Heidi Hoefinger

In this article we will discuss the first Coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown and its immediate aftermath on the lives of migrant sex workers living and working in France, drawing on original interviews gathered between May and July 2020. Since 2016 in France, sex workers have worked under the so-called Swedish model legal framework criminalising the demand of sexual services. This has meant that sex workers, both migrant and non-migrant, have had to find various strategies to continue working within a criminalised environment      infringing upon their rights and safety. Research in the French context has largely shown that the introduction of the Swedish model increased the financial precarity and impacted in significant, detrimental ways the physical and mental health of sex workers (Le Bail & Giametta 2018). In the context of the existing hardship to which migrant sex workers were exposed under this repressive regime in France, this article investigates if and how the law enforcemen...

This article draws on the findings of the research project Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work, and Trafficking (SEXHUM), a study investigating migration, sex work, and human trafficking in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. In this article, we focus on how racialized categories are mobilized in antitrafficking practices in France. Since April 2016, the French government has enforced a prohibitionist and neo-abolitionist law criminalizing the demand for sexual services. This coincided with the targeting of Chinese and Nigerian cis-women and with the neglect of Latina trans women working in the sex industry according to racialized and sex-gendered understandings of victimhood. Whereas Chinese women tend to be presented by humanitarian rhetoric as silent victims of Chinese male-dominated mafias, Nigerian women have come to embody the ultimate figure of the victim of trafficking by an overpowering Black male criminality. Meanwhile, (sexual) humanitarian actors have neg...

This is the final SEXHUM POLICY REPORT providing policy recommendation drawing on our research findings in Australia, France, New Zealand and the United States. For more information on the SEXHUM project: www.sexhum.org Our research findings strongly suggest that: Decriminalization and labour rights ● The repeal of all repressive laws that criminalize both the sale and purchase of sexual services is the most appropriate and least harmful policymaking framework for sex work. ● The decriminalization of sex work should be accompanied by anti-discrimination measures and socio-economic resources supporting the access of sex workers, including migrants, to healthcare, housing, employment, education, financial and insurance services, parenthood rights and other key dimensions of social life. ● A work permit with sex work authorization should be available to migrants working in the sex industry. This should not mention sex work or ‘adult entertainment’ in order to avoid further stigmatization and victimization of migrants. Anti-trafficking Policies and Interventions ● Anti-trafficking interventions should separate themselves from anti migration and anti sex work law enforcement if they want to reduce the vulnerability to exploitation of the people they aim to support. ● Access to protection and support for victims of trafficking should not be conditional to collaboration with law enforcement or to the possible prosecution of their traffickers. ● Any policy and social intervention on sex work and trafficking can only have a chance of succeeding if it also includes prospective and actual migrants’ legal right to access the international and national labour markets.   Social Interventions ● Sexual humanitarian, anti-migration, and anti-sex work initiatives and interventions are harmful to the lives and rights of migrant sex workers. As such they should be defunded and the resulting resources diverted to sex worker rights associations and other organizations supporting them. ● Sex worker rights organizations and communities should be consulted before any new policies and interventions targeting sex workers are designed and implemented. Their feedback and reactions should be taken into consideration, including not proceeding with such policies and interventions. ● Peer-to-peer (migrant) sex worker community support networks, organisations and outreach projects should be specifically funded and promoted to continue providing a range of free in-language services and community spaces. Stigma, Discrimination and Abuse ● Sex workers should be able to benefit from mainstream and targeted assistance and protection measures in the context of domestic violence. ● Police who commit violence, harassment or other crimes against sex workers must be held accountable for their abusive acts. ● Since sex workers are part of different minority groups, policies addressing sex work must effectively address all structural discriminations framing it such as sexism, racism, and transphobia. ● The voices of groups representing marginalized sex workers, such as transgender sex workers, sex workers of colour, or immigrant sex workers, should be elevated. More details about project findings and their policymaking implications are available in the specific country sections of the report.

RAPPORT FINAL FOCUS SUR LES POLITIQUES: résumé en langue française du rapport final du project SEXHUM et de ses implications pour les politiques en France. Pour plus d'information sur le project SEXHUM et ses résultats: www.sexhum.org

This paper examines the intersections of ethnicity, race, sexuality, sociality and urban space in the LGBTQ ‘post-migrant’ clubbing scene in London. Relying on ethnographic research conducted in clubs catering to young LGBTQ clubbers who claim British-Asian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Arabic identification, I argue that clubbing is a specific and productive kinship practice and that the clubs themselves are contested spaces where familial and gendered expectations are resisted, while cultural forms are embraced. These clubs are safe spaces both for ‘coming out’ and ‘coming home’ and for constructing queer alternative kinships and families, as well as spaces in which competition, violence, jealousy, and discrimination co-exist. This paper is framed through the lens of intimate ethnography.

