Sexuality Research & Social Policy

http://nsrc.sfsu.edu
December 2008 Vol. 5, No. 4

Book Review
Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand
By Heather Montgomery. New York: Berghahn Press, 2001. 224 pp., $27.95 (paper), ISBN-10: 1571813187.

Children in the Global Sex Trade

By Julia OConnell Davidson. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005. 178 pp., $25.95 (paper), ISBN-10: 0745629288.
Kerwin Kaye

I would hopethat people would be very, very careful with their daughters after seeing this. Mira Sorvino, star of Human Trafficking, speaking of what she hoped the miniseries would accomplish (Genzlinger, 2005, 7) Within the emotionally charged narrative of sex trafficking, the image of the underage prostitute has assumed an increasingly high profile. Several popular movies and television shows have relied on representations of the sexual exploitation of underage youth in order to dramatize the purported plight of those sold into bondage for the purposes of commercial sex. Indeed, nearly all of the recent popular media have relied on such images, ranging from movies such as Holly (2006) and Trade (2007), to the Lifetime Television Networks popular miniseries Human Trafficking (2005), to the critically acclaimed Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever (2002). These portrayals have been screened at the United Nations and used by organizations such as the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women in both educational and fund-raising efforts. The presumed reality of these fictionalized depictions derives from the fact that they are often loosely based on investigative or news reports that trace similar themes. Together, this blended combination of news, semifictional representation, and creative fabrication places the child

prostitute at the center of the sex trafficking narrative, where it is intended to provide the moral foundation on which the entire discourse rests. Given the reactionary policies that have emerged from such portrayals, it is necessary to better understand how depictions of human suffering can operate to recuperate that suffering for conservative ends. It is far from coincidental, for example, that many of the narratives rely on the trope of virginity to dramatize the brutality of the trafficking situation. The young victims in Holly, Trade, and Human Trafficking were not only virginal but also prepubescent, further signaling the inappropriateness of the sexual abuse. This intense preoccupation with virginity reveals the profoundly conservative notions of innocence and defilement that lie at the heart of much of the antichild prostitution narrative. This narrow focus on the violation of innocence links it to historical concerns with womens sexual honor and to the ultimate rescue of these powerless victims through the agents of a chivalric heroism, as represented by either the police or representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). As the aforementioned quote from Mira Sorvino shows, these discursive devices can generate impulses toward the surveillance of girls (and women) that have long been themes of patriarchal protectionist control.

Address correspondence concerning this article to Kerwin Kaye, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, 41 East 11th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: kab316@nyu.edu

Sexuality Research & Social Policy, Vol. 5, Issue 4, pp. 8791, electronic ISSN 1553-6610. 2008 by the National Sexuality Research Center. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp 87

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Thus, a close examination of the panoply of characters evoked by the plot structure of child sex slavery provides a clear view, in abbreviated form, of the structure that also undergirds narratives of adult sex trafficking. Two excellent book-length monographs provide alternative maps for this territory: Heather Montgomerys (2001) Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand and Julia OConnell Davidsons (2005) Children in the Global Sex Trade. The work of these two authors has been usefully amplified by scholars such as Carole Vance (2004), whose work has detailed the significance of the melodramatic form within anti-trafficking narratives, and Libby (Elisabeth) Anker (2005, 2007), who has written about the role of melodrama within U.S. political discourse more generally. Together, the work of these scholars brings critical attention to the notions of childhood innocence deployed within stories of child sex trafficking. Because the works are notably different in method and scope, it is worthwhile to discuss each in turn. Heather Montgomerys text is an ethnographic study based on 15 months of fieldwork in a Thai village with a significant child prostitution trade. There, she traced the development of social concern surrounding the issue, interviewed dozens of children engaged in prostitution (some who began as young as 3 years of age), and carefully assessed the role of prostitution within the childrens familial roles and overall economic circumstance. Montgomery examines the social constructions of innocence that distort the lives of these underage victims and lead to policies that are often counterproductive at best.1 At the outset of her book, she challenges: It is, perhaps, a truism that activists in the West need child prostitutes in developing countries far more than child prostitutes need the activists; they fulfill a special need and function in Western iconography. At some level, there is an agreement about what is expected of child prostitutes and how they will be portrayed.Journalists know what child prostitutes should look like, so they find HIV-positive children, rescued from brothels, who can be recognized as the real thing.[T]hese storiesfulfill the needs of the campaigners and advocates, not those of the children. (pp. 2223) As noted previously, typical stories focus on the defilement of an often virginal innocent. Montgomery, however, argues that such narratives fail primarily because

