Professional Documents
Culture Documents
0002716214521376
0002716214521376
research-article2014
By
CHENDA KEO,
THIERRY BOUHOURS,
C ambodia was one of the first countries to
enact a law on human trafficking in 1996.
This law, one of the harshest in the country,
RODERIC BROADHURST,
punished trafficking as severely as premedi-
and
tated murder. Although there had been some
BRIGITTE BOUHOURS
concern about human trafficking within
Cambodia, a global campaign, led by the United
DOI: 10.1177/0002716214521376
States, had been waging a war on human trafficking that required action on the
part of the Cambodian government to ensure the continuation of development
aid to the country. Human trafficking, or modern day slavery, was described by
the U.S. Department of State (USDS) and the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime (UNODC) as a transnational enterprise controlled by organized
crime, which enslaved 12.3 million people, generated $32 billion in profit for
human traffickers, was the third most profitable business for organized crime,
and posed a serious threat to national and global security (UNODC 2008; USDS
2009). Such unverified, high estimates suggested the presence of a moral panic
about human trafficking and have subsequently been found to be unreliable or
inflated in terms of the number of individuals involved and the profits earned by
trafficking (UNODC 2012).1
Apart from some NGO reports and a few studies of trafficked persons, virtu-
ally nothing is known about the individuals involved in human trafficking in
Cambodia, and some evidence suggests that the experiences of individuals
involved in Cambodian trafficking stand in contrast to prevalent claims about the
abusive and criminal characteristics of human trafficking. In 2006, one of this
articles authors interviewed nine boys and eight girls under 18 years of age, all of
whom had been trafficked to work in Thailand and subsequently reintegrated
into their family or community in Cambodia (Keo 2006). None saw themselves
as victims. They had willingly followed their recruiters to Thailand to earn an
income and support their impoverished family. They considered themselves
good children because of their ability to work and share the burden of support-
ing their family. Most had been trafficked by family members, relatives, or
neighbors, and a few by strangers. Few had suffered physical abuse and most of
them had been treated well. From their accounts, human trafficking did not
sound like a risky activity, and traffickers did not seem to make big profits.
Since the late 1990s, the authors have been engaged in a longitudinal study of
the trends and patterns of criminal activity in Cambodia, which included victimi-
zation surveys. We have found scant evidence that trafficking is a major problem
or that it involves organized crime, and our results are consistent with those of
another study (Steinfatt 2011). This article presents some of the results of our
research in Cambodia, which as far as we know is the first to draw on in-depth
interviews with alleged offenders.2
We examine not only traffickers characteristics and the methods they use but
also the way in which human trafficking, especially as a customary practice, has
been problematized and criminalized. This study illustrates how trafficking has
been officially constructed and the resulting negative consequences in Cambodia.
We argue that the hegemonic agenda of the Westin terms of security, morality
(especially prostitution), and human rightstriggered a security and moral panic
about trafficking worldwide. Pressured by foreign and local NGOs and the need
for foreign aid, Cambodia adopted a repressive law that defined human traffick-
ing ineptly and in effect targeted consensual commercial sex activities. In the
hands of a dysfunctional criminal justice system, harsh laws have not deterred
potential traffickers but produced serious unintended consequences that have
turned law enforcement into an instrument for corruption and injustice, and
against the powerless.
We found only two studies that focused on human traffickers, as distinct from
trafficked persons and their rescuers. Levenkron (2007) examined the court dos-
siers of 325 Israeli traffickers and their accomplices who were convicted between
1990 and 2007. Nair (2004) conducted interviews with 160 active sex traffickers
of women and children in India, in addition to 561 trafficked persons.3 Nearly
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 205
half (47 percent) of the trafficked persons reported that their traffickers were
female. In contrast, Levenkron found that only 10.5 percent of the Israeli traf-
fickers were female. This gender difference raises interesting questions about
womens involvement in trafficking activities and their treatment by the criminal
justice system in different nations. Both studies found that most offenders had
engaged in trafficking in an attempt to escape poverty and alleviate dire financial
situations. Neither study supported claims about the high profitability and
involvement of organized crime in human trafficking. On the contrary, they
showed that human trafficking was generally perpetrated by individuals or small,
loosely organized criminal networks. This finding was corroborated by Brown
(2007), who conducted in-depth interviews with 515 Cambodian sex workers.
