Film, at least in the arena of human trafficking, it seems is no longer just about feeling good, it is now much more about what the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW 2013) have dubbed ‘feeling good about feeling bad’. Following this entanglement of film with anti-trafficking and activism/ awareness-raising, the girl victim became the lynchpin of TBS’s campaign. Monthly film screenings were the idea of TBS’s local Singaporean campaign partner UN Women Singapore. These screenings were run over the course of almost two years during and immediately after the campaign, with nine different films shown. Whilst there is clearly no shortage of such films in global circulation, none based in/on Singapore has yet been made. This gives rise to the strategic importation of films from other contexts. As Braema Marthi, former politician and anti-trafficking advocate in Singapore, confided with reference to TBS’s campaign activities, ‘It’s the Singapore way actually. If we want to make an issue we use other places to start. We raise awareness from outside to inside; in Singapore it is very sensitive to do things the other way around, especially when we talk about children or sex or trafficking’ (personal communication, 12 January 2010). With the onset of concern about human trafficking in Singapore, the Singaporean non-profit anti-trafficking organisation Emancipasia was formed in March 2012 to raise awareness for and provide advocacy around the issue of human trafficking in Singapore. In June 2012, Emancipasia also launched a campaign for this purpose which had three interrelated elements: the photograph exhibition briefly introduced at the outset of Chap. 1, the symposium held at the National University of Singapore (discussed in Chap. 2), and a Human Trafficking Film Forum. The film forum was promoted with the following injunction: ‘Perhaps nothing provides a better perspective on human trafficking than film and documentaries’ (Emancipasia website, accessed 2 September 2012). Emancipasia continues at the time of publication to hold film events, with a screening of 36 films and documentaries over the course of as many months. In addition, a further ten special screenings were held at the National University of Singapore since Emancipasia Founder and Director Sylvia Lee felt that ‘students and youth should be the key agents of change on this issue. We are targeting them because of their potential to be actively involved in this issue in the future’ (personal communication, 5 September

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2012). The film screenings have continued intermittently as well. Ten documentaries and more than a dozen feature films on human trafficking have so far been drawn on for Emancipasia’s forum.

Women at the Cinema Dodds (2008) recently noted that despite increasing interest on the part of geographers in filmic politics, critical attention to audiences—and one may well add the cinematic space—is still largely lacking (though see Crang 2002). In this part of the chapter, I explore this neglected aspect of filmic politics in TBS’s and Emancipasia’s human trafficking activism. Cinematic viewing is arguably conducive to the creation of an intimate anti-trafficking public by tapping into shared affects that mobilise the audience to become part of the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore, in particular, through volunteering for the NGOs that stage the film screenings. Affect is debated in two main ways in human geography and cognate disciplines; according to the ways, it is distinguishable from or intersects with emotions (for a recent treatment, see Pile 2010), and the socio-­spatial relations that are produced by and in turn themselves produce affective milieus (e.g. Bissell 2010; Edensor 2012; Jayne et al. 2010). In this sense, affective fields or atmospheres ‘must be understood as the relational potential for things to act or change in a particular space’ (Bissell 2010: 273). Brown and Pickerill (2009: 26) argue that ‘Emotion is strategically deployed and fostered by [social movement] organisers to engender sufficient commitment amongst activist collectivities to maintain their ongoing interest’ or, indeed, to garner their interest in an issue initially. This involves building ‘affective attachments (to the cause, and amongst activists)’ (p.  26). The cinema is a significant site in which this occurs in Singapore’s anti-trafficking context, primarily as it operates as an affective atmosphere, and a space where affect can be collectively and intimately experienced. As Berlant (2008) explains, to develop shared ‘affective attachments’, members of a public—in this case, the audience—must already possess some common identity or history. The audiences for TBS’s and Emancipasia’s film screenings are predefined in ways that are both classed and gendered, thus enabling us to interrogate the viewers not as an undifferentiated general public, but as a formation that is generated through and, in turn, reproduces particular affective responses and moral stances towards the interrelated subjects of gender-based violence, child prostitu-

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tion, and proper relations of protection from harm, such as between a mother and child, or a safe environment during formative teenage years. This, Berlant (2008) argues, is a necessary condition for the emergence of an intimate public: ‘What makes a public sphere intimate is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience’ (p. 8). The film screenings were deliberately oriented to three particular groups of women: activists already involved or interested in gender issues (including female volunteers for UN Women Singapore and Emancipasia), educated Singaporean and expatriate women, and university students. The gendered repertoires most readily mobilised during the film screenings relate to motherhood and youth. Berlant (2008: x) herself suggests, ‘consumption of “women’s culture” would be a way of experiencing one’s own story as part of something social, even if one’s singular relation to that belonging is extremely limited’. Shared age and gender were important sites for the generation of compassion amongst the younger (university student) members of the audience, especially for Emancipasia, who specifically targeted this group. One young Singaporean law student, Grace, for example, recounted after viewing Lilja-4-ever that she was ‘shocked by the violence that the young women in the films suffer; many of whom are around the same age as I am. I cannot imagine if my life was like that; if I cannot study, if I have no opportunities and no choices”. Grace was able to identify with Lilja’s experience of being a teenage girl with aspirations to improve her life, but she was simultaneously unable to relate to her geographical, classed, and familial positioning as an abandoned and poverty-stricken girl in Russia. A similar sentiment was expressed by a Singapore Management University social science student, Amy, after she viewed the Australian documentary Trafficked, which explored the trafficking experience and post-exit trajectory of a young Thai woman trafficked to Australia. Amy was ‘shocked that a girl my own age and from a neighbouring country to Singapore could have such an experience. It makes me realise I am lucky, but it also makes me feel very sad that these girls are missing out on the best years of their life’. That these girls are ‘missing out’ is only understandable on a personal level because Amy herself is able to experience a comparatively ‘good’ teenage life in Singapore. Sympathy is extended to Lilja and others like her in the context of these shared axes of identity, but which simultaneously produce Amy and Grace as privileged subjects compared to Lilja and the Thai victim trafficked to Australia.

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Unlike Emancipasia, UN Women have a large number of volunteers working on a range of women and development issues in the Asian region, including many expatriate ‘trailing spouses’ who often attend fundraising events and awareness-raising forums on a variety of gender issues. UN Women were thus able to mobilise a number of existing volunteers who were not students, as well as new volunteers around trafficking specifically through film screenings. Many of these volunteers are mothers with dependent children and so could relate to issues around vulnerability and unprotected girls. One English expat volunteer, Susan, reflected after viewing The Day My God Died that ‘it is hard to imagine such poor girls subjected to such terrible abuse right in our own region, and maybe right in Singapore. These girls are the same age as my own daughters; they could be my daughters if I was a citizen of, say, Cambodia or Nepal’. Like the student volunteers, Susan was able to both relate to the situation of the girls through protectionist discourses which drew on intimate relations between mother and child, but was ultimately unable to empathise with the national or social contexts in which the vulnerabilities which produced these relations initially. Indeed, one site where the documentation of intimate publics has been most vigorously pursued is in the arena of motherhood (for a recent example, see Morrison 2011). Thus, rather than understanding the subjects of these films as constrained by gender-based and structural violence, discrimination, and poverty, Susan was only able to appreciate the lack of protection these girls’ mothers were able to offer their daughters. Responsibility was thus projected onto the trafficking site and scenario (the ‘terrible abuse’) rather than on the conditions that enabled this scenario in the first place. The cinema thus constitutes an important space for building the ‘affective attachments’ necessary for the formation of an intimate anti-­trafficking public in Singapore. Trafficking film screenings that privilege the girl victim as an object of sympathy framed through gendered and aged repertoires produce a cinematic atmosphere thick with the haze of sadness, outrage, shock, and, ultimately, compassion. Importantly, these viewers’ responses to the tragedy of the child victim are consumed together and draw on shared gendered repertories. Further, because there is often a ‘Q & A’ session in the cinema post film screening (discussed further below), the viewers are able to engage with each other’s responses to the films, simultaneously processing their own reactions through dialogue with the NGO organisers and each other. Bonds—with other viewers and with NGO organisers—can thus be forged as the audience relates not only the

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experiences of the characters in the films but equally to the sentiments expressed by other viewers and screening organisers. Emancipasia’s Sylvia Lee claimed, for example, that the film screenings provided a ready pool of prospective volunteers for Emancipasia and that the majority of the organisation’s volunteers were identified as a result of ‘sign ups’ following film screenings. In UN Women’s case, they placed TBS’s campaign petition against trafficking at the exit of the cinema, as well as information about UN Women’s work, which could be perused post film by viewers and enable them to consider ways to become involved. But if the possibilities of an intimate anti-trafficking public are nurtured through these screenings, the progressive potential of this public is less assured. To understand why this is so, we turn in the final part of the chapter to the relations of expertise, authority, and intervention that are created through the films’ content and cinematic performances during the Q & A sessions.

Girls on Film Different subject positions in trafficking and anti-trafficking relations are established through both the content of the films screened in the campaigns and the extension of these relations in performances in cinematic space. Films screened (often more than once) as part of TBS’s campaign in Singapore included Lilja 4-ever, Holly, The Day My God Died, and Trade, all of which focus on accepted epicentres or ‘hotspots’ for international trafficking. All the films—including these four—have, as their central character, a female minor (two in the case of The Day My God Died). Trade takes us outside of Asia to North and Central America (Mexico) where ‘Adriana’, a 13-year-old Mexican girl is kidnapped whilst walking near her home in Mexico city and trafficked by land across the Mexico-­ United States border by a notorious Mexican crime boss where she is advertised in a global Internet forum for paedophiles as a ‘young virgin’ available for purchase to the highest bidder at a forthcoming online auction. The Day My God Died replaces the fictional characters of the above two films with ‘real victims’. The film describes the day when some young girls were abducted from their village in Nepal and sold to a brothel in Bombay. With actual spy camera footage from the notorious ‘cages’ (cage brothels) of Bombay, the documentary weaves through the lives of several trafficked girls, including Gina, who was sold at age seven and beaten with sticks and aluminium rods, and Anita, lured by a friend and then drugged and sold at age 12, after which she was beaten and threatened she would

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be buried alive if she did not comply with her traffickers. The viewer is told that the girls are forced to service up to 20 clients a day, including during menstruation. In Europe, we encounter the central character of Lilja, a 16-year-old Russian girl in the film Lilja 4-ever. Lilja’s mother abandons her and leaves her to fend for herself in a dilapidated apartment in Moscow. She is subsequently courted by a young Russian man who becomes her boyfriend and who lures her to Sweden with him to try for work as a farm labourer. Upon arrival, she is sold by her ‘boyfriend’ to a man who locks her in an apartment, rapes her, and pimps her from his car until she manages to run away after several harrowing months of sexual exploitation. Principally in all these iterations, the victim is essentialised as the female minor who is trafficked across international borders. She is poor and, despite her different modes of recruitment (being sold, kidnapped, a voluntary migrant, and from a range of different family situations), she is never expecting that she will be sold into prostitution (she is always innocent, unknowing). She thus fulfils the standard of the ‘virtuous victim’. Further, her trafficker and other exploiters are always shadowy male figures. Finally, as the films continue, we encounter the ways Holly and Adriana exit their situations; through rescue efforts of a heroic figure (in both cases a White American male) after which their safety is restored. In Lilja’s case, she manages to escape by herself, but is left wandering the undisclosed streets of Sweden until, alone and desperate, she attempts to commit suicide by jumping from an overpass into oncoming traffic. This poignantly illustrates a key point made in all the films, namely the ultimate tragedy of unrequited sexual defilement coupled with failure to be saved. The film ends, but the point is clearly made—the safety and security of the girl victim unequivocally lies in the hands of racially marked adults, and as we may possibly read from Lilja’s attempted suicide, without this, she is incapable of overcoming her situation of sexual exploitation through her own agency and initiative. Lilja—perhaps more than the other victim characters—does nonetheless exert a greater degree of agency, and a possible explanation for this was the involvement of ex-federal police in providing expert input into trafficking victimology during the films’ production. Nevertheless, despite Lilja’s circumstances, a fertile ground is laid in all the films for intervention which, according to the emerging global architecture governing anti-trafficking, involves three ‘Ps’: prevention, protection, and prosecution (UN Protocol 2000). Both Holly and The Day My God Died also introduce other significant anti-trafficking stakeholders—the NGO ‘heroes’ who rescue and then care

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for the victims. In Holly, the renowned NGO, Agir pour les femmes en situations precaire or Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (AFESIP), plays a role in the storyline as the shelter where Patrick takes Holly. Through the character of a French NGO worker at AFESIP, Marie, the viewer learns about the important work that this organisation does to protect (female) victims. When Patrick talks to Marie about how he ‘saved’ Holly, Marie replies, ‘You didn’t even save her yet. It takes five minutes to rescue a girl from the brothel, but five years to reintegrate her into society’, so legitimising AFESIP’s anti-trafficking interventions in the area of victim rehabilitation. The Day My God Died introduces the work of similarly renowned Nepali NGO Maiti. Founder and Director of Maiti, Anuradha Koirala, describes her work with Nepalese sex trafficked girls, ‘First you have to learn to take them as your own child. Then you will feel the sorrow and then the strength comes out from you to protect them’. This sentiment not coincidentally echoes those made by many of the viewers in the film screenings in Singapore, especially the mothers in the audiences. This quotation appears not by chance, on Independentlens’s website, where the film has its own page. This protectionist discourse is naturally important in justifying Maiti’s work and on the web page of Independentlens, The Day My God Died is presented not only as a documentary but also as a movement, so collapsing the distinction between film and social movement and echoing the recent strategy of forming linkages between film, NGO actors, and celebrities that was first used in the context of anti-trafficking by MTV EXIT and the United Nations. Yet another theme unites the narratives: namely that concerning the distinction between the (innocent) child victim and the adult victim and/ or willing prostitute. This is significant for several reasons, but primarily because it reappears in Singaporean government and NGO distinctions between legitimate/deserving victims and underserving voluntary migrant sex workers. This is extremely relevant when considering the localisation of human trafficking as a social movement, demonstrating that it is not only relations of authority and intervention that are narrated through the films but also the articulation of (il)legitimate subjects of these interventions. In Holly and Trade, respectively, a secondary female character is introduced into the storyline who personifies this binary. In Holly, this character is a young woman who was trafficked as a minor into prostitution but has remained in the sex industry (and in the brothel where Holly is deployed) voluntarily into adulthood. For our purposes, her main significance is in a conversation where she tells Patrick that she ‘wants to get out [of prostitution] but there is no alternative now’. Although sympa-

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thetic, Patrick ultimately dismisses her as, unlike the unwitting virgin Holly, she is beyond redemption. In Trade, the character is Veronica, a young Polish single mother, captured by the same crime gang as Adriana. Veronica ultimately commits suicide after a failed attempt to escape together with Adriana. Unlike Adriana, whose virginity remains intact throughout the film and until she is rescued, Veronica submits to rape in order to protect Adriana from the same fate. As suggested in the opening vignette, the cinematic space for screening TBS’s and Emancipasia’s campaign films is also a significant site in itself for confirming these relations of expertise, knowledge, capacity to act, and deserving subjects of intervention. The inclusion of authoritative ‘experts’ through the Q & A sessions at the conclusion of the films both put a face to this expertise and simultaneously validated the story of trafficking advanced in the films. Both Weitzer (2007) and Lindquist (2010) have analysed victim testimony and expert commentary, respectively, in outlining the textual production and legitimisation of expert stakeholders in anti-trafficking work. In Singapore, the narrations of these experts also embody the relations of anti-trafficking narrated in the films where the victim is presented as someone to be acted on, who cannot herself articulate appropriate knowledge about trafficking, and who is better understood by highly educated Western and Asian women who are positioned as authorities. The cinematic space thus becomes not only a viewing space but also a space for interacting with and learning from supposed anti-­ trafficking experts, and for hearing about the ‘real-life’ experiences and challenges of those deemed to be ‘at the coalface’ of the issue. Given that it is ethically problematic to bring ‘real victims’ to the audience, local and international NGO experts in the field enable the reality of the issue of human trafficking to still be consumed personally by the viewers. In Emancipasia’s screenings, Sylvia Lee positioned herself as such an expert, despite no prior history of working with trafficked persons in Singapore or elsewhere. The relations of expertise and intervention were further extended to the NGO organisers and audience members. Recall Emancipasia’s volunteer law student, Grace, for example, who was motivated to ‘do something’ after the powerful affect/effect of the film. Although this student did not know exactly what she could do, Emancipasia’s work became validated as an organisation through which her intent could be harnessed. As Grace explained, ‘I knew I had to try and do something. The best way was

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to use my education and volunteer for an organisation that is really working on this issue’. What I wish to emphasise from this pronouncement is that the student had come to see herself as able to play an important role in anti-trafficking work, despite her only orientation to the issue coming through a single film viewing. Grace continued: I felt that it was my responsibility to take some action. As a law student I obviously had skills that Emancipasia, or maybe another NGO, might be able to use. I could see from watching The Day My God Died that there were so many different types of support these girls needed; social workers, doctors and psychologists, police, and of course lawyers. I could see how I might be able to make a difference by volunteering. Another example of this emerges from TBS/UN Women’s film screenings. When one Australian expat volunteer, Meghan, was asked what she would do with the information she had gained through viewing the film Holly, she said she would ‘help design educational materials to raise awareness in schools about the dangers of (sex) trafficking. I have to do something. These situations are morally repugnant. Disgusting men raping these poor girls day after day and ruining their lives. How can I not do anything?’. In this instance, despite no prior expertise or in-depth knowledge of human trafficking generally, of sex trafficking specifically, or of the ways it may be manifest in Singapore, or—perhaps most importantly—no contact with any migrant woman or girls in Singapore’s sex industry, this volunteer felt that it was her moral obligation to be involved in UN Women’s anti-trafficking work in Singapore. In sum, relations of intervention and authority are established— indeed normalised—through filmic representation and cinematic performances of trafficking and anti-trafficking. Given that all the volunteers for both UN Women and Emancipasia had viewed at least one and often several of these films, it comes as no surprise that they would see themselves as the ‘helpers’, thus unwittingly consigning trafficked girls themselves to the subject position of the ‘helped’. The social relations of agency and helplessness that define a compassionate anti-trafficking public are thus established in part through the content of the films themselves which, through the portrayal of the social relations of helping, rescuing, saving, and rehabilitating the victim (but only the virtuous ones) ultimately place her welfare in the hands of the White men and women, expatriate NGO staff, and co-ethnics from privileged socio-economic and geographical locations.

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Conclusion This chapter builds on recent work in human geography concerning the relations between activism and affect and emotion, focusing on film screenings as a key site through which these relations are developed. Where activism is conducted through film, important questions for geographers emerge about the political effects of filmic strategies that rely on affect and emotion as a means of inciting activist cultures. What is novel about the representation of children in anti-trafficking forums vis-a-vis development, however, is their entanglement with film. Film not only works at an affective level to mobilise the public to anti-trafficking, it also helps construct, validate, and localise the contemporary social justice/ human rights relations of expertise that define the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore. We might therefore auger that there is further scope to elaborate the recent interest of geographers in film by extending discussions to the affective force of film and consequent connections to a broad range of interventions (as in Carter and McCormack 2006). These discussions of the relationship between affect and film provide impetus for geographers to engage with the way human rights issues—and human trafficking specifically—are affectively produced and consumed through their discursive and textual production and circulation through film and in the cinema. Lauren Berlant’s (2004, 2008) conceptualisation of intimate publics helps us understand how films about sex trafficking can realise an intimate anti-­ trafficking public that marries with, and is channelled towards, NGO anti-­ trafficking activism. But, in attempting to provide an empirically grounded answer to Melissa Wright’s (2010) question about the emotive potential in social justice activism posed at the outset of the chapter, we may well conclude this is not always a celebratory task filled with the possibilities of empowerment, recognition, and participation. This is a point Berlant herself (2004) and others (Brown 1995; Doezema 2010) have also made. Although it is important to recognise that activism through anti-­trafficking and human rights films does not always produce problematic outcomes, it bears questioning in the Singaporean context how films and cinematic performances might better harness the potential of volunteers/activists to make a positive difference through a recognition not just of their own importance to the movement, but also that of victims themselves. Concerning this, two points bear reiterating from discussion in this chapter, and to which we will return in subsequent chapters.

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First, despite growing literature on both the politics of film and the relationship between activism and emotion, little attention has been directed towards how these two discrete geographical subjects work together to produce new political formations and actors, in this case, in the arena of anti-trafficking. The cinematic space in particular helps nurture the very political entity of an intimate public oriented to social justice and human rights. Viewing the film in the cinema with like-minded others enables the production of sadness and sympathy amongst the audience as a collective. These affective logics—what Seigworth and Gregg (2010: 15) call the ‘how of affect’—comprise a cinematic aesthetics that produces new communities and hierarchies of, in this case, anti-trafficking subjects. Yet for Emancipasia’s and TBS’s campaigns, a shared viewing experience does not in itself guarantee particular affective outcomes, and therefore the possibility of common bonds of meaning, understanding, and, most significantly in this context, solidarity. The character of the audience becomes important insofar as their common gendered, classed, and educational histories predispose them to shared affective responses. In both campaigns, then, we see the deliberate pre-selection of the audience through promotion of the film screenings only in certain outlets such as via email lists of feminist and migrant worker NGOs. The intended audience already has a shared interest in gendered oppression and violence against women and, at least in the case of Emancipasia, sex trafficking specifically. Whilst Edensor (2012: 1108, his emphasis) reminds us to ‘avoid suggestions that the calculative manufacture of affect … determines feelings and meaning’, it surely bears emphasising that in advocacy campaigns around issues such as human trafficking, a particular audience is sought; one that will hopefully share particular affective responses to the films but, more importantly, be motivated to continue the fight against trafficking together long after the intensity of the cinematic atmosphere subsides. Second, the relations between activism, film, and emotions/affect need to be held open to closer scrutiny. I believe there is potential for human rights and social justice activism to replicate the position of helplessness and powerlessness amongst victims that it seeks to problematise. The labelling of particular films—especially those produced by independent film producers and/or with the involvement of civil society actors—as educative or oppositional because they involve experts, are based on stories of ‘real victims’, or are screened as part of anti-trafficking activism is surely questionable. Many of the human trafficking films shown in TBS’s

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and Emancipasia’s campaigns do indeed involve such stakeholders, but their power to educate or to pass as oppositional is open to serious question and their potential to discipline far more notable. Because they reproduce and circulate highly stylised scenarios and subjects of human trafficking, they are implicated, perhaps unwittingly, in the perpetuation of a ‘colonising vision’ (cf. Raimondo 2010) of the problem of and solution to human trafficking. Bondi and Laurie (2005) have elsewhere commented on the ways local NGOs are ambivalently positioned as activists in relation to conventional development discourses and travelling neoliberal agendas—simultaneously pulled between incorporation and reconfiguration. Yet, where NGOs and other civil society actors are involved in activism around human trafficking or where activism takes the form of direct involvement in the production of films, the question of incorporation or reconfiguration cannot be posed quite as neatly as this, with the mobile frame of the girl victim both challenging (state) inaction and simultaneously reproducing the Othered victim. This tension was also noted in Raimondo’s (2010: 116) discussion of activist AIDS documentaries where films often ‘struggle to create intimacy without resorting to forms of narrative and visual colonialism’. In particular, the discursive rendering of the victim through an ‘injured identity’ (Doezema 2001; following Brown 1995) produces an investment in the use of suffering as a tactic for framing the problem of (anti)-trafficking. Damage or injury—of sexuality, innocence, youth, the physical body—as a frame relying on negative emotions becomes a source of power to intervene (for local organisations) as much as it does to influence and align with local actors (for TBS): ‘It fixes the identity of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification and repositioning’ (Brown 1995: 27, in Doezema 2001: 21). Further, the very classed and gendered character of the audience reinforces these differently positioned anti-­ trafficking relations of legitimate knowledge and capacity to intervene and act. These concerns have not been lost on at least some geographers. Chris Philo’s (2005) critical geography of vulnerability in particular addresses the question of ‘how the pain of the wounded should be represented and memorialised’ (p. 443). His brief foray into answering this question leads him to suggest that ‘the discourses arising from their suffering—even those advocating on their behalf—become separated from the pain of the victims’ (p. 450). Berlant (2008: iv) also suggests this as a possibility in the

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formation of an intimate public: ‘This means that people participate in it who may share nothing of the particular worlds being represented’. In Singapore’s anti-trafficking landscape, we may therefore well ask: how do local NGOs and other social movement actors relate to trafficking victims if they can sympathise with their suffering but not empathise with their experience? How can this activist mobilisation through film assist in efforts to enable her to move on from trafficking, and in ways that do not re-­ inscribe the stifling ‘colonial relations’ of assisting, intervening, and protecting that have seemingly become central part of the mind-set and repertoire of anti-trafficking activists and their audiences? An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Girls on Film: Affective Activism in Anti-Trafficking Film Screenings in Singapore’. Political Geography 45: 45–54.

References Agustin, L. (2003). Sex, gender and migrations: Facing up to ambiguous realities. Soundings, 23(33), 84–98. Andrijasevic, R. (2007). The spectacle of misery. Gender, migration and representation in anti-trafficking campaigns. Feminist Review, 86, 24–44. Berlant, L. (2004). Compassion: The culture and politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge. Berlant, L. (2008). The female complaint: The unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernstein, E. (2007). The sexual politics of the “new abolitionism”. Differences, 18(3), 128–151. Bissell, D. (2010). Passenger mobilities: Affective atmosphere and the sociality of public transport. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(2), 270–289. Bondi, L., & Laurie, N. (2005). Introduction. Antipode, 37(3), 394–401. Bosco, F. J. (2006). The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and three decades of human rights’ activism: Embeddedness, emotions, and social movements. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(2), 342–365. Bosco, F. J. (2007). Emotions that build networks: Geographies of human rights movements in Argentina and beyond. Tijdschrift voor Economische and Sociale Geographie, 98(5), 545–563. Brown, G., & Pickerill, J. (2009). Space for emotion in the spaces of activism. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(1), 24–35. Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Brown, W., Iordanova, D., & Torchin, L. (2010). Moving people, moving images: Cinema and trafficking in the New Europe. St Andrews, UK: St Andrews Film Studies. Carter, S., & McCormack, D. (2006). Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention. Political Geography, 25(2), 228–245. Crang, M. (2002). Rethinking the observer: Film mobilities. In T.  Creswell & D.  Dixon (Eds.), Engaging film: Geographies of mobility and identity (pp. 13–31). London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield. Creswell, T., & Dixon, D. (Eds.). (2002). Engaging film: Geographies of mobility and identity. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield. Dalby, S. (2008). Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk down and the Kingdom of heaven. Political Geography, 27(4), 439–455. Desyllas, M.  C. (2007). A critique of the global trafficking discourse and U.S. Policy. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 34(4), 57–80. Dodds, K. (2008). ‘Have you seen any good films lately?’ Geopolitics, international relations and film. Geography Compass, 2(2), 476–494. Doezema, J. (2001). Ouch! western feminists wounded attachments to the “third world” prostitute. Feminist Review, 67(1), 16–38. Doezema, J. (2010). Sex slaves and discourse masters: The construction of trafficking. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge. Edensor, T. (2012). Illuminated atmospheres: Anticipating and reproducing the flow of affective experience in Blackpool. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(6), 1103–1122. Emancipasia. (n.d.). Retrieved November 22, 2013, from www.emancipasia.org. Entertainment Weekly. (n.d.). Retrieved April 30, 2012, from www.ew.com/. Gandy, M. (2003). Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(2), 218–240. Global Alliance Against Trafficking of Women (GAATW). (2013). Feeling good about feeling bad: A global review of evaluation in anti-trafficking initiatives. Bangkok, Thailand: GAATW.  Retrieved from http://www.globalinitiative. net/wpfb-file/gaatw-feeling-good-about-feeling-bad-a-global-review-of-evaluation-in-antitrafficking-initiatives-pdf/. Hoijer, B. (2003). The discourse of global compassion: The audience and media reporting of human suffering. Media, Culture and Society, 2(24), 513–531. Hughes, R. (2007). Through the looking blast: Geopolitics and visual culture. Geography Compass, 1(5), 976–994. Independentlens. (n.d.). The Day My God Died. Retrieved June 29, 2011, from http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/daymygoddied/movement.html. Jayne, M., Holloway, S., & Valentine, G. (2010). Emotional, emotional and affective geographies of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. New Series, 35(4), 540–554. K-11. (n.d.). Retrieved June 29, 2011, from http://redlightchildren.org/aboutthe-films/about-the-k11-project/.

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Koivunen, A. (2010). An affective turn? Reimagining the subject of theory. In M. Liljestrom & S. Paasanen (Eds.), Working with affect in feminist readings: Disturbing differences (pp. 8–29). London, UK: Routledge. Lainez, N. (2010). Representing sex trafficking in Southeast Asia? The victim staged. In T.  Zheng (Ed.), Sex trafficking, human rights and social justice (pp. 134–149). London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge. Lidchi, H. (1999). Finding the right image: British development NGOs and the regulation of imagery. In T.  Skelton & T.  Allen (Eds.), Culture and global change (pp. 87–101). London, UK: Routledge. Lindquist, J. (2010). Images and evidence: Human trafficking, auditing, and the production of illicit markets. Public Culture, 22(2), 223–236. Mackenzie, A., & Dalby, S. (2003). Moving mountains: Community and resistance in the Isle of Harris, Scotland and Cape Breton, Canada. Antipode, 35(2), 309–333. Manzo, K. (2008). Imaging humanitarianism: NGO identity and the iconography of childhood. Antipode, 40(4), 632–657. Moeller, S. (1999). Compassion fatigue: How the media sell disease, famine, war and death. New York, NY: Routledge. Montgomery, H. (2001). Modern Babylon: Prostituting children in Thailand. London, UK: Berghahn Books. Morrison, A. (2011). “Suffused by feeling and affect”: The intimate public of personal mummy blogging. Biography, 34(1), 37–55. MTV EXIT. (n.d.). MTV EXIT information booklet. Retrieved August 13, 2013, from http://mtvexit.org/. Pain, R. (2004). Introduction: Children at risk? Children’s Geographies, 2(1), 65–67. Philo, C. (2005). The geographies that wound. Population, Space and Place, 11(6), 441–454. Pile, S. (2010). Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(1), 5–20. Raimondo, M. (2010). The queer intimacy of global vision: Documentary practice and the AIDS pandemic. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(1), 112–127. RedLight Children’s Campaign. (n.d.). Retrieved April 12, 2012, from www.redlightchildren.org/about_us/. Roseti, C. (2007). Media geographies: Uncovering the spatial politics of images. Geography Compass, 1(5), 995–1014. Ruddick, S. (2003). The politics of aging: Globalisation and the restructuring of youth and childhood. Antipode, 35(2), 334–362. Schaeffer-Grabiel, F. (2010). Sex trafficking as the ‘New Slave Trade’? Sexualities, 13(2), 153–160.

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Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–28). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shah, S. P. (2006). Producing the spectacle of Kamathipura: The politics of red light visibility in Mumbai. Cultural Dynamics, 18(3), 269–292. Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annalar, 86(B), 57–78. Thrift, N. (2009). Understanding the affective spaces of political performance. In M.  Smith, J.  Davidson, & L.  Bondi (Eds.), Emotion, place and culture (pp. 75–95). Aldershot Hants, UK: Ashgate. UN.GIFT. (n.d.). Retrieved March 21, 2012, from www.ungift.org/. United Nations. (2000). Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. Geneva: UNODC. Weitzer, R. (2007). The social construction of sex trafficking: Ideology and institutionalisation of a moral crusade. Politics & Society, 35(3), 447–475. Wright, M. (2009). Justice and the geographies of moral protest: Reflections from Mexico. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(2), 216–233. Wright, M. (2010). Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice. Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), 818–827.

CHAPTER 4

Elastic Victimhood: The State, NGOs, and Negotiating the Parameters of ­Anti-­trafficking

Excerpt from Field Notes (7 November 2014): It is late 2014, and the Singapore government has organised a TIP consultation to discuss the Private Member’s Bill on the Prevention of Human Trafficking proposed by conservative People’s Action Party (PAP) MP, Christopher de Souza. A representative from the TIP Taskforce opens proceedings with an introductory spiel reflecting on Singapore’s responses to TIP over the preceding three years, since the TIP Taskforce was established. He stated, “There are two areas where we think we have improved. First, is our case referral framework, where we have new SOP’s [Standard Operating Procedures]. Second, we have introduced awareness-raising grants for civil society organisations working on anti-trafficking. Other areas? Well, we agree to disagree. Labour trafficking, for example. This is a bit of a tricky one because there is ambiguity, not clarity in the cases. Do we treat it as a grey zone of TIP, or not? We, as a Taskforce, need to be quite clear on what constitutes labour TIP cases. Whether it is TIP or not, all cases of alleged abuse will be investigated. We will work with you in partnership and through your on-the-ground networks”. The TIP Taskforce representative from the National Police Agency (NPA) then spoke, after which de Souza himself took to the podium to explain why he was motivated to develop the bill. Finally, the floor was open to questions and HOME’s Director raised the question of whether some cases of foreign domestic workers would be considered under the TIP Bill. De Souza responded that, “My view is if you come on a valid contract and you have agreed to it I would not consider that to be exploitation for the purposes of TIP. It is purely an employment matter and doesn’t elevate to TIP. HOME’s spokesperson persisted, “We are not just talking about high and unreasonable agency fees here. We are also

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talking about deception in the conditions of work”. De Souza, looking decidedly frustrated by this persistence with the FDW question, responded that, “I agree it is important, but it is best prosecuted under existing legislation… We can do more for the victims who are truly victims. We don’t want to overly incentivise people putting up their hands to be a victim”. The meeting was closed soon after this debate between de Souza and HOME about FDWs as victims, and nothing about the apparently “grey zone” of labour trafficking was ultimately clarified. HOME’s spokesperson confided afterwards that much of their initial optimism about the new Bill was rapidly being replaced by concern about how labour trafficking was to be treated. Getting MOM to accept NGO referrals for labour TIP victims was, he lamented, “Likely to be an uphill battle”.

Introduction This chapter critically traces the evolution and parameters of the Singapore government’s current approach to human trafficking and migrant worker NGO responses to this, which in turn have shaped their own work on the issue. The government’s approach is characterised in this discussion by what I label ‘pretence politics’, meaning that the logic underlying anti-­ trafficking activities and responses is one of managing competing interests rather than attending to the substantive goal of reducing the extent of human trafficking and/or attending to the needs of exploited migrants themselves. A key element of pretence politics is performance, in which the contradictions of competing moral and political impulses and interests are managed—if not necessarily resolved—through public staging of anti-­ trafficking. I identify the dual impulses of widening and narrowing victimhood—or ‘elastic victimhood’—as competing characterisations of trafficking in the city-state put forward by NGOs and the state, respectively. The above excerpt illustrates these competing parameters of TIP, as well as government efforts to publicly reconcile them. The broader political-economic context which underlies and directs this approach is one fraught with the tension created by the government’s desire to retain and enhance Singapore’s global city status and regional positioning, on the one hand, and international demands for effective human rights standards to be met, in this case, in the realm of anti-­ trafficking, on the other. Whilst these should not necessarily be conflicting or competing goals, in the Singapore context, they arguably produce tensions because of the important role migrant workers play in Singapore’s

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continued development. The labour/migration regime which underpins Singapore’s economic ascendency is, in other words, an important explanatory factor in shaping pretence politics. In Singapore, where the post-­ independence government has actively stymied the labour movement and incorporated it into the machinery and interests of the state (Coe and Kelly 2000, 2002), the location of human trafficking as a labour issue is potentially damaging not only to the reputation of the city-state but also to one of the founding pillars of its economic ascendency. Recent strands of inquiry in geography and cognate disciplines have critically examined the interstices between vulnerable mobilities, human/ labour rights and protections, and systems of classification of populations (Hyndman 2010; Hyndman and Mountz 2007). This literature posits that vulnerable mobilities—refugees in particular—are in part constructed by migrant-receiving (and, in some cases, source) states through modes of differential classification that sort legitimate/authentic subjects of protection and redress from those who are undeserving. Alison Mountz (2003), in particular, has documented the ways states sort migrants into different categories/claims through a critical analysis of the processes of asylum seeker classification in the Canadian context. She argues that these processes imposed by immigration and police both draw on and themselves perpetuate hierarchies of legitimacy in asylum claims that consequently enable differential access to human rights protections to be extended to different (racially and geographically inscribed) groups. In studying the differential responses of the Canadian government to two refugee child soldiers, Jennifer Hyndman builds on this work in suggesting that ‘geographical location and imagination strongly shape access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of “child soldier” in particular’ (2010: 248). In this chapter and those that follow, we begin scrutinising the ways this develops in the Singapore context. Such scrutiny begins with the observation that, in both policy and its performances, the government has simultaneously reiterated its commitment to eliminating human trafficking in Singapore, whilst being careful to limit understandings of who might ‘qualify’ as a victim in the city-state. The key outcomes of Singapore’s current response have been the ‘carceral protection’ of a number of migrant women and girls in government-run shelters where they are contained, often for long periods of time and, simultaneously, the ‘remedial deflection’ of other trafficking victim types to pre-existing legislation (see Chaps. 7 and 8 for a more detailed discussion of these deflections and exclusions). These outcomes are produced

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through two interrelated modes of managing migrant populations. The first severely narrows definitions of human trafficking in the Singapore context. The second normatively evaluates individuals based on the severity of their case and sectors in which trafficking occurs. Srikantiah (2007), in discussing the United States, describes how the government makes determinations of victim status which in large part draws on preconceived ideas about the ‘iconic’ or ‘prototypical’ victim who is construed according to a compendium of characteristics or indicators: she is completely controlled by her trafficker(s) and therefore exercises no agency in her migration; she is forced into sex; she is not deployed in the formal economy and, as such, is devoid of any association with economic migration; she is forced (abducted or coerced) from the outset rather than only after her arrival at the destination; she is subject to overt rather than subtle forms of control; and she is completely blameless. In a stark example of this same logic guiding responses to refugees, Heaven Crawley notes how in the UK protectionist claims by unaccompanied child asylum seekers are undergird by a view of ‘these children [as] powerless, innocent and profoundly vulnerable and therefore in need of particular forms of protection’, thus simultaneously excluding children who exhibit unchildlike behaviour or who express ‘political views and agency’ (2010: 162). In the case of trafficking, issues concerning the management of migrant labour regimes provide an important logic explaining state efforts to shape access to protections, in addition to classifications emerging from ‘geographical imaginations and location’. We return to these suggestions again in the following chapters. Foucault’s concept of regimes of truth, particularly his suggestion that states utilise modes of classifications in order to manage and control populations is important for discussion here. He argues that whilst appearing depoliticised and technocratic, systems of classification conceal implicit political agendas and interests. The depoliticisation of migration has been subject to extensive critique recently, as scholars recognise the ways international (labour) migration has become progressively de-coupled from politics. As Antoine Pecoud (2015) has suggested, international migration narratives depoliticise their topics and instead focus on strategies through which migration can be achieved: These include: (1) the reliance on ambiguous terms and notions that support different and sometimes contradictory interpretations; (2) the consequent development of arguments that remain at an abstract level and avoid taking clear positions in the key debates raised by international

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migration; (3) the technocratic reliance on expertise and empirical evidence to avoid political controversies; and (4) a naturalisation of the global socio-economic context in which migration takes place, which is taken for granted and therefore unchallenged (p. 95). As the discussion in this chapter and the ones that follow reveal, these suggestions also hold true in the Singapore context. In particular, analysis of public forums where human trafficking is discussed and debated between the state and civil society, such as in the vignette that opened this chapter, reveals the use by government officials and politicians of both vagueness and ambiguity (especially in relation to how individual cases are to be treated and the bases by which claims are to be assessed) and empirical evidence (especially by invoking case studies). Certainly, in Singapore, the migration regime that underpins the nature of the sojourns of ­transient workers is not open to question in these debates. In this sense, any suggestion of legal or policy changes in response to human trafficking occurs as amendments within the current labour migration framework, with human trafficking-specific legislation continuing to be oriented primarily in practice to women and girls in the sex industry who are not migrant workers in the city-state. The following section briefly overviews the three stages of the government’s responses to human trafficking in Singapore: an initial denial stage, followed by a concessionary stage, and the current third phase of containment. Following this is a discussion of the ways NGOs have challenged the government’s delineation of trafficking, leading to the emergence of a context of ‘elastic victimhood’, where the parameters of victimhood simultaneously stretch and contract through civil society-government manoeuvring and negotiation.

