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 …

This piece was written in September 2006. The AIDS conference it mentionned was the one before that of 2008 where vulnerable groups where at last put under the spotlights. Names, places and minor details have been modified to protect people’s privacy.
Bedtime story
Wat, my neighbour has a new lodger, a 35-year old Thai from a village near Kantchanabury named Keaw. Keaw left his town 3 weeks ago ro come to Bangkok looking for a job. His dream job is to be a driver but he does not have the money needed …

Or the case of Thailand compulsory licensing vs. right wing pharmaceutical lobbyists
This article was written in May 2007, revised in June 2007 and minor edits were made on 17/11/08. I decided to republish it after my attention was drawn by the Wisdom of Whores to a recent opinion piece written by Roger Bate for the New York Times. In his latest article for the NYT, Bate conflates generic and counterfeit medicine finding another occasion to held high the flag of a sometimes unscrupulous pharmaceutical industry. The text below is a …

Miss Pink Competition 2006
© peripheries

In an article strangely entitled “Thailand’s lady-boys are in a class of their own, at last”, The Independent reports on the Bangkok Suan Dusit University where young male transgenders are allowed to wear make up and female uniform. It is this “at last” that is rather strange.
There is no question that Thai ladyboys deserve to be treated like any other human beings within the Thai society. In this regard Thailand is much more liberal than most western societies, though this liberalism is very much codified and …

Lack of funds and misused thereof are the two main causes of a failing HIV prevention. As noted by Emily Geminder, HIV prevention does not attract as much financial attention as a quest for an HIV treatment, and when funds are committed to prevention, they end up financing interventions that are more dogmatic than evidence-based and whose results are hardly quantifiable and rarely quantified.
This USAID-sponsored poster promoting abstinence in Zambia as part of an HIV prevention campaign is a good illustration of what William Easterly describes as “the native people …