521376ANN The Annals of the American AcademyTrafficking and Moral Panic in Cambodia

research-article2014

This article examines the backgrounds of traffickers in

Cambodia: why they became involved in trafficking,
how they operate, their earnings, and the criminal jus-
tice systems response to their activities. Our research
draws from interviews with justice officials, NGOs, and
detained alleged traffickers; and from a review of police
and prison records. The results challenge alarmist
claims about the high prevalence, profitability, or role
of organized crime in human trafficking. In Cambodia,
80 percent of incarcerated traffickers are poor unedu-
Human cated women who lack legitimate opportunities and
whose unsophisticated illicit activities earn very little.
Trafficking and We argue that the Cambodian government, in return
for foreign aid, adopted a repressive law that defines

Moral Panic in human trafficking ineptly; in the hands of a dysfunc-

tional justice system, the law has turned into an instru-
ment of corruption and injustice against powerless
Cambodia individuals.

Keywords: human trafficking; trafficker; smuggling;

antitrafficking law; moral panic; corrup-
tion

By
CHENDA KEO,
THIERRY BOUHOURS,
C ambodia was one of the first countries to
enact a law on human trafficking in 1996.
This law, one of the harshest in the country,
RODERIC BROADHURST,
punished trafficking as severely as premedi-
and
tated murder. Although there had been some
BRIGITTE BOUHOURS
concern about human trafficking within
Cambodia, a global campaign, led by the United

Chenda Keo is a professional and scholar in the field of

human trafficking. He served in many high-profile
positions with NGOs and UN agencies. In 2012, he was
appointed Advisor to the Cambodian Ministry of Social
Affairs, Veterans, and Youth Rehabilitation. He is the
author of Human Trafficking in Cambodia (Routledge
2014).
Thierry Bouhours is a visiting fellow at the Regulatory
Institutions Network, Australian National University.
His research focuses on historical and contemporary
patterns of violence, crime, and policing in Cambodia.
He has a broader interest in comparative analysis of
criminal victimization in Southeast Asia.

DOI: 10.1177/0002716214521376

202 ANNALS, AAPSS, 653, May 2014

TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 203

States, had been waging a war on human trafficking that required action on the
part of the Cambodian government to ensure the continuation of development
aid to the country. Human trafficking, or modern day slavery, was described by
the U.S. Department of State (USDS) and the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime (UNODC) as a transnational enterprise controlled by organized
crime, which enslaved 12.3 million people, generated $32 billion in profit for
human traffickers, was the third most profitable business for organized crime,
and posed a serious threat to national and global security (UNODC 2008; USDS
2009). Such unverified, high estimates suggested the presence of a moral panic
about human trafficking and have subsequently been found to be unreliable or
inflated in terms of the number of individuals involved and the profits earned by
trafficking (UNODC 2012).1
Apart from some NGO reports and a few studies of trafficked persons, virtu-
ally nothing is known about the individuals involved in human trafficking in
Cambodia, and some evidence suggests that the experiences of individuals
involved in Cambodian trafficking stand in contrast to prevalent claims about the
abusive and criminal characteristics of human trafficking. In 2006, one of this
articles authors interviewed nine boys and eight girls under 18 years of age, all of
whom had been trafficked to work in Thailand and subsequently reintegrated
into their family or community in Cambodia (Keo 2006). None saw themselves
as victims. They had willingly followed their recruiters to Thailand to earn an
income and support their impoverished family. They considered themselves
good children because of their ability to work and share the burden of support-
ing their family. Most had been trafficked by family members, relatives, or
neighbors, and a few by strangers. Few had suffered physical abuse and most of
them had been treated well. From their accounts, human trafficking did not
sound like a risky activity, and traffickers did not seem to make big profits.
Since the late 1990s, the authors have been engaged in a longitudinal study of
the trends and patterns of criminal activity in Cambodia, which included victimi-
zation surveys. We have found scant evidence that trafficking is a major problem
or that it involves organized crime, and our results are consistent with those of
another study (Steinfatt 2011). This article presents some of the results of our
research in Cambodia, which as far as we know is the first to draw on in-depth
interviews with alleged offenders.2

Roderic Broadhurst is a professor of criminology at the Regulatory Institutions Network,

Australian National University. He is an associate fellow of the Australian Institute of
Criminology. Apart from work on crime victim surveys, his current research includes crime
and violence in Cambodia, homicide, organized crime in China, and crime in cyberspace.
Brigitte Bouhours is a visiting research associate at the Regulatory Institutions Network,
Australian National University. She has worked on the development and analysis of large-scale
victimization surveys in China and Southeast Asia. Other research interests include violence
against women and comparative analysis of crime and violence, particularly in Southeast Asia.
NOTE: This research was supported by ARC Discovery Grant DP0776057, Building Rule of
Law Capacity in a Transitional State.
204 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

We examine not only traffickers characteristics and the methods they use but
also the way in which human trafficking, especially as a customary practice, has
been problematized and criminalized. This study illustrates how trafficking has
been officially constructed and the resulting negative consequences in Cambodia.
We argue that the hegemonic agenda of the Westin terms of security, morality
(especially prostitution), and human rightstriggered a security and moral panic
about trafficking worldwide. Pressured by foreign and local NGOs and the need
for foreign aid, Cambodia adopted a repressive law that defined human traffick-
ing ineptly and in effect targeted consensual commercial sex activities. In the
hands of a dysfunctional criminal justice system, harsh laws have not deterred
potential traffickers but produced serious unintended consequences that have
turned law enforcement into an instrument for corruption and injustice, and
against the powerless.

The Global Moral Panic around Human Trafficking

Following an independent and critical review of nearly one thousand publica-
tions on human trafficking, we reached the same conclusions as have a growing
number of researchers (e.g., Davies 2009; Zhang 2009). The literature is replete
with unsubstantiated, extraordinary estimates of the extent and profitability of
the phenomenon, as well as unsupported claims about its control by organized
crime syndicates. The striking statistics, estimates, and claims are recycled and
augmented, report after report, by uncritical authors who routinely conflate
human trafficking with human smuggling and prostitution. Weitzer (2007) has
shown that an unusual alliance of moral entrepreneurs, including ideologically
motivated radical feminists committed to the abolition of prostitution, played a
leading role in promoting the global human trafficking panic. Others have com-
pared it to the moral panic about white slavery during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (Doezema 2000; Sandy 2007). Cohen defined a moral panic
as follows:

A condition, episode, person, or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat

to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical
fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politi-
cians, and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their
diagnosis and solutions. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten at other
times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such
changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.
(Cohen 1973, 2)

We found only two studies that focused on human traffickers, as distinct from
trafficked persons and their rescuers. Levenkron (2007) examined the court dos-
siers of 325 Israeli traffickers and their accomplices who were convicted between
1990 and 2007. Nair (2004) conducted interviews with 160 active sex traffickers
of women and children in India, in addition to 561 trafficked persons.3 Nearly
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 205

half (47 percent) of the trafficked persons reported that their traffickers were
female. In contrast, Levenkron found that only 10.5 percent of the Israeli traf-
fickers were female. This gender difference raises interesting questions about
womens involvement in trafficking activities and their treatment by the criminal
justice system in different nations. Both studies found that most offenders had
engaged in trafficking in an attempt to escape poverty and alleviate dire financial
situations. Neither study supported claims about the high profitability and
involvement of organized crime in human trafficking. On the contrary, they
showed that human trafficking was generally perpetrated by individuals or small,
loosely organized criminal networks. This finding was corroborated by Brown
(2007), who conducted in-depth interviews with 515 Cambodian sex workers.
Many of the female traffickers had themselves been previously trafficked as sex
workers.