From Government Denial to Concession and Containment Three stages to the Singapore state’s response to human trafficking can be discerned. First is a denial phase commencing in 2010  in which the Singapore government reiterated its stance that human trafficking was not a significant problem in Singapore. Second was a concessionary phase in which the government backtracked on its original claims that human trafficking did not exist to any significant extent in the city-state in light of growing evidence (particularly research reports) of human trafficking, and

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in response to political pressures emerging as a result of Singapore’s planned location as regional headquarters of Interpol. This phase saw the establishment of the Singapore government’s TIP Taskforce in 2012. In 2017, the Singapore government entered its third and current phase of response to human trafficking, articulated primarily through its National Approach Against Trafficking in Persons. This approach was to replace the previous National Plan of Action (2012–2016). The key differences between the new ‘Approach’ and the previous ‘National Plan’ include less specificity (less focus on many measures in favour of broad, overarching goals) and a renewed commitment to the ‘Ps’ of anti-trafficking (prevention, protection, and prosecution), but with the inclusion of a fourth ‘P’, namely, partnerships (both with NGOs/CSOs and international organisations). Prior to 2010, the government of Singapore had repeatedly denied the existence of human trafficking in the city-state, a claim made both when trafficking was raised during parliamentary question time and in responses to Singapore’s ranking of Tier 2 Watchlist in the US State Department’s 2010 Annual Trafficking in Persons Report. This changed in late 2011 when ECPAT International released the report on the commercial sexual exploitation of children and young people in Singapore (discussed in Chap. 2), suggesting that trafficking, at least of young women and girls into the sex industry, was a significant problem in the country. Because of the evidence contained in this report—including narratives of some participants concerning the disregard of Singapore government authorities in identifying and protecting trafficked women and minors—Singapore began to implement some anti-trafficking measures. Hence, the country was placed in the 2011 Annual Trafficking in Persons Report produced by the US Department of State to Tier 2. The government now recognised human trafficking as an issue and publicly committed to addressing it through several new policies and dedicated agencies. Thus, the government both confirmed the existence of trafficking (it was now impossible to deny, at least in the sex industry where minors were concerned) and simultaneously held fast to its reiteration of denial (for other sectors), a point to which we will return later. The ECPAT report constituted a significant juncture in the rise of an anti-trafficking movement and infrastructure in Singapore—one that has brought the government, NGOs, academia, and civil society into its fray over the past decade. In terms of government responses, several measures followed hot on the heels of the 2011 TIP Report, including the forma-

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tion of a dedicated Trafficking in Persons Taskforce co-chaired by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The TIP Taskforce developed a National Plan of Action that contained 31 initiatives to curb trafficking in Singapore. Trafficking in Persons was also included in regular security issues courses for senior police officers and bureaucratic personnel from various other ministries, such as Immigration and Customs Authority (ICA). Significantly though, personnel from the Ministry of Manpower, the ministry tasked to address labour trafficking, do not participate in these training courses. Despite this array of measures, the Singapore government neither signed nor ratified the 2000 Trafficking Protocol, making it the only ASEAN country to fail to do so. Until late 2013, the government maintained that provisions in existing legislation, such as the Penal Code and the Women’s Charter, were adequate to address trafficking in persons. Only in 2014 did this change with the government first publicly announcing its intention to sign and ratify the Protocol. The current containment phase, which commenced in 2014, is characterised by the continuation and expansion of the initiatives of 2012 but also simultaneously by an effort to control the parameters of victimhood in ways that reinforce some of the early civil society tropes, such as the female/child victim and the predominance of the sex and entertainment industry as the epicentre of Singapore’s human trafficking problem. This current approach will likely constitute the mainstay of the government’s response in the short to medium future and crystallises the logic of the prevailing pretence politics. There are two discursive elements to this pretence politics as it is practised performatively and through the policies of the TIP Taskforce; the use of public and closed stakeholder forums to reiterate the government’s approach and, ostensibly, consider the perspectives and experiences of civil society stakeholders; and an emphasis on technocratic interventions that tend to depoliticise issues related to human trafficking specifically, and labour migration more generally. Each of these is examined here in turn, focusing on how these two elements have created a context in which elastic negotiations over victimhood prevail.

The Image Work of Anti-trafficking in Singapore A critical examination of the Singaporean state’s anti-trafficking response necessitates that attention be directed not only to the emerging policy and legislative formations and institutional arrangements briefly outlined

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above but also to the public performances of anti-trafficking by government representatives. In addition to government-produced materials (policy statements, legislation, media releases, etc.), the often-stylised performances that accompany these official pronouncements become subjects of analysis in themselves. I focus here on two types of performances: those involving media (particularly television documentaries and news media) and meetings, seminars, and interactive forums organised by Singapore’s TIP Taskforce. Rendering certain types of victims more publicly visible and legitimate constitutes an important way the Singaporean state narrows the parameters of trafficking victimhood. This represents what de Luca (2012: 16) terms an image politics: ‘an image politics transforms the way people view their world by reducing complex sets of issues to symbols that can ­reconstitute the identity of the dominant culture by challenging and transforming mainstream society’s key discourses and ideographs’ (see also Chaps. 5 and 6 for the ways this is achieved in relation to the elision of male and female migrant labourers in Singapore in other sectors). Processes of exposure and erasure, in which sex trafficking victims presenting certain indicators of trafficking (a minor, or deceived about the type of work they will be doing, experiences sexual and physical violence, and is locked in her workplace and kept under surveillance) are rendered highly visible and promoted publicly as the penultimate and most deserving and legitimate victims of trafficking. These characterisations are undergird by racialised and gendered inscriptions of innocence and vulnerability in trafficking (Shah 2006) and, somewhat ironically, reiterate and confirm the child victim narrative of ECPAT, TBS, and other anti-trafficking stakeholders in 2010–2011. Within Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment industry, there are three broad groups of migrants present: adult women who are deceived about the nature of their work and coerced; adult women and some men who are consenting and voluntary but may be deceived about the conditions of their work (e.g. remuneration or the number of clients they need to service per day); and minors, who are always considered trafficked even where they consent to performing sex work in Singapore. By far, the easiest group to identify as victims according to the UN Protocol’s definition is minors, since questions around their knowledge and consent are irrelevant precisely because they have not reached the age of majority. This enables the government to focus victim identification efforts in ways that reinforce a disproportionate emphasis on migrant girls. In 2013, for

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example, of all trafficking cases investigated by Singapore’s TIP Taskforce, 80 per cent were female minors in the sex industry. These cases will, according to MP de Souza, attract a more severe punishment (deterrence, in legal parlance) than other trafficking cases. Thus, the Singaporean government has already begun to craft ideas around severity of trafficking based on its characterisation of, and differential punitive responses to, types of victims. Adult migrant women in the sex industry were also targeted as potential victims if they were felt by the government to fit the indicators developed by the TIP Taskforce. As a Taskforce representative from MHA explained: ‘The number of adult women who were determined to be victims was more than fifty. However, those who willingly entered sex work— even if they were consequently exploited—were not considered to be eligible as victims’ (personal communication with TIP Taskforce representative, 11 March 2013, emphasis added). Writing from a legal perspective, Jayashri Srikantiah argues that female minors and adult women who were completely deceived about their work in the sex industry are the ideal victims because they embody severe trafficking and are therefore good witnesses and ‘an effective prosecutorial story’ (2007: 160). Thus, the validity of consenting adult women who may have been exploited in the sex or nightlife entertainment industry as victims was, unlike women and girls who were completely duped, much less assured (see Chap. 8 for further discussion of the use of discretion in legal characterisations of victims). In early 2014 a research report on the commercial sexual exploitation of migrant women in the sex and nightlife entertainment sectors in Singapore was publicly released, arguing that there is a complexity and variability to migrant women’s positions and experiences in these sectors, and that voluntary migrant sex workers also experience exploitative and degrading conditions, including where these are characterised by deception about working and other conditions. The report argued for a wider consideration of a range of experiences of migrant women that did not reproduce the binary of the ‘good victim, bad prostitute’ (Yea 2014). Because the report received a significant amount of media attention, particularly at a time when the trafficking legislation was being developed and publicly promoted by the government, the government’s hand was forced concerning its position on trafficking-like practices involving voluntary migrant sex workers in the city-state. At one of four public consultations on the proposed member’s bill on trafficking put forward by MP de Souza, for example, de Souza himself stated that:

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Consent only extends so far. If she [migrant sex worker] consented to, say, servicing five men a day but when she arrived she was forced to service twenty-five, that is unacceptable. In her case we would look to the Women’s Charter to prosecute the case. There is no need to bring that case under a trafficking law. (emphasis added)

Deflecting the exploited, but nonetheless voluntary migrant sex worker from a trafficking determination in this way enables the government to recognise that whilst she has been exploited and despite deception in her migration experience, she is (arguably) better served under other legal provisions which, notably, contain no provisions for victim protection or redress. Monica Casper and Lisa Jean Moore’s treatise on missing bodies helps frame the techniques by which the Singaporean state has distilled victimhood to its starkest rudiments of violence and unfreedom, particularly amongst minors in the sex industry, but also amongst selected migrant workers. For Casper and Moore, in the contemporary period certain bodies are ‘hyper-exposed, brightly visible and magnified, while others are hidden, missing and vanquished’ (2009: 3), suggesting a process of ‘corporal visibility and erasure’. Casper and Moore’s suggestions echo Judith Butler’s (2004) thesis on the rendering of some bodies as ‘human’; to be accepted as vulnerable, exploited, or, perhaps, victimised because they are marked as damaged, innocent, poor, powerless, or tragic. Foucault (1980) suggests that these strategies of government rest on techniques of visibility which raise important questions for geographers: ‘How are some objects highlighted whilst others are obfuscated? What relations are suggested between subjects and space?’ (Legg 2005: 148). Missing bodies—or those obfuscated in such techniques of visibility—become, in other words, the bodies of those disqualified as victims; organised and validated through an image politics and system of differential classification that reinforces the visibility of certain permutations of victimhood while reducing others to a situation of banal exploitation under which there is limited redress for labour violations and human rights infringements. Television media has been implicated in this in Singapore in the airing of two crime drama episodes in 2012 (based on a story of a real victim) and 2013 (a hypothetical case), respectively. The first was an episode of the documentary series Get Real (2012), dealing with controversial social issues in Singapore, and drew on the case of a 17-year-old Filipina victim, Chat. Chat’s testimony is typical of techniques employed for documentary

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stories of child sex trafficking. She sits on a bed in a dark room in her natal home (constructed as a safe space and a suitable site for return, albeit economically marginal) with her face obscured by the dim lighting. In place of her face is a teddy bear; a symbolic device invoked to represent her innocence lost. Doezema also comments that ‘the invocation of iconic indicators of youth such as dolls and teddy bears, the lingering descriptions of fresh youthful beauty, and the pitiful descriptions of poverty … serve a moral and dramatic function’ (2000: 49), working to demarcate the innocent victim from the “bad prostitute”. Chat narrates her story of recruitment at the age of 17 by a friend of a friend in Manila, who promises her a waitressing job with a good salary in Singapore. She discusses the proposition with her mother, who readily agrees. She leaves for Singapore shortly after only to find herself presented with a ‘debt’ and forced to sell sex in order to repay it. She escapes and manages to return to the Philippines with the assistance of the Philippines Embassy. Upon return she discovers she is pregnant. Her narrative stalls as she begins to cry; there is something wrong with the baby and she miscarries. As Weitzer explains, central to the success of ‘moral crusades’ such as that against sex trafficking, ‘the testimonials of a few “rescued” victims are presented as evidence. Horror stories and photos of young victims are prominently displayed’ (2007: 463). He further notes the effectiveness of such a strategy in the United States, where ‘several members of Congress–including sponsors of the trafficking legislation in the House and Senate—have stated that they became interested in trafficking only after hearing a particular victim’s testimony’. For Chat the expert is Ms Dolores, the Director of ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) Philippines. The role of these experts is to bolster the credibility of claims about the extent and specific characteristics of trafficking, including valid victim profiles. A second story appeared on Crimewatch (2013) and narrated the fictional story of a Vietnamese minor trafficked into prostitution. This reinforced the visibility of the child victim established by the real case of the Filipina minor.1 The identification of female minors and some adult women as trafficked reinforces the validity and visibility of a pre-formed subject of trafficking that was already circulating in Singapore’s popular media and had emerged through early research and documentation of TIP in Singapore in 2010–2011, and which the government itself had helped mould and perpetuate, since the media in Singapore is government owned. From 2010 until the time of writing, newspapers carried stories about human trafficking that focused exclusively on the sex industry and affirmed the govern-

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ment’s harsh stance against both traffickers and clients of trafficked prostitutes by emphasising the punitive actions they were taking against these individuals. It was emphasised that traffickers and clients were subject to criminal prosecution for related offenses, because Singapore did not yet have a dedicated trafficking law. One case that received excessive media attention in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil newspapers in Singapore was that of a 17-year-old PRC girl who was in debt and forced into prostitution in Singapore’s notorious Geylang prostitution district. The girl’s passport was confiscated and she was rescued when she attempted to escape from her trafficker-cum-pimp. Upon reaching a verdict in the case, Judge Low Wee Ping was quoted as saying, ‘the teenager was here because of international trafficking of minors for the purpose of prostitution’. A similar process of sorting migrant sexual labourers has also been documented for the United States where ‘the US Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act at once extends protection to victims while at the same time it differentiates trafficking victims from illegal migrations and sex workers. Subjects are thus positioned as worthy victims or unworthy sex workers/ undocumented migrants’ (Hua and Nigorizawa 2010: 403–404; see also Chapkis 2003). Gendered images of vulnerability and victimhood such as those depicted in Singapore’s print and television media are important in establishing and enacting such demarcations. Critiques of this politics of representation rightly argue that ‘those wishing to seek aid as subjects of sex trafficking must often argue their own cultural backwardness in order to be legible as ‘legitimate’ victims’ (Hua and Nigorizawa 2010: 401; see also Yea 2014).

Performing Anti-trafficking in Public Forums The second element in the state’s pretence politics, examined here only briefly, involves performances at public forums on anti-trafficking. The Singapore government, through its TIP Taskforce has held over a dozen public consultations/forums and invitation-only seminars/ briefings collectively since 2014, outlining its approach to TIP and seeking feedback. This part of the chapter draws on information gathered during participant observation at ten of these forums, including four invitation-only and six publicly open events. Critical observations of these events suggest two concerns. First, although public and stakeholder views are sought, these are managed in highly circumspect ways, so that government proposals

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and plans regarding trafficking are not significantly challenged or amended as part of the outcome. The government is nonetheless able to invoke the staging of these events as evidence of its participatory, inclusive and democratic anti-trafficking policy work, which also fits with its new commitment to the fourth ‘P’ of partnerships. In the lead-up to the launch of the National Approach to Trafficking in Persons, the TIP Taskforce held three public consultations with the general public and interested stakeholders. The events involved a brief introduction of the work of the Taskforce, according to the various government ministries with differing TIP responsibilities. This included brief overviews of the work of the Ministry of Manpower (labour trafficking), Ministry of Home Affairs (sex trafficking), and Attorney General’s Office (legislation). The invitation-only meeting for anti-trafficking stakeholders that followed these public consultations in late 2016 was intended to brief NGOs, pro-bono lawyers, and academics as to the new government approach that followed the public consultations. The draft National Approach that was circulated differed very little from the previous plan, however, and simply reiterated its focus on the ‘4 Ps’, but with less specific detail of actual initiatives than had been put forward in the previous National Plan. Both the vagueness and the lack of significant difference or between the previous and the new approach were met with frustration by the civil society stakeholder participants, as the opening vignette revealed. However, what is worth emphasising here is that there was limited opportunity for open-floor feedback, as stakeholder views were solicited in a highly structured manner, with all participants asked to divide into break-­ out groups according to their area of interest and field questions to the Taskforce representative assigned to their group. In this manner, the Taskforce was able to simultaneously open up and close down dissenting and critical responses to the ‘new’ approach. The role of statistics and ‘evidence’ in human trafficking research and data is another element that is invoked during the government’s public performances reiterating its role in anti-trafficking in Singapore. There is now some critical literature on statistics in anti-trafficking, and David Feingold (2010) has articulated concerns around the (mis)use of statistics and data particularly well when he questions how information on human trafficking comes to be constructed as ‘data’ (or ‘evidence’) and how that data then comes to be drawn upon to inform policy. He suggests that much of what comes to be circulated and so perpetuated as data in human trafficking is not collected through rigorous research processes and may

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not even be verifiable. This situation emerges because data collection has always been problematic in documenting human trafficking because of a range of difficulties associated with access to victims and disclosure of information pertaining to their experiences. Thus, trafficking in persons ‘myths’ are constructed leading to a disjuncture between trafficking realities and policy responses. Nonetheless, he argues, evidence is (selectively) used as a means by which to both validate and simultaneously discount particular claims about human trafficking, and to inform policy directions. The invocation of data as evidence of the state’s commitment to its progress in addressing human trafficking in Singapore is also articulated through public performances and spaces. In the forums in which I ­participated, for example, at least one of the government representatives giving a presentation about TIP would include the number of initiatives the government was currently undertaking to address TIP in Singapore (at the time of my observations, this amounted to ‘no less than 36’), the number of victims identified (which was always presented by year, with the number not surprisingly increasing each year), the number of prosecutions and convictions (which were presented in the same format as the numbers of victims), and, lastly, the amount of money the government was committing to responding to trafficking. In some, but not all, public performances, other statistics were also introduced, including the number of government officials (or, more commonly, police) who received capacity-­ building training in TIP and the number of civil society projects the government funded to address TIP. The last of these initiatives, in particular, was interesting because it illustrates quite clearly how most of the government’s initiatives are remotely situated from interventions that directly benefit or impact on trafficked persons themselves. Thus, although potentially a progressive initiative, the types of projects supported are limited to such activities as a year-long business campaign to engage businesses in discussions about slavery in supply chains, Emancipasia’s photo exhibition (discussion in the Introduction to the book), and my own project to raise the level of understanding of trafficking amongst university students. NGOs such as HOME had applied for funding support from the Taskforce under this initiative in order to development better outreach and victim care services, but were not funded. The number of initiatives and their promotion and circulation through government forums serve an important function not only in showing the progress of the government in responding to trafficking through quantifi-

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cation of their efforts but also of the ways they reinforce particular ways of seeing trafficking, for example, in terms of the numbers of victims identified or the number of cases prosecuted. These, then, also become a part of the regime of truth established around trafficking, with civil society and NGOs coming to engage the TIP Taskforce and other government officials through the terms set by these pronouncements (e.g. by arguing that the numbers of identified victims are too low or questioning the quality and depth of capacity-building training for police). In this vein, and looking specifically at the Indian state, Sturt Corbridge (2005) argues that we must interrogate official stories, including the production of statistics and see them as ‘technologies of rule’.

Migrant Rights, Non-governmental Organisations, and the Widening of Trafficking Victimhood So far, in this book, discussion has examined the ways a focus on the identification of certain victims in the sex industry and concomitant coverage by the media helped craft a politics of visibility of sex trafficking victims in Singapore. These victims fit a particular profile for trafficking victimhood, defined by helplessness, innocence, youth, and forced prostitution. This ‘visible victim’ type was crafted and solidified in some anti-trafficking awareness-raising initiatives established under civil society and government campaigns, as discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3. This part of the chapter examines the involvement of NGOs in defining trafficking victimhood in Singapore. Whilst some NGOs continue to fall in line with government constructions of victimhood according to the visible victim stereotype (such as Hagar and, to a lesser extent, Emancipasia), other NGOs contest this characterisation of trafficking victimhood as the most relevant in the Singaporean context and advocate for a more inclusive range of experiences of migrant exploitation as fitting within the purview of human trafficking. The response by the HOME representative at the public forum introduced at the outset of the chapter represents one example of this, where questions around labour and FDWs were raised. Some key migrant worker rights NGOs, such as HOME, TWC2, and Health Serve, began advocating for a broader and more inclusive definition of trafficking victimhood in the mid-2010s. In their work, these NGOs attempt to re-frame existing migrant worker problems, such as wage theft, excessive overtime, unsafe working conditions, and threats and

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abuse as indicators of human trafficking. Discussion here engages with the question of why NGOs would undertake this re-framing. The analysis indicates the importance of the belief that in anti-trafficking interventions, the promise of realising migrant worker rights and justice may be better fulfilled than under existing advocacy discourses. This belief is based on considerable NGO experience over the past decade of failure to achieve large-scale policy shifts in the governance of migrant workers in Singapore, including their access to rights and justice, and the failure to achieve small-­ scale wins for exploited migrant workers in their pursuit of claims.2 A critical mass of anti-trafficking stakeholders also began to be formed in the wake of the 2011 ranking. Part of the impetus of the swelling of the anti-trafficking community’s ranks occurred under the guidance of the US Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. A representative from the TIP Taskforce and a social worker for an NGO were invited in successive years to participate in a ‘trafficking study tour’ of the United States to network and learn about best practices in anti-trafficking. In addition, Bridget Tan, the President of the same NGO, was conferred with a Trafficking Hero Award in 2012, again by the US DoS’s trafficking office. In a rather strange admission, it was only after she received the award that she professed, ‘now I must do something about trafficking’. The will to respond to trafficking gained momentum as other organisations, such as the awareness-raising NGO Emancipasia, the research-oriented Trafficking Research Project (TTRP), the Inter-­ University Initiative on Human Trafficking, and student movements such as NUS’s Traffick Light group, formed. These groups and organisations, along with existing NGOs, have devoted considerable effort to awareness-­ raising about trafficking in Singapore to the general public and to students, some of which was discussed in Chap. 2. What is notable about these organisations is that the impetus for their formation lay not in self-­ identified needs to address trafficking in Singapore, but to the ‘rumour of trafficking’ (Wong 2005). In other words, none of these newly formed entities were established because of their interaction with vulnerable groups of migrants or potentially trafficked persons, and none provide direct support to the populations they profess to represent. Indeed, none had met or spoken with trafficked persons in Singapore prior to their formation. This set these groups apart from the already existing migrant rights NGOs whose advocacy was based on direct experience with exploited migrant workers and substantial disillusionment with state actions on the issue of migrant rights. Thus, NGOs and CSOs advocating

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around TIP in Singapore cannot be understood as a cohesive and united group sharing similar interests or even goals. Some women’s and migrant worker NGOs that existed before anti-­ trafficking arrived in Singapore amended the focus of their work to incorporate a TIP agenda. This trend is not unique to Singapore and both Lindquist and Piper (2007) and Lyons and Ford (2010) have noted the ways trafficking has filtered into the work of NGOs in Indonesia as a result of heightened donor and governmental interest in the problem rather than because of self-identified gaps from their own work. The same can be said for Singapore. HOME was the most aggressive in this undertaking, which began with the launching of a Trafficking in Persons Desk (discussed further in Chap. 2). Given the growing profile of the issue in Singapore, the government’s commitment to it, and emerging funding opportunities associated with anti-trafficking work, it appeared to hold much appeal as a means of achieving progress in addressing pre-existing migrant worker human rights concerns. Despite the general orientation of anti-trafficking in Singapore to sex trafficking, labour issues achieved discursive prominence amongst NGO advocacy because there is a greater institutional presence of organisations addressing migrant labour issues in other sectors apart from migrant sex work. Low-valued migrant workers presently number approximately one-­ quarter of Singapore’s total population and occupy low-end positions in the construction, marine, and landscaping sectors (male workers from South Asia and China), and as foreign domestic workers (FDWs) (female workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia).HOME, TWC2, and other NGOs and academics have published studies over recent years, highlighting, in detail, abuses of migrant workers in Singapore (TWC2 2006; HOME 2013; HOME & TWC2 2011; Yea 2014). Lenore Lyons has argued that despite the government’s public commitment to create an ‘active citizenry’ in Singapore, including an extended presence of NGOs, migrant worker issues nonetheless pose distinct problems of civil society organisations because the issue of migrant worker rights is extremely sensitive. As she argues, ‘the constraints on activist engagement that are faced by Singaporean NGOs are compounded when issues of citizenship are central to activist concerns’ (2005: 2). Subsequent to public and governmental recognition and acceptance of trafficking in Singapore, NGO reports began to appear on the subject, framing existing migrant worker problems as trafficking problems.

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HOME, for example, penned a report in 2012 that evaluated the applicability of a human trafficking framework as a way of understanding the experiences of migrant domestic worker abuses in Singapore. Not surprisingly, given that HOME conducted the research in-house and amongst runaway FDWs staying at their shelter, they concluded that a stultifying 98.5 per cent of their sample of 150 women could clearly be identified as trafficked. This finding supported earlier assessments of the situation of FDWs in Singapore put forward in a report by Human Rights Watch (2005) and was further reiterated by HOME’s lead researcher in paper published from the study (Clarke 2013). The relevance of the example of HOME’s report for purposes of discussion here lies not so much in the findings—which are unsurprising, given that HOME conducted the research themselves and that the ­organisation has been a tireless champion of FDW rights in Singapore since its formation two decades earlier—as in the ways in which the organisation defined trafficking victimhood to be widely inclusive of the experiences of the types of women who commonly seek assistance from them. According to HOME’s lead researcher on the study, ‘We defined trafficking as involving the usual three elements of recruitment, transportation that was facilitated by a third party, and exploitation in their workplace’ (personal communication, Libby Clarke, 15 January 2013). In response, I further queried the use of recruitment as a defining element of human trafficking, since the UN Trafficking Protocol recognises that only certain types of recruitment may be considered in classifying someone as a victim of trafficking. Specifically, the Protocol names recruitment by means of the use of deception, fraud, or giving or receiving benefits from a person to secure their consent to the intended movement (UNODC 2000). Many of the respondents in HOME’s study were cognizant of the conditions attached to their work in Singapore, and so the defining element of deception or fraud appeared not to be particularly relevant for the majority of HOME’s respondents. It is true that FDWs shoulder a debilitating debt payable to recruitment agencies organising FDWs’ migration that keeps many FDWs in bonded employment situations where they may be paying off a debt for up to eight or nine months of a two-year contract. Arguably, this situation makes it almost impossible for women to leave errant or abusive employers because to do so would render them unable to clear their debts and in a situation where they may have to begin the entire process of applying to be an FDW again, which, of course, would further exacerbate their debt situation. Debt bondage, as well as contract substitu-

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tion, has been recognised as a particular problem in relation to the exploitation of FDWs in a range of different destination contexts in both Asia and the Middle East. HOME’s researcher responded that ‘There are some studies that have been done in which any act of recruitment leading to exploitation is defined as trafficking, and so we followed the definitions in those studies for our own report’. Further, trafficking as a crime rests on links between actors who knowingly and deliberately move a person into a position of exploitation. It is highly debatable whether the local recruiter in the village or even the maid placement agency in Jakarta conspired with the maid agency in Singapore and the prospective employer to place an FDW into an exploitative situation from which she could not easily extricate herself, even where this might have been the outcome of her labour migration. This is not the place to debate whether or not HOME’s ­definition of trafficking is correct or incorrect and whether it has any legal resonance (e.g. in prosecuting recruitment agencies and other actors), as much as it is to recognise HOME’s creative interpretation of indicators of trafficking to classify a larger cohort of respondents as representing cases of trafficking for domestic servitude in Singapore. In this context, NGOs such as HOME and others working to assist migrant workers in Singapore who may encounter trafficked persons in their work are continually presenting what they believe to be strong cases of labour trafficking in various sectors—but primarily domestic servitude and amongst male migrant workers—drawing on the internationally accepted and sector-specific indicators developed by organisations such as the ILO (outlined above). However, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) to date has not publicly disclosed the indicators of trafficking it employs in identifying labour trafficking victims. Although such indicators do exist and are held by MOM case officers who receive migrant worker complaints, the Taskforce does not disclose these lists of indicators in making referrals to MOM, MHA, or the Taskforce, despite several public requests for them to do so. This reticence bespeaks of an agenda of not only narrowing victimhood but, relatedly, of lack of clarity in making determinations of victimhood in Singapore, especially in relation to labour trafficking. Other migrant worker NGOs in Singapore approached trafficking in a slightly more cautious manner, wanting to gain a fuller understanding of the meaning of trafficking and how it may relate to their clients before asserting publicly that trafficking was a significant concern for migrant workers in Singapore. TWC2, for example, sought the assistance of someone from the newly established Trafficking Research Project to trawl back

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through their recent history of case notes to see whether and to what extent elements of trafficking may have been present for the men and women they encountered in their support work. The major failing of such an exercise, of course, is that unless one is actively looking for indicators of trafficking in interviews with clients, it is often missed in case information.3 In sum, these NGO efforts to expand the parameters of trafficking victimhood in Singapore must be understood in a political-economic milieu of systemic abuse and exploitation of low-valued migrant workers and the failure of years of advocacy, direct support work, and research to significantly alter this landscape in ways that enhance the rights and protections available to exploited workers. Although, for example, the NGO TWC2 penned a comprehensive report in 2006 detailing exploitative work arrangements for FDWs in Singapore and recommending a cap on ­recruitment fees and increase in salary, they lamented in 2013 that ‘The issues raised unfortunately remain topical even in 2013: placement costs have risen further since the report was published’ (TWC2 2013). Defining such workers as trafficked, then, presents a strategic outlet through which to champion the abuses of these migrants and perhaps, achieve some justice for them. Creative interpretation of trafficking indicators and studies conducted in other contexts provide a way for NGOs to seek to improve responses by the Ministry of Manpower and other government agencies to the plight of migrant workers in Singapore. In a neoliberal state such as Singapore, this, of course, is likely to contribute to a heightened sense of anxiety in government quarters about the extent of the city-state’s trafficking problem. It is to a consideration of this in the context of the tabling of the Prevention of Human Trafficking Bill in Parliament in mid-2014 that we turn in the final part of the chapter.

The StopTraffickingSG Campaign and the Widening of Victimhood As demonstrated above, NGOs began to engage with the parameters of the state’s approach to anti-trafficking during both its concession and containment stages by arguing for the need for anti-trafficking protections to extend beyond clear-cut cases in the sex industry. These arguments were made both through research reports, such as TWC2’s reports on trafficking of migrant fishers (see Chap. 6) and HOME’s report on FDWs, and in opportunities to engage TIP Taskforce representatives directly in public

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forums related to migrant workers and anti-trafficking. Further, both HOME and TWC2, in particular, began to ‘test’ cases of exploited migrant labourers they were supporting by presenting them to MOM as potential labour trafficking cases (discussed in further detail in Chaps. 7 and 8). Yet, as the TIP Taskforce’s responses to these cases and to assertions in various public and closed stakeholder forums held by the Taskforce revealed, such arguments for widening the parameters of victimhood yielded little ground. In fact, as also demonstrated above, in some ways, the Taskforce was able to bring NGO critiques of the scope and nature of its responses to human trafficking into its fold through the creative use of data and evidence apparently attesting to its efforts to extend understandings of trafficking to the realm of labour. In the final part of this chapter, we turn to briefly examine the most recent phase of these negotiations between the state and civil society around the breadth and depth of trafficking responses in late 2014 when several NGOs initiated a campaign aimed at ensuring the new Prevention of Human Trafficking Bill would be more comprehensive in both its approach and reach than the previous few years of government responses had demonstrated. When MP Christopher de Souza tabled the Prevention of Human Trafficking Bill in Parliament and held public consultations in October 2014, the proposal to introduce dedicated anti-trafficking legislation was welcomed by civil society groups long advocating for the rights of migrant workers in Singapore, as well as the newly formed groups concerned specifically with trafficking of women and in the sex industry. However, this initial enthusiasm was soon replaced by concern about whether the proposed Bill would go far enough to actually protect victims of trafficking in Singapore. To this end, four migrant and women’s rights NGOs in Singapore—Maruah, AWARE, HOME, and TWC2—together formed a campaign under the banner ‘StopTraffickingSG’ to advocate for inclusion of some hitherto marginalised responses and recognition of the issues that underlay them. Questions over the adequacy of protection formed the nub of the campaign, from which two interrelated suggestions emerged. First was the argument that victims were unlikely to come forward to avail the protections offered by the Taskforce under the proposed framework of victim protection unless the rights to work during investigation and the right to remain in Singapore for work post investigation/legal proceedings were assured. The Campaign proponents therefore argued that the framework was not truly ‘victim-centred’.4 The second, and related suggestion, con-

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cerned what the Campaign referred to as ‘muddy terminology’, where key terms crucial to making trafficking determinations remained undefined in the bill. In particular, the terms ‘deception’ and ‘forced labour’ were not defined. In response, de Souza argued that the writing of the Bill was consistent with the UN Protocol definitions (although the vagueness of the Protocol has come under criticism precisely for this lack of specificity around key terms). Both de Souza’s and the Taskforce’s responses to the criticisms of the proposed Bill put forward by the Campaign and others were characterised by two somewhat contradictory impulses: vagueness and the invocation of ‘evidence’. The vagueness concerned both justifications for lack of commitment to concrete definitions of terms. De Souza reiterated on several occasions, for example, that it was important, ‘the judge is given the ­flexibility to determine the standard of proof’. We see these arguments again reiterated after the Prevention of Human Trafficking Act (PHTA) was passed (see Chaps. 6 and 8 for details of cases where the government contested important terms such as debt bondage, forced labour and deception through particular cases of victims). Lack of legally encoded definitions of key terms associated with exploitations characterising human trafficking has enabled the government to exercise enormous flexibility and discretion in assessing trafficking cases (as discussed further in Chap. 8). The invocation of evidence to contest Campaign suggestions around the desire of exploited migrants to work and remain in Singapore came in the form of de Souza’s and the Taskforce’s selective use of cases of women in the sex industry presented as evidence that they wanted to return home immediately. De Souza was quoted as saying, ‘The people with whom I have spoken—ladies who unfortunately would come under the ambit of sexual trafficking [sic]—they did not want to work. That is one of the reasons why not putting in a one-size-fits-all right for everybody is useful’ (22 October 2014). In fact, de Souza had spoken to some of the women Sister Mary and the Franciscan Mission of Mary (FMM) was supporting. These women, I knew, could not legally remain in Singapore to work because they had entered on Social Visit Pass (SVP) visas, which did not confer working rights and was not transferable to another (right to work) visa. One of the women experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome after her trafficking experience in Singapore which, it emerged, was related to deep-seated events in her life in the Philippines prior to coming to Singapore. In her case, from a mental health perspective, she was not in a position to remain in Singapore. There were many other migrant entertainers/sexual labourers, however, who

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wished to remain in Singapore and work, primarily to pay off the substantial migration debts incurred for their costs to work in Singapore. Introduced in Chap. 6 is the story of Delores who, despite the Philippines Embassy pleading her case as human trafficking to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA), was told she would not be able to remain in Singapore. She was swiftly deported to the Philippines, carrying considerable anxiety about debt, shame, and unfulfilled migration goals. De Souza is, of course, correct to suggest that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to victim protections and victimology is not appropriate. The disparity between the desires of the two ‘cases’ introduced above bears this out. However, an approach that aims to introduce discretion into legal determinations of visa/work status allows for the possibility of legislating discretionary (and possibly large-scale) deportation for those for whom staying in Singapore is not deemed by individual judicial figures or TIP bureaucrats as a feasible option. A more suitable approach may be the establishment of minimum standards concerning migration/work status, as introduced in some other contexts. Whilst the StopTraffickingSG Campaign crystallised the positions of the main migrant and women’s rights NGOs and the state in relation to victim protection and labour trafficking, what I wish to emphasise here is the ways this debate about victim protection, including its arguments concerning labour trafficking, were coming together to constitute a regime of truth around human trafficking where, despite disagreements between state and civil society positions, the different stakeholders in the anti-­ trafficking movement nonetheless broadly agreed on the parameters of the debate. To this end, the debate about anti-trafficking in Singapore was one centred on the definition of labour trafficking and the nature of protection, with other minor points of contention concerning the commitment of the government to a partnership approach, and the status of victims who were proposed but not yet accepted by the state as victims, and the status of victim whose status as trafficked had been recognised. The civil society position was summed up clearly by the Director of HOME when he stated a few months after the PHTA had come into effect that ‘The most urgent change needed is better laws. This would mean, for example, being able to switch employers, debts, FDWs being included in the Employment Act and so on. The government says it is committed to TIP, but this is not reflected in the laws’. Ultimately, the ‘truth effect’ of this debate has been the discursive elision of issues around the nature of prevention and of prosecutorial processes. Although I had

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been a participant observer of various TIP interventions in Singapore for several years, what struck me most was the lack of substantive critique of the meaning and practice of ‘prevention’ by the Singaporean state, which has been characterised most strongly by the use of raids and compliance checks to remove (and ultimately deport) potential victims. And although the NGOs involved in the campaign were concerned about the nature of the prosecution process and its effects on victims, this did not figure significantly in the StopTraffickingSG Campaign.

Conclusion In part, discussion in this chapter reinforces observations that Anderson and Andrijasevic (2008) made several years ago in the context of anti-­ trafficking in the UK, namely, that focusing on the ‘evils of trafficking’ (something which some NGOs also engage in) depoliticises progressive and open debate about migrant rights and the regimes which underpin migrant worker incorporation. In this chapter, I have begun to examine the ways trafficking victims are characterised by destination states in ways that result in the exclusion of certain victim types. I suggested that the narrow victim focus of the Singapore government principally on ‘sex trafficking’ of female minors, some adult women, and some work permit holders in other sectors can be understood according to the threat labour trafficking responses in particular may pose to Singapore’s (migrant) labour market. The inclusion of long-standing migrant worker exploitations under a trafficking framework—recently advocated by NGOs focusing on migrant worker rights in Singapore—becomes diluted or invalid as a trafficking concern. Elsewhere, Shamir has argued that the current criminal/human rights approach to trafficking internationally ‘fails to deal with the economic, social, and legal conditions that create workers’ vulnerability to exploitation and is therefore mostly ineffective in curbing human trafficking’ (2012: 80). In Singapore, this exclusion is arguably not serendipitous, but deliberately crafted in response to the logic of the state in reinforcing a particular (migrant) labour regime. In other words, the inscription and elision of trafficking victimhood must be understood in the context of flexible and temporary labour migration policies in the city-­ state that form a part of its broader global economic aspirations. Heightened precarity in migration and work arrangements both in Singapore and throughout the region under these altered labour arrangements have produced a more expansive pool of vulnerable workers facing

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various permutations of exploitative and unfree situations. But what is particularly notable about this milieu is the emergence of a global human rights discourse on human trafficking in tandem with (but almost entirely in isolation from) these labour migration regimes. The challenge states like Singapore therefore set themselves is to manage the tensions arising from the juxtaposition of these two opposing tendencies of fulfilling human rights standards whilst maintaining regimes of precarious work and unfree labour. The successful management of these tensions results in ‘states of contradiction’ (Vance 2011) in which governments appear to respond to trafficking—as narrowly defined—without doing very much at all to address broad labour and human rights violations. This chapter draws in part on a published paper: 2015 ‘Trafficked Enough? Human Rights, Missing Bodies and Victim Identification in Singapore’, Antipode 47 (4): 1080–1100.

Notes 1. Media attention to raids on migrant sex worker venues that “netted women who were illegally plying their trade in Singapore” further reinforce the divide between the good victim and bad migrant sex worker that was established through interventions aimed differentially at victim identification on the one hand and immigration offenders on the other. Typical media images of migrant sexual labourers in Singapore support a discourse of criminalisation. Such images often depict foreign women (including Thai, PRC, Chinese, or Filipinas) being caught in a police raid, scantily clad, hiding their faces from the camera, and being led away by police. All these images convey a message of guilt, not victimhood (discussed in more detail in the next chapter). 2. It may also be argued that this renegotiation is driven in part by a need amongst NGOs for funding to continue their work. As they are in a high-­ income country, NGOs in Singapore are largely outside the purview of many funding circuits. Anti-trafficking can provide a stream of income that otherwise would not be readily available to many NGOs in the country. 3. One project of TWC2, The Cuff Road Project (TCRP) which provides free meals and other social supports to migrant workmen who have fallen out of work, was less enthusiastic about embracing a trafficking framework to interpret the experiences of their clients. As the co-ordinator of TCRP stated, “Why would we single out some men who might fit the definition of trafficking and leave other men who have equally legitimate claims to abuse and exploitation out just because they can’t be called trafficked?”. 4. This has in fact been borne out since the passing of the Bill—see Chap. 8.

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References Anderson, B., & Andrijasevic, R. (2008). Sex, slaves and citizens: The politics of anti-trafficking. Soundings, 40, 135. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso. Casper and Moore. (2009). Missing bodies: The politics of visibility. New York, NY and London: New York University Press. Chapkis, W. (2003). Trafficking, migration and the law: Protecting innocents, punishing immigrants. Gender and Society, 17(6), 923–937. Clarke, L. (2013). Behind closed doors: Trafficking for domestic servitude in Singapore. The Equal Rights Review, 10, 33–58. Coe, N., & Kelly, P. (2000). Distance and discourse in the local labour market: The case of Singapore. Area, 32(4), 413–422. Coe, N., & Kelly, P. (2002). Languages of labour: Representational strategies in Singapore’s labour control regime. Political Geography, 21(3), 341–371. Corbridge, S. (2005). Seeing the state: Governance and governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crawley, H. (2010). ‘No one gives you a chance to say what you are thinking’: Finding space for children’s agency in the U.K. asylum system. Area, 42(2), 162–169. Crimewatch Singapore. (2013). Episode 6, Part 1. Trafficking in persons. Retrieved August 18, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= prAwQvk68SA. de Luca, K. M. (2012). Image politics: The new rhetoric of environmental activism. New York: Taylor and Francis. Doezema, J. (2000). Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in contemporary discourses of trafficking in women. Gender Issues, 18, 23–50. Feingold, D. (2010). Trafficking in numbers: The social construction of human trafficking data. In P. Andreas & K. M. Greenhill (Eds.), Sex, drugs, and body counts: The politics of numbers in global crime and conflict (pp. 46–74). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. London: Pantheon. HOME. (2013). The invisible help: Trafficking into domestic servitude in Singapore. Singapore: HOME. Retrieved August 15, 2016, from https://www.home.org. sg/research. Hua, J., & Nigorizawa, H. (2010). US sex trafficking, women’s human rights and the politics of representation. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12(3–4), 401–423.

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Human Rights Watch. (2005). Maid to order: Ending abuses against migrant domestic workers in Singapore. Human Rights Watch [online]. 10 (17). Retrieved from http://hrw.org/reports/2005/singapore1205. Hyndman, J. (2010). The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’. Political Geography, 29(5), 247–255. Hyndman, J., & Mountz, A. (2007). Refuge or refusal. In D. Gregory & A. Pred (Eds.), Violent geographies: Fear, terror and political violence (pp.  76–92). London: Routledge. Legg, S. (2005). Foucault’s population geographies: Classifications, biopolitics and governmental spaces. Population, Space and Place, 11(3), 137–156. Lindquist, J., & Piper, N. (2007). From HIV prevention to counter-trafficking: Discursive shifts and institutional continuities in Southeast Asia. In M.  Lee (Ed.), Human trafficking (pp. 139–158). Devon: Willan Publishing. Lyons, L. (2005). Transient workers count too? The intersection of citizenship and gender in Singapore’s civil society. University of Wollongong Research Papers online. Retrieved from http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti cle=1094&context=artspapers Lyons, L., & Ford, M. (2010). “Where are your victims?” How sexual health advocacy came to be counter-trafficking in Indonesia’s Riau Islands. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12(2), 255–264. Mountz, A. (2003). Human smuggling, the transnational imaginary, and everyday geographies of the nation-state. Antipode, 35(3), 622–244. Pecoud, A. (2015). Depoliticising migration. In Depoliticising migration: Global governance and international migration narratives (pp.  95–123). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shah, S. P. (2006). Producing the spectacle in Kamathipura: The politics of red-­ light visibility in Mumbai. Cultural Dynamics, 18(3), 269–292. Shamir, H. (2012). A labour paradigm for human trafficking. UCLA Law Review, 60, 76–137. Srikantiah, J. (2007). Perfect victims and real survivors. Immigration and Nationality Law Review, 28, 741–798. TWC2. (2006). Debts, deductions and delays: Wage issues faced by foreign domestic workers in Singapore. Singapore: TWC2. Retrieved from http://twc2.org. sg/2009/05/24/debt-delays-deductions-wage-issues-faced-by-foreigndomestic-workers-in-singapore/. TWC2, & HOME. (2011). Made to work: Attitudes towards granting regular days off for migrant domestic workers in Singapore. HOME: Singapore. UNODC. (2000). Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. Vienna: UNODC.

