(In)visible Women and (Anti)-trafficking

Abstract

This chapter provides a detailed description of the situations of migrant women and girls in two key sectors in Singapore: domestic service and the sex and nightlife entertainment sector. Consideration is given particularly to the complexities of migrant women’s situations, drawing largely on women’s own narratives. It is suggested in the chapter that for migrant sexual labourers, sexual exploitation issues are often intertwined with, and even overshadowed by, problems relating to labour exploitation. For foreign domestic workers (FDWs) such complexities are often also evident, where exploitation in private households is not singular in nature—confinement or abuse or financial exploitation—but rather has multiple and compounding elements. Building on this observation about the complexities in women’s situations of exploitation in Singapore, the second part of the chapter examines the representation of these migrant women in the public, particularly print media domain. In doing this I extend the argument made in Chaps. 2 and 3 that women are either rendered highly visible by the state (and often by NGOs) within anti-trafficking frames or rendered invisible and obscured from it.