The Cambodian Context

Cambodia is among the poorest countries in the world, ranked 138th out of 186
countries on the 2012 Human Development Index. In 2004, it was estimated that
35 percent of Cambodians were living below the poverty line set by the World
Bank at $0.45 per person per day. More than half of the population is either illit-
erate or never completed primary school, and a lack of education among females
is common (National Institute of Statistics 2009). Good governance is inhibited
by a highly centralized administrative structure, corruption, nepotism, cronyism,
lack of transparency, and incompetent officials (Kato et al. 2000).
The policing system is tarnished by allegations of malpractice, corruption, and
favoritism. Torture, forced confessions, and illegal arrests and detentions have
been frequently reported by the media and human rights NGOs (Asian Legal
Resource Centre 2001). Recruitments, appointments, and operations are politi-
cized and influenced by cronyism. There is a general lack of professionalism
within the police force, and many units are understaffed. The reputation of the
judiciary is equally compromised by allegations of capture by the executive and
corruption. The working environment in the courts is generally subpar. Chronic
understaffing and a lack of judges and courtrooms result in large case overload
often dealt with by swift and unfair rulings. In addition, judges may experience
intimidation and their personal safety is not guaranteed (Broadhurst and
Keo 2011; Khiev 2004).

The origin of the 1996 law

Following the arrival in 1992 of the United Nations Transitional Authority in
Cambodia (UNTAC), which coincided with both a boom in the local sex industry
and the proliferation of foreign (mostly Western) NGOs, Cambodia joined the
battle against trafficking to protect children and women from this crime. From
only twenty-five in the 1980s, the total number of NGOs in the country had
206 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

grown to more than two thousand by 2008 (Ek and Sok 2008). Since controlling
human trafficking involves multiple approaches and discourses, antitrafficking
programs were embedded within various sectors of NGO activity with an esti-
mated two hundred institutions working on the problem in Cambodia and
employing some five thousand people (Delauney 2007). To sustain this level of
NGO activity, significant donor funding was necessary.
Trafficking is criminalized in Article 3 of a hastily enacted 1996 statute: the
Law on Suppression of the Kidnapping, Trafficking, and Exploitation of Human
Beings:

Any person who lures a human being, male or female, minor or adult of whichever
nationality by ways of enticing or by any other means, promising to offer any money or
jewelry, with or without the persons consent, by ways of forcing, threatening, or using
of hypnotic drugs, in order to kidnap him/her for sale or prostitution, shall be subjected
to imprisonment from ten to fifteen years. The perpetrator shall be punished to impris-
onment from fifteen to twenty years if such victim is a minor of less than 15 years old.
Those who are accomplices, traffickers/sellers, buyers, shall be subject to the same
punishment term as the perpetrator(s); shall also be considered as accomplices, those
who provide money or means for committing offences.4

The law did not define trafficking but amalgamated selling, procuring, and
recruiting people for prostitution, irrespective of whether the individual was
coerced or was moved across or within national borders; neither did the law
define the terms victim, accomplice, and buyer. The unqualified term
accomplice meant that a wide range of peopleincluding a brothels security
guards, cleaners, cooks, and law enforcement or military personnel providing
protection to brothelscould be subjected to the same punishment as a procurer
or trafficker (Perrin et al. 2001).
The 1996 law was enacted with little understanding of trafficking and was,
de facto, a law against the organization of commercial prostitution. Because con-
sent was irrelevant by law (with or without the persons consent) virtually all sex
workers could be declared victims and those helping or managing sex work,
human traffickers. Yet Keo (2010) has shown that the majority of women and girls
who had been trafficked between 2007 and 2009 in Cambodia were destitute,
aware that they were being recruited into commercial sex work, and willing to do
such work. For example, in 2009, twenty-seven NGOs reported eighty-five cases
of trafficking involving 109 victims. Roughly half the victims were from broken
or economically unstable families. Most (95 percent) were recruited voluntarily,
76 percent had agreed to engage in prostitution at the time of recruitment, and
31 percent of them had previously worked in the sex industry (Keo 2010).
In 2000, the Ministry of Interior created the Department of Anti-Trafficking
and Juvenile Protection Police with financial and technical support from various
NGOs. In 2007, the government established a national taskforce to work in coop-
eration with a myriad of government and nongovernment antitrafficking agen-
cies. A U.S.based NGO, Asia Foundation, received some $3 million from
USAID to conduct a countertrafficking program in Cambodia, and is believed to
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 207

have been behind the establishment of the national task force. With the help of
an international consultant, the Ministry of Justice drafted a new antitrafficking
law, which was passed on January 18, 2008, after pressure from the Bush
administration.
The 2008 law on the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation
did not address the inconsistencies of the 1996 law but rather cast an even wider
net encompassing child and adult prostitution, pornography, indecency against
minors, the management of prostitution, and the nebulous concept of human
trafficking. Implicitly, the law conveyed the message that the prostitution insti-
tution was intrinsic to human trafficking; although it did not expressly prohibit
voluntary prostitution, it created conditions that made lawful prostitution virtu-
ally impossible (Keo 2009). Terms such as exploitation and organized group,
which are crucial when one has to interpret and enforce the law, were left to the
interpretation of criminal justice officials. When the Cambodian Center for
Human Rights (2010) monitored trafficking trials, it concluded that it is clear
that the application of the law has been inconsistent at best and incorrect at
worst. It casts doubt on the judiciarys understanding of LHTSE [the antitraf-
ficking law].