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Vance, C. S. (2011). States of contradiction: Twelve ways to pretend to do nothing about trafficking while pretending to. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 78(3), 938–948. Weitzer, R. (2007). The social construction of sex trafficking: Ideology and institutionalization of a moral crusade. Politics and Society, 35(3), 447–476. Wong, D. (2005). The rumour of trafficking. IIAS Newsletter, 42(11). Yea, S. (2014). Social visits and special passes: Exploitation of migrant women in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment sector in Singapore. Singapore: FMM.

CHAPTER 5

(In)visible Women and (Anti)-trafficking

Excerpt from Interview (26 April 2015): Rochelle is 29 years old and entered Singapore on a domestic worker’s visa. She came to Singapore from an impoverished part of the Southern Philippines in Mindanao. Her boyfriend is working in Saudi Arabia in construction and she has left her 3 years old son in the care of her sister back in the Philippines. Without coming to work in Singapore she admits it will be extremely difficult to enter her son in school. Her agency called her in mid-March to inform her that they had processed her papers and explained to her what she needed to bring to Singapore. They told her to come as quickly as possible to Manila, from where they would send her. When Rochelle presented at the agency in Manila she was informed that, from her two years contract she would have salary deductions for the first 8.5 months, which would cover the agency fees and costs of her migration and placement. Her total monthly salary for the duration of her contract was to be SG $350, of which she was to receive SG $10 per month whilst her debt was repaid. In her ninth month of work she was to receive SG $170 per month and then, after a year of working, she would finally receive all her salary each month. But her employer did not adhere to this agreement and began holding her salary as a form of forced savings. She would be returned this money once her contract was completed, she was told. Rochelle confessed that she did not know about the forced savings when she signed her contract, and this situation was entirely unacceptable for her because she needed to remit money each month to support her son’s basic needs. In addition, while her contract stipulated she was to perform household work, when she reached her employer’s house she was told she would also need to take care of the couple’s ten months old triplets in her spare time. The contract stated 8 hours a day rest, minimum, and one day off per month. But again, Rochelle was given © The Author(s) 2020 S. Yea, Paved with Good Intentions?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_5

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no days off and her breaks were always interrupted and scrutinised. She recounted that even if she took a shower or ate her meal for more than one minute she would be chastised for taking too long. The employer was very strict and, apart from these emerging new stipulations about household duties, time management and savings, Rochelle lamented that her employer was always scolding her, usually ending with water or plastic bottles being thrown at her. Sometimes she was unaware of the reason for her being scolded. “I hold three grocery bags and the babies’ stroller and it’s so hard to control, but the husband does not help me; he just scolds me. In the car there are six seats for passengers, but they make me sit in the back with the bags. I ran away yesterday because it is too much for me to take. Even when they go out to visit their family, I have to go with them and clean the houses of their relatives. After I wash the plates and the floor at these other houses, they are angry at me for sitting down, so they make me clean the toilet. If a towel drops by my ma’am’s side she makes me come and pick it up, instead of bending herself to get it. I tell them if they are not comfortable with my work they can take me back to the agency, but they refuse. They say other helpers are better than me but they won’t let me go. I don’t understand their attitude”. Rochelle was very concerned about her situation, particularly since her ma’am would not let her change employers, but also because she was not allowed out of the house without permission. In fact, Rochelle was never provided with a key, and had to ask her employer to let her out just to take out the garbage. Her ma’am confronted her at midnight one night because Rochelle had requested to the agency directly to transfer her to a different employer. The ma’am was so angry, she recalled: “My ma’am’s telling me she took a knife to her previous helper and waved it in her face. She said she would do the same to me. She punished me by making me wash the babies’ clothes till 2 am. So, at 5.40 am when they are asleep I run away. We are on the fifth floor, so I jump out the window and land on the second floor, then again jump down to the ground floor, but I break my ankle on that second jump. I finally made it back to the agency; a taxi driver gave me SG $5 for the MRT, but no-one else would help me. When I reached the agency the manager just shook her head and sighed, “Ai, Filipina. Just do your work and don’t complain””.

Introduction It is quite extraordinary to consider that despite the excessive attention women and girls have received within the emerging anti-trafficking movement in Singapore as described in Chaps. 2 and 3, so many female migrant labourers continue to be marginalised both within their sojourns in the city-state and within government infrastructures purported to extend legal

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protections to trafficked persons. The situation of Rochelle, introduced above, illustrates some of the key themes taken up in this chapter. Variegations of Rochelle’s situation with her employer are unfortunately commonplace in Singapore and exemplify the complexities of exploitation for migrant women in the private economy. Non-adherence to contracts, with additional duties or alterations to salary/debt arrangements often arbitrarily introduced, verbal and physical abuse, threats and degrading treatment, unrealistic expectations about work and rest time (and insinuations of laziness), and removal of freedom of movement are examined. Rochelle was also restricted in her use of her mobile phone; although she owned a mobile phone, her employer only allowed her to use it twice a month, whilst being supervised, and she had to sign a paper agreeing to the deduction of salary for the SIM card and call credit. As Chap. 4 revealed, despite the hundreds of cases of FDW abuse encountered by migrants rights NGOs in Singapore, and the detailed reports attesting to the types of conditions illustrated by Rochelle’s experience (see especially Wessels 2015; TWC2 and HOME 2017), there is still a reticence amongst the TIP Taskforce and cynicism amongst employment agencies and much of the general public about the claims of FDWs to being victims of trafficking. Chapter 4 examined this reticence in terms of the concept of elastic victimhood. This chapter provides a detailed description of the situations of migrant women and girls in two key sectors in Singapore: domestic service and the sex and nightlife entertainment sector. Consideration is given particularly to the complexities of migrant women’s situations drawing largely on women’s own narratives. It is suggested in the chapter that for migrant sexual labourers, sexual exploitation issues are often intertwined with, and even overshadowed by, problems relating to labour exploitation. For FDWs, such complexities are often also evident, as exemplified by Rochelle’s experience, where exploitation in private households is not singular in nature—confinement or abuse or financial exploitation—but rather has multiple and compounding elements (see also Yea and Chok 2018). Building on this observation about the complexities in women’s situations of exploitation in Singapore, the second part of the chapter examines the representation of these migrant women in the public, particularly print media domain. In doing this, I extend the argument made earlier in Chaps. 2 and 3 that women are either rendered highly visible by the state (and often by NGOs) within anti-trafficking frames or rendered invisible

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and obscured from it. Yet, those who are invisible in media and state representations of trafficking are nonetheless still made legible as subjects of highly sensationalist and often unethical reporting that is prefigured by a regime of truth around trafficking victimhood and exclusions from it, pitting women either as criminals/violators (particularly for migrant sexual labourers but also in some cases for FDWs) or as different (non-­ trafficking) types of claimants or victims. Thus, the neat dualistic conceptions of visibility/invisibility introduced in Chaps. 2 and 3 are further examined but also complicated in the chapter with some women and girls rendered as grievable life (cf. Butler 2009) through framing as victims of trafficking, and others continuing to be positioned as bare life, that is subjects to be managed through the various techniques and technologies of biopower in ways that deprive them of protections and render them (more) vulnerable. Discussions in the chapter, and for the male migrant labourers examined in Chap. 6, thus continue to draw on arguments about the politics of (in)visibility introduced in Chap. 3, particularly scholarship inspired by Judith Butler’s (2009) notion of a ‘grievable life’. To reiterate, in examining the discursive rendering of another group of highly vulnerable human rights claimants, namely refugees, several scholars have identified the pivotal role mobilising imaginaries of ‘crime’, ‘deviance’, ‘fraud’, and so on have for framing perceptions and prefiguring responses to those seeking asylum (Gorman 2017; Tazreiter 2015; Darling 2011). Geographers, in particular, have argued that the role of space in these framing processes is significant, with migrant subjects’ discursive construction shifting as they move, particularly if their mobility challenges normative modes of entry to a territory. As such, they move from being perceived through compassionate lenses as poor, hapless, and needy refugees suffering human rights abuses, to perceptions and responses based on criminality and opportunism, and driven by state security concerns. In reflecting on the relevance of such discussions for female migrant labourers in Singapore, we might argue that in the case of FDWs, public perception endorses their necessary presence and indispensable role in supporting Singaporean households whilst they ‘don’t cause trouble’, but once they run away from an employer or make a complaint to an NGO, a discursive shift occurs as they come to be seen as ‘troublemakers’, ‘ungrateful complainers’, and so on. Media reporting has an important role to play in bolstering such perceptions. For migrant sexual labourers, the division of women into ‘victims’ (to be rescued and rehabilitated) and ‘criminals’ (to be punished and removed) also

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re-frames complex trajectories and experiences into simplified and dichotomous categories and so the chapter analyses 20 print media stories reporting on migrant sexual labourers and 20 reporting on foreign domestic workers. But before examining media representations and their role in the discursive framing of, and elision from, victimhood in more detail, we turn first to explore the complex conditions that characterise many FDWs and migrant sexual labourers’ exploitation in Singapore.

Migrant Sexual Labourers in Singapore In Singapore, female migrant labourers are found in two sectors: the sex and nightlife entertainment sector and foreign domestic service. In the sex and nightlife sector, women come from a range of countries, including the Philippines, Peoples Republic of China (PRC), Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. Women from the Philippines, Bangladesh, and PRC are allowed by the government to legally work in Singapore as performing artists and can enter on a visa for this work, which has validity for six months and can be renewed for a further six months. All other women and girls enter on social visit passes (SVPs, or tourist visas) which have a validity of between two and four weeks and may be extendable for a further 2–4 weeks. Very little in the way of research has been conducted with migrant sex workers and entertainers in Singapore (for exceptions, see Yea 2014; Lainez 2017). The little research that has appeared points to a highly variegated and complex picture. There are significant numbers of trafficked women and girls amongst migrant sexual labourers, including women and girls who are completely duped about the nature of their work, women and girls who are aware that their work may involve mild forms of sexual labour undertaken by choice rather than through force, and those who are clear about the nature of their work as sexual labourers but are nonetheless duped about the conditions attached to that work, including numbers of clients and remuneration for clients serviced (Yea 2014). Lainez’s (2017) detailed ethnography of Vietnamese migrant sex workers in Singapore further reveals that voluntary migrant sex workers are often extremely organised in their migration, despite its informal nature, and this organisation is necessary to help safeguard women against exploitative working environments (though not always successfully). There are four principal types of venues where migrant (and local) women are deployed in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment indus-

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try. These are bars and nightclubs, on the street in and outside known commercial sex districts, in commercial sex district-based brothels (regulated and unregulated), and in forest-based brothels. Filipinas comprise the mainstay of women deployed in bars and nightclubs (including KTV bars), though there are increasing numbers of South Asian (especially Bangladeshi) and Vietnamese women also being deployed in these clubs. Indonesian women are deployed primarily in street-based prostitution along with women from a range of other nationalities (including Vietnamese women, mainland Chinese women, and South Asian women). Thai women are deployed primarily in forest brothels but also in regulated brothels in established prostitution districts. The majority of migrant women at all four sites enter Singapore on social visit passes, although in bars and nightclubs Performing Artist’s Visas (PAVs) are used to deploy women for hostessing and sex work. Foreign women in Singapore’s sex and entertainment sector experience various exploitative practices during their sojourns in Singapore. These are in addition to the mistreatment they often face whilst still in their home countries, which primarily takes the form of fraudulently extorted payments for migrating and which contributes greatly to their migration debt. Exploitation during and after the trafficking process includes financial, sexual, and labour. This is important to stress because much of the research on sex trafficking, for both Singapore and elsewhere, tends to suggest that the key—or only—site of exploitation women experience is forced sex. For the vast majority of migrant sexual labourers in Singapore, this characterisation simply does not hold. In this sense, then, the majority of victims depart to a greater or lesser degree from the ideal type established in Chaps. 2 and 3 and validated through governmental responses. The majority of the women I knew through my research disclosed that financial problems were a key dimension of their experience of exploitation in Singapore. These women worked in bars and clubs, and usually agreed to a salary amount payable per month, but did not receive either all or part of their salary for each month or, for some women, the entire duration of their employment. This was generally because they had to first pay off a debt incurred as part of their migration. Costs of living in Singapore (food, accommodation, utilities, transport) were also normally added to the debt. For many women, the initial amount they owed was further inflated through a system of arbitrary penalties if they ‘did something wrong’. This was the case for Rina (28 years, Filipina) and Myah (17 years, Indonesian), respectively. Rina recounted:

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I came to Singapore on a performing artist’s visa. I pay PHP 6000 to the recruiter in the Philippines and she told me that is for my ticket and escort once I arrive in Singapore. So, I come to Singapore and I found out that I shouldn’t have paid that PHP 6000 because I have another debt to my boss in Singapore. My debt to my boss is SGD 1500. I have to entertain customers and go on bar fines to pay the debt. If I do something wrong he [boss] gives me a penalty, so it is impossible to clear the debt. Also, he didn’t tell me that I have to provide my food, taxi to work. This is added to my debt so of course I can’t pay it off.

Myah similarly related that: When I am still in my hometown there are two guys and one girl and they said their boss asked them to find women and girls in the village to work in another country. They will handle all the costs and guarantee the job…. They offered me work in a cafe in Batam, but in fact we just stay one night in Batam and then they took me to Tanjung Pinang. From my hometown they took me by bus to Telaga Punggung harbour and then by boat to Tanjung Pinang. After the second day there they made me a passport so I can work in Malaysia or Singapore. I don’t know how much it costs for me to come to Singapore because my boss pays all the costs. In the beginning I don’t know I have a debt. I know it only when I’m in Tanjung Pinang on the sixth day. They said my debt is for all my costs of transport and the documents. They said at first that I could repay this debt by serving drinks as a waitress in a pub, but then they asked me to service the guest as a sex worker. They said if I don’t do that they will abandon me on an island. I don’t earn any money. Mami takes all the money that I’ve earned and she said she keeps it in the bank for me. She said after one year, when I pay my debt she will give me whatever is left.

Examining the Japanese and South Korean contexts, respectively, Parrenas (2012) and Yea (2015) also found that debt incurred during the migration process yokes migrant women entering on Performing Artists’ Visas to working situations where they experienced sexual exploitation in the context of their jobs. Mimi’s (26 years, Filipina) account of her situation in a bar in Singapore encapsulates the multiple channels through which women deployed in bars can experience financial exploitation in the context of their migration experience in Singapore, which includes their agency fee for the arrangement of the Performing Artist’s Visa, as well as these other costs. However, debt is also arbitrarily imposed upon arrival in Singapore

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and includes a whole swathe of deductions, penalties, fines, and additional costs that are entirely unanticipated by women. As Mimi recounted: After a few days I reported to my agent and I gave her PHP 10,000 to process my papers for an entertainer in Singapore… She told me my work permit would be processed once I was in Singapore. It takes three months and I have to exit to JB [Johor Bahru] for more than one month, so no salary then. Every time a girl runs away from that pub all the other girls have to pay a SGD 200 penalty each. My boss says, “It’s alright for the girls to run away because I collect all the penalties”. Our situation is this: no food allowance, no transportation to work; no fixed salary, we know already we need to pay rent and it will be deducted, no day off even though we are supposed to have one every Sunday. We have penalties which include if a girl runs away, or if we get tips from customers, or sometimes if we don’t make enough drink commission he takes away our cell phones. We have a quota for drink sales; if we don’t get customers to buy us fifteen drinks a night to fulfil our quota we have to stand in the doorway until 11 a.m. the next day and also pay a penalty. If we eat in the pub my boss says to us, “Don’t eat, you’ll get fat”. He deducts a penalty for that too.

In fact, the pub that Mimi was deployed in had been the subject of numerous complaints to the Singapore Police Force (SPF) by the Philippines Embassy, for various trafficking and labour-related issues, and at least 14 women had run away from that pub over the 18 months in 2013–2014 when I conducted my fieldwork. Every woman who participated in my research, whether deployed in entertainment venues or on the streets were told that they would have to first pay off a debt before they could receive income from their sexual labour and, as Mimi’s narrative illustrates, this was utilised as a key mechanism to deny these women their salaries, in both the short and longer term. Some women knew about their debt, whilst for others the debt either was not revealed to them until they reached Singapore or was inflated once they were in Singapore. Another of my Indonesian participants, Rani (24 years), said: I am a sex worker already in Batam, but my daily living is so high that I’m always in debt to my friends, so I agreed to come to Singapore. The mami who arranged my visit to Singapore agreed to help handle all my documents, passport, and travel costs to Singapore. For all these necessities I didn’t pay anything but my salary will be cut to settle the debt which is SGD

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1200. The mami [agent/ pimp] said that I can work for one month in Singapore, settle all my debt and make a lot of money on top. When I get to Singapore I must have a lot of guests just to clear my debt. The condition is ninety-five guests short time to clear the debt. I can’t really make any extra money at all.

Importantly, debt bondage—a key indicator of human trafficking and, as we shall see in Chap. 6, one that also characterises the migration circumstances of male migrant workers in Singapore—is used as a means to coerce women in most types of commercial sex venues in Singapore into performing sexual labour and/or performing it under conditions not previously agreed to, since women would only be ostensibly ‘free’ to earn money for themselves or leave their employer/agent once their debt was cleared. In other words, these debts had to be cleared before they were to be given any money from the sexual services they rendered whilst in Singapore. Only a smaller number of the women I knew deployed in the streets explained that they had not expected to work in the sex industry, or at all in Singapore, and were sold for sex under conditions where there was no promise of remuneration for their services by their pimp. These women were the types of victims more readily accepted for trafficking determinations (see Chap. 8) and more readily approximated the ideal-type victim described in Chaps. 2 and 3. As suggested above, debt bondage is a key inducement for women to perform commercial sexual labour under exploitative and often degrading conditions. This works in two ways. First, some women who had agreed to undertake sex work in Singapore are forced to do so under conditions which they did not expect or agree to previously. Second, and more commonly, women are forced to perform sexual labour instead of work they had agreed to. Joanne (24 years old, Filipina) said: My recruiter told me I would earn commissions for drink sales in a pub in Singapore. He didn’t ask me to pay any fee, because I paid all my costs to come myself. But when I got here [Singapore] I was told by my boss that I have to go out and look for customers for sex because I have to pay an utang. The amount is SGD 2500. The first night a Pinoy [Filipino] wanted to buy me on a bar fine but I refuse to go. When we got back to the house after work our minder left us alone, so I ran away. That is after just one night.

Myah (17 years, Indonesian), whose account of fraudulent recruitment and debt bondage was introduced above, was also clearly in this situation.

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She further expounded that, ‘If I wasn’t tricked I would never have become a sex worker. It is worse for me because I am really forced to do the bad things like oral and anal sex. I was asked to service three men at the same time, but I refuse it and I ran away from the inn’. The point here is that, for most women in my research, financial exploitation and debt bondage went hand in hand with sexual exploitation, which included not only forced sex but also excessive numbers of clients and degrading acts and conditions for performing sexual labour. Furthermore, I found that many of the women, especially those deployed in entertainment venues, were expected to perform various gradations of sexual labour, including erotic dancing, oral sex, and fondling. Those like Myah experienced repeated forced intercourse, while having to perform other sexual acts. Health concerns are strongly tied to experiences of sexual exploitation, and the women I knew cited three key concerns relating to their well-being. First, some said that they were not able to negotiate condom use with clients, even where their boss or pimp provided them with condoms. Ernie (17 years, Indonesian) said: I have many bad experiences with customers. Many of my customers want me to imitate the sex in the movies on TV. When I say I don’t want to do that they hit and kick me. I always ask my customer to use a condom, but they nearly all refuse. The customer demands that I do sex without the condom because they paid for me, so they can do whatever they like. Mami scolds me if I say something to the customer about the condom.

Myah also said, ‘Every time I want to pee it is always pain(ful) and after having sex sometimes I see the blood come out of my vagina, even though it is not my menstruation’. Some participants stated that many of their clients were violent and abusive before and during intercourse. These women were occasionally also physically or sexually abused by their bosses or pimps. Rhea stated that: In my case I’m beaten two times by my boss. The first time we have a lot of customers so my boss is happy and he starts to drink whiskey. He gets drunk and tries to tell me some story, but I don’t get it. So, I asked him if I could go home because I’m really tired and it’s late. He said “no” and then he slapped me and pushed me against the wall. He asked the bartender for scissors and then he cut my bra, panties and dress. So, I’m standing there naked and he makes me stand at the door till 9 a.m. He slapped me again the next day with the bottom of his sandals. Then he said to me if I do something

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wrong I always get a slap with his sandals and he said, “A person should be lucky to get slapped from my sandals because they are expensive”. Then he laughed. After that I thought I’m really wrong to come here in Singapore.

Syan (21 years, Indonesian) also had confronting and negative experiences of sexual violence in Singapore: I was offered a job in Singapore by a man who came to my workplace in Bandung. The job is supposed to be a waitress in a pub…. I never do sex work before I came to Singapore. In Singapore I have to look for clients on the street in Geylang. I have a lot of bad experiences of clients humiliating me. One time there were two guests at once, so I had to service two guests at the same time. Many times, I got a guest who cums [ejaculates] in my mouth. The guests are mainly from Singapore.

Finally, all the migrant sexual labourers who participated in my research without exception were denied decent food and living conditions, which led to poor health, including complaints of lethargy, depression, and fatigue. Although the Trafficking Protocol distinguishes between trafficking for labour exploitation and trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation—a distinction which the Singapore government has reiterated and transferred into their ‘whole of government approach’ to trafficking—in reality, these two forms of exploitation are intertwined as far as migrant sexual labourers in Singapore are concerned. Women deployed for exploitative sexual labour, especially in entertainment venues, are also expected to perform other duties, including cleaning and cooking. Apart from these additional duties, women are also required to work longer hours than initially agreed to, with the majority of participants working for upwards of 16 hours per day, 7 days a week. Women on entertainer’s visas see themselves as legitimate migrant workers, entering Singapore on a working visa, and many of their disputes arise from their labouring circumstances, and they do not always or necessarily frame their experiences as principally involving sexual exploitation. Such complexities also inhere to the experiences of FDWs, where, as Rochelle’s narrative introduced at the outset of the chapter suggests, women’s exploitation often traverses several parameters. Yet with the way Singapore’s anti-trafficking architecture has developed, it is virtually impossible to address this complexity. As Chap. 4 revealed, the Singapore government’s TIP Taskforce divides responses to ‘sex’, ‘labour’,

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and ‘organ’ trafficking amongst different ministries, thus rendering invisible the claims of women whose exploitation cross more than one particular classification. Moreover, women in the sex industry who do not enter Singapore on work visas (such as an entertainer’s visa) cannot make claims as victims of labour trafficking since they are not legally entitled to work in Singapore. They may be able to be considered as victims of sex trafficking but, as we shall see below, the regime of truth that underscores victim classifications in Singapore discursively act to exclude the vast majority of women exploited in the sex and nightlife entertainment sector from considerations of victimhood.

Foreign Domestic Workers The other key sector where migrant women are exploited and trafficked in Singapore is paid domestic work. This sector is open to foreign women 23 years of age and above from the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar, and (as a pilot) Cambodia. Foreign Domestic Workers (FDWs) are excluded from Singapore’s Employment Act because the nature of their work requires ‘unique’ conditions that depart from standard work arrangements in other sectors, including living with their employer, being on call 24 hours a day, and greater ‘flexibility’ in being on call to work. The fact that FDWs work (and live) in private residences of their employers means that their abuses are often well hidden, with limited freedom of movement and association often trapping women in exploitative working situations with little possibility of seeking assistance. Two NGOs have published reports detailing the situation of FDWs in Singapore. HOME (2013, 2019), as discussed in the previous chapter, published a report in 2013 based on a review of 150 cases that they had directly assisted, arguing that 96 per cent of these cases had experiences in Singapore which presented strong indications of human trafficking. They more recently published a report which drew on several cases of FDWs to argue that their experiences represented clear-cut cases of forced labour according to the ILO’s indicators of forced labour (see Chap. 4). TWC2 (2015) published a study which, although not foregrounding the situations of FDWs as trafficking, argued that these migrant women are especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in their work in Singapore due to the managed migration regime that creates situations of indentured migration and debt bondage, an argument many scholars have made in relation to migrant labourers in other contexts, such as the UK and Canada

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(e.g. Anderson 2010). Because FDWs are not allowed to legally change employer whilst in Singapore without the approval of their agency and release from their previous employer, these situations create opportunities for a range of abusive practices to continue. NGOs in Singapore that assist and support FDWs escaping abusive employment situations state that FDW clients face debt bondage; manipulation and non-payment of salary; physical, psychological, and sexual abuse; and accusations of crimes, such as theft. Rochelle’s experience exemplifies many of these problems. FDWs like migrant sexual labourers narrated a range of situations which coalesced around debt, coupled with psychological abuse and degradation. Others complained of excessive and unreasonable working hours and of being ‘on call’ for their boss 24 hours a day, of being deployed in multiple workplaces, including both other private residences and commercial establishments, and confinement or restrictions on their movements. But they differed with other problems related to their employment—and ostensibly their reasons for leaving their employer. Some women complained primarily of physical or sexual abuse by their employer, or more subtle acts of verbal and psychological abuse, including degrading and demeaning treatment. Some women’s grievances centred around docking of salary or of salary deductions from employers. Many of these complaints find resonance with those of migrant sexual labourers, though NGOs tend to present the exploitation or trafficking of migrant sexual labourers as principally located in episodes of sexual rather than labour exploitation. Grace (31 years, Filipina), like Rochelle, experienced significant departures from the conditions agreed to in her contract. In her case, the employer deployed her to clean in houses of three different family members and in two boarding houses they owned. After six months of working, her employer added another four units in Jurong, leaving Grace with the burden of cleaning ten dwellings. In the boarding houses, Grace was also asked to take care of the foreign students, including washing and ironing their clothes. Like Rochelle, Grace also was given no days off and was expected to complete an unrealistic load of duties, including cooking for the family at the original house where her employer resided. Coupled with Grace’s unrealistic workload and the excessive working hours such a load demanded, Grace was scolded and verbally abused by her ma’am and the family members at the other houses. After six months of working like this, verbal abuse turned physical. As Grace recounted:

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After six months my employer hit me on the face. She didn’t like the drink I prepared for her because it contained sugar. She began scolding me every day. I worked for two years and I can count the number of days I’m not scolded on one hand. I have to sleep on the floor of the kitchen; there’s no bed for me, no covers and no fan. I am awake and up at 5 am each morning otherwise I can’t get all the work done, but I am always tired from not sleeping well each night.

For Grace, as with many other FDWs, such situations produce both physical and psychological health problems. In Grace’s case, she recalled her plan to suicide by jumping from the balcony of one of the houses where she was deployed. As she stated, ‘After seven months I stared at the window one day and thought to jump. My friend saw me and she told me not to. I told her it is better to die than stay in this situation’. Apart from Grace’s work demands and the abuse and degradation she experienced at her employers’ and other relatives’ hands, Grace was also denied freedom of both movement and association: I’m like a prisoner. I cannot go outside to buy things, only together with her (her employer). I cannot go to speak with other Filipinas [in the neighbourhood]. If I am going to one of the other houses to clean, they either take me or let me walk. But if I’m not there is ten minutes they will call my ma’am. She (employer) only lets me use my cell phone on the weekend or at night to call my children. But how can I call when its already 10, 11, 12 o’clock at night when I finish my work?…. Even the newsletter for FDWs that comes every few months from MOM I am not allowed to read; my employer keeps it. They need to give me my freedom. If they are good to me and give me a day off every month its okay that I sleep on the floor. I need to work because my husband is unemployed and I’m the only one in the family to work.

Unlike Rochelle, who received very little of her promised salary, Grace received SG $350 a month after her period of deductions ended. But she was still subject to penalties for ‘mistakes’ in her work and deductions of food, such as being deducted SG $1–2 for cooking rice. Despite the stipulations of her contract, Grace was also responsible for purchasing her own food, such as noodles, bread, coffee, and soup. Because Grace did not hold a copy of her contract, she was unable to easily contest these things. Ultimately, Grace revealed that had she known the nature of her working and living situation in Singapore, she would never have agreed to migrate to Singapore as an FDW.

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Experiences such as those of Rochelle and Grace give an insight into the types of abuses perpetrated against FDWs, and similar situations have been widely documented for FDWs elsewhere in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In Singapore at least, exclusion from consideration under the Employment Act or Employment of Foreign Manpower Act has meant that access to redress for women is more difficult, with conditions often explained away as part and parcel of the nature of the private economy. Removal of freedom is often justified as in the best interest of the maid’s safety, salary deductions, and forced savings as a form of security for the employer against a maid running away (as are the withholding of ­documents), and even changes to the contract seen as not a form of deceptive recruitment but has part of the flexibility in work situations that employers and agencies cannot easily anticipate. Yet, there is very little justification for verbal and physical abuse and degrading and dehumanising treatment. Whilst physical and sexual abuse can sometimes lead to charges against employers’, verbal abuse, though pervasive and widespread, is almost never prosecuted. Thus, much like the experiences of the migrant sexual labourers, abuse and mistreatment of FDWs in Singapore, despite its entrenched nature, remain largely outside the parameters of anti-­trafficking, and even of basic protections offered by other laws. To understand why this is, discussion in the chapter turns now to more closely examine the discursive construction and distinction between migrant sexual labourers and maids, and of various situations with the sex and nightlife sector itself.

Media and the Perpetuation of (In)visibility An emerging strand of critique of anti-trafficking work focusing on representations of victims/migrants has made an important contribution to understanding the ways the media, NGO awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns, and government stakeholders can perpetuate essentialist and dichotomous depictions of migrant workers, particularly in the global sex industry (Andrijasevic and Mai 2016; Andrijasevic 2007; Doezema 2010). Much of this work has focused on the ways simplistic representations of (migrant) sex workers as all trafficked ‘sex slaves’ create and reinforce understandings of these women as powerless victims lacking agency and relying on others to rescue and rehabilitate them (Mai 2013). Further, in this process, the voluntariness of migrant sexual labourers is dismissed or downplayed (Anderson and O’Connell Davidson 2003).

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Chapters 2 and 3 introduced some of these representational frames and processes, with a particular focus on the ways a victim master narrative has become embedded in Singapore through the importation and local grounding of the sexually exploited female child frame. The chapters focused on the role of NGOs and student groups’ advocacy campaigns (Chap. 2) and film and documentaries (Chap. 3). The remainder of this chapter examines the ways migrant women and girls are depicted by the local print and online media in Singapore, often acting in conjunction with the state and especially in co-ordination with the police. There has been some attempt to examine the misrepresentation of trafficking victims and situations in the media in the United States (Austin and Farrell 2017), which found that, ‘Research on human trafficking frames in print media revealed that portrayals of human trafficking were for the most part oversimplified and inaccurate in terms of human trafficking being portrayed as innocent white female victims needing to be rescued from nefarious traffickers’ (p. 1). The discussion here draws particularly on critical work on the role of police raids in anti-trafficking efforts where media is also present to report. Research in other contexts, particularly the UK and the United States, has found that police attempt to turn all those rescued in raids and related activities, such as compliance checks, into victims of trafficking (Hill 2016) or focus almost entirely on women and children when rescuing victims, often to the exclusion of male victims and labour trafficking in sites outside the sex industry (Farrell and Pfeffer 2014). Whilst these suggestions have much relevance to the Singapore context, it is further suggested that in Singapore, the state also uses the media to perpetuate the divide between the ‘powerless victim’ and the ‘unworthy prostitute’ (Krsmanovic 2016), which fits with its overarching goal of ensuring the number of victims remains relatively small and where they are characterised in extremely narrow and stereotypical ways. Whilst the exclusion and disqualification of exploited migrants from trafficking determinations is taken up more fully in Chaps. 7 and 8, the discussion of images here supports a twofold argument. First, I argue that raids are a first step in perpetuating vulnerabilities for those deemed ‘voluntary’ and therefore not trafficked. Thus, the situations of migrant women in the sex and nightlife entertainment sector described in the first part of this chapter are often made worse through anti-trafficking interventions that leave them criminalised rather than supported (see also Soderlund 2005), with few options in between within such a dichotomous framework. The flipside of this is the rendering of female child victims as highly visible (as discussed

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in Chap. 2). Second, in relation to ‘sex trafficking’, it is argued that media draw on nationalist-purity discourses of ‘threat’ to the nation in their reporting of raids and subsequent ‘removal’ of women from Singaporean territory. To my knowledge, Annie Hill (2016) is the only scholar to have critically examined the relationship between the state and media in ‘staging a raid’. In her examination of anti-trafficking raids in the UK, Hill found that raids enabled the state to ‘amplify its anti-trafficking agenda’ by making its responses appear highly visible and, ostensibly, effective. As we saw in Chap. 4, this politics of visibility in anti-trafficking responses also involves a performative element played out in public forums in anti-­ trafficking run by the TIP Taskforce. Hill argues nonetheless that the ways raids are conducted belie the UK government’s commitment to implementing a ‘victim-centred’ approach to trafficking (something the Singapore government has also been at pains to emphasise as part of its approach to trafficking, see MOM 2016). Contrary to government pronouncements, raids, she concluded, ‘disregarded [women’s rights]… and the harm they experience’ (p. 39). Particularly harmful practices include the photographing of women’s faces, disclosing their full names and other personal information, and not providing women with basic supports post rescue. This last problem is something encountered in many diverse contexts as anti-trafficking government authorities often deny victims initially identified as trafficked with anti-trafficking support and protection interventions until further investigations confirm their victim status.1 In Singapore, vice raids on sex/entertainment venues are regularly conducted, often as part of broader vice operations. Until late 2015, these raids were concentrated in three key sites—forest brothels; KTV bars and massage parlours; and hotels and guesthouses in districts of known prostitution activity, such as Geylang, Little India, Joo Chiat, and Changi. In late 2015, the Singaporean government, through the implementation of a number of planning and zoning amendments, began cracking down on dubious entertainment establishments, particularly in Geylang, in an attempt to ‘clean the area up’ (The New Paper 2017). The re-zoning aimed particularly to increase the residential areas of Geylang with increased housing stock (The Straits Times 2015). However, rather than contributing to the reduction and eventual eradication of prostitution activities in the district, the re-zoning merely displaced them as brothel owners and pimps began shifting operations to the heartland suburbs of Singapore. Thus, whilst raids continued in Geylang and other districts

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with a substantial sex industry, operations commenced in new locations, such as the middle-class suburbs of Jurong, Woodlands, and Clementi where private dwellings, particularly condos and Housing and Development Board (HDB) apartments were targeted. In raids in both pre-existing prostitution areas and the new suburban locations, the media is often called on by the police to report the operations. Distilling the key visual and narrative tropes of the 20 articles on migrant sex worker raids analysed for this chapter, four themes emerged as prominent organising representations of migrant sexual labourers as perpetrators of immigration and employment-related crimes. First, and in relation particularly to the visuality of the media reports, women are depicted in ways that are meant to accentuate their criminality. Images that created this effect include women in handcuffs, scantily clad and in high-heeled shoes (supposedly indicative of clothes women in prostitution would normally wear), women seated next to ‘evidence’ such as condoms, being removed handcuffed from premises by police or lined up handcuffed against a wall, or, supposedly most incriminating of all, seated on a bed with their heads in hands or face covered by their hair and with other incriminating evidence in view, including mobile phones and laptops, by which liaisons with clients could be arranged (The Straits Times 2017a, b, 2018b, c). In addition to the incriminating impulse that runs through these highly stylised and staged images, three other aspects are noteworthy. First, men are largely absent from these media depictions, despite most reports indicating that male pimps and managers were also ‘arrested and charged’. One Straits Times image depicts only the five (foreign) women arrest on 8 March 2018 for immigration, employment, and drug-related offences, with the two men nowhere to be seen (The Straits Times, 8 March 2018). Another article reports that 134 women and two Vietnamese men were arrested with the image and headline only focusing on the women, with the men’s inclusion coming only in the drop-down text of the article, despite the fact that it was the two men who were responsible for organising the vice activities and recruiting the women via online social media forums (Asia Times 2018). This selectivity is perhaps in part driven by the desire of the media to present eroticised images of scantily clad women as hooks into the stories (see also O’Brien 2013). Third, an emphasis on numbers erases individual experiences and biographies and situates women as a ‘mass’, homogenising and flattening their experiences. All 20 articles analysed included the numbers of the women

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in their headlines, with ‘134 across the island’ being the largest group (Asia Times 2018). And whilst a significant critique of raids focuses on the ways photographing women’s faces compromises their rights to privacy and exposes them to possible harms (Hill 2016; Krsmanovic 2016), photographs of lines of faceless women sitting in the same pose and wearing the same types of clothes have the potential, conversely, to de-humanise the subjects and render them nameless traces of the same criminal profile. Fourth, the articles’ use of language to describe the raids and their outcomes is significant because it is suggestive of deviance, allusion, and intent to defraud the state. The use of the terms ‘netted’ and ‘nabbed’ are particularly prevalent in the articles and are substituted for the term ‘rescue’, which is conversely used to describe anti-trafficking operations. ‘11 women were nabbed in police raids on unlicensed massage parlours’ on 14 December 2017 (The Straits Times 2017e), ‘8 women nabbed in Hougang and Kovan vice raids’ on 27 October 2016 (The Straits Times 2016), ‘17 women nabbed during latest anti-vice raids’ on 29 June 2018 (Today On-line 2018a, b), and so on (see also The Straits Times 2017b). As with the other articles analysed, the iteration of numbers discussed above is also evident here. A final discursive trope that emerges from the analysis is nationalising in its impulse and concerns the preservation of the ‘purity’ of the nation through the capture and removal of contaminating criminal elements. Whilst others have demonstrated the ways that nationalist/citizen discourses are invoked in the removal of both unwanted migrant workers (Szorenyi 2016) and refugees (Tazreiter 2015), migrant women in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment sector specifically compound these logics of contamination/removal with the addition of discourses of (national) anxiety centred on morality and sexual deviance in relation to the family and home space specifically. Such discourses constitute a palpable theme in the media’s reporting, particularly in relation to the thread of reporting that identifies threats to the heartlands of Singapore after the re-zoning of Geylang dispersed many of the sex industry businesses based there. Several Straits Times articles (2017d, e) focus on raids carried out in suburban locations (e.g. after the effects of the re-zoning of Geylang) and carry the suggestion that foreign women are invading safe, Singaporean domestic spaces of HDB blocks. One such article focuses on three PRC women arrested in a Jurong HDB, with residents interviewed stating that ‘they often saw strangers pacing the corridor outside the unit, and they were glad the women were arrested’ (p. 2). A similar suggestion was made

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in other articles, including one reporting on raids in several residential areas around Singapore (Asia Times 2018), and another which interviewed ‘heartland’ residents in Boon Lay (Yahoo News 2018). The residents in the collective expressed concern about exposure of children and families to immoral activities possibly taking place in massage parlours: One shopper there, a 54-year-old insurance agent and father of two who only wanted to be known as Mr Lee, expressed disbelief when told of the number of massage parlours in the mall. “I’m surprised that there are that many (massage parlours). I’ll be worried for my children if they were to walk past there… I don’t see a need to have so many parlours in this place”, he told. Yahoo News Singapore

Besides the ‘heartlands’ issue, a related nationalising discourse of the media articles concerns headlines and text that present the impression that foreigners are the root cause of vice-related activities in the sex and nightlife entertainment industry, with Singaporeans either excluded or presented as only involved when acting in concert with (and presumably under the influence of) foreign nationals. All the articles analysed listed the nationalities of the women arrested for engaging in prostitution, including the prominent racial groups of PRC, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Filipino women. For those organising vice-related activities, such as pimping or running an unlicensed brothel, the emphasis in media reporting was either on the key role played by a foreign national in assisting a Singaporean to realise vice-related activities related to prostitution or on the primacy of a foreign national influencing his/her partner to engage in such activities. In the former case, the invocation of a Pinoy (Filipino) bar manager illustrates this strategy: By paying a Lucky Plaza pub $300, customers could take any one of its female performing artistes out for a five-hour sex session. They would pay the pub’s cashier Mitra Lino Jr Alvarez, a district court heard yesterday. The Filipino man, 38, who worked at Ok Kalang Pinoy Pub, was fined $2,000 for helping its Singaporean licensee Omar Kasmuri, 49, with vice-related activities. Omar’s girlfriend, Elena Medalya Alvarez Ma, 50, is Alvarez’s mother. She helped in managing the pub. (The Sammyboy Times 2018)

In this reporting, the Pinoy barman was privileged as the key instigator of the crimes, along with his mother, who was also the pub owner’s girl-

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friend, with the Singaporean pub owner’s role less prominently reported by the piece. Representations of Maids as the Abused and the Abusers Several published studies have analysed media representations of transient migrant labourers apart from sexual labourers for other contexts, including Canada (Bauder 2005, 2008), Spain (Suarez-Navaz 2007) and California (1996), with each of these studies demonstrating the ways media constructions frame migrant labourers in ways that justify or ­legitimise policies and positions that reinforce their powerlessness and transience. In Bauder’s (2008) study of offshore farm workers in Canada, for example, he argues that these workers are portrayed by the press as, ‘valuable economic resources, and as skilled agricultural labour; but also as a social problem and potential criminals; employing them is depicted as a means of providing assistance to poor families in the global south. Taken together, these narratives constitute a powerful discourse that legitimises the exploitative practices of the offshore program’ (p. 101). Foreign domestic helpers are similarly subject to media depictions that produce or at least reinforce particular legal and policy ‘truth effects’, with media reporting situating them largely outside a trafficking framework in Singapore and, in the process, contributing to the representation of exploitation of maids either as isolated and shocking instances relating to ‘abuse’ or as ‘criminals’ wilfully deceiving their employers through calculating and shrew acts such as theft or engaging in work outside their employer’s household. Three tropes appear repeatedly in media reporting of maids in Singapore. On the one hand are abuses to which maids are subject (usually at the hands of their employer) and suicide and selfharms by maids. On the other are reports of murders, thefts, and abuses inflicted by maids. In these framing processes, the former frames situate maids as hapless victims of ‘bad’ employers, whilst the latter positions maids as ruthless, calculating, and inhumane deviants. What I wish to highlight in analysing these constructions is that, despite their opposing nature, they are united in their positioning of maids (as) problems outside a labour exploitation frame. Of the 20 newspaper articles carrying stories of maids analysed for this chapter, none mentioned either human trafficking or labour justice as a means of addressing the harms to which the women were subject in Singapore. This, of course, reinforces the pronouncements of members of the TIP Taskforce given in media state-

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ments and public forums on human trafficking that maids’ ‘problems’ are better addressed through the provisions of other legislative mechanisms and that they do not constitute cases of trafficking (in Chap. 4, some of these statements were recounted). In this sense, whilst the articles position maids through two strongly opposing frames, in neither case are maids as a group of migrant workers rendered recognisable according to the master narrative of human trafficking established in the 2010s, as we shall now see. Maids as victims of abuse is a repeated theme in the media reporting of maid issues in Singapore and a large number of media reports focus on this concern. The story ‘Myanmar maid recounts incidents of abuse by Singaporean couple’ (Yahoo News 2017), related the story of horrendous abuses suffered by a maid at the hands of her Chinese-Singaporean employer and his wife. The reporting of this case included details of physical and verbal abuse suffered by the maid, surveillance through CCTV cameras, restrictions on food intake and toilet breaks, 5.5 hours rest time a night only (from midnight till 5.30 a.m.), and removal of freedom of movement. The employers, it was reported, faced either two years imprisonment or SG $5000 in fines for ‘purposely causing harm’ in a decision by the District Court. Both the husband and wife were granted bail of SG $5000 each. The reporting and legal response to the case elides both questions of labour exploitation or the links between situations of abuse, surveillance, and confinement and labour exploitation, even though the case fulfils the definition of labour trafficking established by the ILO (2009). According to the ILO, the case of the Myanmar maid meets the minimum indicators for investigation of the case as labour trafficking, including excessive working days or hours, confiscation of documents, isolation, confinement or surveillance (all strong indicators of labour trafficking), bad living conditions, very bad working conditions, and threats of violence against the victim (all medium indicators of trafficking). Nor was any mention of the fate of the maid post-court, despite the common situation where migrant workers involved in legal proceedings are normally deported, and in many cases with yet unrepaid migration debts.2 Several articles carry stories of maids who have self-harmed or attempted/committed suicide, with these stories only rarely drawing a link with the theme of abuse discussed above. ‘Domestic helper allegedly attempts suicide from 8th floor of Choa Chu Kang HDB block’ (The Independent 2018) reports the case of an Indonesian maid who climbed

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out of the eighth-storey window of the apartment where she worked in an apparent suicide attempt, before being rescued by the Singapore Civil Defence Force. No mention was made of the motivations for the suicide attempt, with reporting simply stating, ‘we really don’t know what drove this maid to take this extreme course of action’. Thus, whilst the tragedy of such cases becomes a media spectacle, the migration and deployment situations that are often at the heart of such attempts (Human Rights Watch 2005) remain unacknowledged in such reporting.3 Contrary to the sensational, but individualised, stories of abuse suffered by maids at the hands of employers, the vast majority of media stories focus on abuses inflicted by rather than on maids. The plethora of media articles dealing with murder and other forms of violence heavily outweigh those discussed above: ‘Maid in Singapore jailed for hurting baby with knife’ (Channel News Asia 2016),4 ‘Maid charged with murder of 70-year-­ old woman at Cho Chua Kang flat’ (Channel News Asia 2018), ‘Maid Kills Employer in Singapore for Nagging Too Much’ (The Straits Times 2018a). These and similar stories depict maids as of questionable mental health and advise of the need for better checks on the mental health of maids to be introduced to avoid such tragedies. In other words, the suggestion is conveyed that the mental health issues of maids are pre-existing and that their employment situations in Singapore are not likely to have contributed to outbursts of violence against employers or that maids were pre-disposed to violence, with their employment situations perhaps, at best, providing only a catalyst. Functioning in a similar way as the media depiction of migrant sexual labourers as threats to the fabric of Singapore’s heartlands, the violence and deviance of maids appear as a threat to the integrity and safety of the Singaporean family. The theme of threats maids potentially pose to the Singaporean family and values is further extended in stories of maids who have either lied or stolen from their employers or engage in other salubrious activities, such as having affairs. One such story concerns an Indonesian maid who was jailed for a year for stealing SG $41,000 from her employer’s 76-year-old wife (Today 2018). The Today’s reporting of the crime emphasised its pre-meditated nature and the breach of trust it represented: Citing several aggravating factors, DPP Lim said Eka [the convicted maid] had committed a serious breach of trust. “Domestic helpers form a very integral part of the Singapore family nucleus—they are given heavy responsibilities and a lot of trust, as the reside in their employer’s house and have

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access to their belongings”, he added. In sentencing Eka, “District Judge Hamidah Ibrahim noted that her crimes were deliberate and planned”.

