A few years ago, when I was a full-time member of the faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School, faculty and staff were required to go through various trainings. One of them was on how to spot sex trafficking so that we could turn in traffickers to the police.
I’m the kind of person who, during those trainings, will typically read the material. That time was no exception. My memory is hazy, but I do remember that one slide in the presentation showed an equivalence between being an adult prostitute and being sexually trafficked. “That can’t be right,” I thought. I assumed that sexual trafficking involved some amount of coercion or, at least, someone who was under age. If it had a been a live presenter, I would have raised the issue. But it was an on-line video. Tracking down whom to talk to was too much work.
The experience did make me wonder, though, whether there were many other instances in which adults voluntary engaging in voluntary capitalist acts were referred to as sex traffickers.
I was right to wonder. On today’s Reason site, Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown interviews sex work researcher Tara Burns. The item is titled “What Everyone Gets Wrong About Sex Trafficking Laws,” Reason, October 14, 2024.
Here’s a key excerpt:
Burns: So, I thought that there were probably people out there who were being helped by all of this anti-trafficking rhetoric and the anti-trafficking laws. I knew at that point of two sex workers who had been arrested for sex trafficking when they were not sex traffickers, but I thought, “We’re just collateral damage and something good is actually happening for some people who really need it.” What I found when I did my records request to find out all of the cases that had been charged under the new trafficking law: At that point, it was only sex workers who had been charged. And every sex worker who had been charged with sex trafficking had been charged with prostitution in the same case that they were charged with sex trafficking.
When I was designing the survey, I had put in there some questions to find out if people met the federal definition of a sex trafficking survivor or not. And when I filtered for the people who met the definition of a sex trafficking survivor, they were two or three times as likely to be sexually assaulted by police. And just every other bad thing on the survey—being turned away from services at shelters or by counselors or being turned away from trying to report a crime—all of it was happening to them two or three times more often than to other sex workers.
So I had thought that there were victims who were being helped, but actually it was those victims who were being the most harmed by the laws and the rhetoric. I think the same kinds of marginalizations that make people vulnerable to abuse within the sex industry can also make people vulnerable to abuse by police officers and discrimination by shelters and stuff like that.
Note the disgusting irony. We are told to look out for sex traffickers because that will reduce the number of people forced into prostitution. But if we cooperate, we might well be helping the police use force against innocent non-coercive people.
The whole thing is worth reading.
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