A Critique of The Anti-Human Trafficking Industry in Taiwan From 2003 to 2009

• Main Authors: Keng-Liang Cheng, 鄭亘良
• Other Authors: Naifei Ding
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/paj9t8

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 英美語文學研究所 === 97 === The thesis will focus on the anti-human trafficking campaign in Taiwan starting from the 2003 “Throwing Package” incident when the government launched the campaign against Cross-Strait sex trafficking to the enactment of the Act of Human Trafficking Prevention in early 2009. My approach to the campaign will be based on a review of the movement history and discourse analysis. My primary resources are from the public media (mainly newspapers), the government policy reports and the anti-prostitution NGOs discourses from their conferences and movement causes. I will focus on their representation of human trafficking and the development of the anti-human trafficking campaign — especially the convergence of the state and anti-prostitution NGOs — during this period. The thesis will be divided into two aspects. In the micro-aspect, I will argue that the victim protection framework of the anti-human trafficking campaign reproduce the stereotype of human trafficking and reinforce surveillance of immigration and sex work by means of the legitimacy of victim’s human rights. In the macro-aspect, I will indicate that such a limit/violence of the victim’s rights protection reveals the rationalization of the corresponding state rule in Taiwan’s political democratization — the “global governance” wherein, under the legitimacy of the U.S. superpower, the Taiwan state and the NGO share the power to construct a legitimate and efficient surveillance on sex commerce and immigration. Such a ruling tactic not only reflects but also sustains the underlying Taiwan’s imagination as a nation-state in the anti-trafficking campaign — the dual-pronged making as well as mutual-reinforcing making of an exclusive homogeneous nation in terms of race, nationality and sexuality and an international human rights nation that would ironically legitimize the homogeneous exclusion. In this regard, the political implication of my argument shows that “human rights”, which aims at crime prevention to protect victims, gradually becomes “reason of state” that emphasizes the state’s great interest and allows the expansion of the state power. Thus, the corresponding rational political policies, which are delimited by the imagination of a homogeneous nation entity, in turn justify the state control and constitute the double-nation building as a new “fascist” nation, in which the state political power, the mainstream cultural dominance of the anti-prostitution NGOs and the U.S. neo-imperialism converge on a power network of surveillance, while the voices of the marginal social “deviants” are wiped out and categorized for the former political interests. In other words, the political democratization and human rights cause could eventually legitimize and extend the disciplinary power of the state rather than recognize the marginal groups’ alternative practices.