Thus, maids are commonly depicted as lacking integrity and values which cast suspicion on their character. This is a considerable source of anxiety because of the central place and roles maids have in Singaporean homes. The website ‘theAsianparentSingapore’ (no date) re-reports many of these types of stories, with a key thrust of the discussion on the site advice on ways to ensure a ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’ maid is selected for employment. Embedding these anxieties in the popular imaginary is an effective way of ensuring discussion continues to be diverted away from FDWs’ labour issues, including where they may contain elements of trafficking. In sum, maids emerge in the Singaporean media through dichotomous lenses; on the one hand, as hapless victims of abuse, and on the other as perpetrators of abuse or other deviant activities. Whilst these two depictions may appear as entirely opposing, I have tried to suggest that they are related to the extent that they both produce the effect of situating ‘FDW issues’ as beyond the frame of human trafficking specifically and of labour exploitation more broadly. This is particularly the case in media reportage of abuses suffered by maids, which elide labour problems (debt bondage, fines, and salary reductions; changed conditions of salary payment; surveillance in the workplace; removal of freedom; and so on) and instead focus on aspects of maids’ experiences that confirm isolated tales of physical and psychological mistreatment. The resultant legal responses are also highly reported by the media, but again centre on fines and jail terms for mistreatment by errant employers or, in rare cases, the Singaporean agency deploying the maid. No further mention of outcomes for the maid herself, particularly remedial justice for labour exploitation, is normally made in the reporting. The reporting of abuses inflicted by maids or other crimes that demonstrate the threat that maids can pose to Singaporean values result in a general portrayal of (some) maids as pre-disposed to deviance. The outcome of such depictions is a wariness of maids, to be minimised by employers engaging in careful selection of their maid(s) in order to avoid inherently ‘bad’ maids. Thus, although understood as crucial for the Singaporean economy—and therefore viewed in much the same way as the male Work Permit holders considered in the next chapter—the labour/migration regime that defines their sojourns in Singapore is nonetheless legitimised and, as the media’s framing demonstrates, not open to question.

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Conclusion This chapter has examined the multiple forms of exploitation migrant sexual labourers and FDWs experience in their labouring in Singapore. The exploitative situations FDWs and migrant sexual labourers often find themselves in during their contracts in Singapore involve a wide range of practices, from confinement to physical and sexual abuse to non-payment of salary and debt bondage, amongst others. To complement the studies of these circumstances for Singapore is a burgeoning literature documenting similar practices in both Asia and elsewhere and, at the risk of doing an injustice to a rich and informative body of work, it would be reasonable to conclude that legal contractual exclusion coupled with their location in the private space of the household render FDWs particularly vulnerable to labour rights violations and other abuses. Yoked to a substantial migration debt, which is repaid through excessively high and protracted salary deductions, makes exit from unscrupulous employers a risky and uncertain option. For migrant sexual labourers, debt also figures as a constraining factor for women to leave exploitative labouring situations in Singapore. Labour and immigration rights and restrictions have been argued to further entrench FDWs in situations of unfreedom by restricting both their geographical mobility and labour market mobility (Bakan and Stasiulus 2012), a point also made by NGOs and also made in relation to male migrant workers. The anti-trafficking framework adopted by the Singaporean government is arguably poorly placed to deal with such complexities in trafficking indicators or causes, since it privileges classification through reductive sorting of migrant women—into trafficked or not trafficked, into labour trafficked or sex trafficked categories, and so on (a theme taken up more extensively in Chap. 8). Migrant women and girls labouring in Singapore’s sex and nightlife industry also present a complex portrait. On the one hand, women (and very occasionally girls) become unwitting objects of public disdain and government legal retribution when they are ‘netted’ during raids on bars, brothels, and other suspect venues. On the other hand, some women and, not incidentally, a greater number of girls are ‘rescued’ (also the descriptor most commonly employed by the media), at which point they enter a complex set of relationships to the state’s—and sometimes NGOs—anti-­trafficking protections. The representation of migrant sexual labourers caught up in police raids is strategically dichotomous, ren-

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dering some women unworthy prostitutes and others deserving victims, with materialities and subjectivities resulting from this process often having profound effects on women’s trajectories. Similarly, state-media depictions and subsequent treatment of FDW cases in Singapore can foreclose some options for women, whilst only allowing certain others. In this sense, representations engender ‘regimes of truth’ which have significant impacts on policy and other responses to victims, enabling some responses, whilst disallowing others. For women who are not identified as victims of trafficking through raids, and particularly where raids are vice rather than rescue operations, women are normally criminalised, producing palpable immigration/criminal outcomes. Women are either jailed or, more commonly, placed on a Special Pass Visa5 with impending and imminent deportation to follow. Much like the migrant fishers considered in the next chapter, the resources of the state are not brought to bear in these deportation processes and women must find money to finance their passage home themselves. Thus, Special Passes produce new vulnerabilities for migrant sexual labourers and maids since women are to remain in Singapore for the term specified on their pass but without attendant social support or work rights. This kind of treatment reinforces existing (financial, health, sexual) vulnerabilities of women. For migrant sexual labourer, it often means they have little option but to return to sex work—or continuing sex work under degrading conditions—in order to survive for the duration of their stay in Singapore. In addition to the harms commonly identified for migrant sexual labourers—trafficked or not—the visa regime in Singapore therefore constitutes an additional concern. Viewing anti-trafficking as a discursive formation resting on a particular victim frame and invoking legal-pragmatic limits offers another way to view the success and failure of anti-trafficking efforts in any particular context. In other words, rather than seeing anti-trafficking as a failure of implementation (e.g. poor implementation or lack of capacity to investigate) and therefore as a technocratic issue, we may instead see anti-­ trafficking as a framework which is prefigured and undergird by the mobilisation of imaginaries that are at once racialised, gendered, and classed. This suggestion is carried through to discussion in the next chapter, which focuses on the experiences of male migrant labourers and the elision of their experiences of labour exploitation from a human trafficking frame.

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Notes 1. In Singapore, the TIP Taskforce also withholds protections for victims initially identified until further investigations can substantiate their claims as victims of trafficking. NGOs, particularly HOME, have claimed this situation is inadequate because NGOs must shelter and provide other basic supports for victims, often for weeks or months, whilst the Taskforce makes its final determination. This stretches already overwrought capacity of NGOs (personal communication, representative of HOME, 15 September 2015). 2. To demonstrate the thematic continuity, I briefly introduce another story of an abused maid here. ‘Maid reportedly only given instant noodles to eat for over a year’ (The Straits Times DATE?). This story also reported that the Filipina maid in question was not allowed to use hot water to shower and was not allowed outside her employer’s apartment. The woman sought refuge at HOME after escaping from her employer, and HOME reported that the maid was also not paid correctly and fined as a form of punishment for supposed infringements of house rules or for not doing her duties correctly (personal communication, HOME representative). 3. The Singapore government has constantly criticised Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) reporting of human rights abuses in Singapore, including of maids. The Singapore government is now considering new laws to prosecute ‘fake news’ and biased and untruthful statements about Singapore, though HRW argues this could severely curb freedom of speech, especially in a country like Singapore, which currently ranks extremely poorly on the World Press Freedom Index. See AFP (2018). ‘Human Rights Watch “biased” and “untruthful”: Singapore’. 23 March. Available at: https://i.dailymail.co.uk (Accessed 29 August 2018). 4. Of the 20 articles analysed for this chapter, 5 focused on the abuse of Singaporean children by FDWs, including The Straits Times (2018). ‘Maid jailed 9 months for abusing baby boy’. Available at: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/maid-jailed-9-months-for-abusingbaby-boy (Accessed 3 September 2018), Yahoo New (2018). ‘Maid who bit 6-month-old-baby twice jailed 10 weeks’. Available at: https://sg.news. yahoo.com/maid-bit-6-month-old-baby-twice-jailed-10weeks-044540002.html (Accessed 3 September 2018), Asia Times (2018), ‘Caregiver arrested after CCTV shows her beating little girls’ (Asia Times 2018). Available at: http://www.atimes.com/article/caregiver-arrestedafter-cctv-shows-her-beating-little-girls/, and The New Paper (2015). ‘Maid jailed two weeks for hurting baby in Toa Payoh flat’. Available at: https://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore-news/maid-jailed-two-weeks-hurting-baby-toa-payoh-flat (Accessed 3 September 2018).

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5. A Special Pass is a visa status in Singapore and is normally conferred to migrant workers who are held in Singapore for the purposes of an investigation or case resolution (in the medium to long term) or who are held until they can raise funds to finance the cost of their return to their home country (in the short term).

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Darling, J. (2011). Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation. Political Geography, 30, 263–271. Doezema, J. (2010). Sex slaves and discourse masters: The construction of trafficking. London: Zed Books. Farrell, A., & Pfeffer, R. (2014). Policing human trafficking: Cultural blinders and organisational barriers. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 653(1), 46–64. Gorman, C. S. (2017). Redefining refugees: Interpretive control and the bordering work of legal categorisation in U.S.  Asylum law. Political Geography, 58, 36–45. Hill, A. (2016). How to stage a raid: Police, media and the master narrative of trafficking. Anti-trafficking Review, (7), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.14197/ atr.20121773. HOME. (2013). FDW trafficking research report. Retrieved March 29, 2018, from http://www.home.org.sg/library/research/. HOME. (2019). Behind closed doors: Forced labour in the domestic work sector in Singapore. Singapore: HOME. Human Rights Watch. (2005). Maid in Singapore. New York: HRW. ILO. (2009). ILO indicators of forced labour. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/publications/ WCMS_203832/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. Krsmanovic, E. (2016). Captured ‘realities’ of human trafficking: Analysis of photographs illustrating stories on trafficking into the sex industry in Serbian media. Anti-trafficking Review, (7), 139–160. https://doi.org/10.14197/ atr.20121778. Lainez, N. (2017). Social structure, relationships and reproduction in quasi-family networks: Brokering circular migration of Vietnamese sex workers in Singapore. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691 83X.2017.1417028. Mai, N. (2013). Embedded cosmopolitanisms: The subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry. Gender, Place and Culture, 20(1), 107–124. MOM. (2016). National approach to trafficking in persons. Singapore: MOM. Retrieved June 29, 2018, from http://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/ press-releases/2016/0310-launch-of-singapores-new-nationalapproach-against-trafficking-in-persons. O’Brien, E. (2013). Ideal victims in human trafficking awareness campaigns. In K. Carrington, E. O’Brian, & J. Tauri (Eds.), Crime, justice and social democracy: International perspectives (pp. 315–326). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Parrenas, R. (2012). The indentured mobility of migrant women: How gendered protectionist laws lead hostesses to forced sexual labour. Journal of Workplace Rights, 15(3), 327–339. Soderlund, G. (2005). Running from the rescuers: New US crusades against sex trafficking and the rhetoric of abolition. NWSA Journal, 17(3), 64–87.

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Suarez-Navaz, L. (2007). Immigration and the politics of space allocations in rural Spain: The case of Andalusia. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 34(2), 207–239. Szorenyi, A. (2016). Expelling slavery from the nation: Representations of labour exploitation in Australia’s supply chain. Anti-trafficking Review, (7), 79–86. https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.20121775. Tazreiter, C. (2015). Lifeboat politics in the Pacific: Affect and the ripples and shimmers of a migrant saturated future. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 99–107. The Independent. (2018). Domestic helper allegedly attempts suicide from 8th floor of Choa Chu Kang HDB block. Retrieved August 31, 2018, from http:// theindependent.sg/domestic-helper-allegedly-attempts-suicide-from-8thfloor-of-choa-chu-kang-hdb-block/. The New Paper. (2017, July 17). Increased policing of prostitution helps Geylang clean up its act. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from http://stomp.straitstimes. com/singapore-seen/increased-policing-of-prostitution-helping-geylangclean-up-its-act. The Sammyboy Times. (2018). Pub cashier fined for helping with vice-related activities. Retrieved June 29, 2018, from https://www.sammyboy.com/ threads/pinoy-pub-talents-arrested-at-lucky-plaza.252937/. The Straits Times. (2015, January 17). Geylang re-zoning may raise condo values. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/business/interactive-geylang-re-zoning-may-raise-condo-values. The Straits Times. (2016). 8 women nabbed in Hougang and Kovan vice raids. Retrieved June 29, 2018, from http://stomp.straitstimes.com/singaporeseen/courts-crime/eight-women-nabbed-in-hougang-and-kovan-vice-raids. The Straits Times. (2017a). 99 women arrested islandwide for vice activities in 4-day operation. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes. com/singapore/courts-crime/99-women-arrested-islandwide-for-viceactivities. The Straits Times. (2017b). Suspected sex workers nabbed in hotel raid. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/ suspected-sex-workers-nabbed-in-hotel-raid. The Straits Times. (2017d). 3 foreign women arrested for offering sexual services in Jurong West HDB ‘brothel’. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from http://www. straitstimes.com/singapore/3-foreign-women-arrested-for-offering-sexual-services. The Straits Times. (2017e). 11 women nabbed in police raids on unlicensed massage parlours. Retrieved June 29, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/ singapore/courts-crime/11-women-nabbed-in-police-raids-on-unlicensedmassage-parlours. The Straits Times. (2018a, April 23). 15 years jail for maid who killed employer by stabbing her in the throat. The Straits Times. Retrieved August 23, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/15-years-jailfor-maid-who-killed-elderly-employer-by-stabbing-her-in-the.

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The Straits Times. (2018b). 6 women arrested, 7 massage parlours raided in police operation. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/6-women-arrested-7-massage-parlours-raided-in-policeoperation. The Straits Times. (2018c, March 8). 5 women, 2 men from public entertainment outlets arrested for drug-related, immigration offences. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/5-women2-men-from-public-entertainment-outlets-arrested-for-employment-drug. Today. (2018). Life as a Singapore domestic maid’s employer: Managing a live-in domestic helper (FDW) and raising a special needs child. Retrieved March 22, 2019, from https://maid-employer.blogspot.com/2017/02/indonesianmaid-fdw.html. Today On-line. (2018a). 17 women nabbed during latest anti-vice raids. Retrieved June 29, 2018, from https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/17-womennabbed-during-latest-anti-vice-raids. Today On-line. (2018b). Maid jailed one year for stealing S$41,000 from elderly employer. Retrieved from https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/maidjailed-one-year-stealing-s41000-elderly-employer. TWC2. (2015). The right to rest. TWC2: Singapore. Retrieved August 20, 2017, from https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2015/06/12/twc2-59-of-foreigndomestic-workers-do-not-get-a-weekly-day-off/. TWC2 & HOME. (2017, October). CEDAW shadow report for Singapore. HOME: Singapore. Retrieved August 16, 2018, from http://twc2.org.sg/ wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cedaw_Singapore_2017_TWC2HOME.pdf. Yahoo News. (2017, September 25). Myanmar maid recounts incidents of abuse by Singaporean couple. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from https://sg.news.yahoo. c o m / m y a n m a r- m a i d - r e c o u n t s - i n c i d e n t s - a b u s e - s i n g a p o r e a n - c o u ple-114719067.html. Yahoo News. (2018, January 12). More than 90 people arrested for prostitution activities in raids across Singapore. Retrieved September 16, 2018, from https://sg.news.yahoo.com/90-people-arrested-prostitution-activities-raidsacross-singapore-111426112.html. Yea, S. (2014). Social visits and special passes: The exploitation of migrant women and girls in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment sector. Singapore: Franciscan Mission of Mary. Yea, S. (2015). Trafficked enough? Missing bodies, migrant labour exploitation and the classification of trafficking victims in Singapore. Antipode, 47(4), 1080–1100. Yea, S., & Chok, S. (2018). Unfreedom unbound: Developing a cumulative approach to understanding unfree labour in Singapore. Work, Employment and Society, 32(5), 925–941.

CHAPTER 6

(Un)identified Men and Labour Exploitation

Excerpt from Research Notes on Hussain (11 October 2015): Hussain is 21 years old, from Comilla in Bangladesh. He came to Singapore in June 2013 to work as a cleaner, even though the company employing him was a landscaping company. Hussain paid SG $10,500 fees back in Bangladesh for the chance to work in Singapore, having been told by the recruiter that he would be working for a good company and earning $1200 per month. However, upon arrival he was taken to the bin centre of a HDB Block in Clementi and told that he would be sleeping there with seven other Bangladesh men and his salary would be a flat $500 per month with no overtime and no days off. He confessed that he began crying as he despaired about what to do. After deserting his workplace to complain to MOM a few months later he was put on a Special Pass, but was unable to find a temporary job after nine months of trying. He was forced to take illegal work just to meet his debt repayments back home and support his family. Unfortunately for Hussain, he was caught by the police for working without a permit and told he would shortly be deported. I had pleaded for the determination of Hussain’s case (for working illegally) to be re-considered in light of the deception and exploitation that characterised his recruitment and deployment in Singapore. Nonetheless Hussain was indeed deported from Singapore in September 2014 with none of his migration debt repaid and blacklisted from returning to Singapore for one year because of his illegal work incident. He has a young wife, whom he had married just a few months prior to migrating to Singapore. SG $1000 was given to Hussain from the ‘suitcase fund’—a special fund developed by two volunteers for one of Singapore’s migrant worker NGOs—to ease the burden of his failed return home. I heard from his friends in Singapore that he

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Yea, Paved with Good Intentions?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_6

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and his wife left their home in Comilla and migrated to Dhaka in search of work. Hussain finally found a job in a cosmetics factory on the outskirts of the capital, where he earned around US$150 per month. His friends disclosed that they thought he went to Dhaka mainly because of the unpaid debt and the difficulties it was bringing for his family as they were hounded by constant visits and threats from the creditor.

Introduction The dominant discourses and key tropes associated with female/child sexual slavery that have come to preoccupy the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore, as elsewhere, have a number of effects, including the exclusion or de-emphasising of men and boys as possible victims and of trafficking for labour exploitation. The story of Hussain’s failed migration to Singapore is by no means a unique one for low-valued labour migrants to the city-state, and although cases of human trafficking vary widely by ­gender, sector, and the specific employer and agent involved, Hussain’s case draws attention to some crucial issues surrounding the interstices between trafficking victimhood, labour migration, and the discursive construction and exclusion of potential victims taken up in this book. Foremost, his experience is significant for its absence from the emerging anti-trafficking discourses introduced in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4. The push to recognise the prevalence of men and boys as victims of labour trafficking and to recognise labour trafficking more generally against the prevailing understandings of trafficking as a problem largely associated with women and girls in the sex industry (as indeed has occurred in Singapore) has received a significant boost over the past few years. This stimulus has occurred under the advocacy of organisations like the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and International Organisation for Migration (IOM), as well as within academia (Ford et al. 2012).1 Nonetheless, dislodging the normative reading of the human trafficking landscape in Singapore, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as one where female ‘sex slaves’ figure as the penultimate victims is, as Hussain’s trajectory reveals, exceedingly challenging at best. Beyond this, Hussain’s experience is worthy of our further reflection because of what it tells us about the ways (mis)classifications profoundly affect migrant trajectories and futures and because of what it reveals about how political interests can frustrate efforts to both identify and support those who have experienced deceptive recruitment and hyperexploitation in Singapore. In other words, although the experiences of

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Hussain and others like him—as well as many of the women whose experiences were discussed in the previous chapter—sit largely outside the discursive formation of anti-trafficking in Singapore, they are still formed largely through these very discourses. This chapter provides a thick description of the experiences of men who are deployed in exploitative work in or through Singapore. Men’s experiences of exploitation are discussed in detail in the first half of the chapter, whilst discussion in the latter half distils these experiences to gauge the precise ways they are discursively re-framed, largely through the media’s role, as beyond the reach of the state’s anti-trafficking architecture. This discussion thus builds on the suggestion made in Chap. 4—and further expounded in Chap. 5 where migrant women are discussed—that one of the ways male migrant workers are excluded from trafficking victimhood is through the discursive re-inscription of their experiences through the media. Since the PHTA was passed in late 2014 no case of labour trafficking involving a male victim has been tried in a Singaporean court. There is no dedicated shelter or accommodation for men whose experiences constitute severe labour exploitation, whether there is a suggestion of trafficking or not. Men whose claims are deemed ‘labour issues’ are, at best, provided a bed in a dormitory which houses actively employed foreign workmen or, at worst, are told they must fend for themselves in finding a place to sleep and food to eat. Rebecca Surtees (2008) has argued elsewhere that the experiences of male victims of trafficking, and the ways men process and come to terms with experiences of extreme labour exploitation, should not be ‘read off’ from assumptions made about female victims (for whom, in fact, many prevailing assumptions can also be held open to question). Frames of masculinity, including men’s positions in their families, home communities, and as migrant workers, can have a profound effect on the ways men engage with both labour exploitation and human trafficking. As Surtees suggests, the concept of victimhood may sit awkwardly for men (as well as many women) because it can imply powerlessness and lack of control and agency. These concerns can intersect with traditional concepts of masculinity: ‘While there are many variations on the concept of masculinity within and between cultures, it is nonetheless possible to generalize male behavioural norms within a given society, commonly known as “hegemonic masculinity”. Hegemonic masculinity in many social and cultural environments requires men to be strong, stoic, and self-sufficient. Men are commonly viewed as the breadwinner and/or the household head; the

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family protector; and the person most able to care not only for themselves but also for their families’. Whilst it is important to explore the ways trafficking victimhood is experienced by men and to embed this in familial considerations and sociocultural tropes associated with gendered roles and norms, it is also necessary to go beyond the suggestion that ‘men are different’ and therefore have different needs as victims, including not wanting to be classified as victims at all. However, this chapter takes a step back from these discussions to examine the experiences of exploitation of migrant workmen and fishers, so establishing the contours for the discussion in Chaps. 7 and 8 concerning the politics of exclusion/recognition in anti-trafficking. The following section examines the experiences of migrant fishers, primarily from the Philippines and Cambodia, who transit through, rather than labour in, Singapore, after which the chapter turns to an examination of the situations of male migrant workers labouring in the construction, landscaping, and shipyard sectors in Singapore. The final part of the ­chapter examines the role of the media in re-framing men’s negative and exploitative experiences as not trafficking but, especially for migrant workmen in Singapore, as problems related largely to amenities, basic needs, and, more broadly, living conditions, what we might call the materialities of infrastructure in migrant lives.

The Exploitation of Migrant Fishers Several reports have documented the alarming incidence of trafficking of men and boys onto long-haul fishing boats operated out of Thailand (EJF 2013, 2014; IOM 2010; Tenaganita 2009; UNIAP with LICADHO and LSCW 2007; UNIAP 2009). Some documented research has focused on the South Korean sector (Stringer et al. 2015) and Ukrainian men trafficked onto Russian fishing vessels (Surtees 2012). Similar practices involving Taiwanese fishing operations recruiting through agencies in Singapore, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Indonesia have been relatively under-­ researched by comparison. In its Annual Trafficking in Persons Report, the US State Department estimates that there could be up to 160,000 migrant men and boys deployed on Taiwanese long-haul fishing vessels— or vessels bearing flags of convenience (FOCs) but with Taiwanese ownership connections—globally (US Department of State 2015). Whilst many of the on-board conditions experienced by the fishermen present some similarities in all these fishing fleets (Thai, Russian, South Korean, and

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Taiwanese), there are nonetheless important distinctions in the recruitment and deployment of the men as well as their trajectories after leaving the boats. The three major countries of origin from which fishermen are recruited onto Taiwanese vessels are the Philippines, Indonesia, and China, with smaller numbers of Cambodians, Vietnamese, Burmese, Sri Lankans, and Indians also reported to be deployed. Men from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Cambodia are recruited through three key mechanisms: first, directly through employment agencies operating within the home countries of the recruits and where these agencies draw on a network of recruiters working on commission. Second, through the involvement of Singapore-registered manning agencies (agencies that offer ship-manning services, rather than simply being recruitment entities), which have counterpart agencies located in the countries of origin, although many of these agencies are not legally registered recruitment agencies for offshore fishing. These Singaporean agencies also utilise foreign domestic workers based in Singapore, primarily from the Philippines and Indonesia, to recruit men in their home communities and districts on a commission basis, with the recruits then directed to these counterpart agencies or agents (usually also unregistered) in source countries. Third, a smaller number of participants in the Philippines and Cambodia responded to print advertisements in local newspapers, calling for men to work abroad on fishing vessels or in another sector entirely. When men present themselves at the agencies in their home countries, their documentation is arranged and conditions attached to their work are given verbally. Filipino recruits are normally asked to pay a substantial agency fee upfront in the Philippines. The average sum of these placement fees is normally up to SG$1000, with many men selling assets or pawning land or borrowing from relatives and informal moneylenders in order to cover the fees. Cambodian men, by contrast, are normally not asked to pay anything to the agency but are told that some money (though the amount is normally left unspecified) will be deducted from their salaries for the first 2–3 months of their contract. Because the terms of the men’s contracts relating to salaries are normally unfulfilled, these costs become significant debt burdens for the men, as they are unable to pay them back through their work on fishing boats. High levels of deception are involved in the recruitment process, both through descriptions given by individual recruiters and agency representatives in home countries and in Singapore. In home countries, men are

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deceived about the amount of salary and conditions of remuneration, as well as work conditions on the fishing vessels. If fishermen transit through Singapore en route to their deployment on fishing vessels, they are normally presented with new conditions of work and are bullied into signing agreements and contract papers outlining these different and normally far worse conditions. The suggestion that the agencies can be defined as ‘managing agencies’ (rather than employment or manning agencies) and perform an administrative role only (receiving and transferring fishing crew) is extremely important and will be further discussed in Chap. 7. There is a list of standard conditions narrated to recruits by Philippines and Cambodian-based (and sometimes Singaporean-based) intermediary recruiters and agencies. The information that the recruits are given concerning their work and conditions and the ways these were flouted when they arrived at their agency in Singapore are given in Table 6.1 and men’s own narratives supported these findings. Two of the Filipino fishermen who deserted their vessel and presented at the Philippine Embassy in Singapore, Joey and Victor, confirmed these differences: The captain wanted us to transfer to his sister boat, the [name deleted], but I didn’t want to because I fear that no-one will know where we are. We complained to our agency in Singapore and asked to be released from the contract, but they said I’ll only get my salary after my three years contract is up. They said after four month’s salary deduction they will remit money to my family. But up till now (nine months) my family has not seen any money. I want to go home (Joey). In my contract it says 8 hours of work but it became 18–20 hours [a day]. They [Philippine agency] said I would be working on a cargo tanker [a seafarer’s position]. They promised me US$ 350 per month as salary, but I only got US$ 200 and deductions from that. We have colleagues back there [on the boat] that want to leave but they can’t because the agency in Singapore didn’t fix their immigration status. They are here as tourists (Victor).

According to Table 6.1 and Joey and Victor’s own words, they would normally earn a salary of US$ 150 per month after deductions, but even then, this salary was not paid to them. Nearly all the men, driven by the desire to remit as much money as they could, requested their monthly salaries be deposited in an account held in their names in the Philippines, so their families could access this, but this rarely happened. Figure  6.1

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Table 6.1  Mismatch between work conditions given pre-departure (Manila) and upon arrival (Singapore) Pre-departure (the Philippines)

Upon Arrival (Singapore)

Salary of between USD 250 and 400 per month No salary deductions for amenities and food No deductions for equipment and medical

Salary of USD 200 or less per month

Salary to be paid monthly after a period of salary deduction for placement fee (normally four months) Rest during sickness or injury No penalty for early release from contract Regulated working hours (8–10 hours per day) Holding of passports, travel, and other documents by owners of these documents

Deductions (usually USD 50 per month) for food and amenities Deductions (variable) for equipment and medical Salary not paid even after deduction period ended (kept supposedly in an account in employee’s name to be given at conclusion of contract) No rest during sickness or injury Penalty of up to USD 2000 for requesting early (for any reason) release from contract Excessive working hours with no additional remuneration for overtime Forfeiting of passports and other documents to the owner of the boat or Singapore-based agency, respectively

provides a copy of one of my participant’s ‘payment agreement’ and ‘deductions receipt’ from their Singaporean agency that men are requested to sign before being deployed on the vessels. Significantly, fishers are usually informed by their agencies that if they break their contract, they will not receive any salary for the time that they had already worked. Thus, for example, if a man remained on a fishing vessel for ten months and wished to break his contract once the vessel called at port, he would return home penniless, and in many cases, still carrying the debt burden incurred through payment of agency fees. This acts as a major disincentive for men to leave exploitative situations on the vessels and constitutes a tactic to effectively bond the men to their stints on the vessels. Apart from deception concerning salary and conditions of remuneration, men experience extremely exploitative and abusive working conditions once on the boat. In short, these conditions include excessive working hours between 18 and 20 hours per day, seven days a week; working under hazardous and unsafe conditions, including without appropriate equipment and having no access to first aid and medicine; inadequate

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Fig. 6.1  Typical fisherman’s payment agreement and deductions receipts

food, including the provision of food that is beyond its expiry date or allowing men only a very limited time for meal breaks; insufficient water rations; and verbal and physical abuse by captains and senior officers on the vessels. Some of these conditions are reproduced in written contracts men are asked to sign only once they arrive in Singapore and have already outlaid substantial costs to finance their migration (see Fig. 6.2). Exploitation of migrant fishers, much like the women discussed in Chap. 5, fell into four broad categories: financial exploitation, labour exploitation, physical abuse, and psychological manipulation. Financial exploitation occurs principally in relation to contract arrangements with Singaporean-based agencies, whilst the other three elements of exploitation occur primarily at sea (although, as suggested above, some coercion and abuse was documented during men’s sojourns by the agencies in Singapore as well). In addition, in extreme instances there were cases of men who died at sea due to health concerns induced by the conditions of their work. In addition to these concerns, fishermen also faced the dilemma of what awaited them if they were desperate enough to ‘jump ship’ in a

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Fig. 6.2  A contract paper presented to fishers in Singapore

third country, which happened to several of the men in my research and has also been documented by Rebecca Surtees (2012). For men who left their fishing vessel in this way, hitherto undocumented vulnerabilities emerge in countries where they may be unable to avail legal or social protections. Filipino, Cambodian, and Indonesian men on long-haul fishing boats are principally exploited for their labour. Common concerns include excessive working hours, concomitant fatigue leading, for some, to complete mental and physical exhaustion, lack of protective gear and resulting high frequency of preventable ‘accidents’, lack of adequate medical treatment for accidents and sickness, work in extreme environmental conditions (especially frigid temperatures in polar regions), and food and water rations that are inadequate for basic sustenance. According to information provided by the NGOTWC2, which is the only NGO in Singapore to have documented the situations on the fishing vessels in detail, as a result of their own documentation of men’s situations on the boats:

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The men store fish in the cold “hole”. The men work in these cold rooms with no cold weather gear in −80 degree temperatures. They have life buoys but these are locked up in a room. They don’t wear life jackets. Nobody does because most vessels do not have life jackets. In rough seas, many men have been thrown overboard, bitten by sharks… they lose a limb and they have to wait for the vessel to berth (which could be many months) before they get medical attention for their lost limb. There is no protective gear. If there are life jackets, they are in a room and are torn; there are life buoys but they are locked up and no one knows if they are in good working condition. There have been stories of Indonesian fishermen throwing themselves overboard. (personal communication, TWC2 representative April 2012)

Joey and Victor, introduced above, presented together at the Philippines Embassy in April 2011 after deserting their vessel when it docked in Singapore. They recounted the main elements of their labour exploitation at sea which were typical of men in my research, including working 18–22 hours a day, seven days a week; no day off and no overtime for hours worked beyond those agreed to (8–9 hours per day); no rest day for sickness or injury; being forced to work during storms and with no protective gear; being forced to pull the heavy fish up manually from the ocean; and food that was rotten or expired and water rations that were inadequate. Both owners of the fishing vessels and Singaporean-based marine agencies make considerable profits from the exploitation of these men’s labour. As stated earlier, the men in this study agreed to salaries that ranged from US$420 to 250 per month. In fact, most men agreed to a monthly salary of at least US$400 per month, which was subsequently reduced upon arrival in Singapore where their agency forced men to sign a new contract which stipulated a reduced salary, normally at US$150 per month, minus a further US$50 for on-board costs and insurance. The imposition of these arbitrary deductions echoes both the circumstance of the migrant women discussed in the previous chapter and male work permit holders in Singapore, as we shall see below. However, what is also important to emphasise here are the profits the Singaporean-based agencies make from the recruitment/deployment of men. Health problems are also common for the fishermen, many of whom experience extreme fatigue coupled with lack of adequate sustenance, as well as difficult working conditions. This often leads men to also experience depression whilst on board the fishing vessels. Jason, a Filipino fisherman, related the very common problem of seasickness: ‘After big waves

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struck the boat my nausea grew and I wasn’t able to eat. They still forced us to work even with the seasickness. That’s why I decided I wanted to go home’. Forcing men to work when they were sick or injured was the norm on the vessels. One man related in his affidavit to the Philippines Embassy: ‘They would give us expired and rotten food, cans of drink and medicine. A compatriot died because of that; when he got injured on the boat they gave him medicine—an injection—that was more than 5 years out of date. I believe this is maltreatment and I can’t take it anymore’. In relation to the subject of health and injuries, Victor and Joey were animated in their recounting: Victor: I got a swollen leg because we are forced to work standing for about 18 hours a day. We are not allowed to sit down. I got fever after that and they just gave me some painkillers and told me to keep working. We were given two meals a day—rice, bread and noodles only. Sometimes we would eat the fish that we caught because we were really hungry. The bread was always stale and the noodles were three years past expiry date. Now I [Victor] have lost 37 kilograms. I was 127 kilograms when we first started the work and now I am only 90 kilograms [at this point Victor pulled out is mobile phone and showed me a photo of himself back in the Philippines before working on the boat. The healthy, slightly chubby man in the photo was almost unrecognisable from the gaunt, leathery-skinned, and dejected man in front of me]. We have many wounds from jellyfish stings [Joey rolls up his left sleeve and shows me several scars, at which point he interjects]. Joey: When you work like that you remember your family and you are crying. You have no news. You are just waiting for the boat to go to port. A carrier ship [feeder vessel] comes out to collect the fish and give supplies. We have no way to leave and it is so lonely out on the sea.

As Joey suggests, men are socially isolated on the fishing vessels, as they normally only docked once a year—or sometimes less—unless repairs were needed. Because of the isolation at sea men were unable to contact their relatives back in their home countries, further compounding their anxiety. A particularly prevalent injury from working on the vessels involves fishing hooks. Each fishing line is about 14 kilometres in length and each line holds around 4000 hooks. When the lines are reeled into the boat the men must dodge them in order to avoid being stuck. Men who are not experienced at the work or who are not quick enough to move risk injuries, most commonly to the face, neck, and arms (see Images 6.1 and 6.2). Wounds are normally sewn up with a needle and thread, with no antiseptic

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Images 6.1 and 6.2  Common injuries of migrant fishers

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or pain relievers administered. Men with more serious injuries—either from fishing hooks or commonly from shark bites—must wait until their vessel berths before being treated by a doctor. There have been cases of deaths of men who have been unable to endure the wait or who have died from other illnesses induced by the working conditions they must endure. One Filipino fisherman, Eril Andrade, died at sea in 2010 and is one of several men reported to the Philippines Embassy in Singapore as having deceased during their sojourns on the fishing vessels. In Eril Andrade’s case it appears that an infection developed on board the vessel led to heart complications that eventually resulted in his death. According to a briefing paper penned in March 2012 concerning Eril Andrade’s death and the illegal recruitment and trafficking of Filipino fishermen through Singapore, Eril Andrade died on or about 220215 February 2011 in the Bay of Bengal on board Taiwanese fishing trawler MV Hung Yu # 212 that was fishing at that time in the Indian Ocean, but his body was not landed until the vessel docked in Singapore on 6 April 2011. The Post Mortem conducted on 12 April 2011 by Dr. Wee Kheng Poh, Senior Consultant Forensic Pathologist in the Mortuary of the Forensic Medicine Division of the Health Services Authority, Outram Road concluded that the cause of death was “Consistent with Acute Myocarditis”- inflammation of the heart caused by infection.