In 2003, Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) passed the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA), which decriminalized sex work for NZ citizens and holders of permanent residency (PR) while excluding migrant sex workers (MSWs) from its protection. This is due to Section 19 (s19) of the PRA, added at the last minute against advice by the Aotearoa New Zealand Sex Workers’ Collective (NZPC) as an anti-trafficking clause. Because of s19, migrants on temporary visas found to be working as sex workers are liable to deportation by Immigration New Zealand (INZ). Drawing on original ethnographic and interview data gathered over 24 months of fieldwork, our study finds that migrant sex workers in New Zealand are vulnerable to violence and exploitation, and are too afraid to report these to the police for fear of deportation, corroborating earlier studies and studies completed while we were collecting data.

Centred on the slavery trial “Crown vs. Rungnapha Kanbut” heard in Sydney, New South Wales, between 10 April and 15 May 2019, this article seeks to frame the figure of the “Mother Tac” or the “mother of contract”, also called “mama tac” or “mae tac”—a term used amongst Thai migrants to describe a woman who hosts, collects debts from, and organises work for Thai migrant sex workers in their destination country. It proposes that this largely unexplored figure has come to assume a disproportionate role in the “modern slavery” approach to human trafficking, with its emphasis on absolute victims and individual offenders. The harms suffered by Kanbut’s victims are put into context by referring to existing literature on women accused of trafficking; interviews with Thai migrant sex workers, including Kanbut’s primary victim, and with members from the Australian Federal Police Human Trafficking Unit; and ethnographic field notes. The article unveils how constructions of both victim and offe...

ABSTRACT The article presents the findings of the SEXHUM project studying the impact of the different policies targeting migrant sex workers in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the United States. It draws on the concept of sexual humanitarianism, referring to how neoliberal constructions of vulnerability associated with sexual behaviour are implicated in humanitarian forms of support and control of migrant populations. Based on over three years of fieldwork we examine the differential ways in which Asian cis women and Latina trans women are constructed and targeted as vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse, or not, in relation to racialized and cis-centric sexual humanitarian canons of victimhood. Through our comparative analysis we expose how the implication of sexual humanitarian rhetoric in increasingly extreme bordering policies and interventions on migrant sex workers impacts on their lives and rights, arguing for the urgent need for social reform informed by the experiences of these groups.

Globally, sex workers have highlighted the harms that accompany anti-prostitution efforts advanced via anti-trafficking policy, and there is a growing body of social science research that has emerged documenting how anti-trafficking efforts contribute to carceral and sexual humanitarian interventions. Yet mounting evidence on the harms of anti-trafficking policies has done little to quell the passage of more laws, including policies aimed at stopping sexual exploitation facilitated by technology. The 2018 passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the corresponding Senate bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), is a case study in how efforts to curb sexual exploitation online actually heighten vulnerabilities for the people they purport to protect. Drawing on 34 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sex workers and trafficked persons (n = 58) and key informants (n = 20) in ...

In uneven transnational spaces, intimacy is sometimes utilised in unique ways. The goal of this chapter is to provide two distinct examples of the way intimacy is employed as a tool in Cambodia. The first example illuminates how intimacy is made use of in the context of ‘professional girlfriends’ (PGs) and their relationships with foreign men. ‘Professional girlfriends’ is a term used to describe a multifarious group of young women in Cambodia who are employed in bars and actively seek out relationships with ‘western boyfriends’1 from whom they hope to benefit both materially and emotionally. The young women are generally stereotyped by outside observers, and in journalistic and academic depictions, as indirect ‘sex workers’. This is despite the fact that they do not identify as such, nor do they view their quest for ‘western boyfriends’ as work. Data collected over eight years of ethnographic research has led me to develop a more nuanced vocabulary with which to engage in discourse about this population of entrepreneurial women.

The current study analyzes a sample of questions about drugs asked online by youth who participated in the National Institute on Drug Abuse's (NIDA) "Drug Facts Chat Day." The types of drugs youth asked about were coded into 17 substance categories, and the topics they raised were coded into seven thematic categories. The top five queried drugs were marijuana (16.4%), alcohol (8.5%), tobacco (6%), cocaine (5.7), and pharmaceutical drugs (4.5%). The effects of drug use, experience of being high, the addictiveness of drugs, pharmacology, and drug sales were among the more common types of questions to emerge but varied depending on the substance. These findings show the types of information young people are seeking about drugs and have clear implications to inform youth drug education programs.