Prostitution and trafficking in Cambodia

Estimates of the number of prostitutes working in Cambodia are inconsistent.
In 2000, the Cambodia Human Development Report echoed the estimate made
by the NGO Human Rights Vigilance of Cambodia (HRVC), which claimed that
80,000100,000 prostitutes worked in Cambodia (cited in Steinfatt 2011). A 2003
survey by UNICEF suggested that there were 55,000 sex workers in Cambodia.
However, after careful scrutiny and through direct observations and triangulation
of different sources, Steinfatt (2011) showed that these figures were fallacious.
He put the number of sex workers operating in sex establishments in 2002 at
20,829, of which 2,488 may have been trafficked. He estimated that in 2003 there
were 18,256 direct prostitutes5 in Cambodia, with 2,000 regarded as trafficked
(Steinfatt 2011). Steinfatts estimates of the sex worker population were about
five times lower than the HRVC estimate in 2000. More recent figuresessen-
tially corroborating Steinfattsput the number of sex workers in Cambodia at
17,000, with 75 percent of them working outside brothels as independent or
indirect sex workers (Home and Community Care Program 2008).
Official trafficking statistics in Cambodia are equally inconsistent and unreli-
able. In 2003, only seventeen instances of trafficking were recorded by the police,
and in 2008, the number was 108. It is difficult to assess the accuracy of these
figures. For example, official statistics from 2005 to 2009 recorded no human
trafficking events, but the 2008 Annual Report of the National Police reported
77 and 108 events in 2007 and 2008, respectively (National Police Commissariat
2009). From 2003 to 2009, the Cambodian police cleared 23,604 criminal events;
of these, 379 (1.6 percent) involved human trafficking, and 585 alleged traffickers
were arrested (1.7 percent of all arrested offenders). In 2006, Police Commissioner
Hok Longdy remarked, we cracked down on 614 cases of sex trading offences,
208 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

arrested 670 ringleaders (67 female), all of whom were referred to the court, and
we rescued 789 females. Among these offenders, 92 were charged (National
Police Commissariat 2007, 3). These figures do not match official statistics, but,
as is often also the case, the commissioner did not clearly differentiate between
offences relating to prostitution and those relating to human trafficking.
In 2007 and 2008, the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of
Human Rights (LICADHO) conducted prison surveys with large samples repre-
senting 56 percent of the total prison population in Cambodia. In 2007, 3.5 per-
cent of inmates were incarcerated for human trafficking and among them
80 percent were female (LICADHO 2008). In 2008, 3.8 percent of inmates in
the sample were incarcerated for human trafficking, and among them 77 percent
were female (LICADHO 2009). In both years, among the twenty-five reported
types of crime, human trafficking was the crime for which the largest number of
females were incarcerated. LICADHO (2008) documented many complaints
from women who said they had been wrongly imprisoned or had received a long
sentence for failing to pay a bribe; LICADHO also noted that the majority of
female prisoners did not have access to legal advice or representation.

Methods
We investigated five major themes about traffickers in Cambodia: who are they,
why they became involved in human trafficking, how they operate, their earn-
ings, and how the Cambodian criminal justice system responds to their activities.
We used a multimethod and multisource research design and drew on police and
prison records and interviews with 466 individuals, including police, prison,
and court officers; NGO workers; villagers and migrants; and ninety-one incar-
cerated traffickers.6 In Cambodia, court records are not available to the public
and researchers, so we could not replicate Levenkrons (2007) study or triangu-
late with their court dossiers the information provided in the interviews by the
incarcerated traffickers. For some of our traffickers, we were able to check their
accounts by talking to village heads/commune officials and in some cases com-
plainants or the police officers involved. Our sample included the five provincial
prisons of Banteay Meanchey, Battambang, Koh Kong, Kompong Cham, and
Svay Rieng; and the Correctional Centers in Phnom Penh (CC1 and CC2) and
Kompong Cham (CC3). These prisons contained 55 percent of the total prison
population in 2008 and were situated in areas often mentioned either as sources
or destinations for internal and cross-border trafficking (Brown 2007; Derks,
Henke, and Ly 2006). A comparison with prison statistics between 1997 and 2007
suggested that our sample was representative of the population of incarcerated
traffickers.
Our sample of ninety-one interviewees represented 45.7 percent of all incar-
cerated traffickers held in the eight prisons at the time. Although 71.4 percent of
these imprisoned traffickers were female, our sample included only 53.8 percent
(n = 49) female traffickers. We oversampled male traffickers (n = 42) for two
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 209

TABLE 1
Demographic Profile of Incarcerated Traffickers

Female Male Total

(n = 49) (n = 42) (N = 91)

Age (years) Mean age at interview 37.7* 32.3 38.5

Ethnicity (%) Khmer 79.6 83.3 81.3
Non-Khmer (Vietnamese or Thai) 20.4 16.7 18.7
Marital status (%) Single 10.2* 33.3 52.7
Married 51.0 54.8 20.9
Divorced/widowed 38.8* 11.9 26.4
Education (%) No schooling 30.6 31.0 30.8
Primary: 16 years 69.4* 38.1 54.9
Secondary: 712 years 0 26.1 12.1
Postsecondary 0 4.8 2.2
Socioeconomic Poor or very poor 83.7 76.2 80.3
status (%) Averagea 16.3 23.8 19.7

a.Average is defined as an income above the poverty line, set at $0.45 per person per day by
the World Bank in 2004.
*p < .05

important reasons. First, a review of the literature indicated that female offend-
ers were rarely involved in organized crime; therefore, it may not have been
possible to detect participation in organized crime with only a small sample of
male interviewees. Second, the Israeli study suggested that male traffickers had
a greater likelihood of conviction (89.5 percent) than females (10.5 percent),
because their involvement was perceived as more serious than that of female
traffickers.

Profile of incarcerated traffickers

The majority of the ninety-one incarcerated individuals were Cambodians.
Tables 1 and 2 present the characteristics of the sample in terms of demographics
and offense and show distinct patterns between male and female traffickers. The
average age was 38.5 years, but female traffickers were generally older than male
traffickers. Men were significantly more likely to be single than women; however,
a larger share of women than men were divorced or widowed. Among those who
were or had been married, 80 percent had children, and 18 percent had large
families of five to eight children. Although most of the participants had only very
limited education, women had significantly fewer years of schooling than men,
and none had education beyond primary school.
The offending pattern was also gendered: women were more likely to have
been charged with or convicted of human trafficking than men (54 percent were
210 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

TABLE 2
Offense Profile of Incarcerated Traffickers (in percent)

Female Male Total

Offense charged or convicteda (n = 49) (n = 42) (N = 91)

Human trafficking 89.8 50.0 71.4

Abduction for sale or sale into prostitution 6.1 16.7 11.0
Procuring for prostitution 4.1 33.3 17.6

Female Male Total

Redefined status of convicted participantsb (n = 43) (n = 40) (N = 83)

Confirmed traffickers 34.9* 15.0 25.3

Doubtfully convicted 58.1 60.0 59.0
Procuring for prostitution 7.0 25.0* 15.7

a.Includes attempted offenses.