The author of this report, who was advocating for justice on behalf of Eirl’s family, has requested that they not be named. The report remains unpublished and held in confidence. Even when vessels are berthed in Singapore, men whose passports are held by the the captain were told they were unable to go into the port area. Men explained that the captain would inform them that they would incur a fine of SG$10,000 for each crew member that jumped ship whilst berthed in Singapore. Naturally this raises the important question of why—if conditions on board and remuneration were reasonable—men would attempt to jump ship in the first place. Because they were unable to take shore leave in Singapore they were unable to buy a SIM card or phone credit to call their families and were unable to use the port facilities to shower or use the laundry facilities. Men were subjected to verbal and physical abuse whilst on the boats, usually from the Taiwanese captain and sometimes the Taiwanese officers. These senior personnel on the boats would beat the men on the face and body and verbally abuse them, usually for poor working performance or for making a complaint. To exemplify

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this, the following excerpt is taken from four Filipino fishermen whom I interviewed when they had already returned to the Philippines. They recalled that Filipino and Indonesian men would be routinely punished if they were found resting during work time or if their work was not carried out quickly enough. The punishments were usually in the form of beatings (kicks, punches, slaps) by either the captain or the officers. The captain drank heavily and would further abuse the men when he was drunk. It was difficult for the men to keep up with the pace of work required of them since the six hours rest they agreed to when they were recruited was not followed. In addition to physical abuse, fatigue from lack of sleep and food served to them that was rotten or expired were the main complaints of the men. According to ILO’s (2009) indicators of trafficking for forced labour, these conditions constitute key indicators of the exploitative processes and outcomes of human trafficking. They include abuse of vulnerability, deception, restriction of movement, isolation, physical and sexual violence, intimidation and threats, retention of identity documents, withholding of wages, debt bondage, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime. Each of these conditions has been documented for men trafficked onto Taiwanese long-haul fishing vessels. In addition, unlike victims of trafficking who are deployed on land, trafficking at sea offers little opportunity for victims to avail themselves of support, report their situations, or leave these same situations. This ‘confinement by default’ through geographical isolation at sea enables these hyper-exploitative conditions to continue largely beyond the purview of any intervening authority. The prevalence of forced labour and human trafficking in the sector has been confirmed in a more recent publication by the ILO (2013), which overviews published, in-depth research on the issue. They found that migrant workers in particular are too often deceived and coerced by brokers and recruitment agencies and forced to work on board vessels under threat of force or by means of debt bondage. Victims describe illness, physical injury, psychological and sexual abuse, deaths, and their vulnerability on board vessels in remote locations of the sea for months and years at a time. Fishers are forced to work for long hours at very low pay, and the work is intense, hazardous, and difficult. Capture fisheries have amongst the highest occupational fatality rates in the world. In sum, the mode of recruitment, particularly the role of brokers and labour/manning agencies in the fishermen’s home countries as well as in Singapore, Taiwan, and ports of deployment, constitutes both deceptive

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and illegal recruitment. Further, the subsequent conditions on fishing vessels are deplorable, with excessive working hours, unsafe working and living conditions, high incidence of injury, illness and death, and no opportunity to break contracts, leave, or seek advice and support. These conditions have been documented for men deployed on Taiwanese vessels (Greenpeace 2016; Yea and TWC2 2013), though further research could provide a greater depth of understanding of the recruitment practices and debt arrangements, as well as the possible links between human trafficking at sea and other forms of criminal activity, including Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, drug trafficking, and related crimes, as have been suggested by other studies (Greenpeace 2016; EJF 2014).

South Asian Work Permit Holders Men from Bangladesh, India (principally Tamil Nadu), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Thailand, and more recently Sri Lanka and the Philippines may apply to work in Singapore in the construction, marine, landscaping, and cleaning sectors. Their employer-sponsored work permits—to be distinguished from other work passes for higher paid foreign workers on S Passes or Employment Passes—are valid for one or two years, after which they must reapply for a new visa. Much like FDWs, the migration regime established for the incorporation of these workers in Singapore imposes tight restrictions on the conditions of their stay and work, and these arguably have the combined effect of heightening their vulnerability to labour exploitation. The restrictions may be divided into two groups: those relating to their employment and contract and those relating to their social life and residence. The former restrictions include the inability to change the employer (the visa is tied to one employer, creating high levels of employee dependency on the employer) and no insistence on a legally binding and agreed-to contract between the worker and employer. Singapore’s MOM tends to point out that the In-Principle Approval (IPA) is meant to establish key conditions, such as monthly salary and deductions. They also suggest that in a dispute between a worker and an employer the MOM will take the conditions outlined in the IPA as a de facto contract. A number of control mechanisms also exist for WP holders, with particular legal responsibilities placed on individual employers (Bal 2015). These include the need for employers to furnish an SGD5000 security bond per worker before they are allowed to enter the country—this bond will be returned in full if work permit and security bond conditions are

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complied with and after the foreign worker is repatriated (half the security bond is liable to be forfeited if a foreign worker ‘goes missing’) (see MOM n.d.-a.). There are also quota restrictions and a monthly tax—termed the foreign worker levy (FWL)—employers must pay to the Singapore government for each foreign worker they hire. These measures invariably lead to increased employer surveillance and control over workers’ movements, as well as cost-recovery practices on the part of employers, which range from illegal kickbacks to salary deductions and/or low and stagnant wages (Bal 2013: 58–63). Restrictions related to foreign workmen’s social life and residence include the inability to have family members accompany them as dependents, lack of opportunity for gaining citizenship in Singapore, restrictions on marriage to Singaporeans, and, for WP holders of certain nationalities and sectors, restrictions on their place of residence whilst working in Singapore. For example, non-Malaysian foreign workers in the construction or marine sector are not allowed to live in public housing (termed ‘HDB’ flats in Singapore) (see MOM n.d.-b.), and the government’s longer-­term intent is to slowly shift this population to large purpose-built dormitories (often in outlying areas of the city-state) (further discussed in Chap. 7). Collectively, these measures contribute to foreign workmen’s social and residential segregation from Singaporeans; it also ensures they remain transient, with few social or intimate ties binding them to Singapore. These living conditions are important not only as they are sites for the degradation of male migrant workers in Singapore, but also because, as we shall see below, they play a central role in the reconfiguring of men’s experiences of exploitation. Further, one may argue that these conditions dramatically skew labour bargaining relations between employers and workers in favour of the former. As with FDWs, these restrictions on labour mobility and geographical mobility can heighten male migrant workers’ situations of vulnerability (Bauder 2006), including in Singapore. The conditions attached to the work permit stand in marked contrast to those attached to the Employment Pass (which allows for accompanying dependents if one’s salary is above SG$5000 and puts no restrictions on marriage or place of residence) (MOM n.d.-c.). A third, mid-level category, termed ‘S Pass’, has similar conditions as the Employment Pass (dependents’ passes may be granted if one meets the salary requirements) but also some restrictions similar to the WP, such as a combined quota and levy system (see Yeoh 2006).

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Apart from these conditions, the recruitment and migration process for WP holders is also heavily organised, involving a range of governmental and private sector actors in both source and destination countries. That the organisation of contract migration within Asia has become more elaborate in recent years is in large part a response to concerns to protect migrant workers from abuse in their jobs abroad through a range of measures aimed at better training and preparing migrant workers, formalising their migration through agencies that can be held accountable for workers they recruit and deploy, and lowering the prevalence of risky and informal migrations, such as those of minors. Yet some have argued that these ­measures which are put in place to better protect migrant workers have had the unintended reverse effect of placing them in crippling and unrealistic debt situations, which reduce their agency in situations where they may find themselves in the employ of an errant and exploitative company (Parrenas 2011; Lindquist et al. 2012; Baey and Yeoh 2015). For example, first-time intending male work permit holders from India and Bangladesh often pay in excess of SG$16,000 in fees to agencies in their home countries, some of which may be forwarded to a counterpart agency in Singapore. These fees are meant to cover the costs of organising documents (passport, an in-principle approval letter for placement in a company in Singapore), training in the home country in a particular trade or skill, air ticket, and arranging a job with a company in Singapore. Almost invariably, first-time intending foreign workmen do not have the knowledge or contacts in Singapore to arrange their migration independently of these private sector stakeholders, and those intending to work in the construction sector must be able to produce proof of their training in their home country. Men intending to work in the shipyard, landscaping, or cleaning sectors, by contrast, do not need to undergo training. However, somewhat ironically, given that the cost of training is removed from their fees, they generally pay the highest amongst to agents. This may be related to the mandatory monthly foreign worker levy employers pay to the government, as well as the lower barriers to entry for service sector jobs.2 The Singaporean government implemented this tiered levy structure in order to discourage companies from hiring lower skilled foreign workers. Thus, the conditions of stay and the organisation of migration impose restrictions on foreign workmen in Singapore and possibly add to their vulnerability through creating high dependence on the employer and structural vulnerabilities in the employer-employee relationship that emerges from debt-financed migration. One final aspect of the migration

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regime is worth briefly discussing for its potential to discipline workers in their acceptance of these conditions, namely the conditions of deportability (Bal 2015; de Genova 2005). In Singapore, the threat of deportation is ever present for migrant workers, whose work permits can be unilaterally cancelled at the whim of employers without prior notification and little recourse (HOME and TWC2 2010). Once work permits are cancelled, foreign workmen are to be repatriated within seven days. Employers have also been known to hire repatriation companies to ensure foreign workmen leave the country. Yea and Chok (2018) have argued elsewhere that migrant workmen’s vulnerability to trafficking cannot necessarily be located within or reduced to individual elements (or indicators). Rather than this enumerative approach, where elements of trafficking are checked off and counted to arrive at a characterisation of human trafficking, it was argued that individual elements, such as debt bondage or threats and intimidation, tend to compound each other and perpetuate men’s vulnerability to situations of unfreedom. Drawing from that paper, a brief case study of men deployed in one company, from which they later deserted, illustrates the ways labour trafficking of male migrant workers operates in the Singapore context. The case study underscores the description of Hussain’s situation introduced at the outset of the chapter, where debt, intimidation and threats, wrongful deployment and contract substitution, and fraud coalesce to both situate male worker permit holders as victims of trafficking and, simultaneously, elide their experiences from such characterisations. While unfreedom is sometimes related to the absence of a contract (Phillips 2013), in Singapore another practice is equally as commonplace: the arbitrary and unexpected imposition of a ‘condition paper’ (a paper imposing new conditions on workers that substitutes for an earlier contract or agreement) at an unspecified point during their contract period. This is much like the migrant fishers who are presented with new contracts on arrival in Singapore. These documents list new and unreasonable conditions of employment, always biased in favour of the employer. JJ Metals, a medium-sized construction subcontracting company, imposed such papers on all its 80 contract migrant workers. Mahi, a 29-year-old Bangladeshi man, and three of his Bangladeshi workmates, deserted their workplace at JJ Metals after their boss asked them to sign three documents a few weeks after they arrived in Singapore in early 2013. Two of the documents were condition papers, which if signed,

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Fig. 6.3  Illegal salary deductions paper introduced to JJ Metals workers

would enable the  employer to deduct S$130 (US$95) each month as ‘security money’. The paper further read: ‘This money shall be used to pay for expenses incurred for repatriation to my country of origin and any other necessary expenses’ (Fig. 6.3). Asking employees to bear the cost of their own repatriation is, in fact, against work pass conditions in Singapore, but employers are virtually never charged over this. However, as Mahi lamented:

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We really don’t have a choice about signing these papers. If we refuse to sign they [company representatives] tell us we need to go back to Bangladesh. I can’t go back after only being in Singapore for a few weeks because I still have my [migration] debt.

Thus, the threat of deportation, rather than physical force, was utilised by employers to ensure workers complied with directives to sign these agreements. As we shall see in Chap. 8, the threat of deportation is not easily accepted as a legitimate form of force by state actors involved in assisting trafficking claims of exploited migrant workers. Condition papers attempted to legitimise salary deductions such as ‘security money’ and different salary pay rates (such as for working on Sundays and public holidays at the basic rate rather than the overtime rate) or working for a lesser salary than stated in the in-principle approval IPA. Many of these documents also lacked signatures from the company representative and interpreter, throwing into question their legal validity. JJ Metals also imposed salary deductions not agreed to before migrating, including S$1000 (US$735) a year (S$200 (US$147) × five months a year) ‘boss money’, meaning money for placement in the company (an illegal practice), and S$75 (US$55) a month for housing. Housing deductions are supposed to be declared in a worker’s IPA, but bosses often counter this by telling the worker ‘conditions have changed’. This company also physically altered the pay envelopes and salary given to the worker. In this instance, the deductions described above were handwritten on the front of the pay envelope and workers were then asked to sign underneath this before they received their pay. In the pay envelope itself, the dollar amount was also incorrect, always to the detriment of the worker. As Mahi related, ‘My salary after all the deductions appears as S$493 (US$362) minus S$75 (US$55) housing money, making a total of S$418 (US$307). This is handwritten by the boss and every month it is the same [process]’. This particular company and many others also engaged in practices such as not correctly recording overtime, which can reduce a worker’s salary by as much as 30–40 per cent per month. The timecard-punching machine of JJ Metals, for example, would almost always be broken and, despite many complaints from the men, was never repaired. The workers at JJ Metals were told they would earn significantly higher salaries than their IPAs stated if they were willing to work overtime. As Rasel, one of Mahi’s workmates at JJ Metals, stated, ‘If I knew that the real salary was like this, and  that there wasn’t going to be much OT [overtime], I would not

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have accepted to go with this company. But now I’m already here’. Not recording or giving overtime can mean the difference between workers just surviving or being able to improve their economic situation through their migration to Singapore; as Rasel suggested, realistic information provided at home would have allowed workers to make a more informed decision about their migration, especially salary expectations. The ILO’s (2009) indicators for labour trafficking identify ‘deception about wages’ as a medium indicator of deceptive recruitment in trafficking and ‘false information about successful migration’ as a medium indicator of recruitment by abuse of vulnerability. The migration brokers in Bangladesh, operating in concert with the employers in Singapore, undoubtedly provided the men with false and distorted information about salary, overtime, and costs prior to their departure for Singapore. These were then formalised in substituted documents the men were asked to sign after already arriving in Singapore and having spent thousands of dollars in recruitment and placement fees to agents and brokers both in Singapore and in Bangladesh. This case study illustrates the central role documentary and paper manipulation can play in producing situations of unfree labour. Arbitrary and fraudulent substituted contracts, payslips/time sheets, and condition papers that contain unreasonable conditions coalesce to reduce workers’ salaries, despite pre-migration agreements with labour brokers and employers about higher salaries and the availability of overtime to further bolster workers’ income. It is therefore not always the lack of documentation, but the ways in which employers and recruitment agents manipulate documentation to obfuscate and formalise, in a country known for its adherence to the ‘rule of law’, their exploitative demands and practices. The use of euphemisms in condition papers and contracts also attempts to disguise illegal deductions as lawful (by labelling them ‘loans’ or ‘management fees’) and legitimise control strategies (the retention of personal documents such as passports is couched as employers ‘managing’ or ‘safekeeping’ them). Local NGOs and other researchers have documented how workers are sometimes asked to sign blank salary vouchers and timesheets (TWC2 2014; Wise 2013: 438, 443)—these, along with condition papers, serve to protect employers in the event workers file complaints against them. As Mahi reflected, ‘My signature is on the papers, so my case with the MOM is very weak and they [MOM] are not interested in my story about having no choice about [signing] these papers’. As both Rasel’s and Mahi’s narratives illustrate, migrant workers are unable to

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extricate themselves from these situations because of various considerations relating to migration conditions, such as the repayment of migration-­ related debts and restrictive contract conditions that effectively punish workers who attempt to break their contracts or seek redress for illegal salary deductions. In the case of JJ Metals, it was the co-production of unfreedom through intersecting elements related to documents and their contextual embeddedness in broader migration conditions, including migration debts and legal restrictions on workers’ employment mobility once in Singapore, as well as punitive threats, which affected their ability to extricate themselves from their workplace and/or effectively contest those conditions. In sum, men leave exploitative workplaces due to a range of problems including a combination of non-payment of salary, imposition of arbitrary deductions that were not agreed to when men singed their IPA to come to Singapore for work, threats and intimidation from employers relating to forced repatriation to their home country and/or being blacklisted from working in Singapore if the worker complains to MOM or an NGO about their situations, forced—and often excessive—overtime (without remuneration), and outsourcing workers to other companies where they may engage in jobs for which they have not received adequate training and certification (which can exacerbate men’s vulnerability to injury). Many men (and women) are also exploited in the labour migration process, which is increasingly characterised by the extensive role of brokers and agencies who charge the men unrealistically high recruitment and placement fees, which can debt bond workers to errant companies in Singapore (Platt et al. 2016; Yea and Chok 2018).

Reconfiguring Migrant Workmen’s Exploitation Failure to address structural causes of vulnerability and exploitation and re-defining problems of migrant worker exploitation in ways that elide more sensitive and politically challenging issues has become as commonplace for male migrant workers in Singapore as it is for the women considered in Chap. 5. In Chap. 5 we saw how the media was able to reinforce—and in some cases perhaps create—particular frames by which migrant female workers could be either made recognisable as ‘victims of trafficking’ or demonised as ‘criminals’ (at worst) or economic opportunists (at best). We also saw how female migrant worker ‘problems’ could be made legible and easily responded to through discursive constructions and

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policy interventions that were not centred on exploitation. The same holds true for the men whose experiences are discussed in this chapter, although the frames by which their experiences are reconfigured do not necessarily replicate those for migrant sexual labourers or FDWs. This part of the chapter therefore briefly examines the re-making of exploitations akin to trafficking by re-directing emphasis away from a trafficking characterisation. This, it is argued, occurs through two tropes: first, through an emphasis on living conditions and basic needs which are suggestive of technocratic solutions via interventions around such things as ‘building dormitories’ and, second, through a focus on other types of criminal activities, such as ‘phantom workers’ and ‘illegal deployment’. Because migrant fishers are not deployed in Singapore, framing of their problems occurs quite differently to male migrant work permit holders and so will be discussed in Chap. 7 in further detail. The experiences of labour exploitation of three Indian construction workers from Tamil Nadu, Raja, Sarath, and Kumar, which are discussed in further detail at the beginning of the next chapter, tell of how the men were deceived about the conditions of their migration, including salary, work to be performed, living conditions, and so on. In late November 2015 the premises where the three were sleeping were subject to a compliance check by MOM’s MWC, accompanied by several news reporters from The Straits Times, who found 50 men sleeping there. Prior to the compliance check, nine of the workers had in fact presented at the MOM to make a complaint about their salaries and living situations. The story was subsequently reported in The Straits Times (22 November 2014). Of the 50 men removed that night, and apart from the 9 who originally complained, only 5 others were willing to provide statements attesting to their situations. Some of the others, Kumar recalled, were too scared to say anything because of fear of deportation or worse. Others were given kickbacks by the boss of the companies to keep their silence, whilst most were told by ‘another brother’ that there was a legal case pending against them and if they wanted to stay in Singapore he would be able to provide them with work in a different company. The MOM commenced an investigation of the two companies for non-­ payment of workers’ salaries and providing substandard accommodation to workers. The Straits Times ran a series of reports which presented substandard accommodation as the key issue facing migrant workmen—both generally and in this specific instance (Straits Times 31 October, 19 November a & b, 21 November, 22 November 2014). The following is

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typical of the way the men’s problems—and indeed the government’s solution—were reported: The men slept shoulder to shoulder, amid rotting food and soiled clothes. The Manpower Ministry (MOM) is now investigating the workers’ employers for housing them in unacceptable conditions and not paying the men. The employers face fines of up to $10,000 and/ or up to 12 months on prison. But there are many more unscrupulous bosses who go scot-free for subjecting their workers to bad housing…. At the living quarters of a Punggol Housing Board construction site, hundreds of workers use choked and broken urinals. Over at Tuas View Square, about 5,000 workers live in more than 10 factory-converted dormitories which are infested with rats and mosquitos. The government is acutely aware of the problem and has taken important steps to rectify the situation.

Prominence is given to overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in this and the other reports that appeared. With the solution emerging as ‘Nine purpose-­built dorms, which come with cafeterias and basketball courts, will be built over the next two years. They will add around 100,000 beds to the existing 200,000  in about 40 big dorms’ (The Straits Times 22 November 2014). The suggestion that the government should be more rigorous in its inspections and penalties for errant employers was also made in the reports. This was not an isolated or one-off thread running through stories of migrant workmen problems in Singapore. As early as 2009 The Straits Times and Today papers reported on the issue of foreign worker housing. Articles to appear in The Straits Times and Today papers (both 3 April 2009, 2009a) warned that MOM was ‘getting tough’ on errant employers who provided their workers with ‘unacceptable housing’. The Today story related that ‘MOM has taken enforcement action against 217 employers… “Some do not provide proper sanitation or ventilation, while squeeze more than the allowed number of people in a room. This is unacceptable”, said Manpower Minister Gan Kim Yong’. As part of this ‘crackdown’ on employers the MOM teamed up with Singapore’s Civil Defence Force, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and National Environment Agency to conduct an ‘island-wide sweep’ of illegal dormitories. Apart from cracking down on employers who did not comply with housing standards for accommodating foreign workers, the key response to the problem of foreign worker housing was—and continues to be—the construction of new, purpose-build dormitories in outlying areas of Singapore.3 The location is,

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of course, deliberate since foreign workers are seen as undesirable neighbours by most Singaporeans. The dormitories are therefore planned to be as self-contained as possible, so that all services and facilities workers may need can be located within the dormitory complex itself. The MOM is thus able to both physically isolate workers from mainstream Singaporean society and present the key problem migrant workmen face as housing. This 2009 Today article also usefully illustrates the ways housing/living conditions are privileged over other (labour exploitation) issues. This is achieved by making only a secondary and brief mention of salary problems facing migrant workmen. The story stated, ‘The MOM has also come down hard on employers who fail to pay their workers—setting up a taskforce in January to detect such malpractices. Since then it has uncovered 43 firms with salary arrears. Two employers have already been prosecuted for failing to pay salaries, and another nine are being investigated’. Non-­ payment or underpayment of salary is a strong indicator of labour trafficking (ILO 2009) but in such cases workers ‘will be helped to return home after outstanding employment issues have been resolved’. The elision of trafficking is again evident and a legitimate response to salary issues is the eventual deportation of workers. Returning to the 2015 Straits Times story, in much the same vein as the 2009 Today article, little further mention was made of the salary issue. Other concerns such as those related to me by Kumar, Raja, and Sarath on that day when I first encountered them were completely excluded from the media reports. When asked, the three men told me they had never been questioned by MOM officers about their recruitment (were they deceived?), their deployment (was the work substantially different from what they had been recruited for?), their migration debts (were there elements of debt bondage?), the use of threats and punitive actions directed against them (to ensure their compliance), or their working hours and tasks (excessive, dangerous, etc.?). This despite the TIP Taskforce’s declaration some months before that cards were provided to MOM and other government agency officers containing TIP indicators, for the purpose of screening cases for potential TIP victims. At one point a few years prior a lack of government screening for TIP may have been understandable, but the Taskforce is now well into its third year of operation and the new PHTA had recently been passed. Hussain, whose experience of deployment in a bin centre was introduced at the outset of this chapter, also had his problem reconfigured in terms not dissimilar to Raja, Kumar, and Sarath. Hussain lived in a filthy

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bin centre in the heartland district of Clementi where he was deployed to clean HDB blocks, contrary to the work description provided to him in Bangladesh. When Hussain came out of his workplace and his company was placed under investigation, it was for violations of the EFMA relating to housing of workers. The agent in Singapore was also fined for wrongful deployment, but nothing more was said about the other elements of Hussain’s experience and the issue was interpreted as one relating to work permit violations for substandard living conditions and wrongful deployment. The main concern with this interpretation is, first, that ­ Hussain remained in vulnerable financial circumstances for more than a year after his exit from the HDB block, and although the company that employed him was fined, it nonetheless continued to operate. Apart from housing conditions, food has also been presented—both by the government and by some NGOs—as the major issue migrant workmen face in Singapore. A study published in 2015 by the National University of Singapore, which found that nine in ten Bangladeshi migrant workers had unclean and unhygienic food provided by caterers, was highly reported in Singapore’s print media. The report also stated that in their survey of more than 500 workers it was found that most also indicated that they did not receive enough food. Many workers complained that they fell sick after eating food that had been prepared more than 12 hours earlier and not stored correctly, so that by the time workers were provided with the food, it was already going off. The lead researcher in the study was also, notably, reported as lamenting that ‘In our research we thought salary disputes was the main thing they faced, but through talking to the workers it turned out that food was a bigger problem’ (The Straits Times 2015a). Reflecting on this statement, it is clear that one of the key reasons migrant workmen do not complain about ‘salary disputes’ is because of the low chance of successful redress in these problems, as the above cases illustrate. Like housing issues, the problem of poor quality and inadequate food is far easier to remedy though technocratic interventions such as those laid out in a follow-up story by The Straits Times manpower correspondent (2015b) who suggested: If conditions are to improve, the middlemen need to go. When employers take charge of liaising directly with catering companies, the employees get what they actually pay for. The caterers also have their cash flow assured. Secure payments could provide good catering companies the opportunity to scale up their operations, invest in more technology or workers, and prepare

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food in a more timely (sic) manner. Another approach is for all construction firms to take food costs into account when submitting tenders for jobs, said Mr Loo of the contractors’ association. They could then either ensure food is provided at the worksite, or that workers have enough money to pay for lunchtime deliveries. Some employers have taken the lead. Mr Hooi Yu Koh, chief executive and managing director of Kori Holdings, said the company pays its workers about $100 above market rate so as to cover the cost of food. Mr Hooi also knew of a smaller company which employed its own chef to prepare meals and provided transport to deliver freshly cooked lunch to the yard. Developers and contractors could work together to make measures like these the norm. ‘If everyone tenders according to the rules and regulations and no one cuts corners, then it’s a level playing field’, said Mr Loo.

This solution thus allows companies to spend a little extra money to easily fix the problem by ensuring food is fresh and healthy. Similarly, the government is also identified as a stakeholder with an important role to play through ensuing provisions of the EFMA relating to ‘safe working conditions’ are adhered to by making regular inspections of worksites and food catering companies. Whilst this re-framing allows attention to be directed towards technocratic fix solutions to migrant worker problems, which are themselves perceived to primarily relate to basic needs such as accommodation and food, attention is simultaneously diverted away from the structural context that produces highly exploitative practices in both the recruitment and deployment of workers, practices that in many cases constitute key indicators of trafficking. But it is not always possible to deflect attention away from accusations that workers’ experiences fall into the realm of human trafficking, and on some occasions the government is forced to directly engage with—and dispute—suggestions of widespread and endemic worker exploitation. One such illustration of this during my fieldwork with South Asian workers was the response to the ‘Little India Riot’ of Sunday, 8 December 2013. The incident, which was the first riot in Singapore since 1969, was widely reported in the media as an unprovoked, violent ­outburst involving around 400 workers, mainly from Tamil Nadu, setting fire to vehicles, smashing windows, and destroying property in Little India after a private bus ran over and killed a 33-year-old Indian worker (see The Guardian 2013). NGOs were keen to explain the riot as a tragic outcome of the marginalisation of migrant workers, including repressive policies and the types of experiences of hyper-exploitation discussed in this

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chapter. The international media also focused on this explanation for the riot, with editorials in The Guardian (2014) and The New  York Times (2013). Contrary to this interpretation, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong claimed that the riot was an ‘isolated incident arising from unlawful actions of an unruly mob’ (The Guardian 2013). Thus, events that may be causally connected to migrant worker exploitation in Singapore are not only re-framed but also openly contested. In such a context, and contra the experiences of sex trafficked girls in Singapore, it is extremely difficult to discursively consider male migrant workers in Singapore as victims of trafficking. The framing of migrant workmen as an unruly and a criminal/ safety problem is further bolstered by related characterisations of them as dishonest. This characterisation is absolutely crucial in understanding how migrant workmen’s claims to labour exploitation (salary non-payment, fines and punishments, etc.) are received by the MOM and other authorities such as the Singapore Ports Authority (SPA) and ICA with a high degree of scepticism. A large swath of media stories iterates this characterisation. ‘They lied to officials’ (Today, April 24 2009b) tells of 29 Bangladeshi workers who claimed to the MOM that they had not been paid their salaries and their employers had also made unauthorised deductions from their pay packet. The group apparently made this claim because they wished to be placed on Special Passes so as to be able to remain in Singapore. As the article relates how, ‘The accused cynically abused the investigation process. They had also wasted the time and resources of the MOM, which could have been deployed to help workers in genuine need’. It is unclear why the workers would wish to be granted Special Pass visas to remain in Singapore since Special Passes do not carry the right to work except in special cases, and certainly the threat of working illegally is palpable as Hussain’s experience at the outset of this chapter demonstrates (see also Yea 2013, 2015). It was also noted in the article that ‘there were intermittent periods during which some of the workers were not deployed to work. They were either undergoing training to prepare them for skills tests or sent for re-training because their work standards did not meet the shipyards’ requirements’. Having spent many hours with shipyard workers in Jurong and surrounds I knew that underemployment was a serious problem, with many companies bringing in workers as ‘supply workers’ as needed. In periods where the workers were not needed they would be neither paid salary nor actively working. Yet these issues are not subject to elaboration in the article, which focuses primarily on the ‘lies’ of the work-

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ers. This has the effect of validating underemployment and, by implication, reduced or no salary. These types of stories play into the legal characterisations of migrant workers that are further discussed in Chap. 8, especially the use of discretion in making trafficking determinations. The final characterisation of migrant workmen in Singapore that elides suggestions of human trafficking is by framing exploitation as an issue of illegal deployment or non-payment of workers. As with the FDWs discussed in Chap. 5, workers’ labour issues are re-framed as best addressed under other legislative tools, and the media publicly reiterates the appropriateness of the legal remedies enforced. Two articles which illustrate this are Today’s ‘MOM gets tough on errant firms’ (25 April 2009c) and ‘Complaints of foreign workers deployed illegally up from 16 to 412’ (Today 9 April 2009d). The former article names the penalty for not paying workers as a fine of up to SG$5000 or jail for 6 months or both. The article also states that MOM will assist workers with their salary arrears. The latter article states that MOM ‘intensified enforcement against errant employers and 226 were prosecuted for various offences including illegal deployment and unpaid salaries’. Whilst these prosecutorial efforts are important in the sense that they act as a warning to firms to not engage in these practices, the issue of worker exploitation is again not raised. The recovery of salaries (which is not always guaranteed in any case) is, at least for the men in my research, not necessarily sufficient to ensure their vulnerability is stemmed. Whilst some NGOs, such as HOME, lament the lack of attention to trafficking in cases such as these where workers are not paid or deployed illegally, the media continues to reinforce a view that these offences sit squarely outside a trafficking frame. And whilst it is not always the case that illegal deployment or non-payment of salary are indicative of trafficking, they are both strong indicators of labour trafficking that would suggest that further investigation is required.

Conclusion Without the protections of anti-trafficking, migrant Bangladeshi and Indian workmen often find themselves in vulnerable circumstances in Singapore if they experience labour exploitation and consequently desert the workplace to pursue compensation claims or lodge a complaint. As Hussain’s case introduced earlier in the chapter demonstrates, men on Special Passes may not engage in paid employment for the duration of their case, although a small proportion of the men with labour claims are

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allowed to work on a MOM-approved Temporary Job Scheme (TJS) in which companies apply for workers on SPs through MOM. For those with labour claims, the inability to work is devastating since it exacerbates their situations of already having no income to remit and on which to survive in Singapore (including buying food, and paying the costs of accommodation and transportation, and phone cards). Men who take the step of engaging in work illegally run the risk of immediate deportation if caught by the police or immigration authorities if detected. This automatically negates their claims because they will be deported and a claim is discontinued once a worker returns to his home country. As one NGO worker reflected, ‘How are the men supposed to survive for months on end in this situation of no money and not being allowed to earn money?’ (TWC2 representative, 11 January 2013). Notably, whilst there are myriad support programmes for exploited female migrant workers, including embassy shelters, there are none for male migrant workers. The gendered orientation of supports is undoubtedly significant and ties into stereotypes about vulnerability and exploitation amongst migrant labourers generally and trafficked persons specifically (see also Surtees 2008). The continued influence of the master narrative of the female child sex slave provides a compelling explanation for the lack of attention to male victims of labour trafficking in Singapore. Coupled with pragmatic concerns about the potentially high number of labour trafficking claims and concomitant fears around how this may undermine Singapore’s migrant labour regime and economic ascendency, little progress has been made in addressing labour trafficking amongst male—or indeed female—victims in Singapore. Since the passing of the PHTA in 2015 there has been no prosecution of labour trafficking involving male victims. Contrary to this, the Annual Trafficking in Persons Report (US DoS) for 2017 indicated that debt bondage as a precursor to labour trafficking (and sex trafficking) was widespread in Singapore and that the Singaporean government did not have a reasonable grasp on this indicator of trafficking. The government refuted the TIP Report’s claims, with a TIP Taskforce representative in Singapore commenting: ‘Singapore also took issue with “misrepresentations” in the report stating there were “large numbers of migrant workers (who) experience conditions indicative of labour trafficking” here’. Men’s wholesale disqualification from trafficking victimhood and its supports clearly affect their trajectories in and beyond Singapore, as they did with the women discussed in the previous chapter, including the possibilities open to them for redress, justice, and support. Although it is

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beyond the scope of the chapter to examine what becomes of men who are exploited in their work in/through Singapore without redress, such an endeavour would no doubt reveal how widespread the experience of returning home having failed to achieve migratory goals is. The following two chapters turn to other means by which migrant workers are potentially excluded from trafficking determinations, with many of the processes to be discussed pivoting on the media and social movement frames outlined so far in this and preceding chapters.

Notes 1. The ILO, for example, estimates the number of forced labourers globally to be at 21 million persons, with 11 million of these in the Asian region, that is, 3 out of every 1000 people are in forced labour situations in Asia (ILO n.d.). Whilst there is some degree of scepticism over such estimates (Feingold 2017; Rogaly 2008), there is enough evidence coming forward to suggest trafficking for forced labour is a significant and growing problem in the region. 2. The current levy rates and their expected increases can be viewed here: http://www.mom.gov.sg/~/media/mom/documents/services-forms/ passes/schedule_of_levy_changes.pdf. Currently, the levy rates for R1 Tier 3 workers in the service sector ($600) are actually lower or similar to the levy rates for R1 Tier 3 workers with MYE Waiver ($600–$700). 3. The lodge that was the subject of focus in this The Straits Times story was Avery Lodge in Jurong. The dormitory room at the lodge, the article emphasises, ‘has a high ceiling and bay windows, and comes with an attached bathroom and a kitchen’. It also has biometric security (although it is not entirely clear how this is of benefit to the workers) and a barber’s shop.

References Baey, G., & Yeoh, B.  S.A. (2015). Migration and precarious work: Negotiating debt, employment, and livelihood strategies amongst Bangladeshi migrant men working in Singapore’s construction industry. Working Paper No. 26. Singapore: Asia Research Institute. Bal, C. (2013). The politics of obedience: Bangladeshi construction workers and the migrant labour regime in Singapore. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, Perth. Bal, C. (2015). Production politics and migrant labour advocacy in Singapore. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(2), 219–242. Bauder, H. (2006). Labour movement: How migration regulates labour markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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De Genova, N. (2005). Working the boundaries: Race, space, and “illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. EJF. (2013). Sold to the sea. London: EJF. EJF. (2014). Slavery at sea. London: EJF. Feingold, D. (2017). Playing with numbers: The spurious promise of global trafficking statistics. Anti-Trafficking Review, 17, 152–155. Ford, M., Lyons, L., & van Schendal, W. (Eds.). (2012). Labour migration and human trafficking in Southeast Asia. London: Routledge. Greenpeace. (2016). Made in Taiwan: Government failure and illegal, abusive and criminal fisheries. Taipei: Greenpeace International. Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics and Transient Workers Count Too. (2010). Justice delayed, justice denied: The experiences of migrant workers in Singapore. Singapore: HOME and TWC2. ILO. (2009). ILO indicators of forced labour. Geneva: ILO. ILO. (2013). Caught at sea: Forced labour and trafficking in fisheries. Geneva: ILO. ILO. (n.d.). Statistics on forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking globally. Retrieved July 20, 2018, from https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/ forced-labour/policy-areas/statistics/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. IOM. (2010). Trafficking of fishermen in Thailand. Bangkok: IOM.  Retrieved March 22, 2015, from https://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/ mainsite/activities/countries/docs/thailand/Trafficking-of-FishermenThailand.pdf. Lindquist, J., Xiang, B., & Yeoh, B. S. A. (2012). Opening the black box of migration: Brokers and the organization of transnational mobility and the changing political economy in Asia. Pacific Affairs, 85(1), 7–19. MOM. (n.d.-a). Work permits for foreign workers. Singapore: MOM. Retrieved January 12, 2018, from http://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/workpermit-for-foreign-worker/sector-specific-rules/security-bond. MOM. (n.d.-b). Worker permits for foreign workers: Housing requirements. Retrieved January 12, 2018, from http://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/work-permit-for-foreign-worker/sector-specific-rules/housingrequirements. MOM. (n.d.-c). Dependent’s passes—Eligibility. Retrieved January 12, 2018, from http://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/dependants-pass/eligibility. Phillips, N. (2013). Unfree labour and adverse incorporation into the global economy: Comparative perspectives on Brazil and India. Economy and Society, 42(2), 171–196. Platt, M., Baey, G., Yeoh, B. S. A., Khoo, C. Y., & Lam, T. (2016). Debt, precarity and gender: Male and female migrant workers in Singapore. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(1), 119–136. Rogaly, B. (2008). Migrant workers in the ILO’s global alliance on forced labour report: A critical appraisal. Third World Quarterly, 29, 1431–1447.

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Stringer, C., Whittaker, H., & Simmons, G. (2015). New Zealand’s turbulent waters: The use of forced labour in the fishing industry. Global Networks, 16(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12077. Surtees, R. (2008). Trafficking of men: A trend less considered (IOM Migration Research Series Number 36). Geneva: IOM. Surtees, R. (2012). Trafficked at sea. The exploitation of Ukrainian seafarers and fishers. Washington, DC and Geneva: NEXUS Institute and IOM. Tenaganita. (2009). The global catch: Modern day slavery fishermen. Kuala Lumpur: Tenaganita. The Guardian. (2013, December 9). Singapore shocked by worst riots in decades, as migrant workers vent anger. Retrieved August 20, 2018, from https://www. theguar dian.com/world/2013/dec/09/singapor e-riots-decadesmigrant-workers. The Guardian. (2014, April 21). Singapore needs to address its treatment of foreign workers. Retrieved August 20, 2018, from https://www.theguardian. com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/apr/21/singaporeaddress-treatment-migrant-workers. The New York Times. (2013, December 27). Singapore’s angry migrant workers. Retrieved August 20, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/ opinion/singapores-angry-migrant-workers.html. The Straits Times. (2009, April 3). Apartment-style living at largest dorm. The Straits Times. (2015a, June 11). More than 9 in 10 Bangladeshi workers say they are given unclean and unhygienic food: NUS survey. Retrieved August 20, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/more-than-9-in10-bangladeshi-foreign-workers-say-they-are-given-unclean-and-unhygenic. The Straits Times. (2015b, July 23). Help foreign workers eat right. Retrieved August 20, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/help-foreignworkers-eat-right. Today. (2009a, April 3). Foreign worker housing: MOM gets tough. Today. (2009b, April 14). Foreign workers: They lied to officials. Today. (2009c, April 25). MOM gets tough on errant employers. Today. (2009d, April 9). Complaints of foreign workers deployed illegally up from 16 to 412. TWC2. (2014). 26 to 40 per cent of male workers suffer illegal ‘savings money’ deductions. Retrieved September 14, 2018, from http://twc2.org. s g / 2 0 1 4 / 0 9 / 1 0 / 2 6 - t o - 4 0 - p e r c e n t - o f - m a l e - w o r k e r s - s u f f e r- i l l e gal-savings-money-deduction/. U.S.  Department of State. (2015). Annual trafficking in persons report. Washington, DC: US DoS. UNIAP. (2009). Exploitation of Cambodian men at sea: Facts about the trafficking of Cambodian men onto Thai fishing boats. Bangkok: UNIAP.

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UNIAP with LICADHO and LSCW. (2007). Exploitation of Cambodian men at sea. Bangkok: UNIAP. Wise, A. (2013). Pyramid subcontracting and moral detachment: Down-sourcing risk and responsibility in the management of transnational labour in Asia. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 24(3), 433–455. Yea, S. (2013). Introduction. In A thousand and one days (volume 1). Dhaka: Bangla Kathar. Yea, S. (2015). Introduction. In A thousand and one days (volume 2). Dhaka: Bangla Kathar. Yea, S., & Chok, S. (2018). Unfreedom unbound: Developing a cumulative approach to unfree labour in Singapore. Work, Employment and Society, 32(5), 925–941. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017017738956. Yea, S., & TWC2. (2013). Troubled waters. Singapore: TWC2. Yeoh, B. S. A. (2006). Bifurcated labour: The unequal incorporation of transmigrants in Singapore. Tijdeschlift voon Economische en sociale geografies, 97(1), 26–37.

