Broken Lives: Trafficking in Human Beings in the Lao People's Democratic Republic

#425
Title: Broken Lives: Trafficking in Human Beings in the Lao People's Democratic Republic
Author: Asian Development Bank
Publisher: Asian Development Bank
Year: 2009
54 pages

While everything else I've read from Asian Development Bank is pretty straightforward and pragmatic, this document is full of inaccessible anthropological jargon, making it harder to read than many of ADB's English translations from other languages. The main contention seems to be that social disruption (such as dislocation or land-grabbing) disrupts social roles, which means it disrupts social status, therefore, if I follow correctly, meaning both that a vulnerability to trafficking is created and that intervention thus far has been and is doomed to be ineffective since it does not attend to status relationships. Confusing an interpretation of the jargon jumble is the frequent and abrupt introduction of other elements (such as HIV) without integration into the argument. As far as I can tell, this monograph is more about the risks of migration than about trafficking per se. I think, but I only have a doctorate in a related field.

As I was reading, I found myself wondering about internal (in-culture) trafficking as a phenomenon that may be socially different from external (outsider) trafficking (i.e., being sold by your family means something different from being stolen by slavers). I also wondered whether this distinction, if it indeed exists, is simply an expression of indignation from a former majority or less-vulnerable society to finding its circumstances changed and its (sic) women and children now commodified by a more powerful outside demand or force. This is a tangential musing, not a part of this document's disorganized material.