This is a cross posting from Laura Agustín’s blog, Border Thinking on Migration and Trafficking: Culture, Economy and Sex. It is worth circulating broadly in an age where everything is conflated and reduced to a black and white understdanting.

Briefly, sex workers at the Barn Funn Brothel have been forcibly “rescued and liberated” by NGOs, charity workers or the Police (if the latter can be considered as a rescue).

In this poster designed by EMPOWER in Chiang Mai Thailand, the workers list the reasons why they do not wish to be rescued (photo provided by the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers):

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

As observed by Laura, “poorer migrants selling sex might prefer to continue what they’re doing than be ‘rescued’ by people on anti-trafficking crusades. While the rescuers’ good intentions are important, they obviously haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if so, what kind of help would actually be helpful! The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has terrible consequences both for themselves and their families.”

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