they do not recognize the agency exercised by these children. Montgomery goes into great detail in her examination of children as social agentsalthough she also is careful to note that simply because children exercise some small degree of choice in these situations does not automatically render these choices morally unproblematic (nor does it make these youths any less victimized). Nevertheless, in discussing the ways in which children see their prostitution as a moral actoften in relation to familial roles in which the sex trade enables them to provide support not only for themselves but also for their parents Montgomery argues that the limited forms of agency these children do exercise must be recognized in order to fashion relevant policies: Children who see themselves as engaged in moral work that helps their families will not necessarily welcome attempts to rescue them via state- or NGO-provided foster care. As Montgomery comments: It is vital that the cycle of abuse is stopped in communities like Baan Nua [the fictionalized name Montgomery gave to the town she studied], but this involves complex long term intervention which punishes neither child nor parent, which accepts the childrens justifications of their lives as valid and which does not rely on limiting stereotypes of what a child prostitute should be. (p. 146) Montgomerys research is thus a call for activism that eschews emotive appeals based on the defilement of childhood innocence (an image drawn from Western presumptions concerning the nature of childhood, as she makes clear) in favor of politics that are more responsive to the actual needs of the victims.2 Montgomerys book also details numerous other important themes pertinent to the development of a complex analysis of trafficking: the elaborate relationships of fictive kinship that can develop between child prostitutes and their Western clients, drug use within the community and among the children, and social hierarchies

1 In a 2008 article, Montgomery offers a valuable examination of Western clients who pursue underage prostitutes in Thailand.

2 My own research (Kaye, 2007) has revealed similar ideological currents within the U.S. context. Following 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork studying male street prostitution in a West Coast city (which involved a significant percentage of underage youth, mostly 16 and 17 years old), I saw a clear preponderance of services oriented toward youth who best fit the image of a victim. Those who were not willing or able to abandon drug use, those who wished to continue to prostitute, and those who rejected familial contact (which was mandated) had little use for the social service agencies and exhibited a great deal of hostility toward them. Although agencies attempted to rescue victims from the streets, the services generally failed to incorporate a sufficient focus on harm reduction, thus stranding those still on the streets with little help.

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(including pimping) among the children themselves. All of these topics are conditioned and surrounded by the extreme poverty that characterizes Baan Nua, and Montgomery is careful to contextualize the prostitution in relation to the other options available to the children, such as begging or digging through garbage dumps. Montgomerys work thus pushes past the extreme emotionalism and black-and-white thinking that characterizes mainstream commentaries, instead presenting a model that pays careful attention to the actual lives of child participants in the sex trade. By taking a perspective that is simultaneously larger and more detailed, Montgomery turns a critical eye toward the limitations of the common narrative of suffering, offering a more complicated and ethically challenging tale in its stead. Julia OConnell Davidsons Children in the Global Sex Trade expands on some of Montgomerys themes and develops others. Whereas Montgomerys text draws on her own ethnographic research, OConnell Davidson offers a purely theoretical analysisalbeit one that is clearly rooted in her prior ethnographic experience (she refers to Montgomerys text to illustrate her points as well). Like Montgomery, OConnell Davidson emphasizes the need to interrogate the Western conception of innocencenot in order to charge underage prostitutes with guilt of some sort, but to examine the assumptions that structure this ideal and explicate its limitations. Like Montgomery, OConnell Davidson also stresses that most intervention strategies are based on faulty assumptions that ignore childrens agency and neglect the limited but real choices that most of these children make in doing sexual labor. As OConnell Davidson writes: Children who must go hungry, ragged and barefoot, or who only manage to eke out the barest subsistence from performing tasks they find demeaning, can feel just as humiliated as an adult in the same position. Children who are neglected, or physically and verbally abused, by their carers, or who are forced to conform to the grimly regimented, emotionally empty routine of life in a state-run orphanage, or who are consistently made the objects of homophobic bullying and denied opportunities to express their sexuality, can experience this as an extinguishing of themselves as full persons. To run away, even if that means using prostitution as a means of survival, can thus be experienced as an assertion of the self as subject, not as being transformed into an object. (p. 55) Like Montgomery, OConnell Davidson is careful to specify that although most underage youth who engage in prostitution make a choice to do so and are not directly