Many of the female traffickers had themselves been previously trafficked as sex
workers.
grown to more than two thousand by 2008 (Ek and Sok 2008). Since controlling
human trafficking involves multiple approaches and discourses, antitrafficking
programs were embedded within various sectors of NGO activity with an esti-
mated two hundred institutions working on the problem in Cambodia and
employing some five thousand people (Delauney 2007). To sustain this level of
NGO activity, significant donor funding was necessary.
Trafficking is criminalized in Article 3 of a hastily enacted 1996 statute: the
Law on Suppression of the Kidnapping, Trafficking, and Exploitation of Human
Beings:
Any person who lures a human being, male or female, minor or adult of whichever
nationality by ways of enticing or by any other means, promising to offer any money or
jewelry, with or without the persons consent, by ways of forcing, threatening, or using
of hypnotic drugs, in order to kidnap him/her for sale or prostitution, shall be subjected
to imprisonment from ten to fifteen years. The perpetrator shall be punished to impris-
onment from fifteen to twenty years if such victim is a minor of less than 15 years old.
Those who are accomplices, traffickers/sellers, buyers, shall be subject to the same
punishment term as the perpetrator(s); shall also be considered as accomplices, those
who provide money or means for committing offences.4
The law did not define trafficking but amalgamated selling, procuring, and
recruiting people for prostitution, irrespective of whether the individual was
coerced or was moved across or within national borders; neither did the law
define the terms victim, accomplice, and buyer. The unqualified term
accomplice meant that a wide range of peopleincluding a brothels security
guards, cleaners, cooks, and law enforcement or military personnel providing
protection to brothelscould be subjected to the same punishment as a procurer
or trafficker (Perrin et al. 2001).
The 1996 law was enacted with little understanding of trafficking and was,
de facto, a law against the organization of commercial prostitution. Because con-
sent was irrelevant by law (with or without the persons consent) virtually all sex
workers could be declared victims and those helping or managing sex work,
human traffickers. Yet Keo (2010) has shown that the majority of women and girls
who had been trafficked between 2007 and 2009 in Cambodia were destitute,
aware that they were being recruited into commercial sex work, and willing to do
such work. For example, in 2009, twenty-seven NGOs reported eighty-five cases
of trafficking involving 109 victims. Roughly half the victims were from broken
or economically unstable families. Most (95 percent) were recruited voluntarily,
76 percent had agreed to engage in prostitution at the time of recruitment, and
31 percent of them had previously worked in the sex industry (Keo 2010).
In 2000, the Ministry of Interior created the Department of Anti-Trafficking
and Juvenile Protection Police with financial and technical support from various
NGOs. In 2007, the government established a national taskforce to work in coop-
eration with a myriad of government and nongovernment antitrafficking agen-
cies. A U.S.based NGO, Asia Foundation, received some $3 million from
USAID to conduct a countertrafficking program in Cambodia, and is believed to
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 207
have been behind the establishment of the national task force. With the help of
an international consultant, the Ministry of Justice drafted a new antitrafficking
law, which was passed on January 18, 2008, after pressure from the Bush
administration.
The 2008 law on the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation
did not address the inconsistencies of the 1996 law but rather cast an even wider
net encompassing child and adult prostitution, pornography, indecency against
minors, the management of prostitution, and the nebulous concept of human
trafficking. Implicitly, the law conveyed the message that the prostitution insti-
tution was intrinsic to human trafficking; although it did not expressly prohibit
voluntary prostitution, it created conditions that made lawful prostitution virtu-
ally impossible (Keo 2009). Terms such as exploitation and organized group,
which are crucial when one has to interpret and enforce the law, were left to the
interpretation of criminal justice officials. When the Cambodian Center for
Human Rights (2010) monitored trafficking trials, it concluded that it is clear
that the application of the law has been inconsistent at best and incorrect at
worst. It casts doubt on the judiciarys understanding of LHTSE [the antitraf-
ficking law].
arrested 670 ringleaders (67 female), all of whom were referred to the court, and
we rescued 789 females. Among these offenders, 92 were charged (National
Police Commissariat 2007, 3). These figures do not match official statistics, but,
as is often also the case, the commissioner did not clearly differentiate between
offences relating to prostitution and those relating to human trafficking.
