Extending borders of knowledge: gendered pathways to prison in Thailand for international cross border drug trafficking

Abstract

Few researchers have concerned themselves with qualitative gender-comparative studies of women’s and men’s prison trajectories – particularly appraisals relating to international cross border drug trafficking (ICBDT). Using life history interviews with prisoners incarcerated in three regions of Thailand, we describe, examine and compare the features of women’s and men’s pathways to prison for ICBDT. Overall, the findings point to both similarities and divergences in experiences by gender. Three pathways to prison emerged for both women and men: (1) ‘deviant’ lifestyle, (2) economic familial provisioning and (3) inexperience and deception. However, gendered variance was found within these pathways; an additional woman-only trajectory, the romantic susceptibility pathway, was also identified.

Keywords:

• international cross border drug trafficking
• ICBDT
• drug couriers
• drug mules
• gender
• Thailand
• Southeast Asia
• feminist pathways

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by internal funding from the Thailand Institute of Justice and Griffith University. The authors would like to extend their sincere appreciation to the women and men who agreed to take part in this research and who so openly shared their life stories. The viewpoints, findings and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Thailand Institute of Justice.

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Samantha Jeffries has declared no conflicts of interest.

Prarthana Rao has declared no conflicts of interest.

Chontit Chuenurah has declared no conflicts of interest.

Michelle Fitz-Gerald has declared no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Notes

1 The feminisation of poverty refers to the fact that women (and their children) are disproportionately represented among the world’s poor compared to men.

2 The deployment of decoy drug couriers is carried out to distract the attention of law enforcement officials who will sometimes be ‘tipped off’ about the decoy entering the country. Multiple drug couriers will be recruited and travel together; even if a few get caught, the rest may go through unnoticed and the operation will still be profitable to ICBDT organisations (Unlu & Ekici 2012).

3 As outlined by Tantiwiramanond (1997, p. 193), “in matrifocality social organisation revolves around female members of the family […] there is [a matrilocal] residence, in which the groom moves in with the bride’s family, the authority as the head of the household [nevertheless] is passed from father-in-law to son-in-law. Sons and daughters have equal inheritance rights, but usually the parent’s household compound is allocated to the youngest daughter”. However, in return and as outlined above in text, a daughter becomes “somewhat of a bonded labourer to her parents” (Tantiwiramanond, 1997, p. 180).

4 Education in Thailand is compulsory for the first nine years, i.e. six years of elementary school and three years of lower secondary school. Children are enrolled in elementary school from the age of six years. Secondary education starts at the age of twelve years and consists of three years of lower secondary education and three years of upper secondary education. After compulsory education ends (i.e. lower secondary), pupils can pursue upper secondary education in a general academic, university-preparatory track or continue their studies in more employment-geared, vocational school programmes.

5 In this article, the term ‘deviance’ (and related terms) is used to denote socially condemned behaviour – that is, violations of the established social rules and customs that prevail in Thai society. Obviously, ‘deviance’ is a social construction dependent on prevailing power relationships. The authors do not see ‘deviance’ as inherently (un)natural or as intrinsic to any act, belief or human attribute. Instead, we understand ‘deviance’ to be socially created by collective human judgement (Hills, 1980). However, the purpose of this article is not to contest social constructions of ‘deviance’ (or for that matter drug crime) in Thai society. Rather, our intention is to report prisoners’ narratives of their pathways into prison and their reasons for offending. Prisoners’ narratives do not sit in isolation from society; having been publicly labelled ‘criminal’ and condemned to prison for their behaviour, it is perhaps unsurprising that the participants frequently constructed behaviours and actions of both themselves and other people in their lives as being ‘bad’ or ‘deviant’. In this case, for example, ‘deviant’ intimate partners were labelled as such by the research participants; they spoke about their intimate partners being ‘bad’ and doing ‘bad things’ such as using drugs, drinking too much alcohol, ‘partying’ and getting arrested and/or imprisoned for criminal offences.

6 This includes childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse, living with domestic violence and child neglect.

7 This includes informal work such as domestic work, housekeeping, babysitting, gardening, street vending and other usually daily wage labour.