Policing Victimhood: Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State 9781978833333

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Policing Victimhood

Critic al Issue s in Cr im e a n d S o c ie t y Raymond J. Michalowski and Luis A. Fernandez, Series Editors

Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students. For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Policing Victimhood Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State

Corinne Schwarz

Rut g e r s U n ive r sit y Pr es s New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey London and Oxford

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Schwarz, Corinne, author. Title: Policing victimhood : human trafficking, frontline work, and the carceral state / Corinne Schwarz. Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2023] | Series: Critical issues in crime and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022056582 | ISBN 9781978833302 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978833319 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978833326 (epub) | ISBN 9781978833333 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Human trafficking—­United States. | Social work with human trafficking victims—­United States. | Human trafficking victims—­United States. Classification: LCC HQ281 .S298 2023 | DDC 364.15/510973—­dc23/eng/20230117 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056582 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2023 by Corinne Schwarz All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. rutgersuniversitypress​.org

C o n te n ts

Introduction: “Oh, Traff icking? That Happens Here?” Perceptions and Paradigms of Anti-­t raff icking Efforts and the Carceral State

1

1

Carceral Protectionism: Resource Constraints and Rescue Narratives

28

2

The Punishment Mindset: The Inevitability of Carcerality

51

3

Therapeutic Governance and the Regulation of the Post-­t raff icking Self

76

4

Limits to Justice: The Complications of the Carceral State

102

5

Beyond Carceral Logics: Shifting from the “Punishing” State to the “Helping” State

125

Conclusion: Anti-­t raff icking Futures: Justice without Policing and Prisons

144

Acknowledgments Appendix A: Research Methodologies Appendix B: Interviewee Pseudonyms Notes References Index

159 163 173 177 183 207

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In tr od u ction

“Oh, Traff icking? That Happens Here?” P e r ce ptio n s a n d P aradi gm s of An ti-­t r a ffickin g E f f orts and the Ca r ce r a l Sta te February  15, 2017: I waited to begin an interview with Rose, a retired victim services coordinator. Because she no longer worked in a traditional office, though still deeply connected to the network of anti-­trafficking advocacy in her midwestern state, we had to find a public space to conduct our interview.1 Rose picked a diner; I was a bit on edge, since a previous interview in a coffee shop had led to an uncomfortable confrontation with a patron who kept encroaching on our shared table. I was relieved to sit in a booth but too nervous to order anything besides coffee. In the moment, the interview went “according to plan,” following the rhythm and routine I had been able to cultivate over fourteen earlier interviews. Rose’s answers always returned to the importance of criminal legal systems in anti-­ trafficking work, which culminated in her explanation of why mandatory reporting needed to become a bigger, more deeply embedded part of anti-­trafficking advocacy practices: A lot of the victims use [. . .] services for domestic violence. [. . .] It’s a difference of ideology, if you wanna say that. You know, they say, “Well, we’re victim-­centered,” which means the victim makes the decision whether they wanna file charges or not. I understand that in domestic violence. I don’t think human trafficking should fall in that same component. Because human trafficking, if in fact it’s a true trafficked victim, there may be five to ten girls that are affected by the actions of that perpetrator. And so, when that victim is afforded the choice of not reporting, we’re not helping those other five to twenty victims. We’re not helping. We are turning our backs on those other five to twenty women. [. . .] And a domestic violence shelter will say, “Oh, honey, you don’t have to file to a report because they don’t do anything anyway.” [. . .] And I think it needs to be a requirement within every 1

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organization that’s getting human trafficking funding [. . .], that you mandatory report the crime. (interview 2/15/17) I did not push back here, a reality that still feels uncomfortable to admit, even though I did not completely agree with Rose’s perspectives on fellow antiviolence advocates or mandatory reporting policies. In conducting these interviews, I wanted to understand how people engaged in anti-­trafficking work, regardless of the ideologies or political frames they brought to their jobs. I knew I would be encountering what I considered more common viewpoints on trafficking, ones that often centered on punishment and prosecution as centrally important. And while I was beginning to question the primacy of those narratives, it felt somehow wrong to address this in the middle of a formal interview. But there was something here—­this explicit denial of victim-­survivors’ expressed desires, this dismissal of the limitations of law enforcement responses—­that stuck out differently to me.2 Upon leaving our interview, held in a suburban strip mall, I paused in the parking lot of a nearby big box store before driving home. This pause was a necessary part of my transition from interview to road; I would jot down more notes or record a voice memo to myself debriefing the conversation while the words were still fresh in my head. But on this day, I had to first stop to collect myself and my racing thoughts. Throughout the interview, Rose’s ideological orientations toward sex work, human trafficking, and the carceral state were not surprising to hear, given her work was nestled within a law enforcement agency. But other dissonances, specifically between her conceptual framing of victimhood and her description of frontline service provision, unsettled me. Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit someone for labor or commercial sex, including those under the age of eighteen engaged in commercial sexual exchanges, more commonly referred to as domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST).3 The fairly straightforward definition presented here masks the contention and confusion embedded in both its creation (Kinney 2006; Wijers and Quirk 2021) and its current application (Schwarz 2019). Human trafficking is often assumed to be exclusively sexual in nature, reinforced by the continued conflation of sex work with sex trafficking and the heightened public spotlight on cases involving sexual exploitation (Bhavnani and Schneider 2014). Similarly, as late capitalism deepens economic inequalities, the line between a “bad job” and labor exploitation that legally falls into trafficking gets thinner and thinner (Quirk, Robinson, and Thibos 2020). In the midwestern United States, a complicating layer to this definition is the larger impression of human trafficking as simply not occurring in certain regions. Much awareness-­generating activity in the Midwest has sought to establish that

1.  Awareness poster from Ohio Attorney General’s Office, Human Trafficking Initiative (Ohio Attorney General’s Office n.d.)

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human trafficking happens, full stop. For example, the Human Trafficking Initiative of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office provides a range of awareness materials on its website. At the bottom of the page, viewers can find a set of three posters for public distribution. Each poster uses the same image of a globe, glowing blue and pictured as if the viewing audience is above in outer space. Ohio is marked by a red dot, identical to the image used to denote a destination in Google Maps. Even though this image remains consistent across all three posters, the text varies slightly, offering different slogans and conjuring different affective responses. The first in the series, pictured here, emphasizes a collaborative response to combat this social injustice, a “complex problem” in our communities that touches Ohio’s borders even if regular citizens cannot see it. Campaigns like this seek to establish that human trafficking does happen, even in “flyover states” where trafficking is not imagined to occur. Unlike the plot devices of movies like Taken, which feature young women from some vaguely realized urban city being sold into sexual slavery abroad (Haynes 2014), or the sensationalism of vigilante groups like Operation Underground Rescue, whose tales of “rescue” frame trafficking as a problem exclusive to “the developing world” (Marchman and Merlan 2021), campaigns like this place trafficking into an individual’s “corner of the world.” If trafficking can happen “even in Ohio,” viewers must “join the fight” that threatens their region, their community, and their neighbors. In addition to the sheer existence of human trafficking in the Midwest, the larger tropes that influence anti-­trafficking efforts also appear in this region. Specifically, the power of the carceral state and its mechanisms of detention and incarceration resonate here as they do across the United States (Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014; Musto 2016; Shih 2016) and internationally (Chuang 2014; Plambech 2014; Vanderhurst 2017). Human trafficking is almost universally framed as a social justice or humanitarian “problem” that can only be solved with punitive “solutions,” and this framework repeats itself in the Midwest. The structural violence of poverty, social stigmas, and regressive policies, though well known and articulated by many of the service providers I interviewed, is secondary to the perceived need for judgment, punishment, and accountability. In Policing Victimhood, I make two interventions in the scholarship on human trafficking. First, I explicitly connect the fields of critical trafficking studies and street-­level bureaucracy theory (SLBT) to better understand the role of service provision in both undercutting and perpetuating the anti-­trafficking status quo. While much research has analyzed the role of service providers in anti-­ trafficking efforts (Brennan 2014a; Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014; Lutnick 2016; Musto 2013; 2016; Peters 2015; Shih 2016), few scholars have used Michael Lipsky’s foundational framework to assess in-­depth how frontline workers effectively create anti-­trafficking policy “on the ground” through their encounters with



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trafficked persons (Anasti 2020a; 2020b; Hoag 2010; Leser, Pates, and Dölemeyer 2017; Loyens and Maesschalck 2014).4 Lipsky (2010) argues those individuals who work in client-­facing, direct service provision—­educators, law enforcement officers, case managers, lawyers, to name only a few—­“exercise wide discretion in decisions about citizens with whom they interact. Then, when taken in concert, their individual actions add up to agency behavior” (13). Anti-­trafficking legislation may be made in statehouses or congressional offices, and organizational mandates may be formulated after beta testing and board approval, but their real effects manifest in disparate ways at the person-­to-­person level. Second, this book takes seriously the need to think beyond carceral approaches to anti-­trafficking efforts. We are at a historical and social moment where robust conversations about decarceration and decriminalization are entering the mainstream discourse, turning away from carceral approaches that perpetuate violence and stigmatization (Albright and D’Adamo 2017). However, these transformative efforts coexist alongside problematic impulses to implement “End Demand” policies within individual organizations and larger legal jurisdictions (Berger 2012; Bernstein 2012; Majic 2017; Vanwesenbeeck 2017), which use the Nordic model popularized in Sweden to arrest those who purchase commercial sex, driving those who sell sex into increasingly fraught and dangerous environments (Vuolajärvi 2019). Taking up the call positioned within critical trafficking studies, critical criminology, and sex workers’ rights movements to eradicate the structural inequalities that produce marginalization and exploitation, I join their efforts to frame the carceral state itself as a harmful system. The fight to stop human trafficking requires the dismantling of policing and imprisonment as we currently know it, alongside poverty, housing insecurity, identity-­based stigmas, and restrictive migration policies that collectively induce precarity and vulnerability. Maintaining gender-­responsive or victim-­centered programs—­kinder, gentler mechanisms of carceral control (Musto 2019; Whalley and Hackett 2017)—­for trafficked persons simply perpetuate the misguided positioning of “the criminal justice system as the neoliberal gatekeeper of social services” (Heiner and Tyson 2017, 3). Frontline workers in the anti-­trafficking arena are key stakeholders in this reframing. As Leah Jacobs et al. (2020) powerfully write in the wake of the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, institutional commitments to punishment—­from explicit collaborations with police to more implicit forms of social control—­must be dismantled within the social work sector. These practices simply replicate systemic inequalities and harms in a smaller, frontline-­level context. While they write from the perspective of a single professional field, critiquing what they call “carceral social work,” their claims can apply more broadly to frontline workers engaged in work coded as “social justice” or “humanitarianism” (and thus problematically “neutral” [Dadusc and Mudu

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2022]), like anti-­trafficking service providers. Carceral social work involves “everyday practices of violence” (Jacobs et al. 2020, 40) masked as mundane bureaucratic routines. This deeply resonates in the space of mainstream anti-­trafficking service provision, which can involve similar client-­facing practices emphasizing surveillance and scrutiny, as well as judgments rooted less in an understanding of clients’ self-­expressed needs and more in a stigmatizing perception of their identity as deviant or transgressive. Importantly, this everyday violence is not inherently static or stable. Repeating these patterns over and over may make them appear crystallized, but service providers are in a unique place to push against these standardized routines. Even though their work is mediated by personal ethics, organizational standards, professional codes of conduct, and state or federal legislation, frontline workers have the agency to find wiggle room in the gaps and overlaps of these policies—­ and the discretion baked into their role (Lipsky 2010) can be a site of compliance with carceral norms or creative resistance. In the following sections, I will first summarize the two major theoretical frameworks that inform this research to better understand the roles of service providers and anti–­human trafficking efforts: critical trafficking studies and SLBT. If, as Laura Agustín (2007) persuasively argues, the processes of identifying potentially trafficked persons and directing them to resources can be conceptualized as a rescue industry, then these two theories allow us to interrogate how anti-­trafficking service provision is affected by stereotypical perceptions of victimhood and why frontline workers use their discretion in ways that may perpetuate a constrained understanding of justice, even with protection and care at the forefront of their stated missions. To further contextualize these theories, I place them in the history of feminist antiviolence projects that intentionally or inadvertently use the mechanisms of the carceral state. Anti–­human trafficking interventions share many commonalities with the patterns of punishment, management, and control found in state responses to domestic violence, rape, and sexual harassment (Thuma 2019). These carceral approaches are compounded even further by the long reach of the “white slave panics” at the turn of the twentieth century, which shaped the construction of human trafficking as a legal and moral phenomenon (Doezema 1999; Donovan 2006). I then briefly introduce my qualitative research methodology, taking particular care to explain why the Midwest is such an instructive case study to interrogate anti-­trafficking interventions. Finally, I provide an overview of each chapter of Policing Victimhood, which explores a different facet of anti-­trafficking frontline work from an anticarceral feminist, critical trafficking studies perspective. As well, my conclusion offers a set of creative frameworks for thinking about new practices to affirm victim-­survivors and address the root causes of exploitation



