Abstract
This chapter critically traces the evolution and parameters of the Singapore government’s current approach to human trafficking and migrant worker non-governmental organisation (NGO) responses to this, which in turn have shaped their own work on the issue. The government’s approach is characterised in this discussion by what I label ‘pretence politics’, meaning that the logic underlying anti-trafficking activities and responses is one of managing competing interests, rather than attending to the substantive goal of reducing the extent of human trafficking and/or attending to the needs of exploited migrants themselves. A key element of pretence politics is performance, in which the contradictions of competing moral and political impulses and interests are managed—if not necessarily resolved—through public staging of anti-trafficking. I identify the dual impulses of widening and narrowing victimhood—or ‘elastic victimhood’—as competing characterisations of trafficking in the city-state put forward by NGOs and the state respectively.
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Notes
- 1.
Media attention to raids on migrant sex worker venues that “netted women who were illegally plying their trade in Singapore” further reinforce the divide between the good victim and bad migrant sex worker that was established through interventions aimed differentially at victim identification on the one hand and immigration offenders on the other. Typical media images of migrant sexual labourers in Singapore support a discourse of criminalisation. Such images often depict foreign women (including Thai, PRC, Chinese, or Filipinas) being caught in a police raid , scantily clad, hiding their faces from the camera, and being led away by police. All these images convey a message of guilt, not victimhood (discussed in more detail in the next chapter).
- 2.
It may also be argued that this renegotiation is driven in part by a need amongst NGOs for funding to continue their work. As they are in a high-income country, NGOs in Singapore are largely outside the purview of many funding circuits. Anti-trafficking can provide a stream of income that otherwise would not be readily available to many NGOs in the country.
- 3.
One project of TWC2 , The Cuff Road Project (TCRP) which provides free meals and other social supports to migrant workmen who have fallen out of work, was less enthusiastic about embracing a trafficking framework to interpret the experiences of their clients. As the co-ordinator of TCRP stated, “Why would we single out some men who might fit the definition of trafficking and leave other men who have equally legitimate claims to abuse and exploitation out just because they can’t be called trafficked?”.
- 4.
This has in fact been borne out since the passing of the Bill—see Chap. 8.
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Yea, S. (2020). Elastic Victimhood: The State, NGOs, and Negotiating the Parameters of Anti-trafficking. In: Paved with Good Intentions?. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3239-5_4
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