In 2007 and 2008, the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of
Human Rights (LICADHO) conducted prison surveys with large samples repre-
senting 56 percent of the total prison population in Cambodia. In 2007, 3.5 per-
cent of inmates were incarcerated for human trafficking and among them
80 percent were female (LICADHO 2008). In 2008, 3.8 percent of inmates in
the sample were incarcerated for human trafficking, and among them 77 percent
were female (LICADHO 2009). In both years, among the twenty-five reported
types of crime, human trafficking was the crime for which the largest number of
females were incarcerated. LICADHO (2008) documented many complaints
from women who said they had been wrongly imprisoned or had received a long
sentence for failing to pay a bribe; LICADHO also noted that the majority of
female prisoners did not have access to legal advice or representation.
Methods
We investigated five major themes about traffickers in Cambodia: who are they,
why they became involved in human trafficking, how they operate, their earn-
ings, and how the Cambodian criminal justice system responds to their activities.
We used a multimethod and multisource research design and drew on police and
prison records and interviews with 466 individuals, including police, prison,
and court officers; NGO workers; villagers and migrants; and ninety-one incar-
cerated traffickers.6 In Cambodia, court records are not available to the public
and researchers, so we could not replicate Levenkrons (2007) study or triangu-
late with their court dossiers the information provided in the interviews by the
incarcerated traffickers. For some of our traffickers, we were able to check their
accounts by talking to village heads/commune officials and in some cases com-
plainants or the police officers involved. Our sample included the five provincial
prisons of Banteay Meanchey, Battambang, Koh Kong, Kompong Cham, and
Svay Rieng; and the Correctional Centers in Phnom Penh (CC1 and CC2) and
Kompong Cham (CC3). These prisons contained 55 percent of the total prison
population in 2008 and were situated in areas often mentioned either as sources
or destinations for internal and cross-border trafficking (Brown 2007; Derks,
Henke, and Ly 2006). A comparison with prison statistics between 1997 and 2007
suggested that our sample was representative of the population of incarcerated
traffickers.
Our sample of ninety-one interviewees represented 45.7 percent of all incar-
cerated traffickers held in the eight prisons at the time. Although 71.4 percent of
these imprisoned traffickers were female, our sample included only 53.8 percent
(n = 49) female traffickers. We oversampled male traffickers (n = 42) for two
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 209
TABLE 1
Demographic Profile of Incarcerated Traffickers
a.Average is defined as an income above the poverty line, set at $0.45 per person per day by
the World Bank in 2004.
*p < .05
important reasons. First, a review of the literature indicated that female offend-
ers were rarely involved in organized crime; therefore, it may not have been
possible to detect participation in organized crime with only a small sample of
male interviewees. Second, the Israeli study suggested that male traffickers had
a greater likelihood of conviction (89.5 percent) than females (10.5 percent),
because their involvement was perceived as more serious than that of female
traffickers.
TABLE 2
Offense Profile of Incarcerated Traffickers (in percent)
women, 46 percent men), a larger proportion of whom had been charged with or
convicted of procuring for prostitution (see Table 2). Seventy participants had
been sentenced for human trafficking; twenty-one of them (fifteen women and
six men) admitted to their offense during our interview or their narratives
matched the broad definition of their offense because they had engaged in some
form of deception or coercion. We refer to them as confirmed traffickers.
However, forty-nine participants did not admit that they had committed the
offense and their accounts suggest that they had not been convicted beyond a
reasonable doubt. At best they appear to have been doubtfully, and at worst
wrongly, convicted. There was little or no evidence in their narratives linking
their activities to human trafficking, as defined by Article 3 of the 1996 law. We
refer to them as the doubtfully convicted. The thirteen participants convicted of
procuring for prostitution either admitted to their offense or their narratives sup-
ported their conviction. Just over half the participants had been convicted for
victimizing adults (55.4 percent), around one-quarter (27.7 percent) for victim-
izing children, and the remainder for both children and adults. The doubtfully
convicted were significantly more likely to have adult (alleged) victims (71.4
percent) than the two other groups.