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and trafficking beyond the mechanisms of the carceral state. I do not seek to eradicate the role of frontline workers in this field, nor do I attempt to replace the punitive hand of the state with a caring yet still surveilling, managing hand (Bourdieu 1999). Rather, if street-­level bureaucrats have the discretionary power to create policy on the ground, they have the potential to subvert anti-­trafficking norms and shift away from policing client compliance to meeting individuals’ self-­expressed needs from a more holistic, less punitive perspective. Linking T h e o r e t ic a l Fr a m e s: From Traf f ic k in g t o S t r e e t -­ Level Bur e a uc r a c ie s Critical Trafficking Studies While anti–­human trafficking service provision is ostensibly about victim-­ survivors’ material conditions—­assisting individuals who experienced trauma and had their autonomy compromised—­these efforts are also shaped by broader assumptions about trafficking. Frontline workers encounter trafficked clients in a larger social climate where human trafficking is often sensationalized, stereotyped, and conceptualized differently across fields of scholarship, policy, and outreach (Chapkis 2003; Chuang 2014; Kinney 2006; Musto 2009). Thus, critical trafficking studies provides a necessary theoretical framework for understanding and pushing against the norms that frame service providers’ encounters with trafficked persons. Jennifer Musto (2013) coined the phrase critical trafficking studies to describe a field of scholarship that seeks to dismantle and disrupt the dominant frames used to define human trafficking. She writes, “What is ‘critical’ about critical trafficking studies is its theoretical consideration of that which is elided, concealed, and obfuscated in dominant scholarly treatment of the issue” (261). Critical trafficking scholars interrogate the focus on human trafficking as almost exclusively sex trafficking of young women with heightened attention to the violence enacted upon these victim-­survivors (Brennan 2014a; Chapkis 2003; Kempadoo 2015; Lutnick 2016; Skilbrei and Tveit 2008; Srikantiah 2007; Ticktin 2008), while labor trafficking and other forms of exploitation are left underrepresented or poorly defined (Brennan 2014b; Global Alliance against Traffic in Women 2019; Hafiz and Paarlberg 2017; Howard 2014). Critical trafficking studies demonstrates how commonly held definitions of human trafficking are shaped by cultural norms, societal hierarchies, political ideologies, and organizational missions. Even though legislation establishes terminology for human trafficking, these concepts are not deployed neutrally (Chapkis 2003; Kempadoo 2015). Frontline workers use a range of definitions when engaged in anti-­trafficking work that may utilize legislative understandings pulled directly from the text of a policy or moral perceptions rooted in dominant social constructions (Schwarz 2019).

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One major concern with the dominant anti-­trafficking discourse is its reliance on very descriptive retellings of violence and trauma, what Wendy Chapkis (2003) describes as the “gothic portrayals” of sex trafficking (930). These narratives detail extreme sexual violations in graphic, attention-­grabbing terms, creating an assumption that all forms of human trafficking look identically violent and traumatic. As Elizabeth Bernstein (2007) writes, with respect to anti–­sex trafficking and anti–­sex work activism, “Reputable accounts by sex-­worker activists and by researchers, including those based in the third world, suggest that the scenarios of overt abduction, treachery, and coercion that abolitionists depict are the exception rather than the norm” (131). Even if empirical data support a critical trafficking studies understanding of diverse, nuanced, contextual forms of exploitation (Weitzer 2007), the reductive, dominant narrative persists in the public discourse and influences frontline workers engaged in anti-­trafficking efforts. This frame also generates outrage and moral concern for a particular form of human trafficking—­what may be legally considered aggravated human trafficking for sexual exploitation—­“while leaving in place policies that continue to punish the majority of ‘ordinary’ abused and exploited migrants” (Chapkis 2003, 930). In emphasizing the most extreme exceptions to the rule, other, less salacious forms of trafficking slip through the cracks or get reinterpreted as criminalized acts of smuggling or undocumented immigration (Chuang 2014; FitzGerald 2010; Peters 2013). In addition to these tropes of extreme violence, dominant anti-­trafficking narratives mobilize race in stereotypical ways, perpetuating problematic connections between criminality and communities of color (Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012; Soss and Weaver 2017). Human trafficking is often simplistically framed as a problem between older men of color exploiting young women. These young, feminized women are parsed into two limiting constructions: the white American (Baker 2014; Small 2012) or the woman of color assumed to originate from beyond the United States (Kempadoo 2015; Shih 2021b; Srikantiah 2007). This binary framework restricts the discourse in such a way that victim-­survivors who cannot fit into these racialized categories are underrepresented and subsequently may not be able to access—­or be explicitly excluded from—­services and assistance (Howard 2014; Lutnick 2016). As well, critical trafficking studies critiques the role of law enforcement and criminal legal processes in the dominant human trafficking discourse. Annie Hill (2016) describes this as the master narrative of trafficking: a singular focus on using carceral apparatuses, such as law enforcement raids and sting operations, for identifying and rescuing young female victim-­survivors of sex trafficking. This narrative “tell[s] a moral story that excites a desire to resolve a conflict between good and evil by establishing audience expectations that the police will stop the traffickers and save the girl(s)” (Hill 2016, 41). The master narrative is, at its core,



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a traditional “good guys versus bad guys” tale, reinterpreted through the lens of trafficking. In many cases, the assumption of trafficking is enough to validate deploying this narrative, leading to a continued, often harmful conflation of sex work and sex trafficking.5 This reliance on normative tropes—­the police officer as savior, the ostensibly trafficked sex worker in need of rescue—­masks the real violence, disruption, and trauma that can come from these criminal legal interventions (Bernstein 2012; D’Adamo 2016; Grant 2014; 2019; Schwarz, Kennedy, and Britton 2017). Hill (2016) discusses how this approach disproportionately targets sex workers—­some of whom are migrants at risk of deportation—­who are assumed to be victims of exploitation and trafficking. When their status as sex workers is revealed, they are immediately categorized as criminal actors and subject to the punitive force of the carceral state. This example is not designed to risk equating sex work with sex trafficking but to highlight the damages of this conflation beyond the rhetoric of commercial sex. As Hill (2016) continues, “Sex workers fear raids, experience trauma during raids and endure myriad harms in the aftermath of raids, which can include interrogation, detention, prosecution and deportation” (42). Similarly, Musto’s (2013) critique of the “detention to prosecution pipeline” for youth suspected of being DMST victim-­survivors reconsiders the common practice of arresting and detaining youth engaged in survival sex, exchanging sex to meet basic needs like shelter, food, and other fundamentals. State interventions, particularly interventions rooted in the carceral power of law enforcement, can carry consequences, even if the ultimate goal fits into the master narrative’s guiding concepts of saving and rescuing. Street-­Level Bureaucracy Theory Service providers engaged in anti-­trafficking work must use their own judgments—­informed by organizational practices, individual moral codes, and the aforementioned dominant human trafficking discourse—­to determine whether or not they are engaging with a trafficked person. These judgments may be revised with the addition of new information or new layers of interpersonal contact, but they also influence the initial and ongoing dynamics between frontline workers and their clients. SLBT provides a framework for understanding these processes with respect to direct, frontline engagement with clients. I employ Steven Maynard-­Moody and Shannon Portillo’s (2010) formulation of street-­level bureaucracy as theory for its “coherent set of observations and principles that have led to a wide range of empirical studies and have been confirmed and generalized” (254). SLBT interrogates the role of service providers in disseminating resources, engaging with clients, and mobilizing policy at the frontlines. Lipsky (2010) defines street-­level bureaucrats as “public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial

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discretion in the execution of their work” (3). These workers come from a range of sectors, from law enforcement to education and health care, but are all intimately engaged with clients in direct, personal engagement. Conversely, managers and administrators do not generally have the same interpersonal encounters with citizens, as they are largely more distanced from direct work, responsible for overseeing daily operations, filing paperwork, or interacting with higher-­level organizational stakeholders. One of the most critical contributions of SLBT is the concept of discretion. Lipsky (2010) defines discretion as frontline workers’ freedom “in determining the nature, amount, and quality of benefits and sanctions provided by their agencies” (13). Later scholars of SLBT have offered their own nuances on discretion. For example, Martha S. Feldman (1992) describes it as “the legitimate right to make choices based on one’s authoritative assessment of a situation” (164). Vincent Dubois (2014) sees discretion as “the leeway of officials in the enforcement of rules or implementation of programs” (39). Contrary to the negative connotations of bureaucracy, frontline workers are not procedurally, robotically disseminating or withholding services. Rather, they are actively making meaning of their work, the clients they encounter, and their own identity as a frontline worker through the tools at their disposal. These discretionary practices accumulate to constitute organizational policy (Lipsky 2010). Importantly, discretion is not reckless or random—­it involves “decision-­ making within a structure of rules” (Feldman 1992, 164). Additionally, its value can change on a case-­by-­case basis. Evelyn Z. Brodkin (1997) states, “Discretion is axiomatically neither good nor bad but contingent on contextual conditions” (4). If a frontline worker is pressed for time, faced with limited resources, or simply finds a client’s appeals unconvincing, their discretionary latitude may facilitate a negative response for a client. This response could shift toward a positive result if one of these factors changed, such as an extra thirty minutes to spend on a client’s case. Street-­level bureaucrats use their knowledge of rules and procedures in tandem with their discretionary practices—­the stereotypes they have accumulated about their client base; the scripts they have acquired through years of service; the moral codes built into their organizational infrastructure or inherent to their own belief systems; the in-­person social cues provided by their client—­to understand their clients and subsequently deliver services. Discretion is inherent to frontline work, given the need for timely judgments in the face of overwhelming caseloads and limited budgets, so managerial attempts to restrict these decision-­making practices can only displace it. Steven Maynard-­Moody and Michael Musheno (2003) describe discretion as putty, “squeezed by oversight and rules but never eliminated” (10). Eliminating discretion in one facet of work only displaces it to another sector or form of decision-­making.



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In more recent scholarship on SLBT, discretion has been pushed and reframed as a more agentic process of meaning making. For example, Maynard-­ Moody and Musheno (2012) use the term “agency” in their analysis of frontline workers’ decisions on justice and equity. This subtle shift aides in “depicting workers as state centered and culture centered in rendering their judgments” (S18). In this formulation, judgments are contingent on not simply the discretionary practices of frontline work contained to that particular organization but also their contextual knowledge of social scripts and positioning that come from interacting with the world at large. Accordingly, they have a degree of latitude in their judgments outside of the standards set by their workplace or organizational standards, so long as the expressions of this latitude do not transgress “specific, juridical bounds” or result in a “visible negative result” (Maynard-­Moody and Musheno 2012, S18). As Maynard-­Moody and Musheno (2012) explain further, “Thus, expressions of street-­level agency most frequently conserve established cultural beliefs about worthy and unworthy, or safe and unsafe, people” (S21). These beliefs may not be explicitly part of any organizational framework or policy structure, but because of agency, street-­ level bureaucrats may still use cultural norms to make judgments within the parameters of their work. Street-­Level Bureaucracies in Anti–­Human Trafficking Efforts Though the literature directly connecting human trafficking to frontline work using SLBT is sparse (Anasti 2020a; 2020b; Hoag 2010; Leser, Pates, and Dölemeyer 2017; Loyens and Maesschalck 2014), critical trafficking studies and SLBT are incredibly compatible. First, anti-­trafficking service provision is a responsibility primarily held by traditional frontline workers. Lipsky (2010) identifies the following professions as street-­level bureaucrats: “Teachers, police officers and other law enforcement personnel, social workers, judges, public lawyers and other court officers, health workers, and many other public employees who grant access to government programs and provide services within them” (3). Subsequent scholarship within SLBT has explored the workplace roles of police officers (Maynard-­Moody and Musheno 2003; 2012; Epp, Maynard-­Moody, and Haider-­Markel 2014), social service providers (Harrits and Møller 2014; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011), and medical providers (Chiarello 2015; Lara-­Millán 2014). Additionally, many scholars have addressed the role of frontline work within sectors that relate to human trafficking, such as domestic violence advocacy (Hetling 2011; Lindhorst and Padgett 2005), immigration advocacy (Graham 2002; Payan 2012), and public health (Garrow and Grusky 2012; McCann 2009). Human trafficking is a natural fit alongside SLBT’s focus on service providers’ engagement with clients facing both mundane, monotonous stressors and extreme situations, violence, trauma, or exploitation.

