ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the key symbol of anti-trafficking campaigns"—the "trafficked woman"—is constructed and deployed in the cultural advocacy of non-government organizations (NGOs). It describes the silences and violence incurred by a driven pursuit for victimization narratives. The trafficking of migrants into forced prostitution should capture the attention not only of women's groups committed to the abolition of prostitution and their opponents, but also of human rights advocates concerned with migrants' rights and labor rights. The chapter outlines the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women's (CATW) ideological position on prostitution as sexual exploitation that harms all women and traces the CATW-Asia Pacific's production of knowledge about "trafficked women". According to some Korean and international activists such as the CATW, migrant entertainers in gijichon were "victims of sex trafficking". This understanding of the Filipinas as "trafficked" became widely shared among the NGOs in 1999.
