by Katie Palmer
-Canada-

Recently I partnered with a colleague from OneChild, a children’s rights organization, to travel throughout Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand for several weeks to investigate prevalent social issues affecting children and youth in the region. Such issues include child sex tourism, absolute poverty, largely inaccessible primary and elementary education, and health problems arising from large populations inhabiting informal housing districts. In order to gain the most from our exposure trip, we partnered alongside a number of hosting organizations.

One similarity among the varied hosting organizations was the implementation of “advocacy tours.” Geared towards both foreign tourists and wealthier local citizens, advocacy tours (sometimes referred to as “poverty tours” or “poverty tourism”) provide opportunities for participants to understand a variety of social and economic issues common in the Global South.

by Katie Palmer
-Canada-

In recent years, there has been a slight yet noticeable shift among many Western young adult travelers. Once adventurously backpacking across Northern Europe and other parts of the world, they now combine cheap travel to the Global South with short-term volunteer endeavors. Whether one is performing low-skill unpaid work at an elephant sanctuary in northern Thailand for a couple of days, or providing high skill pro-bono legal aid at a law clinic in Nairobi, Kenya, today’s Generation Y is scheduling time to make a difference while on vacation abroad.

by Katie Palmer
-Canada-

At first glance, it seems as if the Government of Singapore has developed a brilliant plan to create jobs for local Singaporeans, to boost tourism, and to generate large amounts of revenue. By opening two world-class Integrated Resorts (IRs), a Singaporean euphemism for casino-based vacation resorts, tourism officials hope to achieve 17 million visitors a year and generate an estimated US$21 billion by 2015.

by Katie Palmer
-Philippines-

Nicki* was eight when her mother sold her to a local pimp in Southern Luzon, Philippines. She was forced to have sex daily with different pedophiles in a seedy brothel. Every night she danced on a stage where men would call her down, take her to a room, and sexually abuse her. This went on for a number of years until the Philippine Government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) rescued her. Nicki stayed in the DSWD’s shelter for girl survivors of sexual exploitation for about two years.

by Katie Palmer
-Philippines-

What happens to a country where there is a tight marriage between the State and the Catholic Church as well as an absence of a national population policy and nationwide inaccessibility to contraceptives, particularly among the poorest of the poor? A population crisis—much like the one seen in the contemporary Philippines.

by Katie Palmer
-Canada-

In 2009, the Toronto Star published a series of investigative reports on the widespread abuse and exploitation of Filipina live-in caregivers. The newspaper repeatedly pegged migrant women as victims: victims of ungodly employers; victims of provincial labor law inequalities; and, perhaps most importantly, victims of oppressive Canadian immigration policy, specifically the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP).

The Live-In Caregiver Program is a visa-entry program that recruits women to enter Canada as live-in caregivers, maids, and nannies for affluent Canadian families. Canadian families hire foreign-born women to care for their children, do their laundry, and prepare their meals. At the same time, foreign-born women from economically impoverished countries, such as the Philippines, have a chance—after living in the employers’ houses for a minimum of 24 months within a 36-month period— to acquire highly coveted Canadian citizenship.

The Live-In Caregiver Program is a far cry from a win-win situation. Activists, journalists and scholars have shown time and time again how the Live-In Caregiver Program reproduces inequalities along the intersecting axes of gender, race, and class.