b.The status of convicted participants was redefined based on whether or not they admitted
to their offense during the interview and whether their account matched the definition of the
offense for which they had been convicted.
*p < .05

women, 46 percent men), a larger proportion of whom had been charged with or
convicted of procuring for prostitution (see Table 2). Seventy participants had
been sentenced for human trafficking; twenty-one of them (fifteen women and
six men) admitted to their offense during our interview or their narratives
matched the broad definition of their offense because they had engaged in some
form of deception or coercion. We refer to them as confirmed traffickers.
However, forty-nine participants did not admit that they had committed the
offense and their accounts suggest that they had not been convicted beyond a
reasonable doubt. At best they appear to have been doubtfully, and at worst
wrongly, convicted. There was little or no evidence in their narratives linking
their activities to human trafficking, as defined by Article 3 of the 1996 law. We
refer to them as the doubtfully convicted. The thirteen participants convicted of
procuring for prostitution either admitted to their offense or their narratives sup-
ported their conviction. Just over half the participants had been convicted for
victimizing adults (55.4 percent), around one-quarter (27.7 percent) for victim-
izing children, and the remainder for both children and adults. The doubtfully
convicted were significantly more likely to have adult (alleged) victims (71.4
percent) than the two other groups.
The prison terms of the eighty-three convicted participants ranged from two
to 27 years and averaged 12.1 years. We assessed which factors impacted the
length of the prison term imposed. Apart from age, socioeconomic status, and
involvement of a child as the victim, all the independent variables had a statisti-
cally significant relationship with length of sentence. Women received signifi-
cantly longer average prison terms than men (13.5 years and 10.6 years,
respectively) as did participants who had been sentenced for human trafficking
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 211

compared with those sentenced for procuring for prostitution (12.7 and 9 years,
respectively). In addition, non-Cambodians, those who were married or divorced,
had little education, and had worked as sex workers themselves received signifi-
cantly longer sentences than other groups. The length of sentence was not
entirely arbitrary, since traffickers were more severely punished than procurers
for prostitution. However, other factors were also predictorssuch as the offend-
ers sex, education, ethnicity, and occupationsuggesting discriminatory prac-
tices by the criminal justice system against women and socioeconomically
disadvantaged persons. Women were significantly more likely than men to be
destitute.7 Bribing police officers or judges was a way of avoiding arrest or reduc-
ing ones sentence, but the most destitute defendants were the ones least able to
pay a bribe.

Findings
Below we outline what we learned from our participants and illustrate the find-
ings with case studies. Of the twenty-one participants categorized as confirmed
traffickers, eleven claimed that they had no prior knowledge that their conduct
constituted human trafficking. Nine were aware that their activity was unlawful,
but they either had assumed that the punishment was not severe or had no idea
about its seriousness. Only one was fully cognizant of the severity of his offence.
For seventeen of them, it was the first time that they had attempted to traffic
someone, but four had successfully trafficked people more than once in the past.
Six confirmed traffickers had trafficked adult women for prostitution. The others
(four men, eleven women) had abducted a child whom they intended to sell, or
coaxed a child into sex work or some other form of labor.

Why people became involved in trafficking

Our participants accounts and their lifestyle prior to being jailed showed that
they were poor and their illegal activities were not particularly lucrative.
However, even if an illegitimate opportunity such as human trafficking were not
very lucrative, it was still more lucrative than legitimate work. In addition, many
Cambodians, and particularly those in our sample, cannot even access these
legitimate opportunities because of their lack of education and skills. This was
the case with Krouch,8 a 22-year-old male who could not find legitimate employ-
ment and started working as a spruiker. Spruikers are generally independent
male agents who are not paid a fixed salary but a small commission depending on
the number of customers they manage to introduce to the brothel. On average
they manage to make $75 per month, but competition among spruikers in red-
light districts is fierce. Krouch reported:

I am an orphan and migrated from Vietnam with three friends. Once in Cambodia, my
friends got jobs as builders, but I could not find a job. A brothel owner asked me to
212 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

become a spruiker at his Svay Park brothel. He told me that it was not illegal. It was easy,
but competitive. I just hung around the street, approached men, and told them that the
brothel had lots of beautiful girls and they were not expensive. I got 25 for each cus-
tomer I introduced to the brothel, and each night I earned about $3. After three years
on the job, I was arrested in a raid. The brothel owner was never arrested. (Krouch was
sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for procuring for prostitution.)

The data suggest that respondents involvement in trafficking was strongly

influenced by both push and pull factors, that is, a lack of legitimate opportunities
and the presence of illegitimate opportunities that enabled them to survive. We
have seen that poor and uneducated women are overrepresented in the statistics
of incarcerated traffickers. Apart from basic interpersonal skills, no particular
knowledge and abilities are necessary to participate in trafficking. Traffickers and
trafficked persons form overlapping populations that comprise many impover-
ished women with familial responsibilities. Human trafficking appears to offer an
illegitimate opportunity to earn money for poor and uneducated women of the
developing world, who become both victims and perpetrators, in a social phe-
nomenon that has been called the feminization of the global circuits of survival
(Sassen 2002, 258).
When Kadas, a 22-year-old Vietnamese sex worker, paid $20 to have herself
smuggled into Cambodia, she hoped that she would earn enough money to sup-
port her family. In Phnom Penh, she worked in a bar catering to westerners, and
provided sexual services on negotiation. She formed a close sexual relationship
with an American customer, Sam, but continued to be a bartender. Sam helped
her pay her rent and had asked her to find young girls for him. Through her social
network, she managed to procure several underaged girls for Sam. Kadas gener-
ally brought the girls and their parents to meet Sam so they could make a deal
with him directly. Sam gave Kadas $20 every time she taught a girl some sexual
skills to pleasure him. In 2006, Kadas and Sam were arrested, and she was sen-
tenced to 27 years in prison. Kadas reported that she was unaware that introduc-
ing willing girls with the consent of their parents to have sex with a foreigner and
teaching them sexual skills was a serious crime. These activities were common
practices at the bar where she worked.

How do traffickers operate?

Despite numerous claims in the literature that trafficked women are often
recruited forcefully, our interviews supported Nairs (2004) and Surteess (2008)
findings: they argued that forced recruitment was relatively uncommon. Twelve
confirmed traffickers, particularly female offenders in sex trafficking cases, had
used seduction or deceptive inducement to recruit people. The trafficked per-
sons were lured to follow the traffickers because the latter had created expecta-
tions of a better life in a new place. Participants who had previously managed
brothels reported that brothel owners generally refrained from involving children
or coercing women into prostitution. Most of them were prosecuted not because
they coerced women into prostitution, but because under Article 5 of the 1996
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 213

law, operating a brothel is considered a criminal act. Choumpou, a 43-year-old

man sentenced to seven years in prison for procuring a woman for prostitution
declared:

The police have more tolerance for brothels not involved in forced prostitution. Some
NGOs keep a close eye on brothels. Brothel owners, therefore, avoid forced and child
prostitution. Besides, there is no need to use coercion because there are plenty of
women ready to work as sex workers.

