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"Sex worker rescue and rehabilitation programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. Manufacturing Freedom offers an ethnographic exploration of two American anti-trafficking organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. Activists brand this jewelry a "slave-free good" and then sell it to consumers in the United States, generating racialized circuits of commerce and morality centered around promises of freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers-whom these organizations universally label as victims of trafficking. Workers, by contrast, often contest the trafficking label and object to the moral and disciplinary processes that ensnare them in a pernicious global web of anti-trafficking rescue. In this novel study, Elena Shih argues that these anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption, thereby generating a transnational moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality"--

Abstract: This paper contributes to the growing consensus of voices who articulate how the newfound North American consciousness around "anti-Asian hate" must connect individual acts of violence to structural forms of state and white supremacist violence. Focusing on the policing of Asian massage work, the essay argues that this unique human-itarian commitment reflects the slow economic violence of rescue. It contextualizes the 2021 Atlanta massage murders alongside the work of Red Canary Song (RCS), a grassroots coalition of migrant massage workers, sex workers, and allies organizing against the policing of massage work in New York. The essay echoes an abolitionist call to not only dismantle policing and punishment mechanisms—as these forms of policing have penetrated most aspects of civilian life—but demands the urgency to build a vast network of community resources coupled with imaginative ways of organizing. Abolitionist feminist frameworks must necessarily encompass economic justice, migrant justice, housing justice, and language justice to name a few. One strategy espoused by RCS builds worker power and the capacity for organizing towards the decriminalization of poverty, migration, and low-wage informal and sex work alike. For Asian migrant workers, the fight for justice is not only about the resources needed to live, sleep, and work safely, it is also about changing the deep-seated mix of paternalism and resentment that refuses to acknowledge Asian working-class communities to ability to make choices within constraints.

Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and "caring" interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these references also expose two conflicting modes of care work that are implicated in contemporary anti-trafficking activism. Building on an extensive scholarship on care work, which has rarely been read alongside critical human trafficking scholarship, this article asks how human trafficking rescue programs expose disparate types of care work deeply connected to sexual commerce. Extending Rhacel Parreñas' typology of moral and material care work of Filipina migrant domestic workers, this article argues that the shifting contexts of gendered care work under conditions of global migration, development, and humanitarianism, require an acknowledgment of how the moral care work involved in global "anti-trafficking" rescue performed mainly by first world women operates in opposition to the material care work of supporting families and households performed by migrant sex workers who are being rescued. As an additional articulation of material care work, global sex worker activists have also expressed how care work is a vital component of the labor relations of sex work itself—as a way to call for its recognition as a form of labor.

The global concern around human trafficking has provoked a transnational justice movement formally spearheaded in 2000 by the passing of the United Nations Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons. In 2008, the People's Republic of China and the Kingdom of Thailand introduced landmark policies that scripted the international language of human trafficking into their domestic legal frameworks. However, the difference in state-society relationships between post-socialist authoritarian China and free market democratic Thailand create a theoretically compelling comparison to answer my central research question: How do transnational social movements establish, institutionalize, and bridge power over relatively autonomous political authorities, markets, and over movement subjects? How do different factions of the movement mobilize resources in relation to the state and the market and how does the nature of institutional embeddedness affect whether they succeed, according to their stated objectives, or to the perceptions of their subjects? Based on 40 months of ethnographic participant observation with an anti-trafficking evangelical Christian social enterprise and global governance project in each country, this dissertation argues that despite global justice goals, faith-based and secular anti-trafficking organizations reproduce women's global subordination in different ways. American evangelical Christian rescue groups offer vocational training in jewelry making as alternative employment to sex work, and sell this jewelry as a slave-free commodity in the United States. The labor processes of vocational training are unique in Beijing and Bangkok due to disparate political economic circumstances in each country: vocational training in China embodies the character of the authoritarian state, while the working conditions in Thailand resemble those of free market firms. In the Chinese secular case, state control emerges as the primary mechanism of anti-trafficking intervention through the creation of a government ministry to address human trafficking. Global governance institutions like the United Nations must work exclusively through selective partnerships with Chinese government organs, which causes the transnational movement to strengthen state control over labor, gender, and migrant rights. In Thailand's free market and democratic monarchy, international pressures to forge an aggressive anti-trafficking response to sex and labor trafficking have resulted in a multi-tiered rescue industry involving the private sector, NGOs, transnational advocacy networks, and new government anti-trafficking entities. The transnational rescue industry in Thailand similarly subjects low wage women workers to new and unregulated forms of scrutiny, surveillance and forced detention alongside the government's support of sex tourism and aquaculture exports as primary engines of growth. Overall, the transnational anti-trafficking movement has embodied the characteristics of authoritarian state power in China, and the free market in Thailand.