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Within scholarship on human trafficking, street-­level bureaucrats are well-­ documented as direct service providers for exploited or trafficked persons, particularly those in law enforcement (Bernstein 2007; Farrell et al. 2016; Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014; Hill 2016; Peters 2013) and medical sectors (Baldwin et al. 2011; Lederer and Wetzel 2014; Miller et al. 2007; Patel, Ahn, and Burke 2010; Stoklosa et al. 2017). Social service providers also play a critical role (Brennan 2014a; Musto 2008; Shih 2016), and many work in collaborative frameworks with members of other street-­level bureaucracies (Musto 2010; 2016). While these projects engage the role of frontline workers—­and often talk about discretion and judgments, two key components of SLBT—­they do not use SLBT explicitly to analyze their anti-­trafficking efforts. SLBT matters to critical analyses of anti-­trafficking work because of the continued reliance on frontline workers to be first responders in cases of exploitation and trafficking. Service providers may be trained and prepared to encounter a “typical” client—­or even a “difficult” client—­but they may not have received adequate or appropriate knowledge about folding the needs of trafficked persons into their caseloads. They may be using inconsistent definitions of trafficking that exclude certain forms of violence or marginalize specific populations based on perceived identity or demographics. If these street-­level bureaucrats have received appropriate training and know how to ethically identify trafficked persons, they could be unable to fully follow through on providing assistance because of time and resource constraints. Particularly with the fraught terrain of anti-­trafficking work—­the competing organizational prioritizes and trafficking-­specific ideological orientations—­it is important to think about questions of discretion, worker agency, and normative judgments with respect to anti-­trafficking work. SLBT opens space for the engagement of these questions. Frontline workers are theorized as both improvisational pragmatists playing within a set of rules (Maynard-­Moody and Musheno 2003) and agents shaped by cultural norms as well as organizational practices (Maynard-­Moody and Musheno 2012). At the same time, critical trafficking studies encourages an engagement with the implicit meanings that undergird policy and practice (Musto 2013), those dueling sites of improvisation and norm-­ abidance identified by Maynard-­Moody and Musheno. Thus, service providers may be working within the parameters of limited policy guidance that fails to capture trafficked persons’ lived experiences; responding to trafficked clients based on their own perceptions of trafficking shaped by dominant discourses; or perhaps more authentically, dealing with some muddled blend of the two. And because anti-­trafficking interventions carry such affective resonance—­like broader humanitarian projects, they are framed as “a work of care” divorced from larger systems of violence that created the conditions for that care to be required in the first place (Dadusc and Mudu 2022, 1211)—­the discretionary violence



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that may emerge from this messy process is often masked or downplayed as an unfortunate part of serving the greater good. Feminist In t e r ve n t io n s a n d the Carc e r a l S t a t e Anti–­human trafficking policy and practice in the United States is deeply influenced by modern, mainstream feminist and women’s groups using punitive measures of the state to address interpersonal violence. Marie Gottschalk (2008) summarizes the historical precedent of feminist reforms becoming ingratiated into state-­affiliated, “stridently conservative” projects of control from the nineteenth century onward: “[The contemporary women’s movement’s] commitment to greater gender equality by reducing rape and domestic violence got funneled through a specific political and institutional context and was transformed in the process. The result was a more punitive environment that contributed to the construction of a carceral state that warehouses a disproportionate number of blacks and other minorities (and a rapidly increasing number of women)” (241). By turning to institutions and government systems, gender equity and violence against women became wrapped up in larger projects of arresting perpetrators, identifying victim-­survivors through surveillance, and managing those identified through bureaucratic mechanisms (Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012; Kandaswamy 2010; Richie 2000; Spade 2013; Thuma 2019). As Wendy Brown (1992) writes, these institutional bodies may replicate larger, gendered power imbalances in their efforts to ameliorate violence against women: “Beneath a thin exterior of transformed/reformed gender identity and concern for women, the state bears all the familiar elements of male dominance” (28). Anti-­rape and anti–­domestic violence advocacies are considered the cornerstone of contemporary antiviolence against women movements within the United States, with the 1994 passage of the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) serving as the landmark legislative victory for feminist advocates. VAWA created the federal office on Violence against Women, increased legal penalties against domestic violence, and offered funding to support shelter services and law enforcement. Priya Kandaswamy (2010) explains that, through this funding and programmatic implementation, VAWA established “domestic violence not just as a problem of national significance but also as one that could be understood within the nationalist language of individual responsibility, family values, and crime control” (258). Domestic violence, in this context, is a problem that law enforcement can identify, prosecutors can take to court, and case managers can buffer against through mandated therapy, housing, and job training programs. However, not all antiviolence advocates responded affirmatively to VAWA’s law-­and-­order approach. As Emily L. Thuma (2019) carefully articulates, under the auspices of protecting women from interpersonal violence, VAWA

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Policing Victimhood

“simultaneously authorized the expansion of institutional violence against the nation-­state’s racial and economic others” (7). Those victim-­survivors whose identities exist outside of normative citizenship—­gender nonconforming, queer, undocumented, poor, of color—­were now marked for increased justice involvement. Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (2012) identifies contention surrounding VAWA’s “embrace of mandatory arrest policies along with federal support to encourage local police departments to process domestic assault complaints aggressively,” responses that some advocates challenged for promoting a pro-­policing stance that “would likely result in higher fatalities and an increase in arrests for women of color” (1452–­1453). One major effect of these feminist interventions was the positioning of violence as a universalized experience: the “it can happen to anyone” frame. This construction was not implemented maliciously but rather, as Beth E. Richie (2000) writes, as “part of a strategic attempt by early activists to avoid individualizing the problem of domestic and sexual violence, to focus on the social dimensions of the problem of gender violence, and to resist the stigmatization of race and class commonly associated with mainstream responses to social problems” (1134). However, in their attempts to demonstrate the universality of violence across race, class, faith, and educational attainment, feminist activists inadvertently placed white women’s interests at the forefront of the movement (Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012; Kandaswamy 2010). Richie (2000) asserts that “when the national dialogue on violence against women became legitimized and institutionalized, the notion that ‘It could happen to anyone’ meant that ‘It could happen to those in power’” (1135). In short, though this universalization was an attempt against individualization, the singular figure of the white female victim-­survivor emerged at the center of an antiviolence agenda with increasingly punitive applications. This approach also divorces violence from the structures in which it emerges, reframing violence against women as a specific problem faced by unique women as opposed to an effect of systemic oppression and inequality. Kandaswamy (2010) argues the “increasing emphasis on criminalization redefined domestic violence as an individual crime rather than as a symptom of patriarchal oppression.” Shifting away from a systemic analysis of violence facilitates the use of law enforcement practices to address crimes on a case-­by-­case basis, “replacing an analysis of domestic violence as a political problem with the idea that perpetrators were criminals and women innocent victims in need of protection” (261). By casting rape and assault as an issue contained to identifiable victims and their perpetrators, carceral solutions focused on deterrence via arrests and prosecution seem logically inevitable—­and the systemic effects of racism, classism, and patriarchal domination remain unquestioned and left to proliferate. The reliance on the state to be the arbiter of justice and punishment introduces a larger concern with the power of these regulatory mechanisms over the



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lives of women identified as victim-­survivors. According to Kristin Bumiller (2008), “Becoming a ‘battered woman’  [.  .  .] means being subject to official regulations of welfare, housing policies, and courts and experiencing the intense informal authority of counselors, program managers, and staffs of social service agencies” (130). In order to gain access to particular resources, women who have experienced the violence of rape, sexual assault, or abuse may have to comply with law enforcement processes or work alongside a case manager. For example, Kandaswamy (2010) describes the role of the shelter system—­a necessity for women who may face housing insecurity when leaving an abusive partner—­to manage women’s productivity within capitalism: “Increasingly, the goal of shelters has moved beyond providing safety for battered women and toward reintegrating battered women into society as good citizens and workers through programs such as job training and life skills classes, eerily echoing welfare reform’s objective of moving recipients from welfare to work” (260). In the shift away from a structural understanding of violence, women are considered successful survivors when they have complied with administrative powers and individually relearned how “to protect themselves from future violence as well as to seek help from professionals who can guide them through the process of psychological recovery” (Bumiller 2008, 64)—­even when the systemic factors that perpetuate violence against women remain in place. This is not to say that those on the receiving end of these mechanisms do not understand the ways they too are subjected to surveillance and regulation. For some, state interference may be more livable than the trauma they experienced interpersonally. As Brown (1992) explains, “Given a choice between rationalized, procedural un-­freedom, on one hand, and arbitrary deprivation, discrimination, and violence, on the other, some, perhaps even most, women might opt to inhabit a bureaucratized domain over a ‘state of nature’ suffused with male dominance” (10). They may feel more equipped to handle or exercise resistance to the more routinized forms of bureaucratic control, such as a case manager who requires them to enroll in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) or General Educational Development (GED) courses. Additionally, some openly recognize that surveillance and regulation are part of the bargain that comes from negotiating with the state for resources and legibility. Bumiller (2008) provides multiple anecdotes from women involved in domestic violence programs who assert their agency within these systems: “Yet in all situations women are not ‘fooled’ by the rhetoric of the helping professions; they understand their contact with the system as part of their process of victimization. They are also acutely aware that in order to make gains within that system it is mandatory that they assume the role of a victim and follow the designated path to recovery” (129–­130). These women offer a complex

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Policing Victimhood

articulation of their own agency within the context of service provision. They are not surprised by the level of control their case managers assert over the direction of their involvement in anti–­domestic violence programming, especially those victim-­survivors who had previously engaged with other social service sectors, like welfare or child protective services. They comply with organizational practices in ways that fit with concepts of appropriate victimhood to access the resources that are directly tied to moving through these domestic violence programs, like secure shelter. Critiq uing Ca r c e r a l S y st e m s First, it is necessary to note not all feminist or women’s groups have historically aligned with carceral systems as gender justice. Both Catherine O. Jacquet (2019) and Emily L. Thuma (2019) have thoughtfully traced the counternarratives of Second Wave–­era feminist activism that positioned “a sexist and white supremacist legal system” as “ultimately counterintuitive to the goals of liberation” (Jacquet 2019, 6) and “explicitly challenged criminalization and explored nonstatist approaches” (Thuma 2019, 7). While the mainstream feminist position—­a feminism that “sees increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women” (Law 2014, n.p.)—­may be more prominent and accessible in public discourse, a resistant strain of feminism has always and continues to problematize the necessity of the state interfering in social justice concerns. Engaging with the state through carcerally influenced modes of justice means engaging with systems that support social structures that disempower marginalized people and communities. For example, Andrew Dilts (2017) problematizes the effects of justice garnered from the criminal legal system: “The mode of justice offered by the white supremacist and hetero-­patriarchal state is focused on verdicts, outcomes, states of affairs, and distributions as its measures of success. Even those theories of justice that focus on procedure and processes, especially in criminal proceedings, nevertheless point to stable outcomes as benchmarks of evaluation, and in doing so, insist that justice is something that can be ‘served’” (190). If the state is itself an oppressive force, then these quantitative processes inherently—­and potentially inadvertently—­also provide a measure of validation for the racism and heterosexism that fuels crime control in the United States. Dean Spade (2013) also draws attention to the ways that “punishment-­based solutions [. . .] are often inaccessible to victims of violence, who may be afraid to call the police because they, their family, or their community are more likely to be harmed by the police than helped” (1037–­1038). Police officers are not neutral community members, especially for those who face increased surveillance and violence when engaging with the law enforcement sector, and thus cannot be positioned as a solution across all spaces and contexts.



