Mobilising the Child Victim: The Emergence of a Trafficking Master Narrative

Abstract

This chapter discusses the constitutive power of the master narrative of human trafficking when social movement actors mobilise the problem of trafficking locally through particular framing processes and amongst local actors. Drawing on recent interventions in the field of geographies of global activism, the chapter explores the constitutive power of framing processes in understanding the anti-human trafficking movement in Singapore. The staging of stories of sex-trafficked minors by Singaporean non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is illustrative of the ways a local advocacy project can endorse and reproduce a rendering of human trafficking as principally a ‘child sex’ issue in their own work, even where it is yet to be demonstrated that this interpretation approximates a country’s human trafficking landscape accurately.