A prosecutor who had worked on many sex trafficking cases told us that most
of these cases turned out to be cases of procuring for prostitution, not sex traf-
ficking. He echoed Choumpous claim that brothel operators did not need to
traffic anyone, because many women were willing to prostitute themselves for a
myriad of reasons.
None of the incarcerated traffickers abducted women or forced them into
prostitution, but in some cases they needed to persuade them, for example, using
feigned love. Speu and his friend Pnaov used to steal and rob to feed their drug
habit. They told another friend, Lvear, that they wanted to sell Speus girlfriend,
Orng, to buy drugs. Lvear had experience in trafficking women and told Speu
and Pnaov to take her to Sihanouk Ville where he knew a brothel owner. Speu
and Pnaov enticed Orng to participate in their criminal activities by saying that
they loved her very much but they needed money to buy guns for their robberies.
She could help them by working in a brothel for a while. Once they had made a
few robberies, they would be able to get her out of the brothel and take care of
her. Orng complied, going with Speu, Pnaov, and Lvear to Sihanouk Ville. They
were attempting to pawn Orng at a brothel for $120,9 when an NGO that had
been investigating Lvears activities reported them to the police. The three men
were arrested, and Orng was rescued. Police officers asked Speu for $1,200 for
their release. He did not have the money, so the three men were incarcerated.
Pnaov was released because his family managed to strike a deal with the court,
but Speu and Lvear were sentenced to 10 and 11 years, respectively, for sex
trafficking.
Abduction was used only with young children to be sold into adoption. Seven
participants (including five women) abducted small children who were too young
to be persuaded to follow them. One case involved Romdoul, 38, who moved
from Prey Veng province to work in Phnom Penh, leaving her three children with
her mother. Romdoul had quit her job and left her husband when she discovered
that he was having an affair with a co-worker. Cheakmeas, a 58-year-old female
job broker got Romdoul a job in a shop, where she was earning $35 a month.
Some weeks later, Romdoul decided to return home and look after her children.
Cheakmeas knew a couple who was offering $200 to adopt a child. Romdoul
abducted her friends one-year-old daughter and gave the girl to Cheakmeas, who
then took her to the couple. The girls mother reported the two women to the
police. Romdoul and Cheakmeas were sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.
214 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Twenty-five of the ninety-one incarcerated participants had been arrested for

their alleged involvement in cross-border trafficking. However, the majority of
the incidents reported by our participants occurred within Cambodia, and com-
plex and costly means of transportation were not necessary. Champei, a 61-year-
old woman, told us:

I managed to convince two girls to work in a karaoke parlor in Koh Kong. We traveled
in a shared taxi from Phnom Penh to Koh Kong. Because the girls were willing to go
with me, the taxi driver was not suspicious. We acted as if we were ordinary passengers.
(Champei was serving 10 years imprisonment for trafficking.)

Although much emphasis is given to sex trafficking, not all our respondents
were prosecuted for activities relating to prostitution. Two male participants had
been involved in labor trafficking. Karot was convicted of trafficking two children
to work in plantations in Thailand. He had brought groups of illegal Cambodian
laborers into Thailand before. As a group leader, he was responsible for subcon-
tracting assignments with plantation owners to perform specific jobs such as cut-
ting trees or removing grass. He would come to the plantation with a team of
workers who did the jobs, negotiate a lump sum payment with the owner, and pay
his workers as he wished. He himself labored to increase his income, which aver-
aged $10 a day. By Cambodian living standards, this was a good income. However,
he was arrested and could not afford the $1,500 demanded by the police for his
freedom. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for labor trafficking.
Smuggling people across borders so they could work outside Cambodia was
frequent. Kabas, 41, a widow with a second grade education, supporting eight
children, had spent $87 to be smuggled to Bangkok to work in a restaurant. She
could speak Thai and soon knew the routes to Thailand, and could commute eas-
ily and cheaply between the two countries with no need for smugglers. She got
acquainted with some Cambodian and Thai border police and started smuggling
people. Within a few years, she managed to smuggle thirty elderly women to
work as beggars in Bangkok. Deducting transportation costs, she made $12.50
per smugglee. She was eventually arrested and convicted to eight years in prison
for human trafficking and smuggling. She said: People think smugglers make
heaps of money, but in fact they do not. They have to share the proceeds with
border patrollers of both sides. Had I $3,000 for a bribe, I would not be spending
time behind bars.
The organization of traffickers was simple: among the twenty-one confirmed
traffickers, fifteen operated alone, five were linked to three independent and
small-scale social networks, and only one claimed to be a former member of a
large Cambodian organized crime syndicate. In a few cases several individuals
had been convicted for their connection to a single trafficking incident. Their
accounts did not suggest that they belonged to a criminal organization, but rather
that they merely happened to be acquainted. For example, a trafficker who
abducted and sold a child may have had no prior relationship with the buyer, but
both seller and buyer were then arrested and convicted of trafficking. Confirmed
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 215

traffickers were mostly recruiters or procurers for others such as owners of broth-
els and karaoke parlors, child adopters, and child molesters to whom they were
minimally connected. Only two confirmed traffickers continued to exploit the
trafficked persons after they had arrived at the destination. What is important to
note is that eleven confirmed traffickers had prior relationships with the traf-
ficked persons: they were family members, relatives, friends, acquaintances, lov-
ers, or neighbors.
For example, Somaly, a 54-year-old widow, was a sole operator who was
accused of trafficking her granddaughter and her granddaughters friend.
Somalys granddaughter, Sopham, had been disowned by her parents. Sopham
and two female friends, including Rodeng who was 16, asked Somaly to help the
three of them find a job. Somaly recommended them to a garment factory where
she was employed at the time. However, after nine days, the three girls were
fired. Unable to help them with a new job, Somaly persuaded them to work in a
brothel fronting as a coining house10 that was run by Rolous (another female
participant), who gave Somaly a $100 commission. A month later, Rodengs sister
found out that Rodeng was working at the coining house and called the police
who arrested Rolous and Somaly. Rolous was sentenced to 18 years in prison for
human trafficking and procuring for prostitution, and Somaly to 14 years. This
case did not involve coercion or transportation of the person to a different loca-
tion, but it is legally a case of human trafficking because money had been
exchanged, and whether the trafficked person consented to enter into sex work
was irrelevant under the 1996 law.
Each of the three networks we uncovered consisted of three to six individuals
who had formed an informal alliance without clearly defined roles and responsi-
bilities or a hierarchy. These networks were family or friend-based, weak, ama-
teurish, and had no clearly formulated plan. They were based on the temporary
partnership of a few individuals looking for ways to make quick money and who
came up with the idea of abducting a child, or procuring or trafficking a woman
into prostitution. Seng and her husband belonged to such a network. In 2006,
Seng (a bartender who occasionally prostituted herself), her husband, and a
street-seller procured two young girls for a U.S. national. The street-seller intro-
duced the daughters of her friend to Seng for a small commission. Sengs hus-
band transported the girls to the house of the American. All four were
apprehended: Seng and the street-seller were convicted of child trafficking;
Sengs husband, of being an accomplice; and the American national, of child
molestation.
The characteristics of the networks described by our participants did not
match the features of criminal organizations described by the UNODC (2002):
they were small, independent, poorly resourced, and loosely organized networks.
They were involved in only occasional operations with no long-term goals or
established leadership, similar to the Chinese human smuggler rings studied by
Zhang and Chin (2002). One of the twenty-one confirmed traffickers, Lvear (see
above) claimed to be a former member of a large organized crime syndicate. He
described a Mafia-like syndicate characterized by a clear power structure.
However, human trafficking was not part of its activities, which primarily involved
216 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

