Anti-Trafficking in the Time of FOSTA/SESTA: Networked Moral Gentrification and Sexual Humanitarian Creep (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aligned Across Difference: Structural Injustice, Sex Work, and Human Trafficking
Feminist Formations
Feminist scholars and activists engage in meaningful, contentious debates about the relationships among sex, gender, power, and society. One of the most recent iterations of these arguments reinscribes the pleasure of sex positivity and danger of patriarchal exploitation onto new subjects: sex work and human trafficking. This paper brings together two separate empirically based research projects, one working with sex workers and the other working with members of the anti-trafficking community. As scholars working across these topics, we provide new normative propositions that may bridge these different approaches to resilience, survival, danger, and risk. We find that the real threat identified by our participants was the wide reach of the carceral state onto migrating, working, and trafficked bodies. Our projects find unexpected commonality in shared perceptions of pleasure, agency, and danger among sex workers, human trafficking survivors, and service providers working with trafficked persons. Current debates ignore the lived experiences of our participants, who attempt to find pleasure in context-specific agency and survival, and who locate danger in the looming forces of the security state, criminality, and structural inequalities.
Sexual Politics of Anti-Trafficking Discourse
20 years since the negotiation of the Palermo Protocol on Trafficking in 2000, the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early, almost exclusive preoccupation with sex work to addressing extreme exploitation in a range of labour sectors. While this might suggest a reduced focus on the nature of the work performed and a greater focus on the conditions under which it is performed, in reality, anti-trafficking discourse remains in the grip of polarised positions on sex work even as the carceral effects of anti-trafficking law become evident and the Swedish model of criminalising the purchase of sexual services spreads. In this article, I demonstrate how despite the recent discursive shifts to 'modern slavery' and 'forced labour', the anti-trafficking transnational legal order itself reinforces, rather than diffuses cultures of sex work exceptionalism. The growing international sex workers' movement has offered resistance, yet a closer look at the movement and the widespread support that it has garnered for decriminalisation from international organisations, while valuable, helps reveal the greatest cost yet of anti-trafficking discourse, namely, the inability of the sex workers' movement to produce a sophisticated theory of regulation to reduce levels of exploitation within sex work, one which is commensurate with the informality and heterogeneity of sex markets the world over. Finally, to the extent that neoabolitionist projects derive legitimacy from interventions abroad, especially in the global South, I chronicle the edifice on which it rests in one such context, namely India, to demonstrate how countries in the global South are not merely conduits for the global North's preoccupation with moral gentrification through neoabolitionism, but rather, that the circuits of global governmentality while influential, are highly contingent, thus producing opportunities for creative forms of mobilisation by sex workers.
2013
This article analyzes stories and images of sex trafficking in current mainstream US public discourses, including government publications, NGO materials, news media, and popular films. Noting the similarities and differences among these discourses, the first part demonstrates that they often frame sex trafficking using a rescue narrative that reiterates traditional beliefs and values regarding gender, sexuality, and nationality, relying heavily on patriarchal and orientalist tropes. Reflecting this rescue narrative, mainstream public policies focus on criminal justice solutions to trafficking. The second part suggests alternative frameworks that empower rather than rescue trafficked people. The article argues that the dominant criminal justice approach to trafficking—the state rescuing victims and prosecuting traffickers—will not alone end the problem of sex trafficking, but that public policies must address the structural conditions that create populations vulnerable to trafficking...
Politics & Society, 2007
The issue of sex trafficking has become increasingly politicized in recent years due to the efforts of an influential moral crusade. This article examines the social construction of sex trafficking (and prostitution more generally) in the discourse of leading activists and organizations within the crusade,and concludes that the central claims are problematic,unsubstantiated,or demonstrably false. The analysis documents the increasing endorsement and institutionalization of crusade ideology in U.S. government policy and practice
Sociological Perspectives on Sex Work and Human Trafficking
Sociological Perspectives, 2016
In the United States and beyond, there is often a wide disconnect between grounded empirical evidence about the sex industry and policies on sex work and human trafficking. In this introduction, we briefly review empirical and critical scholarly literature on sex work and human trafficking policy within the United States. We then introduce three sociological articles that provide compelling empirical research on individuals who work in the sex trade as well as those who organize on behalf of sex workers and trafficked individuals. We conclude by inviting more sociologists to narrow the gap between reliable empirical evidence and policies on sex work and human trafficking, and we urge activists and policy makers to listen.