Prescription drug diversion, the transfer of prescription drugs from lawful to unlawful channels for distribution or use, is a problem in the United States. Despite the pervasiveness of diversion, there are gaps in the literature regarding characteristics of individuals who participate in the illicit trade of prescription drugs. This study examines a range of predictors (e.g., demographics, prescription insurance coverage, perceived risk associated with prescription drug diversion) of membership in three distinct diverter groups: individuals who illicitly acquire prescription drugs, those who redistribute them, and those who engage in both behaviors. Data were drawn from a cross-sectional Internet study (N = 846) of prescription drug use and diversion patterns in New York City, South Florida, and Washington, D.C.. Participants were classified into diversion categories based on their self-reported involvement in the trade of prescription drugs. Group differences in background charact...

This study piloted the feasibility of rapidly collecting both self-reports of drug use and saliva specimens for drug toxicology in field settings. The use of oral fluid collection devices to supplement self-reports is unproven in street settings and may pose challenges for field research. Sixty adults who identified as recent illicit drug users were recruited in public settings in New York City, asked to complete a brief drug screening inventory and provided saliva specimens. Descriptive findings are detailed along with critical best research practices and limitations that provide important directions for researchers looking to employ both toxicology and self-report in rapid field recruitment designs.

Global flows of people, information and capital have created transnational spaces in Cambodia. Within those spaces exists the formation of complex and multilayered interpersonal relationships between people attempting to capitalize on the opportunities created by these flows. The purpose of this article is to describe these transnational relationships, namely between young women employed in the entertainment sectors in Phnom Penh, and their western male partners, while highlighting the racialized and gendered motivations of the global actors, the inevitable sociocultural conflicts/constraints/ misunderstandings that arise within the partnerships, and the resulting challenges and psychobehavioral consequences experienced by the mobile and differentiated individuals involved in these postcolonial relational formations.

... Through the lens of cultural studies, and via the practice of 'intimate ethnography', this paper also pays particular attention to the ... cafes helping translate emails and instant messages, lounging afternoons away in front of the television while singing along to karaoke love songs ...

System-involvement resulting from anti-trafficking interventions and the criminalization of sex work and migration results in negative health impacts on sex workers, migrants, and people with trafficking experiences. Due to their stigmatized status, sex workers and people with trafficking experiences often struggle to access affordable, unbiased, and supportive health care. This paper will use thematic analysis of qualitative data from in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with 50 migrant sex workers and trafficked persons, as well as 20 key informants from legal and social services, in New York and Los Angeles. It will highlight the work of trans-specific and sex worker–led initiatives that are internally addressing gaps in health care and the negative health consequences that result from sexual humanitarian anti-trafficking interventions that include policing, arrest, court-involvement, court-mandated social services, incarceration, and immigration detention. Our analysis...

This paper highlights the political and ethical challenges of projects that combine research, advocacy and pedagogy. These challenges are illustrated through the lens of the Global Girls: Autobiography and E-Literacy project, which took place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2008. Within Phnom Penh, there is a population of young women who work in bars, with the aim of forming transactional relationships with foreign men. They barter physical and emotional intimacy and friendship in exchange for various material and emotional benefits. They utilize many skills in order to maintain these relationships, including spoken and written English proficiency, and computer skills such as emailing and communication technology. The goal of the Global Girls Project was to harness those same skills to create a collaborative action-based educational research project focused on autobiography. The aim was to assist the women in improving their spoken and written English skills, grammar, typing, word proce...

In 2003, Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) passed the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA), which decriminalized sex work for NZ citizens and holders of permanent residency (PR) while excluding migrant sex workers (MSWs) from its protection. This is due to Section 19 (s19) of the PRA, added at the last minute against advice by the Aotearoa New Zealand Sex Workers’ Collective (NZPC) as an anti-trafficking clause. Because of s19, migrants on temporary visas found to be working as sex workers are liable to deportation by Immigration New Zealand (INZ). Drawing on original ethnographic and interview data gathered over 24 months of fieldwork, our study finds that migrant sex workers in New Zealand are vulnerable to violence and exploitation, and are too afraid to report these to the police for fear of deportation, corroborating earlier studies and studies completed while we were collecting data.

