This is the second in a short
series of blog posts dedicated to the situation of statelessness among
Thailand’s ethnic minority people (the ‘hill tribes’). They are inspired by our
current research into the impact of statelessness on women in Thailand, which
aims specifically to map the link with human trafficking – a project funded by
the US Department of State’s Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration.
Statelessness, trafficking and Thailand
Numerous
articles and reports point to the link between statelessness and trafficking in
persons. In particular, they discuss how international trafficking victims may
be at heightened risk of ending up “not considered as a national by any state
under the operation of its law” (definition of a stateless person under
international law), primarily due to problems of establishing their identity
and their connection to their state of origin thanks to the circumstances under
which they migrated. At the same time, scholars, NGOs and policy makers agree
that the fact of statelessness puts a person at greater risk of becoming a
victim of trafficking in persons. This is explained by a variety of logical and
compelling reasons, including the problem that stateless people face – due to
their lack of nationality – limited opportunities for formal employment or for
accessing regular migration channels such that they are more likely to become
entwined in illicit and exploitative movements.
One of the
specific country contexts in which this link between statelessness and
increased vulnerability to human trafficking is commonly cited is Thailand.
There, the lack of nationality of the ethnic minority (hill tribe) population
has been described as “the single
greatest risk factor” for trafficking in this community. What better place,
then, to pilot a new methodology that aims to better map and more fully
understand how and why statelessness heightens the risk of trafficking in
persons. This is precisely the ambition of the project for which the
Statelessness Programme received funding from the US Department of State Bureau
for Population, Refugees and Migration and for which we travelled to Thailand
in February 2013.
Reaching workable hypotheses
The first step
in exploring the relationship between statelessness and trafficking is to
develop a hypothesis to test. Given the existing literature on the causal link
between these phenomena and the statements made about Thailand, our hypothesis
is that:
A stateless person is more
likely to become a victim of trafficking in persons than a person with
citizenship.
For example, if we
measured the rate of trafficking in the hill tribe community and found the
average rate of trafficking cases to be 1 in 10,000, we might expect to find the
rate of trafficking cases among stateless people from the same community to be
5 in 10,000 (i.e. for a stateless person to be 5 times more likely to be trafficked).
However, to measure the relative vulnerability to trafficking in this way, you
would have to find a way to comprehensively identify victims of trafficking from
a particular, defined and measurable community and count the number of
stateless versus the number of citizens. This is a very tricky quest indeed,
since trafficking often goes unreported and unidentified, plus the victims of
trafficking may be found in many different destinations spread across Thailand
and even abroad. As such, this kind of methodology would be unfeasible. Nor
would such a statistic tell us very much about why stateless people are more exposed
to trafficking, so it would do little to inform anti-trafficking policy, which
is the ultimate objective of the research.
Instead, we
needed to think more carefully about how the process of trafficking in persons
works and further break down our hypothesis. We came up with the following two
sub-hypotheses:
A stateless person is more
likely to move away from home to seek a better life
and/or
A stateless person is more
likely to become exploited in the process of seeking a better life away from
home
In other words,
if the rate by which a person who moves away from home becomes a victim of
trafficking is the same for everyone, stateless people will be trafficked more
often because they are more often on the move. Or, if the rate by which a
person moves away from home to seek a better life is the same for everyone,
stateless people will be trafficked more often because this more often goes “wrong”
for them, leading to their exploitation. Or both rates are higher for stateless
people than those with citizenship.
Focusing on intrinsic factors
In addition to
elaborating these more focused hypotheses, we also decided to focus on the
intrinsic or internal factors that contribute to a greater or smaller risk of
trafficking: i.e. what is happening at the supply side, in the lives and minds
of the people who are the potential victims. An alternative would have been to
look at other, external factors, such as what is happening at the demand side
or the behaviour of traffickers (e.g. another explanation for a higher risk of
trafficking among stateless populations is that they are more “in demand” by
the employers who would exploit them or that traffickers are deliberately
identifying and targeting only those people without citizenship in their
schemes). Our focus on the intrinsic or internal factors – on people’s own
capacity, attitudes and decision-making patterns – is the best match for our
aim of informing anti-trafficking projects that target the at-risk population. By
getting a better picture of whether and at what point in the migration or opportunity-seeking
process statelessness plays a part in a person’s ultimate vulnerability to
trafficking, the effectiveness of anti-trafficking activities which include
stateless people can be improved because they can be tailored to deal with this
area of vulnerability.
The field research
To summarise, the
field research that we travelled out to Thailand to set up, looks at whether
the capacity, attitude and decision-making patterns of stateless hill tribe
people makes them relatively more likely – as compared to hill tribe people
with citizenship – to seek to improve their lives by moving away from their
village and/or to become exploited if they move away from their village. The
main tool that we are using for this is a survey which will capture data from
450 randomly selected members of Thailand’s hill tribe communities in and
around Chiang Mai province. The same questionnaire will be used for all
respondents, but roughly half of the people interviewed will be stateless and
half will hold citizenship, so that we are able to compare the results and
establish the relative vulnerability. We will supplement the survey results
with some qualitative research (in-depth interviews with trafficking victims)
that looks more closely at the process by which hill tribe people become
victims of trafficking, so that we are fully equipped to interpret the survey
results.
The
questionnaire relies heavily on the theory of Subjective Legal Empowerment: i.e.
by measuring a person’s self-belief in his or her ability to resolve a dispute
or conflict you get a measure of how likely that person is to indeed be able to
resolve the situation (based on the psychological theory of self efficacy – if you
believe you can do something, you are more likely to put in the time and effort
necessary and to indeed be successful). For the purposes of our research, that
means we will be presenting the respondents with scenarios that describe
problems they could encounter in their everyday lives and ask whether and
through what channels they think they could resolve these issues. When the
survey is complete and we can analyse the data, we hope to understand whether
stateless people have a lower Subjective Legal Empowerment in particular areas
of their lives which make them more prone to take the decision to move away in
order to deal with their problems or to get trapped in exploitation. We are
already unreasonably excited about seeing, analyzing and understanding the
survey results!
Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager,
Statelessness Programme
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