CHAPTER 7

Spaces of Deflection and Deportability Beyond Anti-trafficking

It is the 31st of December 2014 and the PHTA was passed two months ago by Singapore’s Parliament without amendment and in near record time. I am sitting in the outdoor food court at Kranji Lodge, a dormitory for male migrant workers remotely situated in the northwest of the city-state, just a couple of kilometres from the Malaysian border. I have visited Kranji Lodge many times—possibly more than twenty over the preceding two years since commencing fieldwork with male Work Permit and Special Pass holders from South Asia. Singapore’s MOM has rented several of the dormitory’s rooms to accommodate some of the workers who have been placed on a Special Pass. This morning I have been asked by a Bangladeshi informant, Rasul, if I could travel out to meet several Tamil men who had just been accommodated in his room by the MOM. I find myself sitting facing Kumar, Raja and Sarath (introduced in Chap. 6), with Rasul seated beside me, bursting to commence his narration of the three Tamil men’s problem. Kumar places a mug of hot coffee before me and asks if I would like some food. Their own breakfast has been provided by the MOM but doesn’t arrive until mid-morning. The timing is deliberate of course, since the late arrival of breakfast acts as a disincentive for men on Special Passes to head out and engage in casual work illegally, which generally commences by 7 am. Rasul begins by informing me that the three men had arrived in Singapore in June and August that year respectively to work for ‘Hari’ and ‘Koa Low’, two electrical engineering companies. It was all three men’s first work stints in Singapore and Kumar had entered on an S Pass, whilst the other two held the more typical Work Permit visas conferred to South Asian men. Their IPAs stated they would each be paid a monthly salary of SG $2300 (for Kumar) and SG $450 (for Raja and Sarath), but in actual fact © The Author(s) 2020 S. Yea, Paved with Good Intentions?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_7

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they had received less than one-third of this. In addition, all three paid exorbitant agent’s fees and were asked to perform work that was completely outside the contours of their job descriptions. As Kumar related, “Even with my qualifications I am doing housekeeping, welding and general work. When I asked the boss about this he said I had to do any kind of work given, otherwise he would send me back to India”. Raja took over from Kumar at this point and explained that when the three had arrived they had no proper place to sleep; they were taken to a rented bedsit in Geylang and told to sleep on the floor with two dozen other men. There was no room even to put their bags, which were thrown outside the door. Every fifteen days or so the three were transferred to a different company as supply workers and their accommodation—although always substandard—also changed. The men were paid SG $30 on most days but never with a payslip or with hours worked recorded. As we continued our discussions of the three’s circumstances, a Chinese Singaporean woman entered the food court and began speaking to some other workers. Her arrival was notable as there were rarely ever any women at the dormitory, and virtually never was a Singaporean to be seen unless they were employed at the dormitory or were workers’ bosses. My curious stare prompted Kumar to explain that the woman was a MOM officer who had come to meet with another brother to discuss his case. The MOM officer called Sarath over briefly and when he returned he looked exceedingly uncomfortable. The officer had apparently asked who I was and when Sarath explained that I was a university professor, the officer had chastised him for speaking to me. “There is no need for you men to be talking to anyone else about your situation here”, she had apparently advised. Not wishing further problems on the men, I left soon after. Raja managed to find a new company and remained in Singapore, but Kumar and Raja were deported a couple of weeks after I met them without the back wages owing to them and still carrying a considerable migration debt. No mention was ever made by anyone of their cases as containing significant elements of human trafficking.

Introduction I had heard dozens of iterations of the same story over the preceding 18 months as the one told to me that day by these Tamil men, stories of non-­ payment of salary coupled with deceptive recruitment, wrongful deployment, and uphauling and degrading living conditions. Many such experiences have been examined in Chap. 6 and several detailed narratives of Tamil migrant workers in Singapore collected in an edited volume attest to how commonplace such experiences are (Yea et al. 2018). But there are

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two elements of these men’s experiences that are particularly relevant to discussion in this chapter and the next: first, is the definition and response to the men’s problems in ways that elide possible questions of trafficking and, second, is the physical and relational distancing of men from possible supports and rights-based interventions. Both these processes, I suggest, render migrant workers with possible claims as victims of trafficking excluded from the emerging anti-trafficking framework in Singapore. Chapters 5 and 6 provided insights into the distinct forms of exploitation female and male migrant labourers in Singapore face. A range of exploitative practices and situations were documented, including debt bondage, removal of freedom of movement and association, arbitrary and changing contractual arrangements, penalties (including financial ones) and punitive actions imposed on workers by employers, threats and intimidation, and degrading and substandard living and working conditions. Discussion in the chapters indicated that such practices manifest in ­multifarious and complex arrangements, depending on whether a labourer is male or female, in what sector he/she is employed, and whether he/she is the bearer of a work permit or Social Visit Pass visa, or another type of visa, and whether or not a migrant labourer is deployed in a workplace with an (un)ethical employer. Further, and as has been noted by several others in relation to migrant worker exploitation, immigration and labour regimes governing migrant worker rights and conditions of entry and stay can constitute palpable challenges to migrant worker protection (Barrientos et al. 2013). In this chapter and the one that follows I turn to explicitly engage with the key question raised in the book, namely, why do so few of these exploited migrant workers in Singapore attain protection or redress through the provisions of Singapore’s emerging anti-trafficking infrastructure? Given that internationally accepted characterisations and indicators of human trafficking, such as those developed by the ILO and the UN. GIFT, provide a ready fit to many of the migrants whose experiences were laid out in Chaps. 5 and 6—and indeed those of Kumar, Raja, and Sarah introduced above—this emerges as a highly relevant question. As I will argue in this chapter and the one that follows, exploited migrant labourers who may well have claims as victims of trafficking within Singapore are disqualified or excluded at various stages of anti-trafficking interventions. In this chapter I focus particularly on exclusion through the application of what I refer to as ‘legal-jurisdictional exceptionalism’, which may be understood as the disqualification of victims through invocation and

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manipulation of legal-spatial demarcations, particularly external borders and internal boundaries. In Chap. 8 I continue my focus on this question by examining two further modes of exclusion: discretionary determinations of status, where potential victims are disqualified as a result of the influence of socio-legal processes of determination of migrants’ status, and obfuscation, particularly through bureaucratic and investigative processes. This discussion focuses particularly on the victim identification stage of anti-trafficking interventions, which is a crucial first phase during which trafficking victimhood may be established or denied. Discussion in the chapter is organised around two registers of exclusion that operate under the frame of legal-jurisdictional exceptionalism, commencing with spaces of deflection and then spaces of deportability. These represent two key ways the state excludes potentially trafficked migrants from human trafficking determinations that involve the intersection between space and the law: first, by invoking limits to territorial ­responsibility (spaces of deflection), and second, by creating spaces of non-­territory within Singapore (spaces of deportability). The first of these strategies reiterates and magnifies the existing territorial boundaries and limits of Singapore. Particularly in relation to migrant fishers transiting through Singapore, preclusion through the creation of spaces of deflection acts as a key mode of exclusion from anti-trafficking protections and provisions. Crafting spaces of deportability, alternatively, works by creatively reconfiguring existing territorial spaces, such as the port (for migrant fishers) and the dormitory (for work permit/ Special Pass holders). Before turning to these spaces, a brief overview of extant geographical scholarship on processes of legal-spatial exclusion of migrants, particularly asylum seekers, from destination states and, in particular, protections supposedly afforded in these states establishes the conceptual parameters for the discussion that follows.

Geographies of Legal-Jurisdictional Exceptionalism The register of exclusion from trafficking victimhood taken up in this chapter involves the manipulation of spatial-legal boundaries and borders to preclude migrants from availing access to consideration under a human trafficking frame. As outlined in Chap. 1, drawing on Agamben’s (1998) conceptualisation of homo sacer and Bulter’s (2009) discussion of grievable lives, a considerable body of critical scholarship on spatial strategies of exclusion of migrant subjects has emerged recently. This has been largely

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in response to heightened concern about the withdrawal of protection and asylum responsibilities for refugees and the reframing of refugee issues through state-centric security discourses to the detriment of human rights protections (Mountz and Hiemstra 2012, 2014; Hyndman and Mountz 2008; Tazreiter 2015; Gorman 2017; Mountz 2011; Walters 2008). Drawing on a range of discrete geographical and legislative contexts, this work illustrates the ways destination states are rendered impenetrable to asylum seekers through deliberate and carefully crafted strategies of exclusion aimed at ‘evad[ing] the provisions of international covenants’ (Mountz and Hiemstra 2012: 456), such as the refugee convention. As Mountz and Hiemstra (2012: 464) argue, ‘These practices aim to prevent migrant arrivals on sovereign territory in order to preclude access to the range of legal rights, social services and economic possibilities such entry triggers’. Mountz and Hiemstra’s (2012) characterisation of state borders as ‘elastic’ in relation to the (un)desirable migrant incites us to consider the precise ways states exclude migrants through legal-geographical demarcations of sovereign responsibility. Mundlak (2009), amongst others, has also noted the ‘elastic’ tendencies of states to territorialise and deterritorialise in relation to labour issues—so crucial to considerations of labour trafficking for migrants in Singapore—since labour law is always expressed territorially. It is nonetheless Alison Mountz’s (2011) work on ‘shrinking the spaces of asylum’ that provides the foundational imperative for the discussion of spaces of deflection in this chapter, with her argument that jurisdictional manoeuvring enables states to invoke geographical demarcations creatively for the purposes of migrant exclusions from human rights protections. Mountz’s and related scholarships help frame discussions on exclusion of migrants with prospective trafficking claims from Singapore’s jurisdiction. However, beyond practices of deflection from Singaporean jurisdiction, the manipulation of space to exclude potential human trafficking claimants also involves the creation of spaces of deportation within Singaporean territory. In examining the (re)configuration of spaces within Singapore’s territory, particularly ports and shelters/dormitories, a related thread of scholarship on camps/accommodation and detention is helpful. Casting a critical gaze towards sites and practices of detention of asylum seekers and ‘illegal’ migrants, Lauren Martin (2012: 312) has argued that detention has become an important strategy in migrant/asylum seeker-­ receiving states, where ‘authority to detain noncitizens has become a key spatial strategy in domestic counter-terrorism, interior immigration

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enforcement and border securitisation’. She argues that detention serves the dual functions of containment and deterrence. Containment enables states not only to limit the unruly and uncontrolled circulation of migrants within a state’s territory, but also to obscure and isolate migrants. As she suggests, ‘the location and conditions of detention allow states to engineer detainees access to legal protections, representation, and resources’ (p. 313). Martin’s focus on detention as containment is preceded by other scholarly observations on the role of borders and bordering practices as internal to the nation-state, rather than existing only at its edges (e.g. Coleman 2008), and the ‘strategic in/visibilities’ (Mountz 2004; Mountz and Hiemstra 2012) generated by detention, as well as specific attention to the ‘remoteness’ of detention (Mountz and Loyd 2014). Further to the obscurity generated by containment, Martin and Darling (2011) both argue that the practices and routines that inhere to spaces of detention themselves also act as a form of deterrence. Martin suggests this occurs because ‘detention-as-deterrence’ can ‘interrupt household incomes, force migrants to give up possessions and savings, and fragment relations of care that sustain transnational migrant networks’ (p.  314). When migrants are detained or sheltered/accommodated for long periods of time they are not only subject to heightened controls, surveillance, and isolation, but they simultaneously lose their ability to earn income, sustain both local and transnational relationships, and ‘live’ rather than simply pass time. If this is true for asylum seekers it must be equally as true for labour migrants whose motivations for migrating oscillate around economic concerns for familial welfare and betterment. Darling’s (2011) discussion of asylum accommodation in the UK is similarly suggestive of the ways shelter unsettles migrant lives. Housing, he argues, ‘is deliberately decoupled from feelings of security, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the border is lived’ (p.  263). In this sense, the imminence of temporariness and departure is played out in a domopolitics of discomfort and insecurity of ‘home’ spaces. Such state practices arguably situate asylum seeker accommodation as a key site of governmentality and biopolitical management where ‘entangled modes of governance…find expression in the logic of accommodation which acts to discipline asylum seekers and reassert arbitrary sovereign authority into a regime of governmental regulation’ (Darling 2011: 263). Whilst much of this literature focuses on the punitive- or surveillance-­ oriented nature of accommodation, Williams (2015) attends instead to a politics of care associated with state-run facilities. Williams’ (2015) ­concept

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of ‘contingent care’ usefully demarcates state-run facilities such as shelters and hospitals as sites where ‘care is increasingly linked to enforcement efforts’ (p. 11). In contexts of (irregular) migrant vulnerability, including risks around injury, safety, and health problems, Williams argues that the United States increasingly utilises access to care as an additional ‘technology of border enforcement’, whereby in ‘The entry of state agencies and agents into the politics and practices of migrant care…. functions as a technology of enforcement and the sick and injured are cared for in order to facilitate their timely deportation. In this context, minimalist humanitarian interventions complement and uphold the enforcement regime’ (Williams 2015: 18). For trafficking victims too, the provision of care and protection in shelters are conditional upon victims cooperating with authorities in investigations and in acting as prosecutorial witnesses. Once these processes are exhausted there are no options to remain in the destination and repatriation swiftly follows. Williams’ arguments therefore add an additional layer of meaning to the legal-jurisdictional politics of spaces of deportability. Although oriented to understanding processes of detention/exclusion experienced by asylum seekers, in its totality this critical scholarship provides insights that are highly provocative in engagements with processes of exclusion relating to potential human trafficking victims taken up in this chapter. Physical sites of exclusion, detention, and invisibility exemplified by shelters and detention facilities, as well as imagined sites of exclusion present in the demarcation of borders and zones, reveal the strategic impulse of the state in managing, facilitating, and justifying exclusions. I now turn to these entangled practices through an analysis of Singapore’s exclusion of potential trafficking victims.

Spaces of Deflection For migrants who transit through Singapore and are deployed on long-­ haul fishing vessels, claims to determinations as victims of trafficking are deflected on the basis that the exploitation of the fishers does not take place in Singaporean territory and therefore remains outside the purview of Singaporean law and jurisdictional responsibility. This argument put forward by the Singaporean government finds broader resonance in practices adopted by asylum seeker-receiving/destination states such as Australia and several European Union (EU) countries, where processes of jurisdictional re-ordering prevent potential claimants from consideration as victims.

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The immediate background to these bordering processes in the Singapore case was the highlighting of the issue of migrant fisher exploitation in 2011–2012 when the problem of potentially trafficked migrant fishers entering and transiting through Singaporean territory was first raised (see Chap. 6). A lack of concerted responses by the Singaporean government to the alleged trafficking of fishermen was suggested in 2011, both in an NGO report that emerged at the time (Yea and TWC2 2012) and in the US State Department’s Annual TIP Report (2011), with the appearance of the issue in the public media domain providing the impetus for the Singaporean government’s strategies in response. The suggestion made primarily by the NGO TWC2, and following this the US Department of State, was that Singapore was allowing trafficking of fishermen to occur unchecked by Singaporean authorities. Singapore’s entry in the Annual US TIP Report for 2011 consequently stated that there was greater reporting on victims of forced labour identified by NGOs and foreign missions on long-haul fishing boats that dock in Southeast Asian ports, including Singapore. Workers reported severe abuse by fishing boat captains, the inability to disembark from their vessels, the inability to terminate their contracts, and the non-payment of wages. MOM interviewed several fishermen who claimed abuses suggesting human trafficking but reported that they could not further investigate due to lack of jurisdiction over the suspected offenses.

The US State Department’s report ignited a fiery response from the Singaporean government. At the nub of the government’s response was the suggestion that trafficking of migrant fishers was a problem with which Singapore was jurisdictionally unable to respond. This rendering of Singapore’s borders as ‘immovable’ creates a palpable space of deflection for the Singaporean state concerning trafficked fishers. The crux of the government’s argument can be traced to the legal-­ jurisdictional dynamics of the long-haul/offshore fishing industry, which enabled Singapore to deny the problem of trafficked fishers fell under their jurisdiction. The Singaporean government argued at the time that the exploitation of the men’s labour on long-haul fishing vessels takes place in international—not territorial—waters. Yet, discussions with migrant fishers through the course of this research revealed that the Singaporean-­ registered and -based manning agencies responsible for deploying the fishers engaged in several practices that constitute strong indicators of

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human trafficking. These included unlawful confinement, contract fraud and contract substitution, illegal and deceptive recruitment, and threats and intimidation (see Chap. 6 for a more detailed discussion of these issues). The arguments based on jurisdictional limitations put forward by Singapore’s MOM thus do not entirely stand up against the testimonial evidence provided by migrant fishers themselves in relation to other stages or aspects of human trafficking, including transportation, harbouring, and deceptive recruitment. Further, the suggestion that migrant fishers’ labour is always and necessarily only exploited in international waters remains empirically unvalidated. Singapore’s territorial waters extend three nautical miles, while Singapore’s exclusive fishing zone extends beyond its territorial waters by 196 nautical miles and in line with Singapore’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) (see CIA World Factbook 2018 for further details). Considerable fishing activity occurs in these waters, as does the transference of migrant fishers onto vessels already at sea. Yet, despite these arguments, the Singaporean state persisted in its deflection at the time, stating in their Detailed Response to the 2012 Annual Trafficking in Persons Report (2012) that: ‘We would like the State Department to clarify these “reports” and to suggest how this issue could be addressed by Singapore, given the jurisdictional issues highlighted below…. We have not found any evidence of forced labour being committed on Singapore-flagged ships, by Singapore employers, or within Singapore waters’. In a follow-up statement Singapore’s TIP Taskforce reaffirmed that, ‘While we share concerns about their [fishermen’s] work conditions, Singapore does not have jurisdiction over foreign fishermen working in off-shore waters on non-Singapore flags’. Thus, in addition to deflections of responsibility based on limits to territorial jurisdiction (offshore waters), the Singapore government further argued that because the vessels onto which the migrant fishers were deployed did not bear Singaporean flags, Singapore was helpless to intervene on the vessels where exploitation of fishers may have been occurring. What is also noteworthy about the above arguments is that the Singapore government does not deny that exploitation may be occurring on foreign-flagged fishing vessels, but only that intervention through anti-trafficking measures is beyond the spatial-legal purview of the Singaporean state. These deflections of responsibility by invoking jurisdictional limits do raise an important question about trafficking specific to the long-haul fishing sector. The UN Trafficking Protocol (2000) does not cover trafficking for labour exploitation where exploitation takes place in international

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waters. According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), oceans may be divided into differing zones of sovereignty. Waters from the coast to 12 nautical miles are classified as ‘territorial waters’ where states have sovereignty. Waters beyond this are classified as ‘high seas’ and are considered to be beyond the jurisdiction of the state, but criminal acts that take place in these waters would come under the purview of international law. These complexities have been most extensively discussed in relation to the issue of piracy. The challenges for trafficking in the long-haul fishing industry thus include defining trafficking at sea as human trafficking according to and in keeping with accepted international definitions, such as the United Nations Trafficking Protocol, delineating national responsibility for acting on instances of human trafficking as a crime, and safe return of victims to their home countries. Nonnemacher (2014) argues that the TIP Protocol is not well provisioned to address human trafficking in international waters, whilst the provisions of the Slavery Convention may better serve to address trafficking at sea because they have provision to include criminal activities involving slavery in international waters. However, in order for the Slavery Convention to be usefully invoked, it must first be determined that exploited migrant fishers are, in fact, slaves. Such a determination presents its own set of logistical and conceptual problems. Apart from practical problems in applying the Slavery Convention to trafficked fishers, further jurisdictional hurdles emerge in relation to international law. Fishers are excluded from the Migrant Labour Convention (2006) and the International Convention on Standards in Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) (1978). Further, fishing vessels are specifically excluded from the Migrant Labour Convention (2006), which means that fishing vessels cannot be inspected for violations of international labour standards associated with working in the maritime sector. The focus is, again, primarily on the conditions of seafarers and is oriented to freight and navy vessels. Finally, although fishing standards were adopted by the United Nations in 1959 and with further amendments in 1966, labour standards were not part of the original documents, which were at the time oriented more towards addressing concerns around overfishing, including its environmental impacts and Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. In order to address these gaps, the ILO’s International Labour Conference adopted during its 97th session the Working in Fisheries Convention of 2007a (No. 188) and it’s Working in Fisheries Recommendations of 2007b (No. 199), which

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aimed to give comprehensive standards addressing the living and working conditions of fishers.1 To date, the convention is only in force in ten countries globally; neither Singapore nor Taiwan, or the four major source countries for migrant fishers deployed on Taiwanese vessels managed by Singaporean agents (the Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam), are signatories. This protection gap is arguably constructed through both jurisdictional loopholes in Singaporean law operating in concert with gaps in protections in existing international laws and lack of commitment to applicable international laws. Pragmatic difficulties for compliance checking and regulating and monitoring vessels for cases of human trafficking in the high seas are also palpable, with to date no clear internationally defined and agreed-to mechanism governing responsibility for such activities. No such body as an ‘international high seas guard’, for example, exists, with international NGOs such as Greenpeace or national coast guards often ‘stumbling’ across cases of human trafficking whilst pursuing other objectives involving fishing vessels (such as IUU fishing). Returning to the role of the Singaporean-based manning agencies as possible traffickers, the responsibility for supporting the men as victims of trafficking was further denied by the Singaporean government in 2011–2012 and again in 2015 on the grounds that these agencies were purported by the government to provide only an administrative rather than recruitment and employment service (MOM 2015). Both the Singapore government and the Singaporean manning agencies themselves suggested at the time that the agencies were not directly involved in the recruitment of the men in the Philippines, Cambodia, or Indonesia and therefore could not be held accountable for the deceptive recruitment practices of intermediaries in the source countries of migrant fishers. If, however, these managing agencies are stepping beyond their roles as administrators and/or are knowingly involved in the deceptive recruitment of men and/or knowingly place them in exploitative situations on fishing vessels then such deflections become untenable. Affidavits made by some of the Filipino fishers collected in 2014 and 2015 suggested that the Singaporean manning agencies were deeply involved in recruiting, transporting, and harbouring trafficked fishers. In sum, the Singapore government denied that trafficking of migrant fishers was a problem for which either Singaporean actors were involved as perpetrators/key facilitators (in their functions as recruiting and manning agencies or owners of vessels) or the Singapore government should consequently take any responsibility by way of redress for victims or pursuit of

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criminal investigations against perpetrators. The government invoked jurisdictional delineations of responsibility to confound efforts to attribute to it such responsibilities to act. This was achieved primarily by claiming that exploitation took place outside Singapore’s jurisdiction. In relation to the Taiwanese government, Greenpeace (2016: 6) similarly suggests: Taiwan knows that these issues exists and does little to address them despite domestic and international requirements…. Taiwan’s [fishing] industry appears to be out of control, and despite legislative change, Taiwan seems either reluctant or unable to properly manage its fleet and its industry. Without proper monitoring, enforcement and sanctions, there will be little change.

Whilst both countries have anti-trafficking laws, Singapore’s TIP Taskforce has arguably been able to construct itself as a hapless victim of the misdeeds of trafficking actors located in other countries, particularly trafficking source countries such as the Philippines and Cambodia, that use Singapore as a transit point through which to deploy victims to their fates.2

Spaces of Deportation The second register of Singapore’s legal-territorial strategy for exclusion from trafficking protections revolves around the re-signification of existing spaces within Singapore, including ports, dormitories, and shelters. Unlike spaces of deflection, which aim to prevent migrants from entering Singaporean territory and therefore being considered under its laws— including the PHTA and local labour laws—the creation of spaces of deportation involves spatial tactics invoked for migrants already within Singapore’s jurisdiction. Spaces of deportation are aimed at variously hiding, obscuring, and removing migrants from Singaporean territory without consideration for whether their experience may fall in the realm of human trafficking. Arguably, and as the cases drawn on below illustrate, more often than not migrants manoeuvring within these spaces exit Singapore without having achieved remedial justice (e.g. through compensation or restitution) and may be criminalised and subject to fines or, for some, blacklisting from returning to Singapore for work in the future. This part of the chapter considers two sites which act as containers of migrants, physically and relationally, namely, the port and the shelter/ dormitory.

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Jurong Fisheries Port As with the discussion of space of deflection above, the key group impacted by the re-signification of the port space are migrant fishers. In 2014 Singapore’s TIP Taskforce publicly claimed to be working with CSOs and NGOs to improve reporting methods, on-shore amenities, and delivery of humanitarian assistance to ‘fishermen in distress’. One of their main efforts in this regard was to put up posters in the port areas so that fishermen could call relevant authorities for assistance. The government provides facts of cases to relevant embassies in Singapore of source country nationals and embassies of relevant flags (MOM 2012). This was followed by the financing and staffing (through the Migrant Workers Centre (MWC)) of a drop-in centre at the main fisheries port in Singapore, Jurong Fisheries Port. The drop-in centre functions as a space where migrant fishers can present themselves if they wish to seek advice from MWC staff and volunteers from the various seafarers’ missions in Singapore about their situations on fishing vessels. As the MOM stated in 2015, and in response to their continued denial of allegations that Step-Up Marine and other administrative agencies were involved in the illegal recruitment and trafficking of migrant fishers: Nevertheless, we remained deeply concerned about allegations of trafficking through Singapore and endeavoured to establish additional protections of seafarers (sic) in distress. In January 2014, MOM, in collaboration with the Singapore Maritime Officers’ Union, various Seafarer missions, and the Migrant Workers’ Centre, set up a Seafarers’ Welfare Centre (SWC) at Jurong Fishery Port. The SWC provides distressed fishermen with shelter and access to assistance from the relevant authorities and civil society organisations. Since its establishment, two cases involving seafarers in distress have been assisted through the SWC.  None of these were found to involve trafficking.

According to this statement, primarily the assistance provided by the drop­in centre concerns options for migrant fishers should they not wish to return to their vessel. In actuality, however, the options for fishers are few and none involve protections as victims of trafficking. What is available to fishers in distress is assistance with repatriation to their home country. This assistance is not financial in nature (e.g. in the form of covering the costs of an airfare), but rather involves the MWC negotiating with the relevant agency in Singapore to recover the costs of repatriation or referring the fisher in questions to one of the seafarers’ missions in Singapore to provide

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temporary shelter and raise the funds needed for repatriation (e.g. through donations). In these processes of assisted deportation, screening for labour trafficking does not seem to take place and no direct anti-trafficking supports are provided to migrant fishers. Although the statement from the MOM quoted above suggests that of the two fishers who were assisted neither ‘were found to involve trafficking’, the basis for this determination remains unclear since no indicators for labour trafficking in the fisheries sector were provided, and the circumstances under which the fishers were interviewed about their experiences were not explained. Such internal processes of victim identification and determination of status are ultimately self-referential and do not yield much by way of transparency (see Chap. 8 for further discussion of this). The function of the drop-in centre is, ultimately, to remove fishers in distress as quickly as possible from Singapore. Given that migrant fishers rarely have any money to contribute towards their own passage home, the key mechanism for expediting removal is through involving other actors to raise the necessary funds for their deportation. The drop-in centre is exclusionary in two further senses. First, it is located in clear view of the fishing vessels themselves, with vessel captains and senior officers able to scrutinise fishers who present themselves for advice and assistance. Because the physical structure of the drop in is an open shed, with no walls, fishers are clearly seen not only entering the centre, but also engaging in discussions with support workers there, using the telephone and so on. Clearly, this scrutiny does not provide an encouraging space for migrant fishers to present themselves for advice. As many commentators have recognised, trafficked persons often experience fear, intimidation, and distrust of authorities, making the decision to seek advice and assistance an already challenging one (Bokhari 2008; Hepburn and Simon 2010). An open space in view of exploiters does very little to encourage fishers to desert their vessels. Second, the port space and therefore the drop-in centre, under the management of the Singapore Port Authority (SPA), can only be accessed with written permission from the SPA and must be applied for in advance. Foreign nationals are not entitled to apply for permission to enter and Singaporean citizens must submit a new application each time they wish to enter. Therefore, migrant rights and anti-trafficking NGO volunteers find it almost impossible (if they are foreign nationals) or exceedingly difficult (if they are Singaporean) to have a presence at the drop-in centre. The seafarers’ missions are the only non-­ government presence at the drop-in centre and maintain that they cannot

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speak against the government and its responses to the trafficking and exploitation of migrant fishers for fear of losing their access to the port (personal communication with representative of the Lutheran Seafarers’ Missions, Singapore, August 2015). The opening of the drop-in centre, and public lauding of it as an effective response to the exploitation of migrant fishers—especially when the Singaporean state’s hands are preverbally tied because of jurisdictional limits—belies the exclusionary impulse that is spatialised within its operation. The drop-in centre at the port exemplifies Mountz and Hiemstra’s (2012) ‘new geographies of enforcement’, in which sovereign territory becomes impenetrable to groups with human rights claims, and whilst their treatise describes a spatial strategy of externalisation of refugees, it is also applicable to the reconfiguration of the port space where potential human trafficking victims are excluded. As they write, ‘These practices aim to prevent migrant arrivals on sovereign territory in order to preclude access to the range of legal rights, social services and economic possibilities such entry triggers’ (p.  467). Ports are important spaces of preclusion because they are peripheral to sovereign territory and therefore often obscured, but also key spaces of migrant arrival. Mountz (2011: 318) is therefore correct when she asks, ‘How do we know what happens beyond the edges of legibility of state border enforcement, where authorities stop counting, documenting, and including, no longer welcoming, processing, or registering entry? What is known, and more importantly, what is not known in the realm of displacement and exclusion, when the mobility of state actors in peripheral areas construct hidden geographies, silence others through containment, and remain themselves hidden from view?’. The establishment of the drop-in centre has had the effect of enabling the Singaporean state to present itself publicly as undertaking action to support the needs of fishermen in distress whilst simultaneously both taking no substantive action to ameliorate the structural and institutional conditions that enabled these practices to be alleviated and keeping exploited migrant fishers obscured and hidden, in the sense Mountz suggests, from a wider view.3 Shelters and Dormitories Whilst ports figure as significant spaces of exclusion of exploited migrants from anti-trafficking determinations, government-run shelters/dormitories can function in similar ways by obscuring migrant claimants from

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access to third-sector organisations which may otherwise be able to provide a range of services for migrants that exceed those offered by the state. Equally, NGOs may be able to offer an alternative interpretation of a migrant’s experience and remedies that may be available to migrants in seeking redress. This was the case for Kumar, Raja, and Sarath, introduced at the outset of this chapter. The location of Kranji Lodge is prohibitive to migrant rights and anti-trafficking NGOs from easily conducting outreach. Migrant rights and anti-trafficking NGOs—already constrained in their capacity to assist migrants—are not able to regularly conduct outreach in migrant worker dormitories or government shelters. As one representative from TWC2 stated, ‘If we went to the dormitories we would be so overwhelmed with cases we wouldn’t be able to handle them. It is easier to let workers come to us if they have a problem’ (personal communication, 12 April 2015). Health Serve was the only migrant rights NGO that regularly conducted outreach to migrant worker dormitories (only for male workers and only in two locations). As their name suggests, this NGO is principally oriented to health and injury problems of male workers and has limited involvement in salary and other labour issues, including where there may be elements of trafficking. Men on Special Passes who are placed at sites like Kranji Lodge also find it difficult to commute to Geylang and Little India, where the main migrant rights NGOs are located. Usually Special Pass holders are affected by an almost complete lack of money and so are unable to cover the cost of transportation to travel to these districts. This ensures that migrant claimants continue to be isolated and obscured in sites remote from those offering rights-based supports. Thus, despite some early claims that NGOs are ‘better positioned’ to assist victims of trafficking than the state, such pronouncements tend to ignore both the pragmatic constraints around the capacity that NGOs often experience and the state’s efforts to, in some cases, obscure exploited migrants from, rather than refer them to, NGOs (Tzvetlova 2002). That NGOs sometimes draw on real cases of exploited and trafficked migrants to advance their advocacy agendas also constitutes a disincentive for the state to introduce migrants to NGOs engaging in such practices (see also Chap. 4). Female migrant labourers, particularly those working in Singapore as entertainers and some FDWs, face similar trajectories as male work permit holders once they encounter the state and are provided with government shelters during the course of legal or other investigative processes. The Keramat dormitory is one of the main facilities where women are placed,

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although the dormitory was purpose built to accommodate FDWs who were in transition in their employment (e.g. having just arrived in Singapore and waiting to be placed with an employer) (MOM 2008). Like Kranji Lodge, the MOM also rents bed spaces at Keramat and places women there who are either under investigation, assisting in an investigation, or, less commonly, have a salary or employment-related claim being mediated by the MOM. The case of Chris from the Philippines illustrates the ways migrant women are obscured from anti-trafficking interventions and protections by NGOs whilst in the spaces of government-run accommodation. Chris was recruited to work in a bar as a waitress by another Filipino woman who already held a work permit visa as an FDW in Singapore. In fact, the recruiter was employed as an FDW for her Singaporean boyfriend’s mother and it was her boyfriend’s pub where Chris was unwittingly deployed. Chris was not expecting to have to perform sexual services in the pub and was not aware that it was an FDW visa that had been applied for on her behalf. She resisted the demands from her recruiter and the pub owner to perform sexual services and eventually went to the police to complain. Chris was them placed in Keramat (with her recruiter) whilst her case of using an FDW work permit to work in a pub was investigated. Chris managed to contact a case worker at TWC2, who subsequently flagged Chris’s case as one with strong indicators of human trafficking. Chris named her recruiter/trafficker as the woman she was now sharing a room with at Keramat and was extremely concerned when her recruiter was scheduled for deportation from Singapore, so taking with her the evidence needed to verify—or at least further investigate—Chris’s claims to being a victim of trafficking made through TWC2. Although Chris had languished in Keramat for several months, once TWC2 became aware of her circumstances and flagged the possibility of trafficking to MOM, Chris was swiftly deported. In fact, the reason Chris had initially contacted the case worker at TWC2 was not because of her concerns about being trafficked, but because she was effectively incarcerated at Keramat; denied the opportunity to communicate about her situation with any organisation; and was not allowed to work whilst her case was going on (e.g. under the TJS). Through the course of their conversations with Chris, TWC2 discovered that many women from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand were residing in Keramat without access to internet, facing severe limitations on mobile phone use, unable to leave the premises of their own volition, and

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unable to undertake paid work. There were dozens of cases of women who had been placed in Keramat for months and, in a few cases, for well over a year. Lorena and Yati, two FDWs from the Philippines and Indonesia respectively, were two such cases (TWC2 2012, 2013), whilst several other FDWs from the Philippines who had, like Chris, been deployed in pubs were also documented. Yati and Lorena were both wrongfully deployed by their respective agencies. Although Yati’s work permit stated her job was a domestic worker, her agency engaged Yati as a runner for the agency. Similarly, Lorena, after her first two placements did not work out, returned to her agency awaiting her next placement. In the interim the agency also deployed Lorena as an unpaid runner for the agency. Lorena related that, ‘I buy food for staff, clean the office, take files of maids to give to staff, collect medical test results and deposit cheques’ (see TWC2 2013). In addition, Lorena was also deployed as a temp maid for two weeks in one household whilst their own maid was in hospital. Lorena was never given a work permit with this family or paid for her two weeks of domestic work there. Lorena reported the misconduct of her agency to the MOM in July 2012 and was thereafter placed in Keramat where she had been languishing for 12 months when a TWC2 volunteer met her in July 2013. Yati, after her agency was raided by the MOM, was also sent to Keramat and had remained there for 18 months, whilst the investigation into her agency was carried out. Both Yati and Lorena were deported not long after the intervention of TWC2 into their cases. Although Yati was deliberately and wilfully deployed as a runner by her agency (exploitation and wrongful deployment) and was falsely led to believe she would be employed as a maid in Singapore (illegal and deceptive recruitment), the resolution of the case against her agency resulted in Yati also being blacklisted from ever returning to Singapore for employment. As Yati stated, ‘It’s not fair to me. They punished me for one year and four months already. If it had been just one year, okay. But MOM said forever, and that’s not okay with me’.4 Both ports and state-provisioned dormitories present exemplary spaces of deportation as they preclude access to both the protections and supports of anti-trafficking by remaining hidden from public view and, most significantly, outside the purview of migrant rights and anti-trafficking NGOs (and researchers). They enable the state to engage unscrutinised in processes of deportation and, as both the cases of fishers and female migrant entertainers and FDWs demonstrate, inattention to labour and human rights abuses that may inhere to migrants’ working lives in Singapore or on fishing vessels. A considerable critical literature exists on

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spaces of deportability and, following De Jenova (2002) and Coleman (2008), it is necessary to consider both hidden and offshore spaces/spaces of entry and interior sites within states, particularly where they are government sanctioned or operated. Shelters for Female Trafficking Victims In a discussion on spaces of deportability of victims of trafficking, it may appear as surprising to see the inclusion of a dedicated shelter for identified and supported female trafficking victims. Shelters and the services they provide for trafficking victims have nonetheless come under some scrutiny for their provision of a kind of ‘carceral protectionism’ (Musto 2016) of victims, particularly the practical difficulties in managing trade-­ offs between protection and freedom, including freedom to pursue livelihoods strategies during usually lengthy legal proceedings. In a comprehensive study of shelters for trafficking victims, Gallagher and Pearson (2010) also concluded that in many cases trafficking victims ‘can be effectively imprisoned in such shelters for months, even years’ (p. 73). Such findings thus paint a portrait of a situation not dissimilar from that described above concerning Keramat dormitory in Singapore, with perhaps the only real difference being the provision of ‘supports’ under the TIP Taskforce’s trafficking framework that lauds a ‘victim-centred approach’. However, arguments such as those advanced by Mountz and Hiemstra’s (2012) and Martin (2012) concerning the use of accommodation to obscure and, ultimately, deport migrants with claims have some merit in understanding the Singaporean situation. In Singapore the government contracts the Good Shepard’s Sisters (Sisters of the Good Shepard, SGS) to accommodate female victims of trafficking at a dedicated shelter. Although other NGOs and some foreign embassies have shelters for female trafficking victims, the arrangement between Singapore’s TIP Taskforce and the SGS is notable in two respects which bare significantly on discussion here. First, because the shelter is government funded and victims referred by the government are primarily sheltered there, the Taskforce exerts ultimate control over the management of the victims. Second, and following on from this, women and girls sheltered here are contained in ways that reinforce their invisibility and isolation—perhaps even more so than the men I met at Kranji Lodge and the women I met at Keramat. Once the criminal case is concluded (or the investigation yields no prosecutorial outcome), the victim is deported. Because Singapore’s PHTA does not guarantee civil proceedings in

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c­oncert with criminal justice cases, this can mean victims are deported without opportunity to both earn reasonable income to compensate for their prior exploitation and pursue civil claims leading to restitution or compensation. Because of apparent concerns about victims’ privacy and protection from further distress, as a researcher, I was not allowed to speak to victims sheltered by the SGS. The information I gleaned from an interview with the Sister managing the shelter was, however, candidly revealing of the dynamics of the carceral protectionism that characterises the sojourn of those women officially classified as victims of trafficking by the TIP Taskforce. According to the Sister: Since 2005 we have been sheltering victims of trafficking. Since 2013, when we were contracted by the TIP Taskforce to provide shelter to victims of trafficking they refer to us, there have been significant financial benefits. We can now do trauma counselling and have enlisted Hagar to help us with this. But there are quite a lot of problems. Some women want to opt out of the process after being identified as a victim of trafficking. We had one Thai victim who didn’t want her rescuer to send her here. We need to get back to the police and discuss with them if a woman wants to go home. There’s not much option though, once a case has started. They police can just try to expedite the case, but the average time they stay here with us in the shelter is around nine months, sometimes longer.

For the SGS, compounding the problem of drawn-out legal proceedings and lengthy stays at the shelter is the lack of work opportunities for most of the women who stay there. As the Sister continued: Language is a problem as we don’t have any Bengali, Sinhalese, or Pakistani speakers. So the women often feel really alone here. To make matters worse, they all have pressure from their families to work and money is a big problem for them. We also have to place restrictions on their movement, for their own safety. MOM relaxed the rules for one Bangladeshi lady in the shelter because she came in to Singapore on a Performing Artist visa, so MOM let her work on the TJS. She earned about SG $1200 a month, but her experience is not a common one.

The SGS, as with other shelters for female migrants in Singapore, offers income-generating projects in house, such as a sewing programme or cooking and catering, but these yield little income for the residents and tend to reproduce stereotypical ideas about appropriate women’s work

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which may not be useful or applicable when women return home. Trauma counselling also provokes critical reflection on the trafficking shelter since it suggests victims are always and necessarily traumatised and that trauma presents in highly prescribed ways. In this case, Hagar reiterates a form of counselling imported from other contexts where it works with trafficked minors, particularly Cambodia. This is potentially another avenue through which the victim master-narrative is reproduced. Both the Philippines and Indonesian embassies have dedicated shelters for female nationals who are in distressing situations in Singapore, with most of those availing shelter-based accommodation entering Singapore as FDWs.5 The NGO HOME also operates a shelter for migrant women and, like the embassies, receives mainly FDWs. In relating details of the shelter, HOME’s representative reflected that the TIP Taskforce has never referred a victim of trafficking to HOME’s shelter because, it was suggested, ‘they know we sometimes notify the press’. As a result, women who are possible victims of TIP in the sex and nightlife entertainment sector are ‘generally referrals from friends and walk-ins’ (personal communication, HOME representative 28 September 2014). Whilst the Singapore police do ask HOME to house women in their shelter, in these cases too they are usually FDWs who are being investigated for criminal acts (such as theft from their employer) rather than victims of trafficking or exploitation and are nearly always FDWs. As a result, approximately 90 per cent of HOME’s shelter clients are domestic workers and less that 10 per cent migrant sexual labourers, and amongst the FDWs no cases referred are flagged as trafficking. Thus, through selective referrals to shelter, with the SGS taking all the referrals, the TIP Taskforce is able to ensure that female trafficking victims remain under the gaze of the state through the agreement the Taskforce has with the SGS. For female migrant sexual labourers, HOME’s shelter offers a different model for accommodation, prioritising women’s agency over considerations of protection based around confinement and monitoring. As HOME’s representative explained, ‘In sex trafficking cases, the women play on their phones. They go out with no restrictions and can have their mobiles on them until up to 10 pm at night. We help them where we can with legal support and medical support, and sometimes with skills training if they want it. Most sex workers don’t even want us to report to the Taskforce because they know they will probably be transferred to the Good Shepard’s shelter. We only push them to let us refer them to the Taskforce because it might be a way to get them on the TJS so they can earn some money’.6

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HOME’s discussion here is telling in its inference that sex trafficking victims demonstrating agency in their situations would not fit the model of victimhood sanctioned by the SGS shelter in its arrangements with the Taskforce. Women’s own choice not to report and face the possibility of being moved to this shelter also clearly weighs in their decisions. Mobile phone use and the ability to go out without surveillance and restriction are crucial for trafficked migrant sexual labourers in Singapore because they are able to call boyfriends/ex-customers and friends in Singapore for financial and other support (see Yea 2013). These expressions of agency do not gel with the ideal of female victimhood expressed by the TIP Taskforce and (biopolitically) managed by the SGS.