The prison terms of the eighty-three convicted participants ranged from two
to 27 years and averaged 12.1 years. We assessed which factors impacted the
length of the prison term imposed. Apart from age, socioeconomic status, and
involvement of a child as the victim, all the independent variables had a statisti-
cally significant relationship with length of sentence. Women received signifi-
cantly longer average prison terms than men (13.5 years and 10.6 years,
respectively) as did participants who had been sentenced for human trafficking
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 211
compared with those sentenced for procuring for prostitution (12.7 and 9 years,
respectively). In addition, non-Cambodians, those who were married or divorced,
had little education, and had worked as sex workers themselves received signifi-
cantly longer sentences than other groups. The length of sentence was not
entirely arbitrary, since traffickers were more severely punished than procurers
for prostitution. However, other factors were also predictorssuch as the offend-
ers sex, education, ethnicity, and occupationsuggesting discriminatory prac-
tices by the criminal justice system against women and socioeconomically
disadvantaged persons. Women were significantly more likely than men to be
destitute.7 Bribing police officers or judges was a way of avoiding arrest or reduc-
ing ones sentence, but the most destitute defendants were the ones least able to
pay a bribe.
Findings
Below we outline what we learned from our participants and illustrate the find-
ings with case studies. Of the twenty-one participants categorized as confirmed
traffickers, eleven claimed that they had no prior knowledge that their conduct
constituted human trafficking. Nine were aware that their activity was unlawful,
but they either had assumed that the punishment was not severe or had no idea
about its seriousness. Only one was fully cognizant of the severity of his offence.
For seventeen of them, it was the first time that they had attempted to traffic
someone, but four had successfully trafficked people more than once in the past.
Six confirmed traffickers had trafficked adult women for prostitution. The others
(four men, eleven women) had abducted a child whom they intended to sell, or
coaxed a child into sex work or some other form of labor.
I am an orphan and migrated from Vietnam with three friends. Once in Cambodia, my
friends got jobs as builders, but I could not find a job. A brothel owner asked me to
212 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
become a spruiker at his Svay Park brothel. He told me that it was not illegal. It was easy,
but competitive. I just hung around the street, approached men, and told them that the
brothel had lots of beautiful girls and they were not expensive. I got 25 for each cus-
tomer I introduced to the brothel, and each night I earned about $3. After three years
on the job, I was arrested in a raid. The brothel owner was never arrested. (Krouch was
sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for procuring for prostitution.)
The police have more tolerance for brothels not involved in forced prostitution. Some
NGOs keep a close eye on brothels. Brothel owners, therefore, avoid forced and child
prostitution. Besides, there is no need to use coercion because there are plenty of
women ready to work as sex workers.
A prosecutor who had worked on many sex trafficking cases told us that most
of these cases turned out to be cases of procuring for prostitution, not sex traf-
ficking. He echoed Choumpous claim that brothel operators did not need to
traffic anyone, because many women were willing to prostitute themselves for a
myriad of reasons.
None of the incarcerated traffickers abducted women or forced them into
prostitution, but in some cases they needed to persuade them, for example, using
feigned love. Speu and his friend Pnaov used to steal and rob to feed their drug
habit. They told another friend, Lvear, that they wanted to sell Speus girlfriend,
Orng, to buy drugs. Lvear had experience in trafficking women and told Speu
and Pnaov to take her to Sihanouk Ville where he knew a brothel owner. Speu
and Pnaov enticed Orng to participate in their criminal activities by saying that
they loved her very much but they needed money to buy guns for their robberies.
She could help them by working in a brothel for a while. Once they had made a
few robberies, they would be able to get her out of the brothel and take care of
her. Orng complied, going with Speu, Pnaov, and Lvear to Sihanouk Ville. They
were attempting to pawn Orng at a brothel for $120,9 when an NGO that had
been investigating Lvears activities reported them to the police. The three men
were arrested, and Orng was rescued. Police officers asked Speu for $1,200 for
their release. He did not have the money, so the three men were incarcerated.