coerced into the work, this fact does not render their situation ethically unproblematic. Both authors identify underage prostitution as a form of abuse, albeit one that requires a more complex understanding regarding the motivations of the actors. Without this understanding, the relatively rare cases of direct coercion by unequivocally evil villains will predominate within political frameworks, leading to interventions that simply do not address the reality of most youths experiences in the sex trade. Both Montgomery and OConnell Davidson do a good job of looking at the social construction of childhood in the West and its relationship with the image of the child prostitute, but OConnell Davidson goes further. Noting that both women and children have occupied a symbolic space outside of the marketplace during the industrial era, OConnell Davidson argues that they have symbolized the integrity of the home and nonmarket morality as opposed to the impersonal sphere of capitalist commerce. As women increasingly have entered that public sphere in the wake of feminism, children more and more have come to hold the meanings and hopes associated with noncommodified sociality. Children thus become better, more sympathetic victims as the former so-called damsel in distress becomes more capable of handling herself (although women in the Third World tend to be more readily portrayed as being just as helpless as before). OConnell Davidsons argument here usefully builds on Viviana Zelizers (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, in which Zelizer argued that industrialism created the conditions under which children ceased to be valued for their labor capacities and became simultaneously economically useless and priceless. OConnell Davidsons analysis suggests that children have become even more central to the construction of non-market-based kinship ties and family values as middle-class women have taken jobs outside of the home. The symbolic defilement of children thus threatens the familial zone as a whole and takes on a moral meaning associated with the violation of all that is purportedly good and wholesome in the non-self-interested private sphere. However, what is at stake in the narrative of child sex slavery goes beyond shifts that have occurred in the sphere of gender. As Libby Anker (2007) has pointed out, the melodramatic narrative has arisen as a tool of state power in a variety of fields following the French Revolution, particularly becoming a tool of state power within the United States subsequent to its ascension as a world power in the wake of World War II (Anker has pointed toward both the Cold War and the response to the

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events of September 11, 2001, as examples). Anker has identified the melodramatic form as a mode of expression that has a clear-cut narrative of victimization and retribution, and a three-character triad of villain, victim, and hero (p. 3). Anker further noted: Visual spectacles of suffering are embedded throughout the narrative and instigate visceral emotionality into the audience experience; melodrama appeals to pathos in order to foment a felt experience in its spectators and create emotional connections to suffering victims. It generates a morally polarizing worldview, in which good is signified in the suffering of the victim and evil is signified in the ferocity of the antagonist; it is the victims injury at the core of the narrative that divides the world into good and evil and demands retribution as response. (p. 3) The melodramatic form thus makes a spectacle of suffering, requiring it in order to generate a dualistic politics of good versus evil and to further justify and mandate the morality of retribution. In the case of sex trafficking, the intense focus on the suffering of the victim serves both to enable voyeuristic pleasure of abusive scenes and to foster moral uncertainty in the cause of vengeance. As Anker (2007) commented: Framing the exercise of American state power as a compulsory rejoinder to evil brushes the political questions and concerns of that power under the rug of transcendent morality, and makes state action, in the service of protecting victims, seem absolutely moral and unquestionable. (p. 34) Actions the state takes in the name of supposedly protecting victims of traffickingwhich often have included a tightening of immigration controls and even the absolute prohibition of womens migration for work (see, for example, Chapkis, 2005; Sharma, 2003, 2005)are thereby removed from critical scrutiny. The externalization of evil both diminishes the ability to see the complications of what is deemed external, and erases any sense of responsibility for decision-making, action or complicity with current conditions.it is the ultimate unquestionable and unquestioning moral certitude of ones own correctness. (Anker, 2007, pp. 1314) Carole Vance (2004) has described and critiqued the particular use of melodramatic narrative in relation to sex trafficking. Vance is similarly critical of how melodramatic framings of sex trafficking fashion dualistic renderings of good and evil and leave the propriety and usefulness of state interventions unexamined. Beyond this criticism, Vance has argued that the melodramatic

narrative necessitates that victims display pure innocence, a requirement with gendered consequences for women: Melodrama requires the female to have every degree of sexual innocence, being sold callously by her family or tricked by relatives.The melodrama as a form has no room for calling the victims complicit, that is, their sexual knowledge or experience.3 Vances (2004) analysis helps make sense of the overreliance on virginal children within anti-trafficking narratives. By locating prostitution in a realm where it cannot be anything other than abusive and where choice is irrelevant, the discourse eliminates all moral ambiguity and uncertainty, but it does so only by relying on conservative ideals about what constitutes sexual innocence. As Vance has noted, this type of thinking has the important consequence of promoting interventions that target only those who embody this good and pure victim. Vance (2004) has argued that the focus on extreme coercion in the discussion of sex trafficking (and prostitution as a whole) makes it impossible to envision more effective strategies for aid: Focusing almost exclusively on rescue, it narrows the scope of strategies including group organizing, decriminalization, and health education. The melodramatic plot renders all health interventions unnecessary, pointless and unimaginable. If all of prostitution is sex trafficked, then what point is there in ongoing health services and education to meet the needs of women in sex work? Unfortunately, the most dramatic and effective and stirring of videos on sex trafficking promotes the worst interventions.4 In this manner, the melodramatic form works against womens capacities as agents, requiring that powerless women be saved by powerful others. As Vance noted in a 2004 panel event at New York University, The melodrama [offers] an imagined outcome consisting only of rescue, not empowerment. Anker (2007) similarly has commented that heroism is significantly masculinized. It is the men who are self-emancipating and self-making; it is the women upon whose suffering men are self-made (p. 12). At times, as in the TV miniseries Human Trafficking, the anti-trafficking narrative generates a female hero like Sorvino who rescues the victims; however, this turnaround is employed only irregularly and, in any case, serves to empower the privileged (White, Western, and often with state affiliation) heroes over those they would rescue.

