Mapping the Regulation and Policing of Asian Migrant Sex Workers

Over the last few decades, Asian migrants who work in the sex industry have become the frequent target of police, government, and social service investigations. Indeed, a range of state and nongovernmental organizations have promoted punitive investigations and carceral policies, claiming to act to protect migrants from being trafficked. However, sex workers, sex workers’ rights activists, and critical antitrafficking scholars argue that rather than providing protection, this increased focus on Asian migrants actively produces myriad harms and has negatively impacted these workers’ lives by endangering their health and safety, increasing stigma and vulnerability to abuse and exploitation, and violating their human rights. To date, there is limited research on how the investigations claiming to protect migrant sex workers often turn into criminal, immigration, or bylaw investigations against them. This doctoral study aims to contribute to this small but growing body of knowledge. Informed by critical social work, institutional ethnography, and participatory action research, this project maps how the illegality of Asian migrant sex workers, particularly those who work in massage parlours, is constructed and produced. First-person narratives of Asian women have provided the threads (including the texts, actions, and institutions) for further investigation of how their experiences are shaped and how investigations against them are organized. This study shows how racism, whorephobia, and xenophobia have been embedded in both the laws and policies that coordinate sex and massage work and the way investigations into regulated and unregulated massage parlours have been organized in Toronto, Ontario. This finding helps us understand the ruling relations between law enforcement and the workers, and how the laws, policies, and practices that are intended to protect women who are purportedly “trafficked” instead criminalize and harm Asian migrant workers. This research also shows the autonomy and resiliency of Asian migrant massage and sex workers, revealing how they organize against and resist this injustice. The knowledge developed from this project has been used by sex worker communities in their ongoing efforts to challenge the dominant ideologies and discourses about sex workers and human trafficking. Further, it has contributed to their capacity to investigate institutional processes and, in turn, foster and create progressive institutional and policy change. This dissertation also offers important contributions to critical scholarship, including critical human trafficking studies, abolitionism, and activist scholarship.

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