Pnaov was released because his family managed to strike a deal with the court,
but Speu and Lvear were sentenced to 10 and 11 years, respectively, for sex
trafficking.
Abduction was used only with young children to be sold into adoption. Seven
participants (including five women) abducted small children who were too young
to be persuaded to follow them. One case involved Romdoul, 38, who moved
from Prey Veng province to work in Phnom Penh, leaving her three children with
her mother. Romdoul had quit her job and left her husband when she discovered
that he was having an affair with a co-worker. Cheakmeas, a 58-year-old female
job broker got Romdoul a job in a shop, where she was earning $35 a month.
Some weeks later, Romdoul decided to return home and look after her children.
Cheakmeas knew a couple who was offering $200 to adopt a child. Romdoul
abducted her friends one-year-old daughter and gave the girl to Cheakmeas, who
then took her to the couple. The girls mother reported the two women to the
police. Romdoul and Cheakmeas were sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.
214 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
I managed to convince two girls to work in a karaoke parlor in Koh Kong. We traveled
in a shared taxi from Phnom Penh to Koh Kong. Because the girls were willing to go
with me, the taxi driver was not suspicious. We acted as if we were ordinary passengers.
(Champei was serving 10 years imprisonment for trafficking.)
Although much emphasis is given to sex trafficking, not all our respondents
were prosecuted for activities relating to prostitution. Two male participants had
been involved in labor trafficking. Karot was convicted of trafficking two children
to work in plantations in Thailand. He had brought groups of illegal Cambodian
laborers into Thailand before. As a group leader, he was responsible for subcon-
tracting assignments with plantation owners to perform specific jobs such as cut-
ting trees or removing grass. He would come to the plantation with a team of
workers who did the jobs, negotiate a lump sum payment with the owner, and pay
his workers as he wished. He himself labored to increase his income, which aver-
aged $10 a day. By Cambodian living standards, this was a good income. However,
he was arrested and could not afford the $1,500 demanded by the police for his
freedom. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for labor trafficking.
Smuggling people across borders so they could work outside Cambodia was
frequent. Kabas, 41, a widow with a second grade education, supporting eight
children, had spent $87 to be smuggled to Bangkok to work in a restaurant. She
could speak Thai and soon knew the routes to Thailand, and could commute eas-
ily and cheaply between the two countries with no need for smugglers. She got
acquainted with some Cambodian and Thai border police and started smuggling
people. Within a few years, she managed to smuggle thirty elderly women to
work as beggars in Bangkok. Deducting transportation costs, she made $12.50
per smugglee. She was eventually arrested and convicted to eight years in prison
for human trafficking and smuggling. She said: People think smugglers make
heaps of money, but in fact they do not. They have to share the proceeds with
border patrollers of both sides. Had I $3,000 for a bribe, I would not be spending
time behind bars.
The organization of traffickers was simple: among the twenty-one confirmed
traffickers, fifteen operated alone, five were linked to three independent and
small-scale social networks, and only one claimed to be a former member of a
large Cambodian organized crime syndicate. In a few cases several individuals
had been convicted for their connection to a single trafficking incident. Their
accounts did not suggest that they belonged to a criminal organization, but rather
that they merely happened to be acquainted. For example, a trafficker who
abducted and sold a child may have had no prior relationship with the buyer, but
both seller and buyer were then arrested and convicted of trafficking. Confirmed
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 215
traffickers were mostly recruiters or procurers for others such as owners of broth-
els and karaoke parlors, child adopters, and child molesters to whom they were
minimally connected. Only two confirmed traffickers continued to exploit the
trafficked persons after they had arrived at the destination. What is important to
note is that eleven confirmed traffickers had prior relationships with the traf-
ficked persons: they were family members, relatives, friends, acquaintances, lov-
ers, or neighbors.
For example, Somaly, a 54-year-old widow, was a sole operator who was
accused of trafficking her granddaughter and her granddaughters friend.