3 Audio recording in possession of the author. 4 Audio recording in possession of the author.

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As the issue of trafficking has begun to shift from an exclusive focus on the Third World to so-called domestic trafficking, the presence of underage victims within the narrative has increased. Although women in the Third World often are envisioned as being powerless, adult women in the First World are less readily seen in this light, so tales of widespread direct coercion tend to become less believable. The existence of a privileged (though not necessarily elite) core of middle-class sex workers, who can make their voices heard via the Internet and activist media, casts further doubt on the claim that no one could possibly choose to engage in sex work, thereby complicating discussions of adult sex trafficking with potentially challenging details pertaining to victims choices (however limited). The emotional grip of melodrama relies precisely on flattening such complexity into a dualistic tale of good and evil. If First World women (much less First World adult gay male sex workers) cannot make for credible victims, then children serve to reinvigorate the melodramatic structure. The figure of the childparticularly the very young childwould seem to render the need for narrative complexity obsolete. Although people on virtually all sides of the debate agree that underage prostitution is unacceptable, Montgomery and OConnell Davidsons works reveal the need for detailed engagement with the nuances of each particular situation. Although worst-case scenarios attract dramatic attention, the reality of the majority of the worlds sex workers, who struggle yet who often angrily resist any portrayal of themselves as victims, goes largely unaddressed. Sex workers, including underage youth, indeed exercise agency, and this fact must be squarely confronted if society is to do more than rescue the few who are forced into laboring under the most desperate of circumstances. Indeed, without taking care in the choice of political framings, the cost of helping even these few may involve harming the many.

References
Anker, E. (2005). Villains, victims and heroes: Melodrama, media, and September 11. Journal of Communication, 55, 2237. Anker, E. (2007, March). The melodramatic imagination and American political life. Paper presented at

the Western Political Science Association, Las Vegas, Nevada. Retrieved September 5, 2008, from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p176041_index. html Chapkis, W. (2005). Soft glove, punishing fist: The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. In E. Bernstein & L. Schaffner (Eds.), Regulating sex: The politics of intimacy and identity (pp. 5166). New York: Routledge. Duguay, C. (Director). (2005). Human trafficking [TV miniseries]. New York: Lifetime Television Network. Genzlinger, N. (2005, October 23). Human Trafficking: Exposing the ultimate exploitation. New York Times. Retrieved September 15, 2005, from http://www. nytimes.com/2005/10/23/arts/television/tvtrafficking.html?scp=1&sq=October%2023,% 202005%20+%20trafficking&st=cse Kaye, K. (2007). Sex and the unspoken in male street prostitution. Journal of Homosexuality, 53(1/2), 3773. Kreutzpaintner, M. (Director). (2007). Trade [Motion picture]. United States: Centropolis Entertainment. Montgomery, H. (2008). Buying innocence: Child-sex tourists in Thailand. Third World Quarterly, 29, 903917. Moodysson, L. (Writer/Director). (2002). Lilya 4-ever [Motion picture]. Sweden: Memfis Film. Moshe, G. (Writer/Director), & Jacobson, G. (Writer). (2006). Holly [Motion picture]. United States: Priority Films. Sharma, N. (2003). Travel agency: A critique of antitrafficking campaigns. Refuge, 21(3), 5365. Sharma, N. (2005). Anti-trafficking rhetoric and the making of a global apartheid. NWSA Journal, 17(3), 88111. Vance, C. (2004, November 19). Innocence and experience: Melodramatic narratives of sex trafficking and their consequences for health and human rights. Paper presented at panel event, Saving Women and Children? Sex Trafficking, Public Policy, and the Media, New York University, New York. Zelizer, V. A. (1985). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. New York: Basic Books.

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