In 2007, China and Myanmar signed their first Bilateral Memorandum of Understanding on human trafficking. The two countries cemented this agreement with the unveiling of the first Border Liaison Office in Ruili City, located in China's southwestern Yunnan Province — one of the primary border crossing points between China and Myanmar. The government focus on human trafficking on this border intersects with decades of struggles to curb the border's porousness to drugs and HIV/AIDS. This paper is based on qualitative ethnographic participant observation and interviews with young Jingpo women living in Ruili City and investigates the risk of human trafficking as a by-product of cultural stigma associated with ethnic marginality, drugs, and HIV/AIDS. The case of Ruili warns us that the global shift towards regarding human trafficking as the single most perilous phenomenon of the current age obscures ongoing issues of vulnerability and cultural stigma for ethnic minority peoples globally. In lieu of state sponsored patrol and monitoring of the border, more attention must be paid to overlapping concerns of people living in border communities, including drug prevalence, disease, and ethnic marginalisation.

In 2007, China and Myanmar signed their first Bilateral Memorandum of Understanding on human trafficking. The two countries cemented this agreement with the unveiling of the first Border Liaison Office in Ruili City, located in China's southwestern Yunnan Province — one of the primary border crossing points between China and Myanmar. The government focus on human trafficking on this border intersects with decades of struggles to curb the border's porousness to drugs and HIV/AIDS. This paper is based on qualitative ethnographic participant observation and interviews with young Jingpo women living in Ruili City and investigates the risk of human trafficking as a by-product of cultural stigma associated with ethnic marginality, drugs, and HIV/AIDS. The case of Ruili warns us that the global shift towards regarding human trafficking as the single most perilous phenomenon of the current age obscures ongoing issues of vulnerability and cultural stigma for ethnic minority peoples globally. In lieu of state sponsored patrol and monitoring of the border, more attention must be paid to overlapping concerns of people living in border communities, including drug prevalence, disease, and ethnic marginalisation.

Global efforts to combat human trafficking are ubiquitous and reference particular ideas about unfreedoms, suffering, and rescue. The discourse has, however, a distinct racialized legacy that is lodged specifically in fears about "white slavery," women in prostitution and migration, and the defilement of white womanhood by the criminal and racialized Other. White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking centers the legacies of race and racism in contemporary anti-trafficking work and examines them in greater detail.A number of recent arguments have suggested that race and racism are not only visible, but vital, to the success of contemporary anti- trafficking discourses and movements. The contributors offer recent scholarship grounded in critical anti- racist perspectives that reveal the historical and contemporary racial working of anti- trafficking discourses and practices globally--and how these intersect with gender, citizenship, sexuality, caste and class formations, and the global political economy.

On 11 April 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law in the United States. FOSTA introduced new provisions to amend the Communications Act of 1934 so that websites can be prosecuted if they engage 'in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution' or 'facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.' While supporters of the law claim that its aim is to target human traffickers, its text makes no effort to differentiate between trafficking and consensual sex work and it functionally includes websites where workers advertise services or share information, including safety tips.[3] Following the law's passage—and even before its full implementation—sex workers felt its impact as websites began to eliminate platforms previously used to advertise services. Backpage, an adult advertising website, was pre-emptively seized by the FBI. Other platforms began to censor or remove content related to sex work, including Google, Craigslist, and many online advertising networks. Sex workers in the United States have denounced the passage of FOSTA for reducing workers' ability to screen clients and ensure safety practices. This paper provides an overview of the findings of a recent survey with sex workers in the United States, details the advent of similar initiatives in other countries, and explores how the legislation conflates trafficking with consensual sex work.

On 11 April 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law in the United States. FOSTA introduced new provisions to amend the Communications Act of 1934 so that websites can be prosecuted if they engage 'in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution' or 'facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.' While supporters of the law claim that its aim is to target human traffickers, its text makes no effort to differentiate between trafficking and consensual sex work and it functionally includes websites where workers advertise services or share information, including safety tips.[3] Following the law's passage—and even before its full implementation—sex workers felt its impact as websites began to eliminate platforms previously used to advertise services. Backpage, an adult advertising website, was pre-emptively seized by the FBI. Other platforms began to censor or remove content related to sex work, including Google, Craigslist, and many online advertising networks. Sex workers in the United States have denounced the passage of FOSTA for reducing workers' ability to screen clients and ensure safety practices. This paper provides an overview of the findings of a recent survey with sex workers in the United States, details the advent of similar initiatives in other countries, and explores how the legislation conflates trafficking with consensual sex work.