 In this video, we're going to focus on human trafficking in the Thai context. Human trafficking is an increase in crime and one that is exacerbated by forced migration. In an article by Yale Global, they report that there has been a massive increase in human trafficking in recent years, and it is women and children who are the most acutely targeted. The UN defines trafficking in persons as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation. Of course, as is articulated by Barna, O'Ketch and Camp, the presence of socio-economic inequality in the world creates a system where those in power very easily dominate and take advantage of those people without power. One of the most serious contemporary effects of inequalities between and within nations is the phenomenon of global sex trade or human trafficking for the purposes of sex. One of the contexts in which human trafficking is clearly evident is in Thailand. In the research article Trafficking in Law calls lawyer bureaucratic state and rights of human trafficking victims in Thailand. Frank Munger identifies three critical processes at stake when we talk about the Thai context of the issue. They are the path of development of Thai political and legal institutions, the globalization of law and the networks of relationships that penetrate the state. Frank Munger has put together a case study of a young Thai lawyer named Duen working towards the cause to prevent human trafficking and through this case study he finds that human rights advocacy by NGO lawyers can become very creative in order to negotiate through unpromising conditions. However, Munger also finds that there are serious limitations to Thai law that produce challenges for many of the lawyer's interventions in the context of the Thai state. Duen's principal responsibility, he writes, is to rescue women from brothels and attend to their welfare and other needs after their liberation. However, to do this effectively, actors in all sectors of the government need to respect the legitimacy of authority for case workers and cause lawyers, as Munger states, law is legitimate when its authority is supported by other power holders. So Duen can only do her job effectively when all the other systems are pulling in the same direction. But, as she often finds, her cause receives little attention from the power elites. Added to this, the police often like motivation to investigate, he writes, assigning low-level priority to trafficking prostitutes by comparison with, quote, real crime, after a raid, police investigations of the status of individual women are often defective, either because of a lack of interest or a lack of skill. So Duen uses one critical and creative process in particular, which can be called networking. Duen relies on a strategic network of workers and organisations in order to affect action. As Munger explains, network relationships are needed to form a team to plan raids, requiring complex coordination among many agencies involved in entry, investigation, arrests, handling immigration issues and caring for the women released from brothels. As Munger continues, cooperation with the network requires initiatives independent from Bangkok superiors and departure from narrow and ministry-serving interpretations of agency authority to allow support for these activities. It is this network, which Munger describes as robust, that produces positive results for Duen and her team despite the limitations imposed by the law and the policing teams. Finally, Munger concedes that while Duen must navigate the muddy waters of legality in ways that often seem potentially at odds with the human rights of victims, Duen's efforts have no doubt bolstered the authority of Thai Law's moral foundation in humanitarian aspirations.