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Additionally, carceral practices often mobilize a conceptualization of identity—­both of victims and perpetrators—­reliant upon larger stereotypes of victimhood and criminality. For example, in her discussion of how feminist activists constructed battered women who could be served under VAWA, Kandaswamy (2010) explains, “To make the law compassionate toward women who were vulnerable to abuse without changing its fundamental principles, however, these advocates had to constitute domestic violence victims as an exceptional category of deserving women that the state was obligated to protect” (266). Deservingness as a category is tied to larger norms of respectability connected to race and class (Soss 2005; Crenshaw 2012). With respect to antiviolence projects, a deserving victim is an innocent victim, and innocence is often afforded to white women more generously than their counterparts of color. Bumiller (2008) writes that “when victims are from criminalized communities (due to poverty, immigrant status, ethnicity, or race) their status as a victim may in many cases become the functional equivalent of being a perpetrator in the eyes of the law” (14). Because law enforcement approaches to antiviolence efforts require a victim and a criminal in order to be legible within its framework, those whose identities trouble the notion of ideal victimhood—­because, perhaps, they are undocumented or receiving government assistance—­find their claims to justice complicated or even negated. Perpetrators are almost exclusively generalized as men of color (Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012), contributing to their stigmatization and serving to justify the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated men of color (Alexander 2010). Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver (2017) explain that “as people and places coded as black or brown come to signify criminality, criminal stigma becomes a wellspring of racial stigma that envelops individuals regardless of their actual transgressions or adherence to rules” (30.17). Men of color are simply assumed to be criminal actors, regardless of the lived experiences of violence that contradict this social construction. As Bumiller (2008) describes, in presenting the role of the media in larger narratives of sexual violence, “Reports of the most horrific cases generate excessive fears among women about the potential threat of violence from dangerous (usually dark-­skinned) strangers. Yet these fears do not conform to the social realities of American life, where women are much more likely to encounter sexual violence from known perpetrators” (19). More women face violence at the hands of an intimate partner, such as a significant other or family member, yet the tropes of criminality perpetuate a “stranger danger” myth with powerful racial overtones. With respect to anti-­trafficking efforts, this myth echoes the pernicious moral panic of racialized trafficking and exploitation in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

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Policing Victimhood

H istories of Ca r c e r a l A n t i–­H um a n T raffic king I n t e r ve n t io n s “White Slave Panics” At the turn of the twentieth century, anti–­human trafficking efforts appeared across the United States and Europe under the guise of “white slavery.” Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-­Yehuda (2009) describe the white slavery panic within the United States as a myth that combined norms of gender, class, and national identity: “Concern about the ‘white slave traffic’ expressed the early twentieth-­century fear that naïve, vulnerable, young women from rural areas and small towns could visit cities and get snatched up and forced onto the street by evil, cunning ‘Orientals.’ In the white slavery scenario, the victim was always a Caucasian and her victimizer, usually a Chinese immigrant. [. . .] This panic also commonly entailed the fear of engulfment of the American wage earner by Asian ‘Yellow Peril’ ‘hordes,’ and represented an assertion of the cultural and racial superiority of native-­born Anglo-­Saxons over Asians” (17). In this stereotypical narrative, the individual exploitation of innocent white women at the hands of male immigrants of color was extrapolated to larger concerns of demographic shifts, expanded citizenship, racial integration, and women’s increased mobility and participation in the public labor force (Donovan 2006; Keire 2001; Soderlund 2005; 2013). Jo Doezema (1999) is careful to point out that white slavery was not a monolithic term but acknowledges one of the core tenets of the myth: “‘White slavery’ came to mean the procurement, by force, deceit, or drugs, of a white woman or girl against her will, for prostitution” (25). Anti–­human trafficking efforts are unquestioningly enmeshed with carceral logics. During the white slavery panic, policies that perpetuated the regulation and punishment of certain behaviors were seen as the primary points for anti-­ trafficking interventions (Boris and Berg 2014; Diffee 2005; Doezema 1999; Pliley 2014). As Gottschalk (2008) writes of domestic anti–­white slavery efforts, “The moral crusades over such issues as ‘white slavery’ [. . .] that regularly convulsed the country were a backhanded way of building the criminal justice apparatus by fits and starts” (240). Formal anti–­white slavery practices involved police surveillance, sting operations, arrests, court hearings, and criminal statutes and legislation. While these were nominally implemented to stop the exploitation of women, its effects were carceral and regulatory of deviant female behavior (Bern­ stein 2007). For example, the 1910 Mann Act, ostensibly designed to prohibit the movement of “white slaves” across state lines, was often mobilized to arrest sex workers (Bernstein 2007; Doezema 1999; Pliley 2014). Brian Donovan and Tori Barnes-­Brus (2011) similarly describe how anti-­vice policing practices under penal codes to punish “pimps and procurers” more frequently identified and charged women engaged in commercial sex.



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Additionally, as Doezema (1999) explains, the racial implications of the white slavery panics served to socially construct men of color as traffickers and perpetrators, drawing connections between race and criminality that persist today: “The ‘white slave’ had as her necessary opposite the ‘non-­white slaver.’ ‘Non-­whiteness’ was usually literally represented, but also figuratively, with ‘otherness’ from the social group conducting the campaign serving as a marker of ‘non-­whiteness.’ The very name ‘white slavery’ is racist, implying as it does that slavery of white women was of a different, and worse, sort than ‘black’ slavery” (30). Immigrants and members of minority communities—­such as Chinese, Black, and Jewish men—­were positioned as the responsible parties for this exploitation (Bristow 1982; Doezema 1999; Goode and Ben-­Yehuda 2009). Thus, anti–­white slavery efforts were regulatory not only for the white women whose deviant behavior was monitored but also for men of color whose race marked them as othered, another node in a system of parallel antiviolence projects endorsed by temperance movements and suffragists (Soderlund 2013). The fragility of white women’s safety could only be maintained through legal and extralegal force, encapsulating everything from activist rhetoric to shut down Black-­owned drinking establishments to the terrorism of white lynch mobs targeting those knowingly mischaracterized as sexual predators (Donovan 2006) and the disproportionate arrests of Black men as traffickers under the Mann Act (Soderlund 2013). Post-­2000 Anti-­trafficking Policy and Practice In the historical presentation of United States–­based anti-­trafficking efforts, the passage of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) is credited as a major turning point in the modern anti-­trafficking movement. The TVPA is considered the foundational piece of domestic anti-­trafficking legislation, though it is not without necessary critique (Gallagher 2017; Merry 2016). As Carrie N. Baker (2013) explains, the TVPA emphasizes a punitive, carceral approach: “The order of the three Ps reflects the priorities of the Act. The focus and the vast majority of the Act’s funding is directed toward criminalization, prosecution, and punishment” (17). Janie A. Chuang (2014) argues this framing reflects the growing rhetorical shift to call trafficking “modern-­day slavery,” language seen within the TVPA and discourse surrounding its implementation: “Slavery imagery entrenches a long-­standing impulse to distill the complex phenomenon of trafficking into a simple narrative of a crime perpetrated by evil, often foreign, criminal organizations and individuals, best solved through aggressive investigation and prosecution, coupled with policing of the border” (636). A punishment-­centered (or punishment-­exclusive) approach that prioritizes prosecution divorces human trafficking from the structural, economic inequalities that perpetuate vulnerabilities. As Jennifer Suchland (2015) explains, “In casting human trafficking as an aberration from local and global economies, the

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Policing Victimhood

juridical definition of the victim of trafficking sets the limits of acceptable precarity for the losers of globalization as well” (7). Some forms of exploitation may never be considered exploitative, especially if they are necessary processes for the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism. Chapkis (2003) calls these the “mundane” harms that are part of the economic violence faced by marginalized populations (here, migrant laborers) under current domestic market conditions. If human trafficking is rhetorically positioned as a criminal act that follows specific guidelines, echoing Hill’s (2016) master narrative—­exploitation of an individual by an easily identified perpetrator or network of bad actors—­then it makes unpleasant sense to see these reactive prosecutorial approaches codified into law instead of preventive or structural solutions. Carceral Feminism and Carceral Protectionism In addition to the connections embedded in policy, the history of using punitive measures of the state to address interpersonal violence has deeply influenced anti-­trafficking activist priorities. Mimi E. Kim (2014) writes, “The anti-­ trafficking movement has succeeded even more swiftly than preceding anti-­rape and anti-­domestic violence movements” in turning to carceral approaches to ending injustice (55), making it one link in a long chain of humanitarian, social justice “problems” that seem to require criminal legal “solutions.” As Bernstein (2007; 2010; 2012; 2018) has carefully addressed, domestic anti-­trafficking efforts have united more politically progressive feminist activists with evangelical groups and conservative politicians under the shared goals of legislating—­here, prosecuting and punishing—­sex work and sex trafficking out of existence. She defines this feminist impulse as carceral feminism: “The commitment of abolitionist feminist activists to a law and order agenda and [. . .] a drift from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals” (2007, 143), a “commitment to heteronormative family values, crime control, and the putative rescue and restoration of victims” (2010, 57) to address human trafficking. Feminist advocates are deeply embedded in anti-­trafficking efforts both domestically and abroad, but those who agitate for this law-­and-­ order approach (Bernstein 2007) are using often-­violent mechanisms of the state (Law 2014)—­arrests, detention, punishment-­centered legislation—­to achieve their goals of ending exploitation. Building upon Bernstein’s framework, Musto (2010) created the concept of carceral protectionism, “a specific brand of anti-­trafficking protection—­one which melds the logics of law enforcement and human rights and where social justice for trafficked persons is imagined along interconnected, co-­constitutive humanitarian, carceral and professional pathways” (385). In attempts to create holistic, uninterrupted care for identified victim-­survivors of trafficking, law enforcement agents and social service providers are increasingly working in



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partnerships as opposed to siloed anti-­trafficking efforts. However, Musto (2010) argues that this multisector approach to human trafficking hinges on a continued centering of criminal legal practices, where “trafficked persons’ protection is deployed to support rather than upend the criminal justice system” (387). As I describe in detail in chapter 1, upon identification, trafficked persons are subject to a host of interventions, such as therapeutic services or case management, but this initial identification often depends on whether an individual is legible as a trafficked person from a law enforcement perspective. If they are interpreted as a sex worker or undocumented person6—­criminalized positions in the United States—­they may not be routed through systems of carceral protectionism and instead face incarceration, detention, or deportation. This recalls the discretionary violence of anti-­trafficking service provision, shaped by some configuration of rule playing and agential meaning making (Maynard-­Moody and Musheno 2003; 2012). Frontline workers may not be explicitly upholding the criminal legal system in their efforts—­in fact, they may be skeptical or outright hostile to shifting their care of victim-­survivors to something more punitive—­but the policies that shape their work and the individual perspectives they hold can make carcerality feel like an inevitable outcome. Especially in the face of limited resources, the eternal struggle of street-­level bureaucracies (Lipsky 2010), the criminal legal system might be the best-­resourced member of these partnerships. Service providers seeking to circumvent carceral protectionism may have no other alternative (or may not be able to conceptualize alternatives, given the dismissal of different forms of justice as utopian [Levine and Meiners 2020]) for the resources they deem central to anti-­trafficking service provision, like beds in secured, vetted spaces or connections to legal resources. One major effect of carceral logic upon anti-­trafficking efforts is the rhetorical framing of law enforcement—­or the range of service providers working in tandem with them—­as operating from an unquestionably charitable motive, even when the intent behind their acts may be more complex. Bernstein (2012) argues this framing erases the power of structures that perpetuate violence and exploitation in favor of positioning individual officers against criminal perpetrators: “The masculinist institutions of big business, the state, and the police are reconfigured as allies and saviors, rather than the enemies of migrant sex workers, and the responsibility for trafficking is shifted from structural factors and dominant institutions onto individual (often racially coded) criminal men” (244–­245). The efforts of law enforcement officers to rescue exploited women from singular bad actors are taken at face value, while the long-­term consequences of arrests and deportation—­and the structural violence of poverty and migration control that fuel this cycle—­are downplayed, leaving untouched the public image of heroic policing. In contrast to state actors, who are often described as agential figures in the act of rescue, trafficked persons are often positioned as passive victims—­not