Human Trafficking and Online Networks: Policy, Analysis, and Ignorance
Antipode, 2016
Dominant anti-trafficking policy discourses represent trafficking as an issue of crime, illegal migration, victimhood and humanitarianism. Such a narrow focus is not an adequate response to the interplay between technology, trafficking and anti-trafficking. This article explores different levels of analysis and the interplay between human trafficking and technology. We argue for a shift from policy discourses with a very limited focus on crime and victimisation to more systemic understandings of trafficking and more robust micro-analyses of trafficking and everyday life. The article calls for an agnotological understanding of policy responses to trafficking and technology: these depend upon the production of ignorance. We critique limitations in policy understandings of trafficking-related aspects of online spaces, and argue for better engagement with online networks. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond a focus on 'new' technology and exceptionalist claims about 'modern slavery' towards greater attention to everyday exploitation within neoliberalism.
Networked trafficking: reflections on technology and the anti-trafficking movement
In this essay, we offer field notes from our ongoing ethnographic research on sex trafficking in the United States. Recent efforts to regulate websites such as Craigslist and Backpage have illuminated activist concerns regarding the role of networked technologies in the trafficking of persons and images for the purposes of sexual exploitation. We frame our understanding of trafficking and technology through a network studies approach, by describing anti-trafficking as a counter-network to the sex trafficking it seeks to address. Drawing from the work of Annelise Riles and other scholars of feminist science and technology studies, we read the anti-trafficking network through the production of expert knowledge and the crafting of anti-trafficking techniques. By exploring anti-trafficking activists' understandings of technology, we situate the activities of anti-trafficking experts and law enforcement as efforts toward network stabilization.
Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Influencing State Policy on a Complex Social Issue
Sociologists in Action on Inequalities: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, 2015
Human sex trafficking is a complex issue that has been a popular topic of newly proposed laws in the United States and globally. Human trafficking can be defined as being put in a situation of economic exploitation that you can’t escape. In the U.S., media commonly equates all human trafficking with sex trafficking. Although many people are actually trafficked for domestic, farm, or factory work, the common narrative of “save the child sex slaves” paints a haunting picture that creates a powerful emotional reaction. People are understandably driven to want to stop a violent, abusive trafficker or “pimp” from profiting from forcing or manipulating our youth, usually believed to be young girls, to trade sex for money. ON THE BOOK THIS CHAPTER IS FROM -- This anthology provides vivid examples of how sociology can be put to good use in today's world. Every reading focuses on public issues concerning race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality. Each chapter includes stories from practicing sociologists that help students better understand how their sociology studies can be applied and provides answers to the question, "...but what can I do with a sociology degree?" Discussion questions and suggested additional readings and resources at the end of each chapter give students the opportunity to delve further into the topics covered and carry out full and nuanced discussions, grounded in the "real world" work of public sociologists.
The Harmful Prioritization of “Sex Trafficking” in U.S. Anti-Trafficking Discourse
2021
In recent years, the issue of “human trafficking,” or what some have deemed “modern slavery” has become increasingly salient in the United States. No doubt, human trafficking is a major humanitarian crisis, with the International Labor Organization estimating some 5.4 victims caught in trafficking networks for every 1,000 people in the world. And yet, the dominant discourse in the US tends to allude solely to the sex trafficking of women. This sex trafficking hysteria in the United States is the backdrop of my research. This Senior Thesis examines how anti-trafficking organizations leave out survivors by addressing human trafficking through selective cases of women’s sex trafficking, effectively framing trafficking as an issue of sexual morality rather than a product of oppressive political, legal, and economic systems. Anti-trafficking NGOs have adopted restrictive and stereotypical portrayals of the “deserving” trafficking victim as a young, sexually exploited woman, rendered powe...
Oblivious 'Sex Traffickers': Challenging stereotypes and the fairness of US trafficking laws
In this paper, we explore third parties who unexpectedly fell within the legal definition of a sex trafficker. The anti-trafficking lobby and media stories frequently portray traffickers as organised, psychopathic, violent, and child kidnappers. We dismantle these depictions by showing the unexpected people who qualify as traffickers. This paper incorporates findings from two studies involving eighty-five third parties in New York City and forty-nine in Chicago. We analyse how teenagers, drivers, and boyfriends qualify as traffickers under US law. We find that two-thirds of them hold inaccurate views about the difference between sex trafficking and facilitating prostitution. Trafficking can be incidental or temporary, and traffickers in these samples were often oblivious to their legal status, potentially resulting in lengthy prison sentences. We conclude by calling for differential sentencing based on traffickers' age, and awareness campaigns designed to alert third parties of the legal distinctions between pandering and sex trafficking.