*Wednesday** March **24** — 6pm — Baitong Restaurant*

*(7 st 360, near Beung Keng Kang market)*
_
Contact: _

Emiko Stock & Pascale Hancart-Petitet

012 521 093 — 092 399 273

<a
href=”mailto:hsh...@gmail.com”>hsh...@gmail.com

*Nicolas Lainez *

will talk about:

*Representations of Mobility and Prostitution *

*An Ethnographic Case Study of Vietnamese Sex Workers Migrating to Cambodia*

This ethnographic paper addresses the issue of women cross-border
mobility for the aim of prostitution between Southern Vietnam (An Giang
province) and Cambodia. The goal is to update existing research carried
out in Cambodia in the late 1990s by Western researchers commissioned by
aid organizations (Derks 1998, Baker 2003), and to bring a Vietnamese
perspective into the picture. Existing research explains mobility from
Vietnam in terms of the easy money female migrant prostitutes could earn
in Cambodia. According to our findings, the situation has changed and
this paper explores why. Although illegal migration for prostitution
from Vietnam to Phnom Penh remains an easy alternative, it appears less
attractive than in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

First, the paper discusses methodological issues. Several significant
barriers were encountered when conducting field research — complex
administrative procedures to obtain research permits, police
surveillance, informant’s fear and distrust — which may call into
question the validity of the data, and thus need to be discussed in
detail. Second, the paper examines the situation on the ground in the
late 1990s: cross-border mobility and routes in the Mekong delta, and
Vietnamese prostitution in Phnom Penh. Third, the paper explores the
reasons underlying the obvious change of perception by potential
unskilled migrants who no longer perceive Cambodia as some sort El
Dorado and therefore an appealing destination. Different reasons help
explain this change, such as increased awareness of risks of deception
and exploitation thanks to massive campaigns against so-called “social
evils” and against “human trafficking.” Another factor is the increased
availability of more attractive professional options, such as internal
migration for prostitution to provinces from the Mekong delta, to Ho Chi
Minh City and its suburban provinces undergoing rapid industrialization
and economic growth (Binh Duong for instance), or to Asian countries
like Taiwan, South Korea, or Singapore. This paper demonstrates that
contemporary mobility is no longer a clandestine phenomenon originating
from remote, rural and porous borderlands. Instead, it tends to be
transnational and framed by international legal standards and
discussions. The paradigm of human trafficking from the late 1990s and
2000s which presented the image of an innocent peasant girl who becomes
a “victim” lured by a trafficker at the border, is now outdated, and no
longer corresponds to realities on the ground.

This paper is based on 18 months of fieldwork in the Mekong delta. It
results from collaboration between the Ho Chi Minh City University of
Social Sciences and Humanities, the University of An Giang, the NGO
Alliance Anti-Trafic (Vietnam), the Observatory of Illicit Traffics in
the Mekong (Thailand), and the Institute for Research on Contemporary
Southeast Asia (IRASEC, Thailand). A French version of this paper will
be published in spring 2010.

Nicolas Lainez is a PhD student in social anthropology at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He studies women cross-border
mobility from Vietnam to Cambodia and Singapour, social construction of
human trafficking, informal credit and usury, forms of people’
transaction and dependency, gender and social stratification.

*Looking forward to see you all there !*

Emiko Stock, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Gabriel FauveaudCoordinating team:

March 5th, 2010 | All | RSS | leave a comment, or trackback.