Check Swinburne's subscriptions for full text availabilityPermanent link: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/218837
- Title
- Risky business: understanding Vietnamese women in custody for drug related offences
- Author(s)
- Le, Roslyn
- Abstract
- This paper builds on recent scholarships that have highlighted the gap in empirical knowledge on drug traffickers in the illicit drugs discourse. Despite the diversity of disciplinary approaches to this field, discussions on drug traffickers are predominantly underpinned -- implicitly or explicitly - by neoclassical economic assumptions. This has consequently led to a narrow conceptualisation of drug traffickers as amoral, selfinterested, profit-driven, utility maximisers. Previous research that have explored the experiences of drug traffickers beyond the realm of neoclassical economic have highlighted how such individuals are embedded within a complex web of socioeconomic, cultural and political structures. Building upon such studies, this paper argues that drug traffickers need to be brought to the forefront of illicit drugs research in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the illicit drug trade. Drawing on the author's own research on Vietnamese women drug traffickers in Australia, this paper will show how decisions to become involved in the illicit drug trade as either cultivators, sellers or importers transcend beyond neoclassical economic assumptions in that they are often influenced by social relationships, and embedded within Vietnamese cultural expectations of women's roles within the family.
- Publication Type
- Conference paper
- Research Centre
- Swinburne University of Technology
- Source
- Proceedings of 'Local lives/global networks', the Annual Conference of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA 2011), Newcastle, Australia, 28 November - 01 December 2011 / Steven Threadgold, Emma Kirby and John Germov (eds.)
- Publication Year
- 2011
- Keyword(s)
- Drug traffickers; Illicit drug trade; Neoclassical economics; Sociology; Vietnamese women
- Publisher
- The Australian Sociological Association
- Publisher URL
- http://www.tasa.org.au/
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2011. The published version of this work will be available in late 2012 in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.
- ISBN
- 9780646567792
- Peer Reviewed