Conclusion Irregular migrants and refugees have generally been the subjects of discussion under the tactics of deportability, and it is perhaps unexpected that regularised migrant labourers with human and labour rights claims based around their exploitative sojourns may also inhabit these spaces and become deportability’s subjects. Yet in Singapore, female and male migrants with possible claims centred on experiences of trafficking are also subject to confinement, isolation, and removal through the strategic use of sites such as dormitories, ports, and shelters. This chapter has examined one type of exclusion from trafficking faced by both male and female migrants labouring in/through Singapore based on practices of jurisdictional exceptionalism. I suggested that whilst civil society and NGO actors generally recognise the ‘fit’ of many of these migrant labourers’ experiences of exploitation with prevailing international criteria and definitions of human trafficking—and as shown in Chap. 4 advocate accordingly for their inclusion in the frame of human trafficking—they are nonetheless largely elided from the state’s anti-trafficking architecture, as well as that of foreign embassies by manipulation of legal-sovereign spaces. The outcome of such elisions has been the exclusion of exploited migrants from the package of anti-trafficking supports available to identified victims in Singapore. This includes accommodation and other basic needs such as food and, significantly for many of the migrants I knew personally, socio-­ psychological and other health interventions. In considering the state’s exclusionary impulse in relation to the interstices between anti-trafficking and jurisdiction, I adopted Alison Mountz’s (2011) approach to understanding human rights-based exclusions as

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politically informed processes motivated by a desire to, in this case, ‘shirk the spaces of trafficking victimhood’, in the same way Mountz describes the ‘shrinking [of] the spaces of asylum’. I have argued that attention should be directed to two spheres of state activity under this response. Discussion in the chapter is not meant to suggest that the Singaporean government does not assist migrant workers who claim to be victims of injustices at the hands of unscrupulous agents or bosses in the companies and households where they had been deployed. For some, MOM does provide accommodation and some meals in government-run dormitories for migrant workers. But these spaces, as suggested in the chapter, can also equally function as spaces of deportability. For migrant fishermen the situation is even less optimistic, as consideration under a trafficking framework is denied, and deportation quickly follows the raising of the necessary funds to purchase an air ticket. In reflecting on possible avenues through which deflections of responsibility for acting may be reduced, one example comes to mind. In 2012 the New Zealand government enacted legislative revisions to increase the protections it was able to offer foreign fishermen who are found in New Zealand waters. Because the fishermen are neither New Zealanders (they are primarily Indonesian) nor do the fishing vessels carry New Zealand flags (they are primarily South Korean), the New Zealand government grappled with how to best address the exploitation of fishermen who entered New Zealand territorial waters and/or ports on foreign-flagged vessels. The solution adopted involved re-flagging vessels with a New Zealand flag, so that the fishing boats would be subject to New Zealand labour laws and provisions relating to working and other conditions (NZ Herald 2012). Whilst it would be feasible for the Singaporean government to adopt this measure, it seems that a lack of political will remains the most significant barrier to extending protections to trafficked migrant fishers passing through Singapore, and exclusion through deflection and deportability remains the norm.

Notes 1. The objective of this Convention and Recommendation is to ensure that fishers shall have decent conditions of work on board fishing vessels with regard to minimum requirements for work on board, conditions of service, accommodation and food, occupational safety and health protection, medical care, and social security.

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Amongst the many improvements, the new Convention: –– raises the minimum age for work on board fishing vessels to 16 years; –– fixes the maximum period of validity of a medical certificate to two years; –– requires the adoption of laws regarding minimum levels of crewing and defines minimum periods of daily and weekly rest for vessels remaining at sea for more than three days; –– establishes fishers’ entitlement to repatriation at the cost of the fishing vessel owner; and –– finally, incorporates port state control provisions modelled after those applicable in the shipping industry (see http://www.ilo.org/global/standards/ s u b j e c t s - c o v e r e d - b y - i n t e r n a t i o n a l - l a b o u r- s t a n d a r d s / f i s h e r s / lang%2D%2Den/index.htm, Accessed on 6 June 2018).

2. Although not made as forcefully or repeatedly, the Singaporean government does also suggest that middlemen in migrant workers’ home countries present major problems in enhancing the likelihood of migrant worker problems in Singapore. Blaming migrant worker source countries for not properly regulating labour recruitment agencies locates the problem of worker exploitation offshore and squarely outside Singapore’s control. In many conversations with TIP Taskforce representatives this view was often reiterated with officials arguing that their hands were proverbially tied because they could not interfere with domestic legislation and policies in source countries. See, for example, The Straits Times (2009), ‘Foreign workers: Source countries should stem the problems’ (17 January 2009). 3. The Singapore government will not use the term ‘trafficked fishermen’ to describe any migrant fisher who winds up on Singaporean shores, even where such an assessment has been made by the embassy of the source country concerned in Singapore. The act of re-labelling fishermen’s experiences as situations of ‘distress’ rather than ‘trafficking’ is a tactic of elision of migrant fishers’ claims for redress as victims. 4. Yati’s husband had a workplace accident a few days after Yati was placed in Keramat. Her husband broke both his hands and was unable to work. Because Yati was detained at Keramat for 18 months, their daughter was forced to drop out of school in Indonesia and the family struggled to find the money to pay for Yati’s husband’s treatment. Such experiences can have secondary, flow-on effects on the vulnerability of other family members. In this case, Yati’s detention leads to the heightened insecurity of her daughter. Often prevention of trafficked rhetoric stands in contrast to the effects of the migration-detention-criminalisation nexus. 5. Other foreign embassies, including the Thai Embassy and Embassy of Myanmar, also provide accommodation for nationals in distress but do not operate their own shelters. TWC2 also provides accommodation for female migrants in distress, but also does not operate a separate shelter for women.

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6. In these cases, it is only women who have entered Singapore on a Performing Artist or ‘Entertainer’s Visa (PAV) who may be able to avail the TJS, since they entered Singapore with a legitimate work permit and therefore come under MOM’s purview as labour or salary dispute cases. HOME’s representative confided that they virtually never see women entering on Social Visit Passes (SVPs or tourist visas) presenting for assistance at their offices.

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ILO. (2007b). International Labour Convention. Working in Fisheries Recommendation (No. 199). Geneva: ILO. International Maritime Organisation (IMO). (1978). International Convention on Standards in Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW). London: IMO. Retrieved January 12, 2019, from http://www.imo.org/en/ About/Conventions/ListOfConventions/Pages/International-Conventionon-Standards-of-Training,-Certification-and-Watchkeeping-for-Seafarers(STCW).aspx. Martin, L. (2012). ‘Catch and remove’: Detention, deterrence, and discipline in noncitizen family detention practice. Geopolitics, 17(2), 312–334. Ministry of Manpower (MOM) Singapore. (2008). Need for Foreign Domestic Workers (FDW) Dorm to be looked into. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from http://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-replies/2008/need-for-foreigndomestic-workers-fdw-dorm-to-be-looked-into. Ministry of Manpower (MOM) Singapore. (2015). MOM statement on alleged human trafficking by Step-Up Marine Enterprise LLP. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from http://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2015/1120mom-statement-on-alleged-human-traf ficking-by-step-up-marineenterprise-llp. MOM. (2012). Singapore Inter-agency Taskforce’s detailed response to the 2012 U.S.  State Department’s trafficking in persons report. Singapore: MOM.  Retrieved August 15, 2015, from https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2012/singapore-interagency-taskforces-detailedresponse-to-the-2012-us-state-departments-trafficking-in-persons-report. Mountz, A. (2004). Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling. Political Geography, 23(3), 323–345. Mountz, A. (2011). Spectres at the port of entry: Understanding state mobilities through an ontology of exclusion. Mobilities, 6(3), 317–334. Mountz, A., & Hiemstra, N. (2012). Spatial strategies for rebordering human migration at sea. In T. M. Wilson & H. Donman (Eds.), A companion to border studies (pp. 455–472). London: Blackwell. Mountz, A., & Hiemstra, N. (2014). Chaos and crisis: Dissecting the spatiotemporal logics of contemporary migrations and state practices. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), 382–390. Mountz, A., & Loyd, J. (2014). Transnational productions of remoteness: Building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders. Geographica Helvetica, 69, 389–398. Mundlak, G. (2009). De-territorialising labour law. Law and Ethics of Human Rights, 3(2), 189–222. Musto, J. (2016). Control and protect: Collaboration, carceral protection, and domestic sex trafficking victims in the United States. Oakland: University of California Press.

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Nonnemacher, S. (2014). Trafficking at sea: The situation of enslaved fishermen in Southeast Asia. In S.  Yea (Ed.), Human trafficking in Asia: Forcing issues (pp. 139–164). London: Routledge. NZ Herald. (2012, May 12). Crackdown on foreign fishing vessels. Tazreiter, C. (2015). Lifeboat politics in the Pacific: Affect and the ripples and shimmers of a migrant saturated future. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 99–107. TWC2. (2012). Blacklisted from Singapore for her boss’s mistake. Singapore: TWC2. Retrieved May 13, 2018, from http://twc2.org.sg/2012/08/06/ blacklisted-from-singapore-for-her-boss-mistakes/. TWC2. (2013). Maid used as ‘runner’ has nowhere to go. Singapore: TWC2. Retrieved May 13, 2018, from https://twc2.org.sg/2013/09/07/maidused-as-runner-now-cant-go-anywhere/. Tzvetlova, M. (2002). NGO responses to trafficking in women. Gender and Development, 10(1), 60–68. UNODC. (2000). Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. Vienna: UNODC. US DoS. (2011). Annual trafficking in persons report. Washington, DC: US DoS. Walters, W. (2008). Bordering the sea: Shipping industries and the policing of stowaways. Borderlands, 7(3), 1–25. Williams, J.  M. (2015). From humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care: Care and enforcement at the humanitarian border. Political Geography, 47, 11–20. Yea, S. (2013, May). Social visits and special passes: Carceral spaces for migrant sexual labourers in Singapore. S’pores. Retrieved June 22, 2018, from http://spores.com/2013/05/social-visits-and-special-passes-carceral-spaces-of-migrant-sexual-labour-in-singapore-sallie-yea/. Yea, S., Balakrishnan, B., & Fordyce, D. (Eds.). (2018). A thousand and one days: Stories of migrant worker hardship in Singapore, Volume 3. Singapore: TWC2. Yea, S., & TWC2. (2012). Troubles waters: Trafficking of Filipino men into the long-haul fishing industry in Asia. Singapore: TWC2.

CHAPTER 8

Discretion and Obfuscation in Exclusions from Anti-trafficking

Excerpt from Field Notes (21 July 2013): It is the end of July and I have just returned from an interview with seven women sheltered at the Philippines Embassy. The women, it turns out were part of a larger group of twenty-six who were deployed as ‘hostesses’ in a pub in the infamous Orchard Towers building in Singapore’s main shopping and tourism thoroughfare of Orchard Road. The women related stories of their recruitment to work as waitresses in a pub in Singapore. Although some of the group admitted that they would consider ‘seeing customers’ outside the pub if they needed extra money or, they were at pains the emphasise, “the customer seemed okay”, they had not at all expected the situation they found themselves in when they arrived at the pub on their first night of work. The women’s concerns oscillated around two key problems. First was the denial of salary, which ‘forced’ them to see customers, thus negating the discretion some of them had suggested they would exercise in decisions about ‘going out with customers’. ‘Seeing customers’ meant having men buy ladies drinks for a hostess in exchange for having her sit with him for a certain period of time. The drinks cost the customers SG $10 each, from which the woman was allow to keep SG $3. Customers were also able to request to bar fine a woman, where she would be taken out of the bar for a few hours or, if the price was high enough, overnight. As was reported by the media: “Police investigations revealed that 15 of the women also provided sexual services to earn more money—keeping half of what they were paid. They offered oral sex in the pub’s three karaoke rooms at a cost of $182. If a customer wanted to have sex, he would have to pay the pub $268 for two hours of the woman’s company” (The Straits Times 2013). The women’s second concern was the removal of their freedom, both of movement and of association. The women were in fact locked into an apartment in © The Author(s) 2020 S. Yea, Paved with Good Intentions?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_8

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nearly Balestier and were under the constant supervision of the operations manager, who held the only key to the apartment. The women explained that they were also ferried between the pub and the apartment accompanied by the manager and a driver so they were never ‘outside alone’. The state-owned media agency, Newscorp, had run several stories about the raid of the pub and the arrest of all 26 women, as well as the pub’s Chinese-­ Singaporean owner, and his Chinese-Singaporean female operations manager who, it was reported, “was in charge of the women” (The Straits Times 2013). The owner was later charged with and pleaded guilty to conspiring and procuring prostitutes, living on immoral earnings and managing a brothel. He was sentenced to 15 months jail and fined SG $42,000. The pub’s floor manager and bar manager were fined SG $22,000 each for abetment. However, what is striking about this case was the framing of the arguments by both the Public Prosecutor and the Defence lawyer. The Public Prosecutor had argued that the pub owner had, “operated a brothel disguised as a legitimate pub business”, and had pocketed the, “substantial amount of $60,000 from the economic ­exploitation of the Filipino women”. Despite the clear articulation of “economic exploitation” of the women indicated by the Public Prosecutor—and one might also add, of their forced confinement—no mention was made of human trafficking or even of supporting a civil claim for restitution or compensation by the women. In fact, all were swiftly deported after the case had concluded and blacklisted from returning to Singapore to work for five years subsequent. Further, the Defence lawyer had argued that, “the women were not coerced into prostitution as they had come here knowing what was expected of them”. Thus, despite their ‘economic exploitation’ and confinement, because they had apparently known they would have to perform sexual services, they were not to be considered victims and, by implication, the sentencing of the pub owner and two managers should reflect this apparent complicity. I found the parameters of this debate strange on several counts, but most significantly because, in interviewing the seven women earlier in the day, the experience of each was unique and singular in quite nuanced ways; certainly the did not all come to Singapore “knowing what was expected of them” and, even for those who had expressed an openness to performing sexual labour, there were clear gradations of this (fondling and kissing were okay, but oral sex and intercourse were not unless with a “favourite customer”).

Introduction The acts of jurisdictional exceptionalism described in Chap. 7 provide insights into one of the key tactics by which the state is able to exclude vulnerable migrants from trafficking protections. These acts, however, do

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not constitute the entirety of modes of exclusion from identification as a trafficked person. This chapter considers two other interrelated modes of exclusion, namely, the use of discretion and of obfuscation. Much like jurisdictional exceptionalism, discretion is most often visible at the point of victim identification, the initial stage where determination of claims and classifications of potential victims are made. But, as the excerpt above illustrates, discretion can operate at a number of stages and spaces, including during legal proceedings at a time when the Singapore government had already begun recognising human trafficking as a problem and established the Taskforce to address it. Discretion, in a legal sense and where migrant subjects are concerned, is best described by Heyman (2009) as unequal legal-bureaucratic sorting based on normative judgements concerning trust, suspicion, and risk. Obfuscation is a broader concept which refers to bureaucratic processes that cause delay, frustration, and, ultimately for many, self-exclusion from seeking support and remedial justice, in this case under a trafficking framework. Obfuscation relates not only to human trafficking, where its key expression is in the demands for provision of testimony and in the temporalities associated with waiting, but has resonance with migrant workers seeking remedial justice through other mechanisms, such as Work Injury Compensation Act (WICA) or salary claims through Labour Court. Unlike discretion, obfuscation more commonly occurs once a migrant’s status as a victim has been initially established. Obfuscation can not only engender a sense of frustration and disillusionment amongst victims themselves, but also amongst other exploited migrants and their civil society advocates, who may come to deem the pursuit of claims to trafficking victimhood cumbersome and ultimately unhelpful in realising either the human or labour rights of those concerned. Processes of legal classification have animated scholarly discussions of irregular migrants, refugees, and, to a lesser extent, forced labourers recently. Legal classifications and the categories that inhabit them have important follow-on effects for migrant subjectivities, identities, and trajectories. Erdal and Oeppen (2018), for example, examine the ways the categories of ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ as legal-bureaucratic constructs profoundly impact migrants’ experiences. But notably, whilst scholars are often keen to argue that individual migrants’ experiences elide such dichotomous thinking in favour of arguably more realistic continuum approaches (Barrientos et al. 2013) grounded in complex experiences of migrants that exceed the dichotomies embedded in formal classifications,

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states tend nonetheless to adhere to such strictly reductionist and dichotomous classifications. I have, elsewhere, argued that in the pursuit of classificatory reductionism many exploited migrants in Singapore are rendered not quite ‘trafficked enough’ by the Singapore state (Yea 2015; see also Brennan 2014; Coghlan and Wylie 2011) despite potentially meeting the formal criteria for trafficking laid down by the UN Trafficking Protocol. Thus, processes of classification are important not only because they enable migrants to gain access to legal, health, and socio-economic supports, but also because they can equally preclude access to such supports. Within this critical body of scholarship three important arguments have been made that are of relevance to discussions of anti-human trafficking in this chapter. First, scholarship has explored the complex ways in which formal/legal categories intersect with informal/socio-political discourses. Heyman (2001, 2009) makes an important contribution to these discussions, suggesting that the interstices of state-centric processes of ­classification and popular discourses (such as those advanced in the media, film, or public events) often lead to mutually reinforcing constructions of categories such as ‘criminal’, ‘victim’, ‘refugee’, illegal entrant’, and so on. Once it is recognised that legal classifications are subject to social and political influence, their impartiality becomes open to critical scrutiny. Scholars have consequently focused on discretion as a process of ‘unequal sorting’ (Heyman 2009) of migrants by legal-bureaucratic agents. Partiality and normativity in the process of sorting thus become key nodes for making a legal determination of status. Strauss’ (2017: 148) observations on this specifically in relation to human trafficking are particularly instructive: ‘The process of determination is the process of characterisation. Ostensibly neutral, the process is in reality deeply normative. Characterisation, like any other interpretive exercise or practice, is never neutral’. Thus, scholars focusing specifically on human trafficking have argued that this ‘unequal sorting’ (Chapkis 2003) of migrants/victims into underserving and deserving categories rests on normative constructions of innocence, guilt, and criminality (see also Davidson 2010; FitzGerald 2012). For Singapore, or any other context for that matter, we may therefore ask: How is one type of migrant rendered as a deserving victim and, conversely, another produced as an undeserving claimant? And exactly how does disqualification work through particular rhetorical devices, acts, and strategies? The chapter begins by examining the processes of classification of exploited migrants in Singapore and the role that discretion plays in these

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processes. The next part of the chapter considers the role of bureaucratic obfuscation for those whose victim status has initially been accepted. I argue that both processes can lead to a significant degree of disillusionment amongst migrants and their advocates in coming forward to authorities and therefore act as a deterrent to seeking anti-trafficking supports. Self-exclusions from claims to trafficking victimhood thus form a significant outcome of these processes.

Discretion, Classification, and Disqualification from Trafficking Victimhood In Chaps. 2 and 3 we saw how the child sex trafficking victim frame became the master-narrative associated with human trafficking in Singapore, whilst Chap. 4 explored the ways the state began to reproduce this frame within its own emerging responses to, and understandings of, human trafficking. A key part of this process where the state is concerned, it is suggested in this chapter, is through the discursive elision of other migrant groups through racialised, gendered, and classed images introduced in Chaps. 5 and 6. This chapter considers how those discursively established as unworthy as victims of trafficking are disqualified by creative interpretations of migrants’ circumstances and invocations of legal and policy frameworks. An evaluation of an individual migrant’s character and situation drawing on already-established stereotypes enables state agents/bureaucrats to decide whether to act or not (e.g. to allow a migrant entry into a country, to hold or arrest a migrant on suspicion of illegal activities, to classify a migrant labourer as trafficked or not, etc.) (Darling 2011). Thus, discretion is an important basis on which a legal determination can be made and is crucial to the scope and nature of all subsequent legal decision-making concerning that migrant. Heyman’s discussion of discretion was preceded by his earlier and related work on classification (2001) in which he argued that classification—or categorisation—of migrants involves formal categories (of law) acting in coalescence with informal ones (political and social discourses). It is the interplay between these categories, especially where they are mutually reinforcing, that produces migrant subjects within the law. He described scenarios for the enactment of classification as inclusive of a range of state-initiated practices, such as questioning/interrogation, documentary review, visual inspections, sweeps and raids, and so on. Legal classification, Heyman argued, can transform an ambiguous or unclear

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and indeterminate story into a ‘more rigidly categorised role… reflective of the wider… political economy and ideology’ (2001: 133). Considerations of discretion cannot be fruitfully made without due attention to these social and political discourses and the ways they influence processes and outcomes of legal determinations. As with the critical scholarship on jurisdictional exceptionalism discussed in the previous chapter, critiques of classification of migrants through discretionary practices by state officials have been most animated where refugees are concerned. Hodge (2015), for example, has demonstrated the ways asylum seekers are reconstituted as ‘security threats’ where their discursive construction as ‘illegals’ and ‘criminals’ within a state-­ citizen securitisation master-narrative displaces their human rights claims within an asylum framework. Mountz and Hiemstra (2014) similarly examine the use of discourses of chaos and crises to argue that discourses become ‘tools’ by which states are able to mobilise and justify containment and exclusion. Such narratives lead to the formation of racialised, gendered, and classed preconceptions of migrants that infuse processes of classification. Griffiths (2012), for example, examined ‘honesty’ in asylum seeker claims in the United States and found a ‘culture of disbelief’ was entrenched amongst state authorities charged with assessing claims. These findings chime with those examined in Chaps. 5 and 6 where the honesty and integrity of migrant labourers making claims became open to question by bureaucrats and others. Discretion forms a basis by which to understand the disqualification of exploited migrant labourers from trafficking determinations in two key ways in Singapore. First is by invoking narrow—and therefore exclusionary—definitions of various indicators of trafficking victimhood, including debt bondage, confinement/restrictions on freedom, and contracts/documents. Disagreements about the meaning of debt bondage and the expression of ‘consent’ in contracts are key arenas where government authorities are able to dispute suggestions that exploited migrant labourers qualify as trafficking victims. Second, migrants are disqualified when they are considered ‘weak’ victims/witnesses, in a legal sense. This is particularly evident where migrants are in some way complicit in their fraudulent migration to Singapore. The default position of the Singapore government (as well as some foreign consulates) in these cases is the deflection of trafficking cases to other pieces of legislation, such as the EFMA or the Women’s Charter. In this part of the chapter I examine each of these processes of disqualification through the invocation of the

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discretion-­classification dyad, by drawing on examples of migrant labourers and the ways the state responds to their claims. Little exists by way of critical scholarship on trafficking determinations drawing on these perspectives. Lindholm et al.’s (2016) examination of the credibility and reliability of child sexual exploitation victims’ testimony is an important exception, with the finding that judges acted ‘arbitrarily’ and ‘subjectively’ and in ways where ‘the way credibility was assessed may also reinforce gender and victim stereotypes’ (recall, in this vein, de Souza’s comments discussed in Chap. 4 concerning ‘flexibility’ for judges to make determinations). Trafficking determinations at earlier points where victims may come in contact with the law—such as the practices of enactment discussed by Heyman—have, as yet, not been subject to in-depth examination in any context that I am aware of. Commonly, in Singapore such points include when a migrant worker presents at MOM to make a ­complaint, when an NGO or CSO refers a migrant to MOM or MHA as a victim of trafficking, when the vice squad conducts a raid or compliance check on entertainment venues, bars, and brothels, or when migrant labourers come under the scrutiny of ICA or MHA for immigration or criminal offences. I turn now to examine these.1 (Im)pure Debt Bondage Debt bondage, as suggested in Chaps. 5 and 6, is a crucial site through which migrant labourers experience exploitation in their sojourns in Singapore. Although the nature of debt agreements and situations of repayment and duration vary amongst types of labourers, and amongst individual labourers within different sectors, the key conclusion that can be drawn from the collective experience of labourers who migrate with a debt is that debt obligations remove the freedom of those labouring under their terms. This occurs when debt repayments oblige labourers to submit to working conditions to which they would otherwise not agree and from which they cannot easily extricate themselves (e.g. by leaving their job to lodge a complaint against their employer). The case of Bangladeshi construction worker, Uddin, illustrates the ways debt bondage situations of migrant workers are excluded from trafficking determinations, despite the ways debt works to remove freedom. Uddin’s case is illustrative not only because it approximates the experience of so many other migrant labourers in Singapore,2 but also because it elicited a public response from Singapore’s MOM. Uddin migrated to

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Singapore for the promise of a job as a construction site engineer. He paid SG$12,000 in recruitment fees to an unlicensed agent in Bangladesh. In addition, when he arrived in Singapore his boss extorted further kickbacks from Uddin for his ‘placement’ in his company, thus further increasing Uddin’s debt burden. Further, Uddin was not deployed as a construction site engineer as he had expected, had his passport withheld by his employer, and was subject to verbal abuse and threats. The salary deductions made by his employer for the illegal placement fee further increased his debt and forced him into performing excessive overtime, and when he complained about these deductions he was verbally abused by his employer. HOME assisted Uddin after his company to make a complaint to MOM about his employer. HOME presented Uddin’s case to MOM as one of human trafficking. HOME argued that Uddin’s salary deductions, deceptive recruitment, passport withholding, and other conditions that characterised his work stint were all indicators of labour trafficking as laid out by the ILO (2005). HOME gave particular emphasis to Uddin’s debt situation as constituting the lynchpin of his forced labour and the reason he felt he could not leave his workplace for over 18 months. In Uddin’s interview with The Financial Express he lamented that, ‘My boss knew I had a loan and if I go back [to Bangladesh], I would have a lot of problems. I need to continue to support my family. He took advantage. I was always working. I couldn’t afford to eat properly’ (9 September 2017: 1). When Uddin’s circumstances were reported in Singapore’s media MOM offered a public response to HOME’s trafficking referral of his case. Through this response the disqualification of Uddin from a trafficking determination was established through the invocation of a narrow definition of debt bondage. MOM stated that Uddin was ‘not in direct debt bondage to his employer and his recruitment fees were paid to an unlicensed agent’. As we saw in the previous chapter, no prevailing international definition of debt bondage exists. The terms ‘direct debt bondage’, ‘to an employer’, or ‘licensed agent’ are therefore qualifications in defining situations of debt bondage. The statement also raises questions about how direct versus indirect debt bondage is defined and whether debt bondage to an agent is qualitatively different from debt bondage to an employer, where only the latter is acceptable. It is also unclear how debt paid through labour involving a recruiter is distinct from that paid to an employer where the outcome—the inability to leave an exploitative employment situation because of debt—is the same in both cases (personal communication, HOME representative 2018). Every male and

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female migrant work permit holder who participated in my research carried a debt burden, which emerged from the costs of his/her migration. This debt burden was most often incurred to an agent, whether licensed or unlicensed, and, in some cases, was complicated by the addition of further debts in the form of kickbacks or fines and penalties imposed by, and payable to, the employer. MOM’s treatment of Uddin’s case also demonstrates how MOM invokes other legislative tools apart from the PHTA as a means of demonstrating a legal response to the issues Uddin faced with his employer. MOM concluded that blacklisting the employer from further hiring of migrant workers was an adequate penalty, claiming that ‘[s]uch transgressions are appropriately handled under other legislation such as [the] Employment Act and Employment of Foreign Manpower Act’ (see Chaps. 4, 5 and 6 for further examples of this). Yet neither act allows for ­protections to be extended to Uddin as a victim of trafficking, and the penalties imposed on the employer are far lighter than those that would be imposed if the employer was convicted of trafficking. Further, many of the companies that are blacklisted for similar offences dissolve the original company and set up new companies under different names but with the same directors. No legal barrier exists to disable errant employers from engaging in such practices.

In anti-trafficking, debt bondage is viewed as one of the key indicators of human trafficking, since it creates vulnerabilities in migrant workers that lead them to be unable to easily leave exploitative work arrangement. However, in Singapore, debts associated with migration are a routine and well-accepted component of the migration process, as they are in many other contract migration contexts. Consequently, the Singaporean government also treats migration debt as a normal practice and, if incurred in the migrant’s home country, entirely out of Singapore’s control (the jurisdictional exceptionalism argument put forward in the previous chapter). Debt thus becomes a site of discretion leading to a narrow range of victim types in anti-trafficking, despite its appearance as a key indicator of ­trafficking in a range of sectors. Weak Victims

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Ann, a 28-year-old Filipina, also had a debt problem during her migration to Singapore. Like Uddin, her debt was not considered ‘legitimate’ within the parameters of the state’s anti-trafficking framework, thus leading to her disqualification from a trafficking determination despite the involvement of the Philippines Embassy in pleading her case to ICA. The reason Ann’s status as a victim of trafficking was rejected is one that is commonly encountered across contexts in making trafficking determinations, namely, Ann’s complicacy in deceiving immigration authorities in Singapore and working without a valid visa. Ann explained that she had a friend in the Philippines who told her that it was very easy to come to Singapore to work as a waitress and asked if she would like to try. Her friend invited her to her house and introduced an agent who would make the necessary arrangements. The agent had worked in Singapore previously and told Ann she would not have to pay any fee. When Ann arrived in Singapore in late 2014 she was met by an employee of the pub where she was to be deployed. She was driven to a house where she would reside with other women working in the same pub and was told to shower and prepare for work. When she arrived at the pub that night she said she was shocked that she was expected to become a prostitute and told the boss of the pub that this was not the work she wanted. He replied that she could leave after she repaid a debt of SG$3500 to him, which was apparently the cost of her migration and deployment. She had no prior knowledge of this debt but had to submit to this arrangement because she was monitored by a ‘watcher’ employed by the pub owner. She was also told she must pay SG$15 every day for the cost of her accommodation, which she initially expected would be free, according to the agent in the Philippines. In one month, Ann had an average of between five and six bar fine customers. She said she would try to make sure she cultivated regular customers so she would not have to have intercourse with many different men. She stated that around 90 per cent of the customers in the pub were Singaporean. Because she had to repay this debt, she did not receive any money from the sexual labour she was forced to perform. After two months, her Social Visit Pass was due to expire. Her boss refused to send her

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and some of the other women working in the pub to Malaysia to renew their visas because it was too expensive.3 Instead her boss hid the women and continued to exploit them in the pub. For a further six weeks, Ann was forced to work until one night when the boss left the door unlocked in the house and she ran away to the Philippines Embassy. The Philippines Embassy advised Ann to surrender to the ICA because she had overstayed her visa. The ICA officer in charge of her case issued Ann with a Special Pass for one week and then extended it for further two weeks. However, the officer decided to also present Ann with an SG$300 fine for overstaying her visa. She was also told to purchase and present an air ticket as proof of her intention to leave Singapore. Ann was unable to raise the money for the fine or the ticket. The Philippines Embassy pleaded leniency in her case because she was a victim of trafficking. Ann did not want to make a complaint to the police because then she would have to remain in Singapore even longer, which she felt would again forestall her ability to earn income to remit to her children back home in the Philippines. Amongst both migrant male and female labourers are many cases of victims who are not considered by the TIP Taskforce to constitute strong victims in a legal sense. In addition to presenting an example of spaces of deportability, the treatment of Ann’s case, and of Chris’ case discussed in Chap. 7, as clearly outside the trafficking framework and the resultant swift deportation of both these women from Singapore speak to another process relevant to our discussion here. As TWC2 was informed by the MOM in relation to Chris, she had violated immigration law by working outside the scope of her visa and had performed paid sexual services in the context of her deployment at the pub (something which Chris has ardently denied in a written statement about her situation). She was therefore considered a ‘weak victim’ by the MOM. Weak victims are understood for the purposes of discussion in this chapter to be those whose claims are confounded by mitigating factors and circumstances, including their work in Singapore (such as working in a pub or voluntarily migrating) and lack of apparent effort to leave supposedly ‘bad’ employment situations (such as not running away when a door

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is left open, or not being physically confined, or giving false statements to authorities, such as not revealing details about sexual exploitation or not revealing details of agreements). In contrast to weak victims are ‘pure victims’, defined by virtue of their uncompromised and undiluted circumstances of victimhood. The female child victims discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3 fulfil the standard of pure victimhood and exert a powerful, if not readily acknowledged, influence over the imaginaries of victimhood in Singapore. In addition to Ann’s and Chris’ experiences in the sex and nightlife entertainment sector, the cases of two Sri Lankan men illustrate the weakness of victims as a basis for exclusion from trafficking determinations and, indeed, in the case of these two men, their subsequent investigation by the ICA for alleged breaches of Singapore’s immigration laws.4 Yan and Aruna entered Singapore on a Social Visit Pass in late June 2014. They were two amongst more than a dozen men who had been brought to Singapore this way for the purposes of working, with several arriving in May, July, and October of that year, respectively. The men were recruited by an ‘agent’ who, according to Aruna, approaches poor villagers with work opportunities in Singapore. He accompanies the prospective workers to Singapore, spends a couple of nights with them in their lodging, and then returns to Sri Lanka. Aruna accepted the agent’s offer of a two-year contract in Singapore because one of his two children has a cleft palate and Aruna needed to save LKR5 lakh for the surgery. In June 2014 he deposited LKR50,000 (around US$350) into the agent’s bank account in Sri Lanka which was to be used for the purchase of his air ticket. When Aruna and three other prospective workers arrived in Singapore they were given instructions as to how to pass through immigration and to give the name and address of a specific hotel in Singapore if asked by the immigration officer at the airport arrival desk. Once they passed through immigration the agent did not take them to the promised hotel but instead deposited them at a boarding house in Little India. On the day of their arrival another Sri Lankan agent, based in Singapore, came to their lodging asking them for money. Each worker gave 2 lakh (around SG$2000) as agents’ fees. Aruna remembers filling out a form, though was unsure what it was for. The second agent then gave each man an SG$10 Ezylink (public transportation) card and Aruna spent SG$100 of his own money on food, which he did not expect. After a couple of days, he was given the address of a restaurant and told to go there for work as a dishwasher. He worked for 15 days from 10.30 am to 10 pm and was only paid SG$40 cash in hand each day.

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After 15 days he and the other workers in his group (who also worked as dishwashers in other locations) were told by their agent to go to the MOM. Aruna thought this was to receive their work visas, but the agent told them they needed to tell the officer a story about being exploited by a false agent, someone they did not know. Aruna was placed on a Special Pass, then given a six-month work permit on the TJS. When I spoke to Aruna about his situation he recalled that he did not really understand why he had to make reference to an unknown agent in order to gain his permit to work, but after discussing with his other three group members, realised that their agent was involved in a scam. He continued to work at his new TJS job for a few weeks but was uncomfortable with the situation and wanted to stop the two Sri Lankan agents from deceiving more men to come to Singapore under false work arrangements. He sought the assistance of TWC2 and took with him photographs, receipts, and other papers relating to his situation and that of his compatriots. However, after TWC2 contacted Aruna’s case officer at the MOM Aruna’s TJS pass was revoked and he was placed under investigation by ICA for work and visa violations. The significance of Aruna’s experience can be found in the ways the TIP Taskforce subsequently responded to Aruna and his group’s migration circumstances. Having been deceived about both the visa/immigration arrangements and the conditions and nature of his work, Aruna was nonetheless framed as an immigration fraud (for lying to ICA officers at the point of entry), a deceitful and manipulative migrant (for creating a false story to the MOM officer at his first appearance), and an economic opportunist (for engaging in work illegally). In conversation with a TIP Taskforce representative, it was clear that subjecting Aruna and his compatriots to punitive actions was the right course of action since, ‘If anyone breaks immigration rules, as they have, then they must be subject to punishment under Singaporean law’ (personal communication, 2 November 2015). However, beyond the formal legal ‘requirement’ to criminalise Aruna and his compatriots, a deeper, latent discretionary element also emerged. According to the TIP Taskforce representative: Aruna has migrated for work before, to the Middle East. He surely knows the way the process works. So many men from India and Bangladesh are involved in this kind of scam; they are desperate to come to Singapore to work but they pretend to be innocent when it comes down to being caught. Aruna is not a victim of trafficking, and even if he was we could never mount a case given his character and his background.

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For Aruna, as with many others, pre-existing, latent gendered, and racialised constructs help frame Aruna’s character according to broader tropes associated with criminality, desperation, and deception (see also Darling 2011). Despite the indicators of trafficking that were apparent in his case, and notwithstanding Aruna taking the initiative to come forward and disclose the ‘real’ circumstances of his migration and employment, this is a clear example of the TIP Taskforce officer’s use of discretion to disqualify Aruna from further investigation as a potential TIP victim. Unfortunately for Aruna the revocation of his TJS work permit and investigation resulted in his deportation some weeks later with no money in hand, no remittances having been sent to cover the surgery his daughter needed, and a debt to his agent still hanging over his head.