drug production and distribution, robbery, fencing of stolen motor vehicles, pro-
duction of pornographic films, and death squad operations. He believed that the
syndicate was under the control of a few senior Cambodian military officials and
benefited from sophisticated links with police and other crime syndicates in
Thailand and Malaysia.
He had already served seven of his 11-year term in prison for attempting to
sell a woman into a brothel. His story about the syndicate was not always credible,
some of it sounded exaggerated, most of his accounts could not be verified, and
the little that could did not match his claims. Finally, his trafficking activities had
little connection with the syndicate, but were side operations for his personal
benefit. Lvears story is important because he claimed to have been a member of
a criminal organization. The interviewer therefore thoroughly questioned what
Lvear was telling him and went to a village in Kompong Cham province, where
Lvear said that, in 1998, he had trafficked three women to be sold in Sihanouk
Ville. The interviewer talked to local people and authorities about the case, but
no one had ever heard of such incidents. This story and that of other respondents
led us to conclude that the general social, economic, cultural, and criminal justice
conditions in Cambodia allow for a simple modus operandi by traffickers that
made the involvement of organized crime unnecessary and also improbable given
the limited financial returns.

Traffickers earnings
None of the participants reported that they had earned much money from
their illegal activities. Eight participants (including three females) had been oper-
ating brothels and were prosecuted for prostitution-related activities, but their
businesses did not seem very lucrative. They rented the premises, which doubled
as a brothel and their own residence. They were aware that operating brothels
was illegal, but they reported that corrupt local authorities, police, and the gen-
darmes turned a blind eye as long as brothel operators were prepared to pay
bribes to them. Rent seeking by corrupt officials cost them between $5 and $50
a month. In fact, thirteen participants, many sentenced for procuring for prosti-
tution, said that some junior police officers were actively involved in the opera-
tion of sex establishments and protection rackets.11
The brothels they operated housed no more than five to ten women, and the
cost of sex services ranged from $2.50 to $5, which they shared with the sex work-
ers. In the most profitable scenario, involving ten women serving ten clients a
day, and charging $5 per client, the brothel operator could make $250 per day,
from which all operating costs needed to be deducted. Most operators were
unlikely to earn even half this optimistic income, as Roeung, a 28-year-old female
brothel operator, sentenced to six years in prison for procuring for prostitution,
complained:

People think brothel owners make a lot of money, but they have no idea of our difficul-
ties. We risk prosecution. We are harassed by police and local authorities, especially
when we fail to pay the bribes in time. Our earnings are spent on bribery, rent, food for
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 217

our girls, utilities, and more. Often the girls borrow money from us, and some run away
without repaying the loan. Some even report to the police that they have been trafficked
so they can default on the loan.

The criminal justice systems response

The treatment by the criminal justice system of the forty-nine participants that
we categorized as doubtfully convicted suggests, at best, negligence by the crimi-
nal justice system, and at worst, corruption. For the confirmed traffickers, the
leading cause of arrest was a complaint to the police by the family of the alleged
victim, but for the doubtfully convicted, it was direct investigations by the
police. Overall, our participants accounts suggest that they had been the subjects
of attempted extortion by unscrupulous individuals and corrupt criminal justice
system officials, as well as victims of incompetent law enforcement. We do not
claim that all these participants were innocent. The reliability of the accounts of
the doubtfully convicted can be questioned on the grounds that convicted traf-
fickers may lie rather than admit guilt. However, some of them confessed to us
that they had committed other offences, such as drug trafficking, procuring for
prostitution, and human smuggling, but they denied being involved in human
trafficking. In addition, other data lend credence to the accounts of these indi-
viduals. For instance, fifty-five prison officers, six antitrafficking policemen, and
fourteen court officials were also interviewed and their narratives confirmed the
accounts of the ninety-one incarcerated participants that the 1996 law had little
deterrent effect and produced harmful unintended consequences.
Most of the interviewed Anti-Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Office offic-
ers confessed that they and their colleagues had very limited knowledge of
human trafficking. Some had only attended a one-day training workshop on the
subject. They blamed their poor performance on a lack of resources, training, and
focus. Instead of spending time investigating potential trafficking incidents, they
were told to cooperate with NGOs in raising public awareness about the dangers
of illegal migration, prostitution, and human trafficking.
The court officials, like the police officers and the convicted traffickers, had
limited knowledge of what constituted human trafficking. According to the
NGOs we contacted, few Cambodian judges know enough about human traffick-
ing to deliver a sound and fair judgment. One NGO lawyer concluded about the
cases she had worked on:

Most offenders were unaware that they had committed offences qualified as human
trafficking. A majority of law enforcement officers also did not have a good knowledge
of the 1996 law, which they had never read. Their actions are based on what they have
been told, heard, or what has been sensationalized. The dramatization of trafficking
issues in Cambodia, created by a big group of powerful NGOs and UN agencies, seems
to play a major part in the incorrect enforcement of the law.

Corruption was a major factor in the unfair application of the law, and legal
ambiguities could also be used as opportunities for abuse of power.12 About half
218 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

the convicted participants reported that if they had been able to pay the bribe
requested by the police or the judiciary, they would not have been convicted or
would have received a more lenient sentence. Accusations of extortion attempts
by judicial officials, as documented in our case studies, were numerous.13 Corrupt
practices are so common in the judiciary that the judges and prosecutors we
talked to did not even pretend they did not engage in them. Rather they down-
played their role by blaming the system in which they operated and the corrup-
tion of officials. In the words of a prosecutor:

Compared to government officials, courts and prosecutors have a modest living stand-
ard. We dont make as much money as they do. We deal mostly with the poor. Even if
we only ask for a small bribe, the poor complain loudly, making it sound like a big thing.
Government officials deal with the rich. Even if they take a lot more, the rich are still
happy and keep quiet.