Globally, sex workers have highlighted the harms that accompany anti-prostitution efforts advanced via anti-trafficking policy, and there is a growing body of social science research that has emerged documenting how anti-trafficking efforts contribute to carceral and sexual humanitarian interventions. Yet mounting evidence on the harms of anti-trafficking policies has done little to quell the passage of more laws, including policies aimed at stopping sexual exploitation facilitated by technology. The 2018 passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the corresponding Senate bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), is a case study in how efforts to curb sexual exploitation online actually heighten vulnerabilities for the people they purport to protect. Drawing on 34 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sex workers and trafficked persons (n = 58) and key informants (n = 20) in ...

The article presents the findings of the SEXHUM project studying the impact of the different policies targeting migrant sex workers in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the United States. It draws on the concept of sexual humanitarianism, referring to how neoliberal constructions of vulnerability associated with sexual behaviour are implicated in humanitarian forms of support and control of migrant populations. Based on over three years of fieldwork we examine the differential ways in which Asian cis women and Latina trans women are constructed and targeted as vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse, or not, in relation to racialized and cis-centric sexual humanitarian canons of victimhood. Through our comparative analysis we expose how the implication of sexual humanitarian rhetoric in increasingly extreme bordering policies and interventions on migrant sex workers impacts on their lives and rights, arguing for the urgent need for social reform informed by the experiences ...

Centred on the slavery trial “Crown vs. Rungnapha Kanbut” heard in Sydney, New South Wales, between 10 April and 15 May 2019, this article seeks to frame the figure of the “Mother Tac” or the “mother of contract”, also called “mama tac” or “mae tac”—a term used amongst Thai migrants to describe a woman who hosts, collects debts from, and organises work for Thai migrant sex workers in their destination country. It proposes that this largely unexplored figure has come to assume a disproportionate role in the “modern slavery” approach to human trafficking, with its emphasis on absolute victims and individual o ffenders. The harms suffered by Kanbut’s victims are put into context by referring to existing literature on women accused of trafficking; interviews with Thai migrant sex workers, including Kanbut’s primary victim, and with members from the Australian Federal Police Human Trafficking Unit; and ethnographic field notes. The article unveils how constructions of both victim and off...

... You must obtain permission for any other use. ... While the complete list is too long to include here, I'd like to emphasize my special thanks to Sara Bradford, Pisey Ly, Andrew Hunter, Anna Olsen, John McGeoghan, Vinh Dao, Chea Borom, Ken Wilcox, Aimee Steel and Nathan ...

This paper examines the intersections of ethnicity, race, sexuality, sociality and urban space in the LGBTQ ‘post-migrant’ clubbing scene in London. Relying on ethnographic research conducted in clubs catering to young LGBTQ clubbers who claim British-Asian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Arabic identification, I argue that clubbing is a specific and productive kinship practice and that the clubs themselves are contested spaces where familial and gendered expectations are resisted, while cultural forms are embraced. These clubs are safe spaces both for ‘coming out’ and ‘coming home’ and for constructing queer alternative kinships and families, as well as spaces in which competition, violence, jealousy, and discrimination co-exist. This paper is framed through the lens of intimate ethnography.

In uneven transnational spaces, intimacy is sometimes utilised in unique ways. The goal of this chapter is to provide two distinct examples of the way intimacy is employed as a tool in Cambodia. The first example illuminates how intimacy is made use of in the context of ‘professional girlfriends’ (PGs) and their relationships with foreign men. ‘Professional girlfriends’ is a term used to describe a multifarious group of young women in Cambodia who are employed in bars and actively seek out relationships with ‘western boyfriends’1 from whom they hope to benefit both materially and emotionally. The young women are generally stereotyped by outside observers, and in journalistic and academic depictions, as indirect ‘sex workers’. This is despite the fact that they do not identify as such, nor do they view their quest for ‘western boyfriends’ as work. Data collected over eight years of ethnographic research has led me to develop a more nuanced vocabulary with which to engage in discourse about this population of entrepreneurial women.

... You must obtain permission for any other use. ... While the complete list is too long to include here, I'd like to emphasize my special thanks to Sara Bradford, Pisey Ly, Andrew Hunter, Anna Olsen, John McGeoghan, Vinh Dao, Chea Borom, Ken Wilcox, Aimee Steel and Nathan ...