Bureaucratic Obfuscation and Disillusionment In the first part of this chapter, discussion centred on processes by which migrant worker issues are re-framed through discretionary processes of (dis)qualification and exclusion. Through these processes, government authorities turn potential human trafficking cases into labour issues, immigration issues, or, sometimes, criminal issues through narrowing the criteria for, and definitions of, trafficking. The bases by which this is done centre on narrow understandings of victimhood that exclude such factors as debt bondage and lack of freedom that are not based on physical confinement or force and by excluding victims who are not ‘pure’ in that their apparent complicity in extra-legal aspects of their labour migration to Singapore. However, in following the paths of many exploited migrant labourers in Singapore, it became clear that an additional register of exclusion was also important to consider, namely bureaucratic obfuscation. A key outcome of bureaucratic obfuscation is disillusionment. Disillusionment amongst migrant claimants stems from frustration with bureaucratic processes that, ostensibly, should enable claimants to achieve some degree of remedial justice, particularly through the receipt of unpaid wages or unfair deductions. Disillusionment is significant for our analysis of anti-trafficking in Singapore because it means that exploited labourers are less likely to come forward to have their claims assessed—or opt out of legal processes after a period of time has elapsed—knowing the palpable (and often insurmountable) bureaucratic obstacles that emerge in the process of coming forward. As migrants circulate knowledge and experiences widely within their social and ethnic networks whilst in Singapore, such

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experiences become precedents by which to judge the standard of seeking justice. Amy’s experience is a case in point. The 37-year-old Filipina ran away from the pub to which she had been trafficked after just two weeks of working in Singapore. In one of the typical scenarios described in Chap. 5, her migration debt was the vehicle by which she was to be forced into prostitution. However, it was another debt that concerned her more. In order to finance her migration to Singapore she was asked by her recruiter in the Philippines to pay a fee or PHP18,000 (SD 540) which her husband borrowed on her behalf from a friend of his using the ‘5/6’ informal interest arrangement common amongst Filipinos who are ineligible for borrowing from regular financial institutions. She recalled asking the recruiter: ‘Really? I can pay off PHP18,000 quickly and earn money?’ to which the recruiter replied, ‘Yes, it’s very easy to make money in Singapore and what is more you can leave in two days to go there’. Impressed by this thought of quick debt repayment and the opportunity to earn easy money, Amy readily agreed to pay the recruiter’s fee. After three days in Singapore, where it had become clear that the only way to repay this debt was to go out with customers for sex, she telephoned her recruiter back in the Philippines who admonished her: ‘What are you doing? You need to go to the hotel with customers for boom or you don’t have money there’. Upon running away and seeking the assistance of the Philippines Embassy, Amy faced further anxiety because she had no means by which to send money back to her husband to pay off the debt. She asked the Embassy if she could work for two weeks in another job (paid domestic work) to earn enough money to pay off her debt, since she still had two weeks validity on her short-term visitors pass visa. The Embassy refused to allow her to do this since it was illegal for her to work on such a visa. She returned to Manila with no money and the Philippines accrued debt still hanging over her head. Amy did not want to avail of the Philippine National Police’s (PNP) TaskForce’s ‘assistance’—even though the Philippines Embassy insisted she be met at the airport by members of the TaskForce—because, she feared, her husband might discover that she had been ‘sex trafficked’ to Singapore and may be angry with her on a number of counts, including for incurring a debt to their friend (at around 12 per cent interest per month) with no way to repay, being ‘fooled’ by a false offer of work abroad and undertaking commercial sexual labour (albeit not at her own volition). Amy felt that the involvement of the TaskForce would definitely

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entail the disclosure of her trafficking experience to her husband, since one of the TaskForce’s duties would be to accompany her back to her home, an experience she had managed to keep from him whilst still in Singapore (e.g. she stated that when she phoned him she told him she was fine and still ‘working in the restaurant’). Further, even with the assistance of the TaskForce, she could not be guaranteed of justice, compensation, or, at a minimum, of the fee money she paid to the recruiter being recovered. As the Labour Attaché of the Philippines Embassy lamented, ‘Even if the TaskForce investigate and file a case, it could be several months before the case is settled. Even then Amy may not get the money she paid because it is quite likely the recruiter will have spent it already and she (recruiter) probably doesn’t have a bank account to trace the money’ (personal communication 30 June 2009). Thus, even in the unlikely event that the money could be recovered after a delay of several months, Amy and her husband would still be burdened with the 5/6 interest which accrues monthly. As Amy’s husband was working as a casual labourer at the time and bringing home a salary of only around PHP600 (SGD 18) per week, and with four children to feed, there was no way they could even meet the interest repayments, let alone the principal amount.5 Amy’s experiences were not unique amongst the Filipinas who took part in my research. Several other women who sought assistance from the Philippines Embassy in Singapore were also presented with the option of being met at the airport upon their arrival back in Manila and offered assistance by the Philippines TIP TaskForce. None of the women I knew desired this assistance, but some felt constrained to accept because they had availed of help from the Embassy. The Catholic Sisters who also regularly make themselves available to support women upon their return from trafficking situations in Singapore have noted that ‘This group evade the Task Force sent by the Embassy. They see them waiting at the gate but they don’t go up to them or identify themselves. They collect their luggage quickly and leave the airport straight away’ (Personal communication, FMM Sister, Singapore, 21 June 2009). What does Amy’s experience illustrate about exclusions from the anti-­ trafficking framework established in both Singapore and, in the case, the Philippines? Foremost the anxieties experienced by Amy and the other women during their migrations were a product as much of their classification as objects of anti-trafficking interventions under the guise of ‘victims of trafficking’ as of their trafficking experiences themselves. Amy’s emotional state when I first met her was a response not so much to what hap-

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pened to her during the time she was in the pub—as traumatic as this was for her—as about what was going to happen to her in the immediate future. The possibility of being met at the airport by the TaskForce with all the ramifications this might entail were equally as traumatic for Amy as the experience she had gone through in the pub. Although ‘shocked’ upon her arrival at the pub the first night, she had managed to avoid prostitution until she ran away, even though it meant that she only earned SGD 10 per night (the equivalent of having two ladies drinks bought for her at SGD 5 each and only just enough to cover her taxi fare back to the apartment where she was staying). Second, being defined as a victim of trafficking by the Philippine state (albeit notably not the Singapore state) did not relieve Amy’s debt pressures. The long road to justice and the possibility—but by no means the certainty—of eventual compensation and recovery of monies paid as broker’s fees to the fraudulent recruiter was one paved with few certainties. There was simply no other way Amy could think of to pay this money since the Embassy, in keeping with its legal protocols in Singapore, could not advise her to take a short-term job as a domestic for two weeks whilst her visa for Singapore was still valid. The key site of Amy’s vulnerability to being trafficked—her and her family’s marginal economic position—was not broken by the anti-trafficking interventions afforded to her. She remained, in other words, both vulnerable and marginal. Moreover, crossing back over the border in the context of return migration as an identified victim of trafficking was the site of considerable anxiety and stress for Amy (see Laurie et al. 2015 for a similar analysis on the India-Nepal context). The health concerns she faced were not a product of sexual abuse resulting in psychological trauma (as presumed by rehabilitative interventions in anti-trafficking), but from the anxieties produced in the context of assistance at the airport when she returned to the Philippines. Finally, Amy’s story and the anecdotes recounted about other women’s experiences in this chapter and Chap. 5 reveal that interventions involving recovery from trafficking exhibit tendencies of bureaucratic obfuscation since the bureaucratic procedures that form part of victim protection have the potential to produce frustration, stress, and ultimately withdrawal by victims. The registers of exclusion discussed in this and the previous chapter, when taken together, produce a context in which migrant labourers themselves, and their advocates in civil society—such as NGOs—are increasingly coming to self-exclude from the opportunity to have an assessment of trafficking made. Migrant worker advocates and migrants themselves

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experience a sense of disillusionment with both the processes and outcomes of trafficking victimhood. The long period of waiting in Singapore, often without the opportunity to earn a reasonable income (or any income), the prospect of a shelter-based form of carceral protectionism (as discussed in Chap. 7), the unlikelihood of victim compensation or restitution, and the obligation to re-tell experiences of violence, exploitation, and deception repeatedly through in court and in the process of investigations are significant disincentives. These are pragmatic considerations then, but many migrants also narrate a longing to go home as soon as possible. Longing and desire are oft-cited emotional registers in migration studies, although these are rarely discussed in relation to leaving the destination/returning home, with scholarship focused on the desire to migrate and the social imaginaries that inform this (as in Collins 2017). Migrant worker NGOs and civil society advocates held great hope in the promise of migrant worker protections through the passage of Singapore’s PHTA. However, as demonstrated in Chap. 4, many NGOs expressed disillusionment with the application of the legislation, particularly with issues of transparency and consistency in definitions and indicators of TIP. HOME and TWC2 are the two NGOs who receive the vast majority of migrant worker cases in Singapore, with the Good Shepard Sisters usually receiving cases of women and girls only through referral and for shelter -based supports after the TIP Taskforce has confirmed a victim’s status as trafficked and involved in criminal justice proceedings. In cases of female migrant labourers, both HOME and TWC2 receive cases involving both FDWs and migrant sexual labourers/entertainers, with the vast majority of cases being FDWs (about 90 per cent of both HOME’s and TWC2’s cases). However, TWC2 claims that it does not generally refer cases where there are TIP indicators to the TIP Taskforce because, as one representative stated, ‘The indicators are vague and seem to be open to interpretation. MOM, we think, does this intentionally as a way of avoiding victim identification’. TWC2’s lack of referrals is then related, in part, to a sense of disillusionment based on the view that there is a deliberate confounding of victim identification by the government. Both TWC2 and HOME also base decisions not to refer potential TIP cases based on prior experiences of referral since the passage of the PHTA. TWC2, for example, recounted the experience of a case they handled of a Filipina FDW that was identified by one of their social workers as a TIP victim. The woman entered Singapore on an SVP and was told by her recruiter that she would receive a work permit on arrival. However, after

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arriving her recruiter deployed her to work as an entertainer in a pub. Her boss in the pub, in concert with her agent, continually inflated her migration debt. When TWC2 flagged the case to MOM as TIP, instead of investigating the claims, MOM charged the woman for immigration violations related to working illegally (recall Aruna’s case discussed in the previous part of the chapter). The woman was placed in a government-operated dormitory for female migrant workers, along with the Filipina who had recruited and deployed her in the pub. Eventually the woman was deported. In another case, TWC2 was passed a handwritten note written by a Thai sexual labourer which stated that the woman was forced to take drugs and perform prostitution. It was a neighbour who initially received the note and consequently passed it on to TWC2 and the SPF. When the SPF did not conduct any rescue operation TWC2 sought the involvement of the TIP Taskforce to remove the women from this situation as a matter of urgency. The TIP Taskforce informed that it was investigating the matter, but in the interim period the pimp relocated. TWC2 was not informed whether the women were rescued and no update on the case was provided. As a result of these types of experiences with the Taskforce, a representative of TWC2 lamented that ‘We haven’t seen a victim-centred approach being applied. Instead we see a criminalisation response where women are held on immigration and work permit violation offences. We have not had one successful referral of a TIP case’. Further, according to both HOME and TWC2, migrant sex workers and entertainers are often reluctant to self-identify as TIP victims. As one representative of HOME lamented, ‘Most sex workers don’t even want to report to the Taskforce. We tell the women that they are a victim in a TIP case and we push them to allow us to refer them to the Taskforce and try to get them on the TJS if they came on an entertainer’s visa. At least then we can meet their basic needs. But they don’t want it. Most sex TIP victims stay three or four months, or less. We try to get their salary through MOM but don’t flag it as trafficking because the women tell us not to. So, we get their money if we can, and arrange their repatriation. Hardly any women come to us who work on SVPs’. Since October 2013, when HOME established its TIP desk, the NGO has identified 30 cases of women who have been trafficked to Singapore, with most of these— around 90 per cent—being FDWs. However, as HOME’s representative suggested above, only one of these has been referred to the TIP Taskforce as a TIP case. US DoS (2017) TIP Report states, ‘The government offered assistance for victims participating in investigations and prosecutions of

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trafficking offenses. NGOs reported that victims of trafficking were offered pro bono legal assistance to pursue civil court claims for restitution, but that all declined the offer; some purportedly did not wish to file official complaints out of scepticism that they would secure said restitution. Others who incurred significant debt burdens as a result of trafficking returned to their home countries instead of seeking redress. As a result, there were no reports of trafficking victims pursuing or receiving restitution through civil claims or criminal court proceedings’.

Conclusion This chapter has considered two further processes of migrant exclusion from anti-trafficking in Singapore. Some work has appeared on the role of classification and discretion in making trafficking determinations (Strauss 2017), arguing that pre-existing racialised and gendered stereotypes operate to influence determination of status and consequent access to supports. To my knowledge no published work has yet explored the potential of processes of obfuscation in anti-trafficking exclusions, and this line of inquiry holds significant import for those wishing to begin to answer the thorny question of why migrants and their advocates reject or opt out of claims to supports as victims of trafficking. Discussion in the chapter confirms the significance of framing and the particularly palpable role of the ‘female child sex trafficking victim’ in understanding exclusions from trafficking, as well as the trajectories of those deemed deserving victims. Whilst it is beyond the scope of this book to document some of the consequences of exclusion of exploited migrants from anti-trafficking protections in Singapore, this is nonetheless an important undertaking for a number of reasons, not least of which is because lack of access to anti-trafficking protections, including remedial justice, leaves migrants open to further abuses, perpetuates the cycle of vulnerability, and does little to dissuade those responsible for exploiting the labour of migrants from continuing to do so in future.6 At one level such disqualification and the need for evidence is understandable, since the Singaporean government has only instituted an anti-­ trafficking response through its TIP Taskforce for five years and only developed a legal framework for human trafficking two years before the time of writing. Issues with victim identification, as well as other elements of government responses, are bound to ensue in the early stages of any state’s anti-trafficking programme. Front-line officers in several key ministries have received training on victim identification, and the government

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rightly highlights this as an important step in building capacity as part of its counter-trafficking efforts. It is also fair to suggest that the Singaporean state has a considerable history of approaching migrant worker problems through these other lenses of labour, immigration, and criminal justice, and these efforts both pre-date and, importantly, prefigure and shape other responses. As a result, severely exploited migrant labourers in Singapore who may be deemed ‘legitimate’ victims of trafficking often exclude themselves from Singapore’s anti-trafficking architecture by choosing not to come forward to authorities to file a case, make a claim, or seek support and assistance. Ann, for example, chose to return home to the Philippines rather than remain in Singapore to make a complaint to the police because she felt (rightly) that attempting to make a claim as a victim of trafficking would significantly forestall her ability to return home. Other women also chose to leave Singapore rather than report their situations to the police, with this being the case both before and after the introduction of the PHTA and other anti-trafficking initiatives by the government. This is not surprising since there has yet to be any prosecuted case of human trafficking in Singapore where a victim has benefitted through remedial justice or through the opportunity to earn enough income to replace the income lost through an exploitative sojourn or whilst remaining in a shelter. Given the protracted stays many supported victims have in shelters, waiting for months on end without income and in the absence of social and familial supports, the rate of self-attrition reaches high proportions. Nonetheless, the PHTA has, somewhat ironically, enabled the Singaporean government to explain (and justify) many migrants’ exclusions from consideration under the frame of anti-trafficking because they do not present a neat and unproblematic ‘fit’ to their definition of human trafficking they themselves have established.

Notes 1. The parameters of unlawful confinement and (lack of) freedom of movement constitute another area where narrow definitions are invoked to disqualify migrants from trafficking determinations. Where migrant labourers are not physically imprisoned or constrained, confinement is subject to question by state authorities in Singapore. This exclusion has emerged for foreign domestic workers, male migrant workers, migrant fishers, and ­entertainers and sexual labourers alike. Confinement and the inability to leave situations of exploitation relate strongly to debt, intimidation, and so

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on, meaning that in theory removal of freedom (to leave) is often yoked to other elements of exploitation apart from physical force. 2. In 2015 the author and two others conducted a survey of 250 male migrant work permit holders in Singapore to determine the precise conditions of their recruitment, contracts, and working situations in Singapore. All those surveyed had deserted their companies in Singapore due to labour disputes or injuries. This report has not yet been published. 3. This is a common strategy of agents of the women and/or owners of the venues where they are deployed. The land border between Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore is relatively easy to commune between. Many women exist in Singapore when their Social Visit Pass expires and renew it in Malaysia before returning to Singapore for another stint. There is a well-­ established network of lodges and hotels in Johor Bahru to accommodate these women. 4. I am grateful to Shelley Thio of TWC2 for introducing me to these two men and to TWC2’s social work team for providing me with some information relating to the men’s case. 5. As it transpired, Amy was so uncontrollably distraught when I met her that I felt she may benefit from some social support from Catholic sisters in both Singapore and Manila. She readily agreed to this suggestion and upon her arrival in Manila an FMM Catholic sister met her at the airport and took her to a retreat where she was provided with space to think through her situation. After talking over the problem of her debt and anxiety it may cause with her husband she agreed for her husband to come to Manila to meet her, with the Sister nearby for support. After the Sister gave a long and detailed explanation of what happened to Amy in Singapore the husband showed sympathy and concern. 6. I take up such an exploration of migrant trajectories in ‘Geographies of Limbo’. Unpublished paper 2018.

References Barrientos, S., Kothari, U., & Phillips, N. (2013). Dynamics of unfree labour in the contemporary global economy. The Journal of Development Studies, 39(8), 1037–1041. Brennan, D. (2014). Trafficking, scandal and abuse of migrant workers in Argentina and the United States. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 653(1), 107–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0002716213519239. Chapkis, T. (2003). Trafficking, migration and the law: Protecting innocents, punishing immigrants. Gender and Society, 17(6), 923–937. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0891243203257477.

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Coghlan, D., & Wylie, G. (2011). Defining trafficking/denying justice? Forced labour in Ireland and the consequences of the trafficking discourse. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(9), 1513–1526. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1369183X.2011.623625. Collins, F. L. (2017). Anxious desires: Temporary status and future prospects in migrant lives. Emotion, Space and Society, pp. 964–980. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.emospa.2017.10.004. Darling, J. (2011). Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation. Political Geography, 30(5), 263–271. Davidson, J. (2010). New slavery, old binaries: Human trafficking and the borders of freedom. Global Networks, 10(2), 244–261. Erdal, E. B., & Oeppen, C. (2018). Forced to leave? The discursive and analytical significance of describing migration as forced and voluntary. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(4), 981–998. FitzGerald, S. (2012). Vulnerable bodies/vulnerable borders: Extraterritoriality and human trafficking. Feminist Legal Studies, 20(3), 227–244. Griffiths, M. (2012). ‘Vile liars and truth distorters’: Truth, trust and the asylum system. Anthropology Today, 28(5), 8–12. Heyman, J. (2001). Class and classification at the U.S. Mexican Border. Society for Applied Anthropology, 60(2), 128–140. Heyman, J. (2009). Trust, privilege and discretion in the governance of the US Borderlands with Mexico. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 24(3), 367–390. Hodge, P. (2015). A grievable life? The criminalisation and securing of asylum seeker bodies in the ‘violent frames’ of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders. Geoforum, 58, 122–131. International Labour Organisation (ILO). (2005). ILO minimum estimate of forced labour in the world. Geneva: ILO.  Retrieved August 6, 2018, from https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/nondiscrim/7/. Laurie, N., Richardson, D., Poudel, M., & Townsend, J. (2015). Post-trafficking bordering practices: Perverse co-production, marking and stretching borders. Political Geography, 48, 83–92. Lindholm, J., & Cederborg, A. C. (2016). Legal assessments of child victims of trafficking for sexual purposes. Behavioural Science and the Law, 34(1), 218–233. Mountz, A., & Hiemstra, N. (2014). Chaos and crisis: Dissecting the spatiotemporal logics of contemporary migrations and state practices. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), 382–390. Strauss, K. (2017). Sorting victims from workers: Forced labour, trafficking and the process of jurisdiction. Progress in Human Geography, 41(2), 140–158. The Straits Times. (2013). Boss of vice syndicate jailed for 15 months, fined $42,000. Retrieved June 29, 2018, from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/boss-of-vice-syndicate-jailed-15-months-fined-42000. US DoS. (2017). Annual trafficking in persons report. Washington, DC: US DoS. Yea, S. (2015). Trafficked enough? Human rights, missing bodies and victim identification in Singapore. Antipode, 47(4), 1080–1100.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: Paved with Good Intentions?

A Tale of Two Vignettes This book has sought to understand the dynamics of the emerging anti-­ trafficking movement and framework by examining its evolution and impulses, discourses, and strategies in a particular context. Singapore was a logical choice to provide the site for such an examination, in part because it is situated geographically as a significant regional destination for human trafficking in a range of sectors and drawing migrants from a large number of ‘source’ countries in both South and Southeast Asia. Whilst these circumstances enable a detailed engagement with the experiences of exploitative sojourns amongst migrant labourers, the choice of Singapore as the site for discussion was also driven by my fortuitous opportunity to trace the contours of an incipient anti-trafficking movement there from its inception in the early 2010s to the present day. A few weeks before completing my fieldwork in Singapore in late 2015, two seemingly unrelated events provided pause to reflect on the arguments made in this book. The first involved an email I received from the Director of the NGO Emancipasia asking if I could advise on an appropriate NGO to direct someone to, regarding a possible case referral. It seemed the Director had been contacted by a person concerned for a migrant entertainer they had stumbled across in Singapore. Whilst case referrals are common elements of anti-trafficking work, this situation reinforced a concern I had identified several years earlier, namely, that many organisations claiming to be working on human trafficking in Singapore, © The Author(s) 2020 S. Yea, Paved with Good Intentions?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_9

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and indeed elsewhere in Southeast Asia, have remarkably few interactions with the migrant subjects at the centre of their cause. It begs what I consider to be a rather important question, particularly where anti-trafficking awareness-raising and advocacy efforts are concerned: to what extent are organisations able to meaningfully and responsibly engage in anti-­ trafficking work if they remain remotely positioned from trafficked persons themselves? Indeed, this question provided the basis for much of the discussion in Chaps. 2 and 3. Extant scholarship on other ‘global’ human rights and social justice movements, including the feminist and environmental movement, has tended to privilege the actors and scope of the movements and gauge its effectiveness—at least in part—in terms of ‘global reach’. Such a networked approach has been particularly appealing to geographers since questions of networks are central to the discipline’s focus on geographies of (inter)connection and the power geometries that inhere to these processes of spatially extenuated activism and advocacy. But as argued in Chap. 2, connection in and of itself does not necessarily provide a robust basis by which to develop a movement in the arena of anti-trafficking. Primarily, as the examples of The Body Shop/ECPAT International’s child trafficking campaign illustrated, importing movement frames from other contexts can do more to distort than illuminate important parameters of human trafficking in places where it ‘lands’. Thus, the emphasis of some of the social movements scholarship on the importance of frames and framing processes in enabling the spaces of a movement to expand should not be immune from scrutiny where questions of (re)representation and relevance are concerned. The dangers inherent in the importation of the ‘mobile child victim’ of ‘sex trafficking’ in Singapore can be surmised as simultaneously creating and eliding an issue. The adoption of the child sex trafficking victim as the valid frame for Singapore’s incipient anti-trafficking movement amongst civil society actors was demonstrated in Chap. 3, where the framing provided by The Body Shop/ECPAT International Campaign became ‘localised’ amongst both existing and newly emerging NGOs and CSOs. The use of film in reiterating this frame was particularly relevant to the Singapore context and, apart from Emancipasia’s long-running monthly human trafficking film screening (which have extended six years at the time of writing), other groups circulated an anti-trafficking discourse through film, public forums and seminars, conference and other events, public displays, and acts that reiterated this key frame. And, as Chap. 4 demonstrated, so successful was

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this mobilisation that the Singaporean state’s initial—and arguably still its principal—response to human trafficking is based around the identification and protection (and eventually removal) of young migrant women who unwittingly enter Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment sector. In order to explain the ascendency of the child female victim frame one does, however, need to cast a scrutinising gaze not only in the direction of localisation of global discourses. That would be too neat an explanation and accord no role to local movement actors in interpreting—and perhaps refining—such a frame. In this sense the individual figures in the early stages of the movement in 2010–2014 are equally as necessary to examine. Women like Bridget Tan of HOME were pivotal in their public roles and speaking engagements in crystallising Singapore’s anti-trafficking civil society movement locally. In this vein, Emancipasia’s email also struck me as highly significant to the arguments in this book. I could not think offhand of one organisation that I would readily refer the potential case to. Did the woman want to leave an exploitative situation? If so, no organisation in Singapore conducted outreach in clubs, bars, brothels, or women’s accommodation. I weighed up the idea of suggesting Project X, primarily because they did do outreach and worked directly with migrant women in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment industry, including through an incredibly progressive peer-support model. But I dismissed the idea almost as quickly as I had entertained it; Project X maintained a staunchly sex worker rights perspective and their supports were not exactly oriented to the case. HOME may have also been a possibility—and in fact, ultimately, I did end up suggesting HOME—because they had assisted some trafficked migrant entertainers and sex workers in the past, but they did not have the capacity to assist women leaving such situations, and although their shelter was more sustainable in its recognition of women’s needs, desires, and circumstances than that of the Good Shepard Sisters, it was not ideal by any means. Other organisations crossed my mind and were then dismissed. After ten years of anti-trafficking fervour in Singapore, I reflected on the remarkable happenstance of not being able to quickly and easily suggest a single organisation that could have assisted the woman concerned. The situation described here speaks volumes to the way the anti-­ trafficking movement in Singapore has become a cohesive and self-­ referential formation, with discursive and practical components. If a movement is at least in part successful in its goals it will affect the ways states respond to a (human rights) issue, including both recognising the

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existence of an issue and dedicating resources to its remedy. If the early anti-trafficking movement in Singapore is to claim any success by this measure, it has been in securing a commitment from Singapore’s government to respond to the problem through both criminal justice and victim protection measures. Chapter 4 examined the relational nature of anti-­ trafficking in Singapore as a formation that rests not on the efforts of social movement and civil society actors alone, but the engagement of the state with discursive and political tenets of the movement these actors initiated. Theorisations of contemporary human rights movements tend to regard the state as always in opposition to movement principles and goals. However, what was novel in tracing the relationship between the Singapore state and the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore was the ways the state adopted the frame of the child sex trafficking victim and validated it through first policy and then legislative iterations. The political and geographical context in which state anti-trafficking responses develop must be given particular consideration here. In the case of Singapore these are summarised as forms of containment. The ability of the state to contain the parameters of victimhood consequently provided the impetus of the re-visioning of the human trafficking problem in Singapore amongst movement groups and actors themselves. Within the state’s growing acceptance of the need to respond to the ‘human trafficking problem’ in Singapore, migrant worker rights NGOs in particular envisioned the emergence of a bolstering of its efforts to advocate for long-held struggles to obtain basic rights and justice for migrant workers. However, as Chap. 4 documented, the containment of trafficking to the exclusion of migrant worker issues was met by NGOs with a sense of disillusionment and reinvigorated advocacy efforts for migrant worker exploitation to be re-­ framed, at least in part, as a human trafficking problem. Thus emerged a context of elastic victimhood, the contracting and expanding of victim inclusion/exclusion in a highly politicised and performative arena. The second episode also occurred within a few months of ending my fieldwork. I had, for two years, given regular workshops to government officials in Singapore on human trafficking, at both an introductory and an advanced level. Senior-level bureaucrats from a range of government departments attended (although notably the MOM was never included in these trainings). After one session an SPF young, female prison officer approached me enthusiastically and introduced herself and her role in one of Singapore’s main prisons for women. I had just given a seminar on victim identification and referral pathways and, as always, tried to make the

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characterisations of potential victims relevant to the Singapore context, rather than reading them off from comprehensive, but often simplistic, international indicators and criteria. The officer eagerly related that she felt there were many women incarcerated in the women’s prison where she worked who fitted the description I had given. ‘Would I be interested in interviewing some of them?’ (Yes) and ‘Possibly trying to do a small study which would be hugely beneficial to the prison guards and maybe even the women themselves?’ (also, yes). I was very much buoyed by the frank and honest assessment of the situations of migrant women in Singapore’s prisons and had long felt such a study would be enormously beneficial to many anti-trafficking stakeholders in Singapore, not to mention the women incarcerated. I left the workshop that day already thinking of interview topics and of what challenges researching in a prison context might present ethically and logistically. I followed up with an email to the prison guard the next day and after a week passed with no reply, sent another. Still no reply. A month passed and I had still not heard from the prison guard since our initial conversation, I gave up on the study and thought she must have been transferred or perhaps told not to communicate with me further. I did learn that she was in fact transferred and reflected with disappointment on the study that could have been and the outcomes that could possibly have dislodged some of Singapore’s well-­ established human trafficking truths. Chapters 5 and 6 described the situations of exploited migrant labourers in Singapore, both male and female. It was suggested that there are a diverse range of sectors and experiences of exploitation that characterise the human trafficking landscape in Singapore; most of which reach well beyond the child sex slave master narrative to actively contest its hegemony. And whilst the state and civil society organisations tend to go back and forth in arguing about who fits the trafficking definition and who doesn’t, in practice the state tends to reinforce the types of demarcations around trafficking victimhood established early on in Singapore’s anti-­ trafficking movement. The episode narrated above illustrates that this is not a passive or merely discursive process, but also one that is actively enforced. Chapter 5, in particular, drew out some of the ways the state-­ media nexus (which is a palpable political formation in the Singapore context) reproduces and accentuates the binaries between innocent sex slaves and manipulative and calculating prostitutes and between FDW exploitation and (sex) trafficking of women and girls. For example, in Singapore, migrant women and girls in Singapore’s sex and nightlife entertainment

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industry are treated through dualistic frames by the Singaporean state, either as moral innocents or as immoral immigration offenders. Arguably, in both the cases of male and female migrant subjects, the trajectories migrants follow after leaving exploitative working situations can heighten, rather than ameliorate, their vulnerability. Arguably the incident with the women’s prison guard would have complicated and ultimately unsettled these simple binaries. And although discussion in the book was only able to briefly touch on some of the effects of differential classifications, it is worth considering in far more depth the often profoundly disabling geographies of vulnerabilities post-exploitation that result from experiences of being trafficked. The major argument presented in the book concerned the distancing of the anti-trafficking movement in Singapore from its key objects, namely, trafficked persons and workers who may have been exploited but not identified as trafficked. One of the greatest ironies of Singapore’s anti-­ trafficking movement has been that during the height of the anti-trafficking fervour, meaningful assistance to exploited migrants remains paltry and largely ineffective. This type of observation is now at the centre of a well-­ established critique of anti-trafficking, and in this sense the analysis within these pages contains little in the way that is novel. However, what continues to be less well understood are the precise modes of exclusion from anti-trafficking that render migrants exploited without appropriate redress. Chapters 7 and 8 addressed this through an elaboration of three registers of exclusion: jurisdictional re-bordering, discretionary classifications, and bureaucratic obfuscation. When they are excluded from anti-trafficking protections, men’s and women’s cases are diverted to other legislative mechanisms. But other legal provisions contain limited or no opportunities to avail supports (e.g. such as accommodation or health services). Further, civil cases for compensation or restitution are rarely pursued in these situations. Migrants who present ‘diluted cases’ of trafficking thus have their claims shifted to other mechanisms. Their cases appear as weak because there is insufficient evidence for an investigation to be pursued as a prosecution, and/or it is weak because the credibility of the victim is questionable. However, as Chaps. 5 and 6 demonstrated, virtually no cases of individual migrants present a perfect fit to the anti-trafficking frame established through the mobile child victim. Migrants reveal ambiguities and ambivalences as neat victims either because they consented to enter Singapore (including, in some cases, with knowledge that they would be working on a non-­working

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visa) or, in the case of migrant sexual labourers, because they may have had a ‘history’ of migration as an entertainer in another country or perhaps because they had entered Singapore using falsified documents. Thus, although the UN.GIFT and UNOCD, as well as various international organisations such as the IOM and ILO, have reiterated on many occasions that conditions of entry and consent to migrate/work are not grounds to exclude migrants from determinations of trafficking, in practice in Singapore such disqualifications are commonplace. Again, the frame of the innocent and unknowing (female/child) victim who is duped and completely unconsenting to work as a sexual labourer appears not only to have discursive resonance, but also real and often quite profound consequences for migrant women and men themselves. This situation also raises a further question: if migrants who may well fall into the ambit of ‘victims of trafficking’ and suffered severe exploitation during their sojourns in Singapore are disqualified from determinations of trafficking, and other legislative tools under which their cases may be heard contain no provisions for support, or indeed for remedial justice, has Singapore’s anti-trafficking law and bevvy of initiatives done anything to disrupt the exploitation of migrants in Singapore? Or indeed to reduce the incidence of human trafficking there? For the vocal and repeated proclamations by Singapore’s TIP Taskforce that their approach to human trafficking is victim centred, there are in reality remarkably few victims to centre.

The Road Less Travelled? The plethora of critiques of anti-trafficking policy and practice over the past decade or so has yielded enormous insights into both the problems of anti-trafficking responses and the discourses and interests that underlie these. Some critical anti-trafficking research has also suggested the need to move beyond the current immigration and transnational crime framework for responding to human trafficking which aims to prevent/regulate labour migration and deter traffickers (e.g. Doezema 2002). Others have suggested that a victim-centred and human rights framework also does not assist migrants because it rests on a recovery model that is not in keeping with the goals of the migrants themselves (Briones 2008). The idea and practice of ‘victimhood’ has certain implications for policy responses to migrant worker concerns that may not be in keeping with their own goals and projects, such as shelter-based incarceration. Other terms such as ‘protection’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘recovery’, and ‘justice’ could be subject to

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similar scrutiny for the organising potential and influence over policy in the current anti-trafficking framework. At the heart of my arguments here is the view that the anti-trafficking framework has ‘done more to legitimate receiving countries’ border control protection than to protect the livelihood needs of … migrant workers’ (Briones 2008: 49). Yet, despite the increasing ferocity of critiques, the architecture of anti-trafficking— both as policy and as a social movement—remains remarkably resilient. Alternative ways of framing anti-trafficking discourses and responses that are more in line with the goals, aspirations, and projects of labour migrants themselves have the potential to significantly improve the efficacy of responses. Briones (2008), for example, has suggested a model that questions the efficacy of the anti-trafficking discourse from the standpoint of migrant workers’ (unmet) livelihood goals according to Nussbaum’s (2002, 2003, 2004) capabilities approach. Di Tommaso et al. (2009) posit a similar framing of anti-trafficking that privileges Sen’s (1985, 1999) related capabilities approach, which itself influenced Nussbaum’s work. These directions offer possible ways of re-framing anti-­ trafficking by putting the anxieties around money and unmet needs at the centre, where exploited migrants also put them. Future directions engaging with this framework could productively explore issues around how livelihood security could be restored or enhanced and how migrant labourers’ investment in their migration might be returned and their financial goals of migration met. In addition to these alterative suggestions for responding to trafficking it is important to develop better processes for understanding migrants’ experiences within (and outside) the anti-trafficking architecture itself. Despite the call for trafficked persons’ voices to be more centrally located within anti-trafficking knowledge and in guiding policy responses and practical interventions on the issue, little of this sentiment has filtered through to actual research outcomes. It is thus important to emphasise the importance of examining the ways migrants manoeuvre anti-­trafficking as a formation. Critical scholarship on human trafficking often posits that migrants’ rights are compromised because of anti-trafficking responses, but the precise ways this occurs in particular geographical contexts are often assumed rather than examined in detail. By drawing on an approach that foregrounds the everyday mobilities of trafficked and exploited migrant workers, the book has aimed to extend critiques by drawing on prosaic and nuanced individual migrant mobilities in light of specific policies and practices of anti-trafficking.

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Beyond these suggestions that aim to recognise and centre migrants’ agency, desires, and aspirations, as well as their pragmatic goals in migration, we need nonetheless stress the ways states, and in many cases NGOs and other civil society actors, have vested interests in narrowing the parameters of victimhood and downplaying the incidence and nature of TIP cases. In order to conceptualise these aspects of anti-trafficking, discussion in this book has drawn on frameworks for disclosing the differential construction of vulnerable groups—those who do and do not constitute ‘grievable lives’ (cf. Butler 2009)—and the formative role these social imaginaries play in understanding exclusions from trafficking. Adopting such an approach enables us to see the possible limits of pursuing ‘better’ interventions, in favour of one that problematises the regime of truth that de-limits anti-trafficking as a discursive and practical formation. Such an approach allows us to explore the ways states and non-state actors alike engage in practices that, taken together, are remotely situated from the everyday struggles of migrants labouring in and through Singapore.

References Briones, L. (2008). Beyond trafficking, agency and rights: A capabilities perspective on Filipina experiences of domestic work in Paris and Hong Kong. Wagadu, 5, 50–72. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? New York: Verso. Di Tommaso, M. L., Shima, I., Strom, S., & Bettio, F. (2009). As bad as it gets: Well-being deprivation of sexually exploited trafficked women. European Journal of Political Economy, 25(2), 142–162. Doezema, J. (2002). Who gets to choose? Coercion, consent and the UN Trafficking Protocol. Gender and Development, 10(1), 20–27. Nussbaum, M. (2002). Capabilities and human rights. In P. De Grieff & C. Ciaran (Eds.), Global justice: Transnational politics (pp.  117–150). London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nussbaum, M. (2003). Capabilities as fundamental entitlements: Sen and social justice. Feminist Economics, 9(2–3), 33–59. Nussbaum, M. (2004). Promoting women’s capabilities. In L. Benaria & S. Bisnath (Eds.), Global tensions: Challenges and opportunities in the world economy. London: Routledge. Sen, A. (1985). Well-being, agency and freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984. The Journal of Philosophy, 82(4), 169–221. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

Index1

A Accommodation (migrant workers), vii, 5, 11, 13, 15, 19, 22, 24, 26, 38, 47, 88, 91, 96, 102, 103, 105–107, 120, 123, 125, 129, 133, 136, 139, 142n5, 149, 150, 160, 162–164, 166–169, 172– 177, 181–183, 185, 186, 197, 199, 201–203, 203n1, 204n2, 204n5, 211, 215, 217, 218, 227, 229n1, 235, 236, 238, 240 Affect, 25, 36, 60, 61, 63, 66, 70, 72, 78, 80, 81, 148, 176, 235 Agamben, Giorgio, 22, 184 Agencies (recruitment), viii, 4, 7, 16, 92, 104–106, 117, 129, 150– 154, 156, 160, 163, 168, 187, 188, 191, 193, 198, 204n2 Andrijasevic, Ruchika, 4, 66, 110, 129 B Bangladeshis, viii, 12, 14, 15, 26n2, 120, 172, 174, 175, 181, 200, 215

Batam, vii, 31, 32, 36, 45, 48, 54n2, 121, 122 Berlant, Lauren, 60, 64, 72, 73, 80, 82 Body Shop (The), 9, 10, 15, 23, 234 Bureaucratic obfuscation, 23, 26, 213, 222–228, 238 Butler, Judith, 18, 19, 53, 96, 118, 241 C Classification (discretionary), 15, 17–19, 23, 25, 89, 90, 96, 126, 139, 148, 211–215, 224, 228, 238 Contracts, 87, 91, 104, 115, 117, 127–129, 139, 151–156, 161, 163, 164, 167, 168, 188, 189, 199, 214, 217, 220, 230n2 D de Souza, Christopher, 87, 88, 95, 107–109, 215 Debt, 15, 97, 98, 104, 109, 115, 117, 120–124, 126, 127, 136, 139,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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147, 148, 151, 153, 161, 163, 164, 166, 168, 171, 182, 215–223, 225, 227, 228, 229n1, 230n5 Debt bondage, 19, 22, 104, 108, 123, 124, 126, 127, 138, 139, 160, 164, 171, 176, 183, 214–222 Deportation/deportability, 49, 109, 140, 164, 166, 169, 171, 176, 185, 187, 192, 194, 197, 198, 203, 219, 222 Discretion (legal), 95, 108, 109, 175, 210–229 Doezema, Jo, 3, 53, 80, 82, 97, 129, 239 Dormitories, 162, 169–171, 185, 192, 195–199, 202, 203 E ECPAT International, 37, 38, 41, 47, 51, 92, 234 Emancipasia, 1, 2, 62, 63, 67, 71–75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 100–102, 233–235 Employment Act (Singapore), 109, 126, 129, 217 Employment of Foreign Manpower Act (Singapore) (EFMA), 129, 172, 173, 214, 217 Entertainer (migrant), vii, 1, 2, 12, 14, 108, 119, 122, 125, 126, 196, 198, 205n6, 226, 227, 229n1, 233, 235, 239 Ethics (in research), 183, 237 Ethnography, 11–13, 119 Exploitation (labour, sexual), 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15, 16, 19, 22, 24, 26, 37, 39, 42, 44, 53, 62, 66, 67, 76, 87, 92, 95, 96, 101, 104– 106, 108, 110, 111n3, 117, 119–121, 124–127, 135, 136,

138–140, 147–177, 183, 187–189, 192, 195, 200–203, 204n2, 210, 215, 220, 226, 229–230n1, 236, 237, 239 F Female child victim (the), 20, 23, 24, 63, 93, 130, 220, 239 Film, 7, 16, 18, 23, 24, 34, 39–41, 43–46, 53, 60–83, 130, 212, 234 Forced labour (ILO), 6, 7, 22, 26, 108, 126, 160, 177n1, 188, 189, 211, 216 Foreign Domestic Workers (FDWs), 25, 87, 88, 101, 103–106, 109, 117–119, 125–129, 138–140, 141n4, 151, 161, 162, 169, 175, 196–198, 201, 226, 227, 229n1, 237 Foucault, Michel, 16–18, 22, 26, 53, 90, 96 G Geylang (Singapore), 13, 32, 98, 125, 131, 133, 182, 196 H Health, 24, 41, 101, 108, 124, 125, 128, 137, 140, 154, 156, 157, 187, 196, 202, 203n1, 212, 225, 238 Heartlands (Singapore), 131, 133, 134, 137, 172 Humanitarian Organisation for Migrant Economics (HOME), 1, 10, 24, 31–34, 37–44, 46–52, 87, 88, 100, 101, 103–107, 109, 117, 126, 141n1, 141n2, 164, 175, 201, 202, 205n6, 216, 226, 227, 235

 INDEX 

I Illegal deployment, 169, 175 Immigration and Customs Authority (Singapore) (ICA), 93, 109, 174, 215, 218–221 Indicators (of trafficking), 2, 22, 24, 25, 90, 94, 95, 97, 102, 105, 106, 123, 126, 136, 139, 160, 164, 167, 171, 173, 175, 176, 183, 188, 194, 197, 214, 216, 217, 222, 226, 237 Indonesia, vii, 13, 16, 31, 32, 43, 44, 48, 54n2, 103, 119, 126, 150, 151, 191, 197, 198, 204n4 Injury (workplace), vii, 53, 82, 156, 157, 160, 161, 168, 187, 196 In-Principal Approval (IPA), 161, 163, 166, 168 International Labour Organisation (ILO), 7, 105, 126, 136, 148, 160, 167, 171, 177n1, 183, 190, 216, 239 Intimate public, 23, 62–66, 73, 74, 80, 81, 83 J Jurisdictional exceptionalism, 202, 210, 211, 214, 217 Jurong Fisheries Port, 14, 193–195 L Labour trafficking, 1, 87, 88, 93, 99, 105, 107, 109, 110, 126, 130, 136, 148, 149, 164, 167, 171, 175, 176, 185, 194, 216 Little India Riot, 173 M Media (role of), 3, 7, 16–18, 20, 25, 41, 42, 46, 48, 62, 66, 67, 70,

245

94–98, 101, 111n1, 117–119, 129–139, 149, 150, 168, 171–175, 177, 188, 209, 210, 212, 216 Migrant fishers, vii, viii, 1, 14, 15, 25, 106, 140, 150–161, 164, 169, 184, 188–191, 193–195, 203, 204n3, 229n1 Migrant Workers Centre (MWC, Singapore), 169, 193 Migrant workmen, 12, 14, 25, 111n3, 150, 164, 168–175 Migration fees, 168 Ministry of Manpower (MOM, Singapore), viii, 88, 93, 99, 105–107, 128, 131, 147, 161, 162, 167–171, 174–176, 181, 182, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 200, 203, 205n6, 215–217, 219, 221, 226, 227, 236 Mountz, Alison, 21, 22, 89, 185, 186, 195, 199, 202, 203, 214 N National Approach to Trafficking in Persons (Singapore), 99 National Plan of Action on Trafficking in Persons (Singapore), 92, 93 P Performing Artists’ Visa, 121 Philippines, The/Embassy, vii, 1, 8, 13, 14, 42, 97, 103, 108, 109, 115, 119, 121, 122, 126, 150–152, 156, 157, 159–161, 191, 192, 197, 198, 201, 209, 218, 219, 223–225, 229 Prevention of Human Trafficking Act (PHTA, Singapore), 108, 109, 149, 171, 176, 181, 192, 199, 217, 226, 229

246 

INDEX

Project X, 10, 26n2, 235 Pure victims, 220 R Raids (police), 49, 70, 110, 111n1, 130–134, 139, 140, 210, 213, 215 Recruiters/recruitment, 6, 11, 59, 76, 97, 104–106, 121, 123, 129, 147, 148, 151, 152, 156, 159–161, 163, 167, 168, 171, 173, 182, 189, 191, 193, 197, 198, 204n2, 209, 216, 223–225, 227, 230n2 Rescue (anti-trafficking), 48, 59, 76, 77, 129, 131, 133, 140, 227 Riles, Annalise, 18, 52 S Sex and nightlife entertainment sector, 10, 11, 13, 25, 95, 117, 119, 126, 130, 133, 201, 220, 235 Sex trafficking, 1, 2, 9, 10, 15, 20, 23, 31, 34, 35, 39, 41–43, 45, 48–50, 52, 53, 54n7, 59, 62, 65–67, 79–81, 94, 97–99, 101, 103, 110, 120, 126, 131, 176, 201, 202, 213, 228, 234, 236, 237 Shelters, 12, 23, 41, 47, 48, 59, 77, 89, 104, 141n1, 149, 176, 185–187, 192–202, 204n5, 226, 229, 235, 239 Singapore Police Authority (SPA), 174 Singapore Police Force (SPF), 122, 227, 236 Sisters of the Good Shepherds, 199, 226, 235

Social Visit Pass (SVP), 108, 119, 120, 183, 205n6, 218, 220, 226, 227, 230n3 South Asia, 103, 181 Spaces of deflection, 22, 25, 182–203 Spaces of deportability, 22, 25, 184, 187, 199, 203, 219 Special Pass (SP), 12, 174, 181, 184, 196, 219, 221 StopTraffickingSG Campaign, 106–110 T Taiwan, 160, 191, 192 Tamil Nadu, vii, 161, 169, 173 Temporary Job Scheme (TJS, Singapore), 176, 197, 200, 201, 205n6, 221, 222, 227 Thailand, 44, 49, 119, 150, 161, 197 TIP Report (United States), 9, 35, 42, 45, 54n5, 92, 176, 188, 227 TIP Taskforce (Singapore), 2, 24, 87, 92–95, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 107, 117, 125, 131, 135, 141n1, 171, 176, 189, 192, 193, 199–202, 204n2, 219, 221, 222, 224, 226–228, 239 Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), vii, viii, 14, 24, 101, 103, 105–107, 111n3, 117, 126, 156, 161, 164, 167, 176, 188, 196–198, 204n5, 219, 221, 226, 227, 230n4 U United Nations Trafficking Protocol, 190 UN Women, 1, 2, 10, 32, 33, 35–37, 40–45, 47, 51, 60, 71, 73–75, 79

 INDEX 

V Violence (sexual, physical), 12, 23, 63, 65, 72–74, 81, 94, 96, 125, 136, 137, 160, 226 W Weak victims, 214, 218–219 Women’s Charter (Singapore), 93, 96, 214

247

Work Injury Compensation Act (WICA), 211 Work Permit, vii, 110, 122, 138, 156, 161–169, 172, 181, 183, 184, 196–198, 205n6, 217, 221, 222, 226, 227, 230n2