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Policing Victimhood

survivors—­in need of saving. For example, Jayashri Srikantiah (2007) deconstructs the trope of the iconic victim: “(1) The victim is a woman or girl trafficked for sex; (2) law enforcement assesses her to be a good witness; (3) she cooperates fully with law enforcement investigations; and (4) she is rescued instead of escaping from the trafficking enterprise. These attributes, taken together, contemplate a victim of sex trafficking who passively waits for rescue by law enforcement, and upon rescue, presents herself as a good witness who cooperates with all law enforcement requests” (187). Within the iconic victim trope, survivors can only exercise their agency during a criminal legal investigation and prosecution process and only if they can provide a narrative that conforms fully to the social constructions of a victim who is wholly blameless. Samantha Majic (2014) has described this as the “victim-­criminal” binary, which establishes limited frameworks for how individuals’ actions, such as engaging in commercial sex, are morally construed to be entirely exploitative or entirely agentive. While it is important to note that Srikantiah (2007) and Majic (2014) are describing stereotypical frameworks, not the step-­by-­step practices of classifying trafficked persons, these norms of victimhood do affect both victim-­survivors’ experiences and service providers’ perceptions. As addressed earlier, these notions are embedded within the criminal legal system writ large (Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012; Soss and Weaver 2017) and may impact whether a trafficked person’s case gets selected to go to trial, their T visa application gets processed, or a perpetrator is constrained by the parameters of a protective order. Chapkis (2003) argues these stereotypes can also be upheld in anti-­trafficking policies: “Protections offered to the innocent help to reinforce the suggestion that the punishments meted out to the ‘guilty’ are justified” (925). Trafficked persons may not be identified as “innocent” because their identity complicates their status as a victim, and conversely, those labeled “guilty” may also have faced victimization through similar systems of violence and exploitation (Bernstein 2012; Marcus et al. 2014). In particular, race, gender, sexual orientation, and citizenship status complicate a person’s ability to be read into the role of iconic victimhood. Stereotypical depictions of human trafficking rely on a binary framework that shows young women in danger of being exploited by men of color (Baker 2014; Small 2012), harkening back to the racial implications of the white slavery panic (Doezema 1999; Goode and Ben-­Yehuda 2009) that construct perpetrators as racial or ethnic others. Male, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming victim-­survivors—­ as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other (LGBTQ+) victim-­survivors—­are often underrepresented in the dominant trafficking narrative, even though research shows these populations face a range of exploitation within the context of sex and labor trafficking (Howard 2014; Lutnick 2016). Additionally, undocumented victim-­survivors of trafficking are in a particularly precarious position—­while the TVPA creates the space for T visas, special paths



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to citizenship for identified victim-­survivors, their initial irregular migration into the United States may lead to their exclusive classification as a criminal or their unwillingness to disclose their trafficking for fear of deportation (Berg 2015; Chapkis 2003; Kinney 2006; Plambech 2014). With respect to victim-­survivors, race plays a complicated role: they may be white women in jeopardy (Baker 2014; Small 2012), at-­risk women of color “over there” (Kempadoo 2015), or female immigrants assumed to be from developing nations (Shih 2021b). Srikantiah (2007) unpacks the mythic construction of women of color as inherently vulnerable to exploitation: “Iconic victims originate from cultures in Asia, Latin America, or Africa stereotyped as suppressing the individuality of women and girls and rendering them simple prey for manipulation by clever traffickers. The iconic victim concept is thus consistent with stereotypes of foreign women and women of color as meek, helpless, and belonging to repressive male dominant cultures” (201–­202). This problematic conception of race and national identity perpetuates the stereotypical norm that trafficking victims of color do not occupy positions of agency. Kamala Kempadoo (2015) goes further to articulate the connections between dominant anti-­trafficking stereotypes and white supremacist-­inflected activist efforts, explaining that “the non-­Western/migrant/sex working ‘victim’ becomes the ground for competing abolitionist, feminist, and humanitarian claims pushed aside by not only the depoliticized neoliberal master narratives but also the racialized, neoimperialist gaze” (18). She argues the current framings of human trafficking as an issue abroad to be solved by white Westerners facilitate the denigration of people of color while lauding and morally elevating white rescuers. M ethodol o g ic a l a n d T e xt ua l F r a m i ngs For this project, I set out to understand how service providers do the actual work of anti–­human trafficking work in two midwestern states. I was and continue to be particularly interested in the practical aspects of identifying and engaging with clients, managing caseloads, and determining which individuals to prioritize and which to exclude from service provision (Baldwin et al. 2011; Brennan 2014a; Farrell et al. 2016; Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014; Miller et al. 2007). Anti–­human trafficking efforts sometimes explicitly and often implicitly perpetuate a particular understanding of what it means to be trafficked, who can be considered a victim, and conversely, who is cast aside as a criminal actor (Chapkis 2003; Majic 2014; Plambech 2014; Srikantiah 2007). As such, I wanted to uncover the stereotypes and norms that undergird service provision for trafficked persons in the Midwest, as these perceptions of identity can serve as a gatekeeping tool of sorts. When faced with a client whose experiences do not align with the dominant, stereotypical image of human trafficking, street-­level bureaucrats can take the effort to ask more questions and dig deeper into their clients’

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Policing Victimhood

experiences—­or, if they do not have the time, money, or other resources, may go with their initial judgments of how trafficking manifests, potentially leaving a trafficked client without recourse or assistance. In each of the states I studied,7 human trafficking has become a bipartisan priority issue through a range of legislative endeavors, task force projects, nonprofit agendas, and public awareness campaigns. Simultaneously, the social service sectors in these states have been bombarded with varying degrees of defunding practices, particularly in the education and foster care systems. Given this interplay between increasing caseloads of trafficked persons and decreasing material supports for clients, I found these geographic regions to be incredibly important sites to host a case study and build on scholarship that acknowledges the role of place in policy and equity issues (Lewis and Ramakrishnan 2007; Stellern and Phipps 2012; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). This focus on two states also facilitates a microlevel case study approach. As Ronald Weitzer (2015) argues, in order to combat the methodological problems of macrolevel human trafficking research,8 scholars should shift to researching specific, smaller regions: “Micro-­level studies have the potential to (a) produce more reliable numbers on victimization (in a universe smaller than nationwide); (b) identify context-­specific structural catalysts of migration, smuggling, trafficking, and slavery; and (c) generate richer insights regarding actors’ lived experiences” (232). In the context of my own research, I am less interested in generating quantifiable numbers of trafficked persons and their perpetrators and more invested in uncovering the stereotypes and norms that shape how midwestern frontline workers think about trafficking broadly. I see this case study as offering a deeper insight into service providers’ rationale for their anti-­trafficking efforts and identifying which narratives of trafficking—­and their attendant attention on certain stereotypes, resource gaps, or notions of justice—­may be more resonant. This book focuses on forty-­two interviews I conducted with fifty-­four total service providers, providing a broad scope of perspectives on vulnerability, exploitation, and trafficking in the Midwest. Appendix A: Research Methodologies provides more detail on the sample of frontline workers and the process of conducting interviews. To interpret their responses, I draw from anti–­carceral feminism, critical trafficking studies, and street-­level bureaucracy theory to analyze frontline workers’ perspectives on client needs and workplace challenges. I begin in chapter 1, “Carceral Protectionism: Resource Constraints and Rescue Narratives,” analyzing how certain criminal legal processes align with the care of “helping” professions in the social service sector. Taking Musto’s (2010; 2016) carceral protectionism framework, I specifically explore practices of detention, incarceration, arrests, and deportation, which are positioned as critical steps in larger anti-­trafficking service provision and rescue efforts. I build on both the conception of anti-­trafficking work as laden with everyday violence and the



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discretionary challenges baked into service providers’ routines. Frontline workers in the Midwest must make do with limited resources, an inherent characteristic of street-­level bureaucracies, but these tools of the carceral state are frequently mobilized as the exclusive solution to these gaps while simultaneously minimizing their inherent harm. Chapter 2, “The Punishment Mindset: The Inevitability of Carcerality,” questions the desire for carceral justice behind service providers’ articulations of accountability and retribution. The dominant anti-­trafficking discourse, as Chapkis (2003) argues, requires a visceral extremity that makes carceral solutions appear inevitable, even necessary, to achieve some kind of recourse. Using Mariame Kaba’s (Intercepted 2017) definition of the punishment mindset as an ideology of increasingly punitive responses to larger social issues, I argue both traffickers and trafficked persons face rigid norms of justice that unquestioningly circle back to punishment. Dominant narratives of human trafficking that recycle tropes of “good” and “bad” (Hill 2016) perpetuate this black-­and-­white conceptualization of justice that rarely matches the complexity of victim-­survivors’—­or perpetrators’—­lived experiences. I interrogate life after trafficking in chapter 3, “Therapeutic Governance and the Regulation of the Post-­trafficking Self.” Though human trafficking is frequently the result of compounding, escalating structural oppressions, many of my interviewees described the need for formerly trafficked persons to improve the self first: self-­care, self-­work, self-­worth, self-­esteem. In line with scholarship on therapeutic governance (McKim 2008), I argue this microlevel focus on individual “deviance” and “empowerment” shifts focus away from the material, systemic failures that fuel precarity. Instead of eradicating structural harms, the responsibility for change is placed onto formerly trafficked persons themselves, who should use their own internal fortitude to successfully transcend the trauma they experienced. Chapter 4, “Limits to Justice: The Complications of the Carceral State,” highlights the ambivalence of the dominant frameworks that rely on punishment and prosecution. Even though carceral protectionist approaches were often the only option for service provision, a small subset of my interviewees were not satisfied with this solution. In particular, the criminal legal system’s reliance on a linear narrative of victimhood and exploitation failed to align with the complexity of some victim-­survivors’ identities or experiences. If punishment and post-­ trafficking empowerment are the only options available, closure or recognition will never exist for those who cannot conform to the dominant narratives that shape these anti-­trafficking frameworks, especially those whose identities are already criminalized or stigmatized. In chapter 5, “Beyond Carceral Logics: Shifting from the ‘Punishing’ State to the ‘Helping’ State,” I dig deeper into service providers’ dissatisfaction with

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carceral mechanisms. Frontline workers, including those whose daily practices were deeply entrenched in the criminal legal system and carceral protectionism, understood that the “punishing” hand of the state simply was not enough. Their suggestions—­moving beyond “awareness,” reinvesting in social safety nets, redefining justice as holistic—­point toward a reconfiguration of anti-­trafficking projects aligned with the “helping” hand of the state. This is not a perfect solution, as the “helping” hand is still managerial, propelling clients toward particular normative outcomes. At the same time, we can think through this shift toward the “helping” state as perhaps a future-­oriented reform (Critical Resistance n.d.; Levine and Meiners 2020) that addresses the immediate material needs victim-­ survivors face while still firmly fixed on a future without these practices of state-­ led control. This abolitionist future is where I conclude in “Anti-­trafficking Futures: Justice without Policing and Prisons.” I do not mean the neoabolitionism that sees all forms of commercial sex as violence against women (Bernstein 2012; 2018; Chuang 2010), the mainstream frame in anti-­trafficking interventions. Instead, I center theories from prison abolitionists in the service of “defang[ing] the carceral mechanisms” (Shih 2021a, 131) that shape our current approaches and creating different paths to justice for trafficked persons. In Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Y. Davis (2003) asks us to consider alternatives to incarceration that do not simply replicate carceral logics in a gentler, more easily digestible format: “What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?” (107). Taking a cue from the vibrancy and dynamism of mutual aid and transformative justice projects, I want to think about an anti-­trafficking future beyond and without the carceral state. Prison abolition is not a clear-­cut, neat process; as the CR10 Publication Collective (2008) so beautifully states, abolition functions as “both a strategy and the goal,” striving toward “the creation of possibilities for our dreams and demands for health and happiness—­for what we want, not what we think we can get” (xii). These carceral mechanisms will not change or disappear overnight, yet we must remain in struggle to imagine the possibilities that lie outside our current paradigms. Overall, my goals in Policing Victimhood are twofold. First, if we as a society are going to keep increasing anti–­human trafficking legislation and policy, we must think critically about the relationships between said policy and the frontline workers tasked with its interpretation and implementation (Berg 2015; Chuang 2014; Musto 2016; Peters 2013; 2015). Legislation does not exist in a vacuum—­and failing to account for the practical manifestations of policy creates potential complications for service providers to be effective, ethical advocates



