Bad Women Rising: Sex Workers Organizing Against Imperial Innocence in Thailand

The question of innocence (and lack thereof) is central to western imperial projects and their determination of who deserves to be “saved” and who, on the other hand, is expendable. In this text, Elena Shih describes the ways through which sex workers in Thailand refuse what she characterizes as compulsory innocence and organize together the political conditions on being “bad.”

Before her death in 2023, Liz Hilton, a decades long sex worker rights activist with the Empower Foundation Thailand, always signed her emails to me with the reminder “Be Bad.” The call towards badness hits me as a vital organizing strategy and orientation is a critical stance against the global anti-trafficking movement, which pits Asian sex workers as inherently victimized, imbricating innocence into who is deserving of rights and livelihood.

The contemporary global anti-trafficking movement, inaugurated in the late 1990s and cemented with the passage of the 2000 UN Palermo Protocol and US Trafficking Victims Protection Act, consolidated existing laws around gender, labor, and family rights into a novel consolidated framework. These laws were imbricated with moral and religious commitments that mapped perfectly onto state and liberal formations of state security, and fortified the powers of policing to maintain status quo.