Somalys granddaughter, Sopham, had been disowned by her parents. Sopham
and two female friends, including Rodeng who was 16, asked Somaly to help the
three of them find a job. Somaly recommended them to a garment factory where
she was employed at the time. However, after nine days, the three girls were
fired. Unable to help them with a new job, Somaly persuaded them to work in a
brothel fronting as a coining house10 that was run by Rolous (another female
participant), who gave Somaly a $100 commission. A month later, Rodengs sister
found out that Rodeng was working at the coining house and called the police
who arrested Rolous and Somaly. Rolous was sentenced to 18 years in prison for
human trafficking and procuring for prostitution, and Somaly to 14 years. This
case did not involve coercion or transportation of the person to a different loca-
tion, but it is legally a case of human trafficking because money had been
exchanged, and whether the trafficked person consented to enter into sex work
was irrelevant under the 1996 law.
Each of the three networks we uncovered consisted of three to six individuals
who had formed an informal alliance without clearly defined roles and responsi-
bilities or a hierarchy. These networks were family or friend-based, weak, ama-
teurish, and had no clearly formulated plan. They were based on the temporary
partnership of a few individuals looking for ways to make quick money and who
came up with the idea of abducting a child, or procuring or trafficking a woman
into prostitution. Seng and her husband belonged to such a network. In 2006,
Seng (a bartender who occasionally prostituted herself), her husband, and a
street-seller procured two young girls for a U.S. national. The street-seller intro-
duced the daughters of her friend to Seng for a small commission. Sengs hus-
band transported the girls to the house of the American. All four were
apprehended: Seng and the street-seller were convicted of child trafficking;
Sengs husband, of being an accomplice; and the American national, of child
molestation.
The characteristics of the networks described by our participants did not
match the features of criminal organizations described by the UNODC (2002):
they were small, independent, poorly resourced, and loosely organized networks.
They were involved in only occasional operations with no long-term goals or
established leadership, similar to the Chinese human smuggler rings studied by
Zhang and Chin (2002). One of the twenty-one confirmed traffickers, Lvear (see
above) claimed to be a former member of a large organized crime syndicate. He
described a Mafia-like syndicate characterized by a clear power structure.
However, human trafficking was not part of its activities, which primarily involved
216 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
drug production and distribution, robbery, fencing of stolen motor vehicles, pro-
duction of pornographic films, and death squad operations. He believed that the
syndicate was under the control of a few senior Cambodian military officials and
benefited from sophisticated links with police and other crime syndicates in
Thailand and Malaysia.
He had already served seven of his 11-year term in prison for attempting to
sell a woman into a brothel. His story about the syndicate was not always credible,
some of it sounded exaggerated, most of his accounts could not be verified, and
the little that could did not match his claims. Finally, his trafficking activities had
little connection with the syndicate, but were side operations for his personal
benefit. Lvears story is important because he claimed to have been a member of
a criminal organization. The interviewer therefore thoroughly questioned what
Lvear was telling him and went to a village in Kompong Cham province, where
Lvear said that, in 1998, he had trafficked three women to be sold in Sihanouk
Ville. The interviewer talked to local people and authorities about the case, but
no one had ever heard of such incidents. This story and that of other respondents
led us to conclude that the general social, economic, cultural, and criminal justice
conditions in Cambodia allow for a simple modus operandi by traffickers that
made the involvement of organized crime unnecessary and also improbable given
the limited financial returns.
