Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 27 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This essay examines the key characteristics and contradictions of the global problem of sex trafficking and the attendant policy approaches of trafficking control and protection. By drawing on examples from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia, the essay examines the competing assumptions of sex work and the problem of sex trafficking. The author interrogates the ways in which the dominant discourse has facilitated and justified the pursuit of particular counter-trafficking policies and paternalistic interventions by state and non-state agencies in the global North and South. The essay highlights some of the gendered and exclusionary consequences of contemporary sex trafficking control. The author also explores the human costs of the violent logic of global trafficking control.

Keywords: control, discourse, gender, policy, sex trafficking, state

Maggy Lee

Maggy Lee is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.