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for victim-­survivors. Second, the social constructions and assumptions about human trafficking embedded in policy and practice have very real consequences on the lives and livelihoods of trafficked persons (Corrigan and Shdaimah 2016; Farrell, McDevitt, and Fahy 2008; Hill 2014; Hoyle, Bosworth, and Dempsey 2011). Allowing these dominant tropes and misconceptions to proliferate does a profound disservice to victim-­survivors and perpetuates the criminalization and stigmatization of marginalized communities. In sum, by framing human trafficking as a criminal legal problem with prosecution-­based solutions, anti-­trafficking efforts become focused on deterrence enforced by state actors, such as law enforcement officers and social service providers, and empowered by carceral logic. Legislation and public discourse may attempt to present a victim-­survivor-­centered agenda, but as Chapkis (2003) explains, it still “serves as a soft glove covering a still punishing fist” (924). Ironically, the same structures that perpetuate inequities and violence—­such as class and race disparities in prisoners under mass incarceration or the isolation and prolonged detention of undocumented citizens facing deportation—­become the solution to address the inequities and violence of human trafficking. Protection is then contingent on a victim-­survivor’s legibility within and cooperation with the criminal legal system. Prevention, thinking upstream to the root causes that could reduce exploitation or trafficking, is limited by the reactive approach of prosecution-­focused efforts. In the rest of this book, I challenge the stance of taking anti-­trafficking justice at face value and shift toward a method of un–­black boxing the system of anti-­trafficking efforts (Latour 1999), thinking more critically and complexly about what our world of service provision could look like if we did not imbue punishment or prosecution with its current power.

Cha pte r 1

Carceral Protectionism Re so u r ce Co n str a ints and Res cue N a r r a tiv e s On June  30, 2017, I conducted one of my final interviews for this project with a dynamic group, six anti-­trafficking service providers whose therapeutic and social service organizations worked together in a multisector task force. As our conversation slowed, I asked one of my last questions, focused on the gaps they recognized in community-­based anti-­trafficking efforts. Allison and Mia, two foster care case managers who worked extensively with vulnerable youth—­some facing the exploitation of human trafficking, others navigating mental health diagnoses or chronic patterns of running away from foster placements that could render them vulnerable to exploitation—­immediately identified a lack of secure facilities outside of the criminal legal system. When youth are already enmeshed in the foster care sector and in need of a moderate degree of crisis care, they are essentially left with the limited options of a new foster placement, inpatient treatment in a psychiatric health facility, or detention: Allison: Because there isn’t anything, they get frustrated, and they take off, and they’re AWOL again. And then, now they’ve got a secure authorization by a judge, so now we’re in secure care. But that may or may not be [. . .] appropriate, and [. . .] you may or may not be accepted. Mia: So then you’re in [a juvenile detention facility], and [. . .] “Wait, so now I’m a criminal? Is that how my life goes now?” Allison: Right. I think that’s the frustrating piece. [. . .] At least a lot of our front-­end referrals are these girls that are sitting in [a juvenile detention facility] that are in our custody. [. . .] But they’re sitting in [a juvenile detention facility] because the judge has just literally, like, “I have no other option. I don’t know what else to do. So I don’t like doing this, but I’m ordering you to secure care knowing full well for ninety days [. . .] that you’re not going to secure care, you’re gonna sit in [a juvenile detention facility].” And everyone acknowledges openly that that stinks. But there’s nothing else. (interview 6/30/17) 28



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It feels strangely fitting to start chapter 1 with a finding from the conclusion of my interview process, as this sentiment was repeated consistently and emphatically across all respondents: carceral spaces, tools, and ideologies were the most easily accessible resources with which frontline workers could address human trafficking in their communities. This was not without concern, as chapter 4 interrogates in detail—­but without secure beds in local jails or juvenile detention facilities, without law enforcement officers investigating suspicious tips, without the power to prosecute traffickers for the harms they committed, what else could these street-­level bureaucrats do? In the pages that follow, I apply Jennifer Musto’s theory of carceral protectionism (2010; 2016) to my interview data on midwestern anti-­trafficking service provision. Frontline workers regularly discussed the presence of the criminal legal system across all levels of assistance, from initially identifying trafficked persons to more protective measures of sheltering and helping them with the next steps of therapy, stable employment, and participation in potential prosecutions. I argue that this strategy of carcerally imbued, anti-­trafficking service provision is intensely resonant for frontline workers because 1. carceral protectionism replicates the standard practices and norms of street-­ level bureaucratic discretion and cross-­sector, collaborative work, and 2. carceral protectionism feeds on the power of “rescue” narratives, which already hold a degree of purchase in mainstream anti-­trafficking endeavors. These two factors combine to make carceral protectionism feel almost inescapable. Carceral protectionism does not require frontline workers to deviate too far from their daily practices of service provision and fits neatly into larger discourses that link law enforcement actors and carceral logics to anti-­trafficking “best practices.” Compounding this further are dire resource constraints that inhibit social service and nonprofit sectors from providing their assistance without collaboration—­leading to a (sometimes ambivalent) partnership with the same agents of the carceral state who may be putting their clients at risk of receiving more violence and surveillance. Carc eral P r o t e c t io n ism As I briefly introduced at the start of Policing Victimhood, carceral protectionism is “enforcement with a protective bent or carcerality inflected with care” (Musto 2016, 4), promoted through “schemes that emphasize law enforcement rescue, therapy, and intensive multi-­professional case management” (Musto 2010, 390). This process blurs the boundaries between the anti-­trafficking Ps of protection and prosecution. It asks carceral actors, like police officers, to serve in the protective capacity of “rescue” and asks service providers outside of the criminal legal system to center law enforcement practices, like detention or

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interrogation, in their own modes of assisting trafficked persons. Given how this scope implicates a range of service providers, I place carceral protectionism within the larger network of practices that make up a prosecution-­focused approach to anti-­trafficking efforts, though it does offer resources to trafficked persons that are inherent to the P of protection. At its core, carceral protectionist efforts are about facilitating practices of care that lead to case closure—­a successfully prosecuted case against a trafficker or network of exploitative actors. Musto (2016) expansively describes carceral protectionism as a process that extends the reach of the carceral state beyond the exclusive purview of law enforcement: “Carceral protectionism is a state-­oriented framework, and as such, all trafficking victims or potential victims are routed primarily through the carceral enforcement apparatus in order to be officially recognized by the state. In the past, trafficked persons interfaced with the enforcement apparatus expressly through interactions with law-­enforcement officials, including local police officers and federal agents charged with enforcing local, state, or national antitrafficking laws.  [.  .  .] However, the law-­enforcement apparatus is broader than the name suggests, and the actors that play a role in supporting the carceral state extend beyond sworn officers and specific law-­enforcement agencies” (20). While much of this passage resonates, I am particularly attuned to Musto’s emphasis on official state recognition within the matrix of carceral protectionism. For trafficked persons, having their exploitation and violence qualified by larger bureaucratic mechanisms can have wildly impactful results; among others, access to housing, financial supports, visas, and assistance in navigating legal claims are all connected to the credible recognition of victimhood (Farrell, McDevitt, and Fahy 2008; Hill 2014; Hoyle, Bosworth, and Dempsey 2011). This is not exclusive to human trafficking, as much scholarship has detailed similar processes in other forms of gendered and domestic violence that must negotiate carcerally influenced service provision (Corrigan and Shdaimah 2016; Sweet 2019). In both contexts, the line between state recognition—­and access to basic elements of livability—­and state violence is narrow. As Carolyn Hoyle, Mary Bosworth, and Michelle Dempsey (2011) write in describing the results of police-­led anti–­sex trafficking raids in the UK, “Crucially, those who escape are not guaranteed safe haven, as the authorities do not always believe them,” especially those without documentation on hand, who are thus assumed to hold precarious citizenship status (325). If their story is believed—­more commonly, if it conforms to some degree of iconic victimhood (Srikantiah 2007)—­then victim-­survivors can more easily access state recognition, even if it is through the problematic care of carceral protectionism. Conversely, if those service providers tasked with ascertaining the authenticity of trafficked persons’ experiences do not believe these narratives, they can use their discretionary power to enact state violence through arrest, detention, or



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deportation. Under carceral protectionism, the same methods may be used—­for example, the detention of a trafficked person in a jail cell—­but the intention behind that carceral mechanism differs. What may be designed as safekeeping and security under the state recognition model easily morphs into explicit, undeniable state violence; one experience turns a trafficked person into a victim, while the other treats them as a criminal. Connecting Carceral Protectionism to Street-­Level Bureaucracy Theory From an SLBT lens, if we understand frontline workers to create policy on the ground through interpersonal encounters between clients and bureaucrats, carceral protectionism creates an environment where criminal legal policies become the default across a range of sectors and encounters. Beat cops responding to a shoplifting call may learn, through questioning, that the perpetrator of this petty theft is committing this crime under the duress of a trafficker; the policies of interrogation, arrests, and detention make sense in their schema. Case managers who engage in street outreach with housing-­insecure communities might receive similar information—­the interpersonal dynamics between two residents of an encampment may indicate force, fraud, or coercion—­and default to extricating one individual to a secure shelter or calling law enforcement officers as “backup” assistance and a connection to detention facilities. This degree of frontline engagement is not neutral; as I detailed in my introduction, those whose identities complicate notions of ideal victimhood may not get the “luxury” of “caring” responses from law enforcement. Michael Lipsky (2010) explains how disseminating policy and labeling clients—­here, as trafficking victims or criminal actors—­can spur a chain effect of real, material consequences and psychological effects: “In another sense, in delivering policy street-­level bureaucrats make decisions about people that affect their life chances. To designate or treat someone as a welfare recipient, a juvenile delinquent, or a high achiever affects the relationships of others to that person and also affects the person’s self-­evaluation. Thus begins (or continues) the social processes that we infer accounts for so many self-­fulfilling prophecies” (9). While Lipsky focuses on the internal work of clients’ self-­definitions, I am interested in what this quote says about livability and recognition. Take, for example, an undocumented victim-­survivor of sex trafficking—­will carceral protectionist practices designate them as a victim of exploitation, deserving of particular legal remedies, or a criminalized noncitizen marked for deportation? The life chances of a trafficked person, particularly under carceral protectionist frameworks, can be truly contingent on how a street-­level bureaucrat exercises their discretion in enacting policy. If a schema that sees migrant laborers as deportable noncitizens first and potentially exploited workers second is then forced into a criminal legal-­centered framework, it should come as no surprise