Traffickers earnings
None of the participants reported that they had earned much money from
their illegal activities. Eight participants (including three females) had been oper-
ating brothels and were prosecuted for prostitution-related activities, but their
businesses did not seem very lucrative. They rented the premises, which doubled
as a brothel and their own residence. They were aware that operating brothels
was illegal, but they reported that corrupt local authorities, police, and the gen-
darmes turned a blind eye as long as brothel operators were prepared to pay
bribes to them. Rent seeking by corrupt officials cost them between $5 and $50
a month. In fact, thirteen participants, many sentenced for procuring for prosti-
tution, said that some junior police officers were actively involved in the opera-
tion of sex establishments and protection rackets.11
The brothels they operated housed no more than five to ten women, and the
cost of sex services ranged from $2.50 to $5, which they shared with the sex work-
ers. In the most profitable scenario, involving ten women serving ten clients a
day, and charging $5 per client, the brothel operator could make $250 per day,
from which all operating costs needed to be deducted. Most operators were
unlikely to earn even half this optimistic income, as Roeung, a 28-year-old female
brothel operator, sentenced to six years in prison for procuring for prostitution,
complained:
People think brothel owners make a lot of money, but they have no idea of our difficul-
ties. We risk prosecution. We are harassed by police and local authorities, especially
when we fail to pay the bribes in time. Our earnings are spent on bribery, rent, food for
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 217
our girls, utilities, and more. Often the girls borrow money from us, and some run away
without repaying the loan. Some even report to the police that they have been trafficked
so they can default on the loan.
Most offenders were unaware that they had committed offences qualified as human
trafficking. A majority of law enforcement officers also did not have a good knowledge
of the 1996 law, which they had never read. Their actions are based on what they have
been told, heard, or what has been sensationalized. The dramatization of trafficking
issues in Cambodia, created by a big group of powerful NGOs and UN agencies, seems
to play a major part in the incorrect enforcement of the law.
Corruption was a major factor in the unfair application of the law, and legal
ambiguities could also be used as opportunities for abuse of power.12 About half
218 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
the convicted participants reported that if they had been able to pay the bribe
requested by the police or the judiciary, they would not have been convicted or
would have received a more lenient sentence. Accusations of extortion attempts
by judicial officials, as documented in our case studies, were numerous.13 Corrupt
practices are so common in the judiciary that the judges and prosecutors we
talked to did not even pretend they did not engage in them. Rather they down-
played their role by blaming the system in which they operated and the corrup-
tion of officials. In the words of a prosecutor:
Compared to government officials, courts and prosecutors have a modest living stand-
ard. We dont make as much money as they do. We deal mostly with the poor. Even if
we only ask for a small bribe, the poor complain loudly, making it sound like a big thing.
Government officials deal with the rich. Even if they take a lot more, the rich are still
happy and keep quiet.
because the participant ultimately was acquitted, making him the most auspi-
cious person among our sample of doubtfully convicted. Kuy was a poor fisher-
man. In 2004, he had an argument with his wife and beat her rather badly. Kroch,
his brother-in-law, was very angry with Kuy for beating his sister and brought him
to the court office. He asked the court to allow his sister to divorce Kuy; Kuy
agreed to the divorce but requested custody of two of his four children. His wife
wanted full custody of all four children. Rather than allowing a divorce, the judge
ordered Kuy to be detained on the charge of attempting to sell his children.
During his hearing, which lasted less than an hour in the absence of legal repre-
sentation, Kuy was sentenced to 15 years in prison for attempted child traffick-
ing. He told the interviewer: I spent most of the time on the water, fishing. I had
little contact with others. I knew where to sell fish, but certainly not where to sell
my two sons. In 2008, he was assisted by an NGO to appeal the provincial courts
decision. During our fieldwork in Cambodia in late 2009, we found out from a
prison officer that the appeal court had already acquitted Kuy.
distinguish four features of the human trafficking moral panic: (1) the elements
delineated by Talbot and generally presented in highly emotional language and
discourses; (2) the vested interests outlined by Cohen, which include moral
entrepreneurs, journalists, politicians, rescuers, and other professionals; (3) the
scope of the panic ranging from the local to the national and international levels;
and (4) the negative consequences such as bad legislation, misuse of resources,
demonization of certain groups, and criminalization of innocent people. Our
study of traffickers in Cambodia illustrates these four characteristics.
