Shanghai. Lei Han/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Yan was a sex worker in Beijing for over five years. Sex work offered greater autonomy and better income relative to the typical low-wage service sector jobs available to rural-to-urban migrants like her. She began working in a massage parlour at the age of 18, after migrating from a rural part of Fujian Province in southern China. As an employee, she provided massages in addition to different sexual services, receiving a monthly salary as well as commissions based on how many clients she saw. After a disagreement with her manager over owed wages, however, Yan grew frustrated with her job and was recruited to work at a Christian vocational training and rehabilitation programme for sex trafficking victims in China. Her recruitment occurred not through a formal raid operation, but through weekly volunteer street outreach conducted by an American non-governmental organisation working in Beijing. While Yan and most of her co-workers do not consider themselves victims of trafficking, the American (NGO) that employs them sees sex work to be inherently exploitative and thus indistinguishable from human trafficking.
In recent years, anti-trafficking NGOs have created a cottage industry of ‘victim repair’ through vocational training as a form of rehabilitation. Numerous faith-based and secular NGOs—working in Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, India, Mexico, Moldova, Uganda, and the US—focus on selling wares made by the women they employ to raise funds and awareness about human trafficking. They insist that wage labour can provide sex workers with an economic alternative to commercial sex, but often do not separate the wage they offer from other subjective requirements of what it means to be a ‘dignified’ and ‘free’ labourer in the global economy. Jewellery, tote bags, blankets, and placemats are among the many products sold online and at anti-trafficking conferences and fairs, such as the annual “Freedom and Fashion” show in Los Angeles that attracts thousands of consumers each year.