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that anti-­trafficking efforts enact violence and harm on the populations they are ostensibly assisting. The ubiquity of carceral protectionism across mainstream anti-­trafficking efforts may foster the presumption that these are the only, or most reasonable, ways of providing resources to victim-­survivors. As Steven Maynard-­Moody and Michael Musheno (2003) write, frontline workers narrate their encounters with clients to emphasize how they “make do” with the frameworks at hand: “[They] present themselves as pragmatists who temper their efforts to do the right thing with a clear understanding of what is possible for individual citizen-­clients in the context of their everyday lives. Their decisions are based on practical knowledge and judgments about people and are improvisational in the face of unpredictability” (23). This is not to say that street-­level bureaucrats are coldly, unthinkingly mobilizing a narrow band of resources (or unquestioningly reifying the carceral state). Frontline work is inherently creative, and service providers must improvise with short notice to align with an organizational mission or internal code. However, the pragmatism of carceral protectionism—­and its limited understanding of what is possible only within criminal legal paradigms—­risks the crystallization of one anti-­trafficking strategy that relies on punishment and violence. If the only available resources are nestled within carceral frameworks, then frontline workers will use their discretion to assemble a program of service provision that draws from what is already possible. Additionally, as Musto emphasizes, carceral protectionism is collaborative and crosses sectors. Frontline workers enmeshed in these group efforts must navigate the competing stereotypes, norms, or assumptions about the clients they serve: “When more than one street-­level bureaucrat is involved, as in the cases of courtroom processing or multi-­disciplinary assessments of  [.  .  .] students with special education needs, it is often the moral worthiness of subjects that is negotiated in these settings” (Lipsky 2010, 109). Thinking back to ideal or iconic victimhood (Srikantiah 2007), trafficked persons’ lived experiences must line up with the discretionary assessment of police, case managers, victim advocates, health care providers, and lawyers, all of whom may collaborate under carceral protectionist efforts. Adding another complicated layer to this collaboration, not every frontline worker entangled in an anti-­trafficking coalition or network of service provision will share ethical orientations or understandings of even the most baseline terms. The definitions of “client,” “violence,” “justice,” and even “human trafficking” may vary wildly (Schwarz 2019). While Maynard-­Moody and Musheno (2003) argue, “Street-­level workers see themselves as moral actors working in opposition to the system and rarely describe themselves as part of it” (22), existing outside of the system does not mean that certain elements of these larger bureaucratic structures—­like a commitment to law and order over more radical forms of



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justice—­automatically disappear in their discretionary practices. I think here, for example, about the tension between the patrol officer attending to a domestic violence call who must work with/around mandatory arrest policies and the shelter advocate who encourages a victim-­survivor to pursue a mode of reporting / not reporting that feels affirming to them. Discretion affords both frontline workers a degree of wiggle room to align more closely with their personal values and codes, but those internal compasses may, in fact, reflect carceral engagements. As I explore further in chapter 2, the punishment mindset (Kaba and Meiners 2014) that perpetuates carcerality flourishes within and outside the formal criminal legal system. Carceral Protectionist “Rescue” Narratives The concept of rescue, while roundly critiqued in critical trafficking studies for its enabling of imperialist paternalism, settler colonialism, and white savior fantasies (Agustín 2007; Bernstein 2010; Bernstein and Shih 2014; Chuang 2010; Kaye 2017; Kempadoo 2015), still manifests across much mainstream anti-­ trafficking discourse. Be it embedded in the name of an anti-­trafficking nonprofit (Phantom Rescue and Search + Rescue), the title of a state-­level task force (the Human Trafficking Rescue Project of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri), or the attention-­grabbing headline of a news article (virtually any Google News search), “rescue” holds a great deal of currency. Kamala Kempadoo (2015) calls these acts “helping imperatives” that seek to elevate the individual rescuer with “little effect on the causes of the problem, and the subjectivity and humanity of the Other is secondary” (18). The structural inequalities that fuel human trafficking are left to proliferate—­in the background, under the surface—­while specific actors get attention for their heroism, victimization, or criminality. Interventions focused broadly on commercial sex, including both sex trafficking and sex work, lean heavily on a rescue model where “victims become passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved, and helpers become saviours” (Agustín 2007, 39). Part of this is spurred by an anti–­sex work ideology that refuses the concept of consent in commercial sex—­women can never consent to this form of violence and exploitation, so rescue becomes necessary to liberate them not only from harm but also from this false consciousness. Janie A. Chuang (2010) calls this “a crusader impulse” that requires the framing of trafficked persons in limited ways, “stereotypes of innocent, naïve Third World women” (1659). As voiceless ciphers in these narratives, trafficked persons are not granted the dignity of being able to articulate their response to this rescue as desired, valued, rejected—­ or something in between. Rescue efforts can be formal or vigilante, from an FBI-­led sting operation through Operation Cross Country (Koyama 2011; Schwarz and Grizzell 2020)

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to volunteers looking for suspected victims on city streets (Shih 2016), but they follow the same script. The “rescue myth” (Chuang 2010; Haynes 2014) uses a heroic savior and an entrapped victim at its core, with an identifiable perpetrator, formerly lurking in the shadows, brought to carceral justice. As Kimberly Kay Hoang (2016) writes in her analysis of Vietnamese anti-­trafficking nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), “The impulse to rescue or save victims before even learning about their conditions of trafficking is problematic, potentially producing more challenges than it solves” (23). The assumptions that undergird the rescue myth—­violent traffickers, pimps, and johns enacting the most extreme forms of violence onto impoverished, captive women (Chapkis 2003)—­may not fully reflect the complex ecosystem of commercial sex, nor may it accurately capture the scope of exploitative labor that should be disrupted in other sectors, like manufacturing, domestic work, or agriculture. The harms and disruptions of rescue, as well as the violence of the police system more broadly, are glossed over in a narrative that frames state interventions, often at the hands of law enforcement, as protective, with victim-­survivors’ needs in mind. Annie Hill (2016) describes this process as making the “visible invisible,” erasing state violence in favor of the closure of the rescue myth: “The police raid hides the repression of sex workers in plain sight by showing it, but framing it as the rescue of ‘sex slaves.’ Raids appear to produce happy endings, displaying the climactic moment of women’s liberation, but it is through narrative closure that they cloak discrimination against sex workers and the repressive mode of control. Through representational foreclosure, women’s experiences of harm and rights violations vanish from view” (44). As she details further, the women “rescued” from the massage parlor in her case study faced a range of violence, from privacy-­ denying “perp walk” photographs published in major media outlets to the loss of earned wages and deportation of undocumented workers whose irregular citizenship only emerged through the process of postrescue identification. Importantly, the rescue narrative ignores the discretionary power of the saviors themselves in determining how interventions are disseminated. Per Amy Farrell, Colleen Owens, and Jack McDevitt’s (2014) research on anti-­trafficking legal responses, certain policies, like “safe harbor” laws to protect youth victim-­ survivors from a criminalized prostitution charge, are supposed to make identifying victims easier for carceral actors: “These laws spare prosecutors from the difficult moral and political choice of parsing blameworthiness, deciding whether the youth should be treated as a criminal deserving punishment or as a victim to be rescued” (164). However, my core theoretical frameworks reveal the holes in this system. As SLBT illuminates, discretion never disappears—­protective laws do not erase the norms and expectations of the rescue narrative that get placed onto victim-­survivors. And carceral protectionism “offers a framework for making sense of interventions where ‘at risk’ victims of sex trafficking may



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in actuality be treated more like ‘victim-­offenders’” (Musto 2016, 4). Rescued victims are still treated as criminals deserving of punishment when the tools of rescue—­surveillant identification, secure detention—­come from the same carceral state that can pivot, in a seemingly arbitrary way, toward punishment instead of care. The following sections trace the methodologies of carceral protectionism, the framing of carceral responses to trafficking as stopgap measures to resource limitations, and the potent “rescue” narratives that facilitate carceral interventions. I found Musto’s framing of carceral protectionism (2010; 2016) echoing almost uncomfortably alongside my interviewees’ words—­not because it was an inappropriate theoretical application but because it held a troublingly clear resonance. In short, the boundaries of carceral protectionism are not constrained by temporal or geographic parameters. Even though the service providers I interviewed exist in different times and spaces, they mobilize the same “contradictory logic” (Musto 2016, 5) of the participants in Musto’s research. Thinking ahead to the conclusion, if carceral protectionism involves networks of state agents operating similarly in different environments, we should think about how these networks themselves echo, replicate, and reinforce one another in creating an inevitability of carceral violence. T ools of Ca r c e r a l P r o t e c t io n i s m Referrals Many service providers indicated they first connected to trafficked persons in need of services through referrals from police officers or members of the court system. Attorney Kyle explained, “That’s how a lot of those [cases] come in, just by contact out just in the world sometimes. It’s not necessarily someone who calls and says, ‘Hey, I’m being trafficked’” (interview 11/3/16). Similarly, Tom, a sheriff, described discovering a potential trafficking case “by accident. I had another officer signed to another call. He was out working this call looking for a suspicious vehicle. And he just happens onto this other vehicle in this neighborhood” (interview 11/16/16). In both cases, police officers are engaged in the frontline work of discovering trafficked persons, sometimes inadvertently, and directing them to community services. Foster care administrator Erin offered an example of a more explicit referral—­a request to complete a human trafficking assessment on a suspected youth victim-­survivor—­directly from a judge, a member of the court system: “Almost, well, every assessment that a judge has ordered, which has been almost all of the assessments we’ve completed in a year and a half [. . .], it’s because the kid was on the run, and the judge ordered the human trafficking assessment. But the law enforcement officer that picked them up did not” (interview 11/17/16). Her example points to a potential gap in effective anti-­trafficking efforts, when

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the law enforcement officers tasked with the identification of trafficked persons cannot complete the first step of the process that should lead to assistance and justice. However, the judge, a fellow member of the criminal legal system, is present to pick up where the law enforcement officers left off. Another strain of referrals involved a formal layer of codification or validation. A referral from a qualified source could expand or constrain a trafficked client’s abilities to receive certain resources; without it, they were placed outside of an organization’s defined target population.1 Thinking about SLBT, this could be understood as an element of frontline triage to navigate limited resources, as Lipsky (2010) explains: “Client differentiation may take place because, confronted with heavy work loads and apparently impossible tasks, street-­level bureaucrats seek ways to maximize personal or agency resources, or they attempt to succeed with some clients when they cannot succeed with all. Sanctioned bureaucratic differentiation, for which triage is the paradigm, is open to the potential that street-­level bureaucrats will differentiate among clients for reasons having more to do with solving or resolving work-­related problems than with providing optimal resource distribution” (107). The major work-­related problem in the field of anti-­trafficking interventions is the classic paradigm of frontline work: too many clients, not enough time or funding. Client differentiation through a formal referral process allowed service providers to draw a line in the sand, maintaining some degree of control over their resource dissemination while still meeting the needs of some legible clients. Tyler, a legal staffer, shared how his organization’s pro bono services for trafficked persons—­free representation to navigate processes for T visa applications, orders of protection, and so on—­used a formal referral process dependent upon a qualified assessment from law enforcement or certain NGOs: “It’s something we just have to do because sometimes, people will claim they’re a human trafficking victim in order to get free legal services. [. . .] They weren’t necessarily human traffick­ing victims.  [.  .  .] The federal government laws of what constitutes human trafficking [are] very specific and, you know, not all people that are underpaid wage-­wise aren’t [sic] necessarily human trafficking victims. Not all people that participate in commercial sex activities are human trafficking victims under the definition of human trafficking by the federal government, and so we have to kind of work within that framework” (interview 10/6/16). From Tyler’s perspective, there are two imagined client groups who could be served by these pro bono services: “real,” verified trafficked persons whose force, fraud, and coercion have met a legal standard and individuals seeking to exploit or push the boundaries of what constitutes trafficking to access free legal help. Some trusted actor with knowledge of federal anti-­ trafficking laws must step in to navigate the flow of referrals, discretionarily parsing out confirmation (and by extension, the label of “trafficked person”). The range of harms that individuals face beyond the TVPA standard may very well deserve free