We spoke to a number of NGOs in Cambodia and they all confirmed that

many judges handed down guilty rulings despite a lack of compelling evidence
against an accused, especially if the latter could not afford to pay a bribe. We
interviewed a judge who confirmed these allegations: Even when evidence is
slim, in the absence of financial reward, many judges I know tend to convict a
person accused of trafficking. This is partly to avoid being seen as corrupt if they
had acquitted the accused. As for me, I normally exonerate the accused if there
is not enough evidence.
Failed attempts at extortion against poor individuals, sometimes by acquaint-
ances or friends, resulted in some of our respondents being accused and eventu-
ally convicted of trafficking. These accounts reveal one of the typical mechanisms
of the perversion of justice when the law becomes an instrument of victimization.
They also document how unscrupulous individuals in collusion with corrupt
police exploited the sensationalized issue of human trafficking to falsely accuse
other people of being traffickers and extort money from them. Three of the par-
ticipants, all from different prisons, told stories in which they appeared to have
been doubtfully convicted because they had had love affairs that others objected
toin Cambodian culture such affairs bring shame to the family. To imprison
and punish the violator, the aggrieved family can bribe the police or the judge
who can now, in addition to rape charges,14 also use the antitrafficking law.
The story of Bopha and her father illustrates how false accusations, incompe-
tence, and corruption in all likelihood resulted in a miscarriage of justice. This
case is particularly interesting because, exceptionally, we were able to review the
court dossier, which was provided by sources we cannot reveal. Bopha was sen-
tenced to three years imprisonment and Cheak, her father, to 10 years for
attempting to traffic two of her girlfriends, Malis and Kabas. Cheak was a moto
taxi driver and the only income earner in the family that included his sick wife
and three children. Bopha dropped out of school in third grade because of dire
poverty and to nurse her mother who eventually died at home from a brain
tumor. After his wifes death, Cheak built a small wooden house on land donated
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 219

by villagers. He wanted Bopha to live with a relative in a provincial town. When

Bopha told Malis and Kabas that she was leaving the village, the two girls said
they would like to go with her.
The next day, Cheak took Bopha to town, and on their way they met Malis and
Kabas who asked for a lift, claiming that they had permission from their parents
to go and work as fruit sellers. Soon they were stopped by the local police, who,
following a complaint from the girls parents, arrested Bopha and Cheak. The
girls parents wanted $500 in exchange for not pressing charges against Cheak
and Bopha. Cheak did not have such a sum of money and offered to sell his
motorcycle, but the girls parents refused to wait and lodged a formal
complaint.
Three legal aid NGOs got involved in the case. One represented Malis and
Kabas against Cheak and Bophas NGO lawyers. According to Cheaks lawyer, at
some stage Maliss and Kabass parents said that they regretted having lodged a
complaint and that the accused were innocent. Another lawyer told us that a
week before the hearing, hundreds of villagers, including Maliss and Kabass
parents, made a request to the court, endorsed by the local authorities, for the
release of Cheak and Bopha, but the hearing continued. Cheak reported that
before handing down his verdict, the judge asked him and Bopha to wait outside
the courtroom. There, a court official, prosecutor, or clerk, requested $500 from
Cheak to have them both exonerated by the judge. Cheak again offered to sell his
motorcycle to get the money. When Cheak and Bopha went back into the court-
room, they were convicted of attempting to traffic Malis and Kabas, and the
motorcycle was confiscated as a criminal implement.
According to the lawyers representing Malis and Kabas, the evidence against
Cheak and Bopha was: (1) Cheak had been caught red-handed carrying Malis
and Kabas on his motorbike, and (2) Malis and Kabas testified that they had been
enticed by Bopha to come to town to sell fruit in the street. Cheaks lawyer
remarked that after the trial, the judge had told him: It does not sound fair for
the defendants, but I dont have a choice. I have to convict them to avoid criti-
cism. Cheak did not appeal the decision because like many poor Cambodians he
is a fatalist: It was my destiny to go to jail, he said. However, in actuality, he did
not have the $5 required for an appeal application, and he also feared that the
Appeal Court might increase his sentence.
The court dossier showed that after Cheak and Bophas arrest, Malis and
Kabas told the police that they had come voluntarily to town with Bopha.
However, the two girls had been placed into an NGO shelter for children who
are victims of violence, abuse, or human trafficking. According to the lawyers, the
girls then changed their testimony, alleging that they had been enticed by Bopha
to go to sell fruit in the streets. The lawyers suspected that Malis and Kabas might
have indeed been enticed not by Bopha, but by their desire to be regarded as
victims of child trafficking because they would then meet the NGOs criteria for
support, such as free education, accommodation, and food.
Our last case study also exemplifies how poor individuals may become the
victims of false accusations and end up in court, where they are unable to meet
demands for money by court officials, and are convicted. We include this story
220 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

because the participant ultimately was acquitted, making him the most auspi-
cious person among our sample of doubtfully convicted. Kuy was a poor fisher-
man. In 2004, he had an argument with his wife and beat her rather badly. Kroch,
his brother-in-law, was very angry with Kuy for beating his sister and brought him
to the court office. He asked the court to allow his sister to divorce Kuy; Kuy
agreed to the divorce but requested custody of two of his four children. His wife
wanted full custody of all four children. Rather than allowing a divorce, the judge
ordered Kuy to be detained on the charge of attempting to sell his children.
During his hearing, which lasted less than an hour in the absence of legal repre-
sentation, Kuy was sentenced to 15 years in prison for attempted child traffick-
ing. He told the interviewer: I spent most of the time on the water, fishing. I had
little contact with others. I knew where to sell fish, but certainly not where to sell
my two sons. In 2008, he was assisted by an NGO to appeal the provincial courts
decision. During our fieldwork in Cambodia in late 2009, we found out from a
prison officer that the appeal court had already acquitted Kuy.

