Anti-trafficking measures in Cambodia

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Human Trafficking

Abstract

After more than seven years in the drafting, in February 2008 the Cambodian Government promulgated its Law on the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation. This paper explores Cambodia’s new Human Trafficking Law and analyses the impact of national, regional and international laws, with particular relevance to the UN Trafficking Protocol and US Government’s Trafficking Victim’s Protection Acts and Trafficking in Persons reports as well as the impact of various social movements and lobby groups in Cambodia’s anti-trafficking sector. It considers the institutionalisation of trafficking-as-transnational-organised-crime and how this narrative has been translated in the Cambodian context and some of the consequences, including the dominance of criminal justice responses and the continued conflation of human trafficking with sex work. Ultimately, the paper argues that it is overwhelmingly women’s bodes that are subject to discourses of trafficking and (sexual) danger in the country, thus leaving men and boys with limited protections and the issue of trafficking in other labour sectors, such as agriculture and fisheries, largely unaddressed.

Author

• Larissa Sandy, RMIT University