The many faces of care: A comparative analysis of anti-trafficking approaches to domestic work and sex work in the Philippines

Human rights groups in the Philippines built on the momentum of the United Nations Anti-Trafficking Protocol to introduce measures designed to address precarious and feminised labour. This paper examines how care has been conceptualised and practiced in relation to two types of vulnerable workers – domestic workers and sex workers. Through a critical historiography of the campaigns for the Domestic Workers Act of 2013, and the Anti-Prostitution Law, which remains pending in Congress, this paper demonstrates that the contrasting approaches to domestic work and sex work construct certain types of income-generating activities as “labour” and others as “abuse”, and reify a hierarchy of work, with domestic work seen as virtuous and sex work as stigmatising. This increases the precarity of sex workers and inadvertently stabilises other feminised work as non-exploitative by positioning prostitution as their “always worse Other”. It also shows that by seeking to induce a “sympathetic shift” through redefining sex work as victimhood, women’s rights groups have re-inscribed the distinction between “good” and “bad” women, and entrenched sex workers’ exclusion from political life. Secondly, drawing on ethnographic research with Filipino sex workers, this paper recognises sex work as productive, and proposes to read sex work alongside other forms of intimate labour.