In the early 1990s, the end of the Cold War and the globalization of economic
activities drove people from the developing world to developed nations through
new global channels of migration, and led the western world in an intensified
campaign against illegal migrants and those who facilitated themthe smug-
glers. During the same period, governments and elements of civil society in the
developed world discovered a related but even more alarming threat to human-
ity and global order: human trafficking. Moral entrepreneurs with various agen-
das coalesced their concerns about illicit migration, indentured work, prostitution,
and child protection in an accelerating panic about human trafficking. Foreign
NGOs and aid donors, the United States in particular, influenced the design and
adoption of the Cambodian law on trafficking. This law was poorly written,
ambiguous, and confounded trafficking, smuggling, illegal migration, and prosti-
tution; it cast a wide net over many ill-defined deviant behaviors. Cambodia
was just emerging from 30 years of armed conflict and still grappling with high
levels of violence, and poverty and social inequality were widespread. The crimi-
nal justice system was weak and corrupt; police and judiciary were poorly trained
and paid and known to systematically engage in rent seeking and extortion. This
anomic period in Cambodia was embedded in a larger transformation brought
about by globalization, and itself a generator of anomic conditions. The new rules
of this transnational, globalized game created both legitimate and illegitimate
opportunities in new global circuits of survival (Sassen 2002). Through these
circuits, women from developing countries such as Cambodia increasingly moved
abroad to try to make a living, and became exposed to the risk of being exploited
and abused, but also to being criminalized.
Given the many known shortcomings of the Cambodian criminal justice sys-
tem, the adoption of such a law becomes problematic. We have seen how the
aims of well-meaning antitrafficking NGOs could be seriously perverted in the
environment under such a law. Was the hegemonic agenda too irresistible or
pressing and the moral and security panics too strong for their supporters to
contemplate the disastrous effects of their good work on the powerless of the
subordinate world?
Eliminating systemic corruption in the Cambodian criminal justice system
requires serious structural changes, only achievable in the long term. In the short
term, legal reforms could reduce opportunities for corrupt behaviors and injus-
tice. For example, voluntary prostitution could be legalized but regulated
through an indigenous democratic policy involving all stakeholders.
It is practically impossible to enforce the 2008 antitrafficking law in ways that
respect and protect the rights of suspects and victims. One option worth
222 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
Notes
1. For example, the 2012 report ventures that the estimate is in the billions.
2. Further details of this project on sex trafficking in Cambodia can be found in Keo (2013).
3. Levenkron did not specify which definition of trafficking was used; Nair adopted the UN definition.
4. Law on Suppression of the Kidnapping, Trafficking, and Exploitation of Human Beings, 1996, avail-
able from http://www.wcwonline.org/pdf/lawcompilation/Cambodia_Law%20on%20Kidnapping,%20
Trafficking%20and%20Exploitation%20Pe.pdf.
5. Direct sex worker refers to those working in brothels or other prostitution settings. Indirect sex
worker refers to those working in settings that are not places of prostitution.
6. We define a human trafficker as any person charged or convicted under Article 3 of the 1996
antitrafficking law.
7. There was little variance in the socioeconomic status (SES) scale (all participants were poor) but
level of education can be regarded as a proxy for SES, and women were less educated than men.
8. We use fictional names in all the cases described here.
9. Although Cambodias official currency is the riel, U.S. dollars are routinely used. For comparison, at
the time of the study the average daily wage of a worker was around $2.50 with no other benefit.
10. A traditional form of medicinal massage common in Cambodia.
11. USDS (2009) reported that a number of police and government officials extorted money or
accepted bribes from brothel operators, and that courts acquitted traffickers in return for bribes. Former
Phnom Penh Police Commissioner, Heng Pov, who was in office between 2004 and 2006, is currently
serving a 92-year prison term for a number of crimes, including murder, extortion, and kidnapping
(Chrann 2009).
12. In 2007, the municipal court acquitted Meng Say, who in 2006 had been suspended for extorting
money from South Korean nationals. Three other police officers involved in the case were sentenced to
between five and seven years in prison for corruption in trafficking incidents (USDS 2009; Prak 2006).
13. In December 2010, a provincial prosecutor was arrested by the Anti-Corruption Unit of Cambodia
for abuse of power, corruption, and extortion (Southeast Asia Weekly, December 6, 2010).
14. There have been reports in the local media about rape in Cambodia that suggest that sometimes
consenting girls claim rape to avoid the wrath of their parents and community. Other cases involve pre-
marital sexual relationships that lead to monetary compensation or forced marriage.
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 223
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