The Trafficking Panic in Cambodia

The findings in this study do not support popular claims about the high preva-
lence, profitability, or role of organized crime in human trafficking in Cambodia.
Our research indicates that the majority of incarcerated traffickers in Cambodia
are destitute women who, pushed by a lack of legitimate opportunities and pulled
by the presence of illegitimate opportunities, engage in unsophisticated criminal
activities for very modest gains. Over half of them are probably the victims of
miscarriages of justice because the law enforcement response has become open
to corruption and injustice rather than a measure that enhances the protection of
human rights.
Problems such as predatory crime, drug use, prostitution, and illegal migra-
tion, though, do share an important characteristic: they are likely to provoke
popular anxiety and moral indignation. The level of anxiety and outrage is often
disproportionate to the prevalence of these problems. The popular perception is
that the problem is worsening despite evidence to the contrary. These anxiety-
provoking problems are often dramatized and sensationalized in newspaper
articles, movies, and TV shows that select the most fear-provoking and extraordi-
nary cases for popular consumption. A significant consequence is the diversion of
attention and resources from other pressing social issues (Talbot 1999; Weitzer
2011). The findings of evidence-based studies should reduce misrepresentations
and misperceptions; yet despite the evidence, these distortions can reach prodi-
gious proportions. When such a situation arises, a moral panic is in full sway.
Talbot (1999) listed four recurring characteristics of moral panics: (1) wildly
inflated statistics that are circulated and reported without any skepticism or cor-
rection; (2) the rejection of credible counterevidence; (3) unreliable research;
and (4) indiscriminate merging of various crimes to make the problem look much
more serious than it is. Drawing from Cohen (1973) and Talbot, we can
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 221

distinguish four features of the human trafficking moral panic: (1) the elements
delineated by Talbot and generally presented in highly emotional language and
discourses; (2) the vested interests outlined by Cohen, which include moral
entrepreneurs, journalists, politicians, rescuers, and other professionals; (3) the
scope of the panic ranging from the local to the national and international levels;
and (4) the negative consequences such as bad legislation, misuse of resources,
demonization of certain groups, and criminalization of innocent people. Our
study of traffickers in Cambodia illustrates these four characteristics.
In the early 1990s, the end of the Cold War and the globalization of economic
activities drove people from the developing world to developed nations through
new global channels of migration, and led the western world in an intensified
campaign against illegal migrants and those who facilitated themthe smug-
glers. During the same period, governments and elements of civil society in the
developed world discovered a related but even more alarming threat to human-
ity and global order: human trafficking. Moral entrepreneurs with various agen-
das coalesced their concerns about illicit migration, indentured work, prostitution,
and child protection in an accelerating panic about human trafficking. Foreign
NGOs and aid donors, the United States in particular, influenced the design and
adoption of the Cambodian law on trafficking. This law was poorly written,
ambiguous, and confounded trafficking, smuggling, illegal migration, and prosti-
tution; it cast a wide net over many ill-defined deviant behaviors. Cambodia
was just emerging from 30 years of armed conflict and still grappling with high
levels of violence, and poverty and social inequality were widespread. The crimi-
nal justice system was weak and corrupt; police and judiciary were poorly trained
and paid and known to systematically engage in rent seeking and extortion. This
anomic period in Cambodia was embedded in a larger transformation brought
about by globalization, and itself a generator of anomic conditions. The new rules
of this transnational, globalized game created both legitimate and illegitimate
opportunities in new global circuits of survival (Sassen 2002). Through these
circuits, women from developing countries such as Cambodia increasingly moved
abroad to try to make a living, and became exposed to the risk of being exploited
and abused, but also to being criminalized.
Given the many known shortcomings of the Cambodian criminal justice sys-
tem, the adoption of such a law becomes problematic. We have seen how the
aims of well-meaning antitrafficking NGOs could be seriously perverted in the
environment under such a law. Was the hegemonic agenda too irresistible or
pressing and the moral and security panics too strong for their supporters to
contemplate the disastrous effects of their good work on the powerless of the
subordinate world?
Eliminating systemic corruption in the Cambodian criminal justice system
requires serious structural changes, only achievable in the long term. In the short
term, legal reforms could reduce opportunities for corrupt behaviors and injus-
tice. For example, voluntary prostitution could be legalized but regulated
through an indigenous democratic policy involving all stakeholders.
It is practically impossible to enforce the 2008 antitrafficking law in ways that
respect and protect the rights of suspects and victims. One option worth
222 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

considering (and possibly applicable to other countries) is to repeal the law on

human trafficking and instead use the existing criminal laws (about abduction,
deprivation of liberty, forced labor/prostitution, and so on), which already pro-
hibit and punish all the types of victimization covered by the human trafficking
concept.
Finally, efforts to professionalize law enforcement and judicial officials should
be made so as to strengthen the criminal justice system. Due to the complex
nature of the human trafficking phenomenon, it is crucial that specialized anti-
trafficking and juvenile protection police take the lead in dealing with human
trafficking cases. In each municipality/province, at least two prosecutors and
judges should be adequately trained on and entrusted with human trafficking
related cases. Countertrafficking efforts should also put increased focus on eco-
nomic development among the most at-risk populations to reduce their vulner-
ability to become traffickers and trafficked victims. Ultimately, what is required
in Cambodia to address human trafficking is not more law and punishment but
more legitimate opportunities to survive.

Notes
1. For example, the 2012 report ventures that the estimate is in the billions.
2. Further details of this project on sex trafficking in Cambodia can be found in Keo (2013).
3. Levenkron did not specify which definition of trafficking was used; Nair adopted the UN definition.
4. Law on Suppression of the Kidnapping, Trafficking, and Exploitation of Human Beings, 1996, avail-
able from http://www.wcwonline.org/pdf/lawcompilation/Cambodia_Law%20on%20Kidnapping,%20
Trafficking%20and%20Exploitation%20Pe.pdf.
5. Direct sex worker refers to those working in brothels or other prostitution settings. Indirect sex
worker refers to those working in settings that are not places of prostitution.
6. We define a human trafficker as any person charged or convicted under Article 3 of the 1996
antitrafficking law.
7. There was little variance in the socioeconomic status (SES) scale (all participants were poor) but
level of education can be regarded as a proxy for SES, and women were less educated than men.
8. We use fictional names in all the cases described here.
9. Although Cambodias official currency is the riel, U.S. dollars are routinely used. For comparison, at
the time of the study the average daily wage of a worker was around $2.50 with no other benefit.
10. A traditional form of medicinal massage common in Cambodia.
11. USDS (2009) reported that a number of police and government officials extorted money or
accepted bribes from brothel operators, and that courts acquitted traffickers in return for bribes. Former
Phnom Penh Police Commissioner, Heng Pov, who was in office between 2004 and 2006, is currently
serving a 92-year prison term for a number of crimes, including murder, extortion, and kidnapping
(Chrann 2009).
12. In 2007, the municipal court acquitted Meng Say, who in 2006 had been suspended for extorting
money from South Korean nationals. Three other police officers involved in the case were sentenced to
between five and seven years in prison for corruption in trafficking incidents (USDS 2009; Prak 2006).
13. In December 2010, a provincial prosecutor was arrested by the Anti-Corruption Unit of Cambodia
for abuse of power, corruption, and extortion (Southeast Asia Weekly, December 6, 2010).
14. There have been reports in the local media about rape in Cambodia that suggest that sometimes
consenting girls claim rape to avoid the wrath of their parents and community. Other cases involve pre-
marital sexual relationships that lead to monetary compensation or forced marriage.
TRAFFICKING AND MORAL PANIC IN CAMBODIA 223

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