This paper explores the sexuality, subculture and solidarity of young women who work in the hospitality and entertainment sectors in Cambodia. Specifically, the focus is on women described as ‘professional girlfriends’ and ‘bar girls’ employed in the hostess bar scene in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Professional girlfriends are young women who engage in a performance of intimacy within multiple sexual or non-sexual ‘transactional’ relationships with ‘western boyfriends’ in order to benefit materially and support their livelihoods. Because of their initial material motivations within the multiple partnerships and the strict cultural taboos surrounding sex and sexuality, professional girlfriends, and most other bar girls, are simultaneously stereotyped as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘broken women’ by general society, and as ‘victims’ by the development community. Despite their simultaneous stigmatization and victimization, however, these young women utilize bar girl subculture, alternative k...

Cambodia has experienced rapid economic development and increased globalization in the last two decades, which have influenced changes in sexual attitudes and politics. Yet deeply embedded patriarchal structures that promote adherence to traditional values, gender binaries, and sexual purity of women impede progress in the recognition of the rights of sex/entertainment workers and LGBT communities. Using the framework of sexual humanitarianism, this paper outlines the ways in which these constraints are compounded by two dominant conflicting narratives that place these groups as either at-risk and vulnerable or socially deviant, and deemed in need of interventions that protect and control. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research on the sex/entertainment industries, and broader gender/sexual landscape in Cambodia, as well as current social activism of the authors, this paper also describes the ways LGBT and sex worker communities are engaging in shared organizing and self-advocacy as strategies to address their needs and the consequences left in the wake of sexual humanitarian interventions. In order to contextualize their deeply-rooted legacy in Cambodia, the paper also provides an overview of past and contemporary gender/sexual norms and diversity, and concludes with a call for governments and policymakers to expand support for grassroots movements and to listen more closely to the voices of LGBT and sex worker communities so that the political and social needs of these groups can be addressed.

Stories of trafficking into the sex industry in Cambodia are a popular feature in local and international media, academic and development literature, policy and humanitarian debates, social and political discourse, and NGO interventions. These stories are powerful for their ability to evoke deep emotions and outrage from their intended audiences. However, they are equally powerful for the ways in which they can cause harm-namely to already marginalised populations of migrants and people involved in the sex trade either by choice, circumstance or coercion. One of the most contentious contemporary trafficking stories is that of the controversial case of Somaly Mam-the self-declared ‗sex slave' turned ‗modern-day hero'. This paper outlines Mam's prolific trajectory of self-representation according to the tropes of sexual humanitarianism and argues that these narratives helped to set in motion one of the most lucrative, and in many ways, most exploitative and problematic anti-trafficking endeavours in Cambodia, to date. The paper concludes with offering suggestions for how the anti-trafficking industry might better address real cases of trafficking and exploitation by focusing on structural violence and systemic injustice rather than on sensationalised humanitarian rhetoric, which can perpetuate harms.

The current study analyzes a sample of questions about drugs asked online by youth who participated in the National Institute on Drug Abuse's (NIDA) "Drug Facts Chat Day." The types of drugs youth asked about were coded into 17 substance categories, and the topics they raised were coded into seven thematic categories. The top five queried drugs were marijuana (16.4%), alcohol (8.5%), tobacco (6%), cocaine (5.7), and pharmaceutical drugs (4.5%). The effects of drug use, experience of being high, the addictiveness of drugs, pharmacology, and drug sales were among the more common types of questions to emerge but varied depending on the substance. These findings show the types of information young people are seeking about drugs and have clear implications to inform youth drug education programs.

This study piloted the feasibility of rapidly collecting both self-reports of drug use and saliva specimens for drug toxicology in field settings. The use of oral fluid collection devices to supplement self-reports is unproven in street settings and may pose challenges for field research. Sixty adults who identified as recent illicit drug users were recruited in public settings in New York City, asked to complete a brief drug screening inventory and provided saliva specimens. Descriptive findings are detailed along with critical best research practices and limitations that provide important directions for researchers looking to employ both toxicology and self-report in rapid field recruitment designs.

Global flows of people, information, and capital have created transnational spaces in Cambodia. Within those spaces exists the formation of complex and multilayered interpersonal relationships between people attempting to capitalize on the opportunities created by these flows. The pur- pose of this article is to describe these transnational relationships, namely, between young women employed in the entertainment sectors in Phnom Penh and their western male partners, while high- lighting the racialized and gendered motivations of the global actors, the inevitable sociocultural conflicts/constraints/misunderstandings that arise within the partnerships, and the resulting chal- lenges and psychobehavioral consequences experienced by the mobile and differentiated individuals involved in these postcolonial relational formations.