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legal services—­I would argue all exploited laborers should be able to achieve some sense of justice, legal or otherwise—­but Tyler’s organization is simply not equipped to handle these daily violences, what Wendy Chapkis (2003) calls the “ordinary” abuse faced by precarious workers (930). Coalitions and Networked Service Provision Coalitional efforts common to carceral protectionism, linking law enforcement actors with various members of “helping” professions, were frequently referenced as a benefit for both service providers collaborating across sectors and trafficked persons themselves. Jake, an investigator, summarized effective collaborations as everyone, from law enforcement to social service partners, “draw[ing] their lines and work[ing] for the best interests of the victim” (interview 9/27/16). Mary, an attorney, worked with a multisector team in her county, providing holistic anti-­trafficking resources to address legal, health care, and therapeutic assistance. From her perspective, collaborative efforts might not necessarily make her job easier, as they required a lot of interpersonal navigation, but they made others’ work easier and resulted in better outcomes for victim-­survivors (interview 9/8/16). Shawn, a law enforcement officer in a smaller jurisdiction, felt that going straight to the FBI for resources was the most useful approach for his sex trafficking investigations: “Everything we could see just from our standpoint looked very similar to human trafficking, so that’s why we worked at that angle. And we had [a local FBI agent] coming in to help us just kind of get all the information through the feds rather than us trying to get what we can” (interview 9/22/16). Shawn had a limited number of officers and hours to dedicate to anti-­trafficking operations, and having the support of a larger, better-­funded federal agency allowed him to conduct sting operations in the manner he found most beneficial. Mitch, a law enforcement officer, worked in a formal task force with various medical, social service, and faith-­based stakeholders. He saw collaborative efforts as a way to buffer against the assumptions that the sting operations he led, focused on commercial sex, were solely punitive: “And from non–­law enforcement, that’s the first thing they tell [the identified victim-­survivors or sex workers], ‘We’re not law enforcement; we just care.’ And then they provide them with their go bag. They provide them with all this other support and give them options” (interview 6/1/17). Carceral protectionism shows us that criminal legal practices and care do not exist in a binary, yet Mitch’s quote pairs these two ways of encountering trafficked clients. Law enforcement cannot care, as the criminal legal system is punitive—­but the frontline workers entangled with Mitch and his colleagues in policing trafficking can turn this sting operation into something more aligned with carceral protectionism. Even with these benefits, collaborative work is challenging work, which my interviewees shared openly, with varying levels of diplomacy. Olivia, an

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administrator at a domestic violence shelter with an extensive anti-­trafficking program, offered a thoughtful description of the challenges that emerge when navigating different framings of “public safety” in anti-­trafficking interventions: Anytime you get groups of folks together to address a specific goal can be challenging, but when we’re looking at things specifically from a multidisciplinary perspective, [. . .] things like facilitating a community coordinated response team to address the issue of human trafficking, [. . .] I’m thinking primarily of working with law enforcement, and I think in a lot of ways that’s actually been one of the greatest things that I’ve seen come out of this position is just really building and improving that collaboration. [. . .] But, you know, for me it’s one of those relationships where law enforcement has a pretty clear goal; [the domestic violence shelter] has a pretty clear goal. The goals usually line up in terms of keeping everyone safe, right? Public safety is the number one priority, but the approaches are vastly different sometimes, and I think that that can be challenging. You know, where we’re coming at it from a survivor-­centered approach, they’re really coming at it from a justice-­ centered approach, and I think both are equally important for public safety but sometimes can be at odds with one another, if that makes sense, in how to actually meet that common goal. (interview 10/5/16) Olivia delicately acknowledged the tensions that may emerge in a carceral protectionist collaboration. Sometimes an ethical orientation toward victim-­ survivors may not align neatly with a law-­and-­order understanding of public safety. A victim-­survivor’s needs may run counter to the programmatic steps and fact-­ finding missions of a criminal investigation, and their feelings of safety and affirmation within the domestic violence shelter may be compromised through the presence of carceral connections. Similarly, Jenny, a youth services administrator, found that her most effective collaborative partners were from organizations that could handle the complexity of the “victim-­offender” paradigm. As she explained, her local domestic violence shelter’s experience with antiviolence efforts translated neatly to anti-­ trafficking interventions: “They are probably, I would say, the best resource for us, just because they’re used to working with victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. And they understand the difference between a criminal versus victim and that entire nuance there” (interview 10/27/16). If a challenge of carceral protectionism is the competing or conflicting schemas that take priority—­using a law enforcement lens to bluntly interrogate every form of violence and coercion that falls under the umbrella of trafficking—­then it makes sense that service providers with comparable frameworks would gravitate toward each other within these networks. It might have been an individual, ideological orientation or an organizational-­level ethos that pulled Jenny’s child advocacy expertise toward



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the antiviolence frontline workers in her community, but it could also result in meaningful, nuanced differences in client outcomes. Questioning and Surveillance Unsurprisingly, the law enforcement officers and lawyers I interviewed noted their use of questioning, interrogation, and surveillance strategies, which translated easily from their more routine client populations to trafficked persons. For example, law enforcement officer George discussed the lengthier interview process he used when engaging with potentially trafficked persons, especially those who may have been involved in illegal activities—­criminalized commercial sex or laboring while undocumented—­while also being victimized: “It’s hard for them to be honest about it, so we get different layers. [. . .] Maybe they admit being at this location, but they didn’t have any involvement, so you turn the page, get a little more trust, and then they start telling you about their involvement. It’s layers and layers and layers of interviews until you finally get to the core of the truth exactly how it is” (interview 12/5/16). The interview strategy is similar, but the duration of the process and resources committed to the process is necessarily longer. Legal staffer Tyler also echoed this sentiment in his own work, which served more of an intermediary role between police and trafficked persons: “And many times, the victims don’t tell you the whole story that first time you talk to them. It takes time to get the whole story out of them” (interview 10/6/16). Ellen, an attorney, mobilized a particularly high degree of surveillance when navigating a DMST case that had crossed state lines but landed in her jurisdiction. A young woman was being remotely “prostituted out” by her pimp/trafficker (Ellen used both words in describing the case) while he remained incarcerated: We find out he’s been doing this, and we restricted the numbers that she was calling. He was still able to find a way to contact her, was still prostituting her out, was still controlling her money and when she worked and how she worked and what she needed to be doing. We finally had to eliminate any and all contact he could have except with his attorney. No phone, no mail, because even he was going through the mail. So we’ve had to restrict all of his contact, and you know we listen to all of the calls and everything. (interview 8/10/16) Because the pimp/trafficker was detained, his communication was subject to a certain degree of scrutiny that has become expected within jails and prisons. However, what is notable here is that the victim-­survivor herself faced certain restrictions as to who she could contact, even though she was not incarcerated or even informally detained. Musto (2016) calls this a “show-­me-­your-­phone” tactic, where police officers request to look at a suspected trafficked person’s text messages, photos, or call logs to ascertain “pimp”-­controlled sex work or other

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markers of commercial sexual exchanges (55). When authoritative figures connected to the carceral state, like Ellen and her legal colleagues, make this request, it may feel impossible to decline—­and also doubles down on the “victim-­offender” bind. Sting operations were referenced less frequently, primarily appearing in interviews with service providers more directly connected to the criminal legal sector, like immigration attorneys, as well as police officers. Somewhat surprisingly, frontline workers outside of the legal and law enforcement sectors—­though mentioned as critical parts of sting operations for victim advocacy and support—­rarely mentioned these busts themselves. This tool of surveillance focused almost exclusively on a nebulously defined sex work or sex trafficking target. For example, law enforcement officer Shawn discovered DMST in his jurisdiction when minors appeared at a sex work–­focused sting operation. Though their intention behind the surveillance was to arrest those engaged in commercial sex, Shawn and his fellow officers had to pivot to something more aligned with carceral protectionism to serve these youth: “We actually had a location set up when we’re doing a week-­long prostitution sting there, where we had men posing as johns to call [. . .] prostitutes and also females posing as prostitutes. [. . .] Twice we had seventeen-­year-­old girls, and they can’t actually consent to that” (interview 9/22/16). Detective Matt shared an example of a longer-­term case in his department that addressed both commercial sex and labor exploitation at a massage parlor, one of only three interviewees who addressed this high degree of surveillance in labor trafficking contexts: “We worked a six-­month case, where we just watched for six months and saw just a high number of workers go through, just let alone the labor traffic that’s happening. You’re working seven days a week, you’re working pretty much ten to ten to ten, sometimes later.  [.  .  .] Well then, let alone the labor issues with that, the lack of paying taxes, all the things they’re avoiding” (interview 12/5/16). Regardless of the context and intentionality—­Shawn inadvertently became engaged in anti-­trafficking frontline work; Matt planned for an anti-­trafficking bust—­there are commonalities in their descriptions. Formal sting operations are time intensive, requiring a great deal of people power to thoroughly surveil a targeted location or population of workers. The “victim-­ offender” bind is also intensified in a sting operation, as frontline workers may be prepared to engage with criminalized actors (sex workers, market facilitators, migrant laborers with precarious citizenship, managers and bosses abusing their employees) but instead find their client base facing more complex forms of victimization and subsequent needs. As to be expected with carceral protectionism, frontline workers outside of the criminal legal sector implemented methods common to criminal legal practices, though the terms they used to describe their actions were more frequently



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aligned with interviewing, holding conversations, and looking out for trafficked persons. Youth services administrator Jenny, who earlier noted the importance of nuanced client care, explained that competing norms around how to even conduct an interview could lead to poor outcomes for trafficked persons: “Even when it comes down to who and when and how should that young lady be interviewed. Who should be doing the interviewing? How should we do it; where should we do it? Who’s the most capable or who has the best expertise or that type of thing? You know, again, so that we don’t further traumatize this child. There’s [sic] good ways to go about that, and there’s good reasons for making those decisions in the right way” (interview 10/27/16). Importantly, the interview is taken for granted as an expectation of service provision, making this degree of questioning feel almost inevitable.2 As I discuss more thoroughly in chapter 2, the power of carceral logics transforms certain outcomes, like a prosecutable criminal case with verified proof of exploitation, into unquestioned necessities for all trafficked persons. For victim-­survivors, including the youth with whom Jenny works, an invasive questioning process may feel harmful or fail to capture the interpersonal dynamics of human trafficking, yet it is one of the only tools available for service providers to approximate some kind of justice in a carceral protectionist framework. Surveillance emerged in both the formal carceral protectionist networks named above as part of collaborative interventions and in more informal, even vigilante ways (Shih 2016). Rebekah, a crisis pregnancy center (CPC) director who often worked in coalition with law enforcement officer Mitch, was deeply invested in the lives of her patients, many of whom worked at local strip clubs, which she saw as sex trafficking. Because she oversaw a more medicalized CPC with nursing staff and a medical outreach team,3 Rebekah had to navigate patient privacy policies like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) while also maintaining a degree of surveillance over these at-­risk women: “So, a lot of times, on my team’s radar, there will be, ‘Hey, this client’s back again and we think you should step in because you may know how to peel another layer.’ So it’s me knowing in my day that if one of our flagged individuals comes in, it’s usually me to be the one to go in and say, ‘Hey, how’re you doing now?’ You know, trying to create that safe space so if disclosure should be their choice that they feel, again, secure enough to respond in that moment” (interview 6/1/17). These flagged individuals were not highlighted for particular health concerns. Rather, they were assumed to be potentially trafficked persons through scrutiny placed on their disclosure of their current workplace, their past histories of trauma, or their co-­occurring drug use or mental health concerns. Rebekah revealed later in our interview that she also went into strip clubs to essentially conduct participant observation: “As I’m in the clubs and listening to the lyrics that the girls are dancing to now and the derogatory, demeaning

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[lyrics], and you’re like, ‘Sug, do you hear what that song’s saying? And what you’re playing into?’” (interview 6/1/17). Part of this can be understood as her self-­described deep commitment to her patients. Even as a high-­level administrator, Rebekah proudly worked her CPC’s text outreach line and took her clinic’s mobile medical unit across state lines to reach patients without transportation or with outstanding warrants that could be triggered by interstate travel. At the same time, this outreach is highly problematic for those current or potential CPC patients who (rightfully) do not want a representative of a faith-­based organization providing limited reproductive health care in their workplace, asking them to consider the existence of gendered exploitation in their labor. Sometimes, in line with the “softening [of] otherwise punitive carceral processes” (Musto 2016, 40), frontline workers directly noted the smaller, more care-­oriented changes they made to carceral mechanisms. For example, investigator Jake attempted to spread information among his law enforcement colleagues about the challenges of interviewing formerly trafficked persons. From his perspective, people inevitably confronted their past trauma while an officer completed the standard interviewing process. In the face of trauma, Jake saw it as imperative to adapt and mobilize a different, trauma-­informed model (interview 9/27/16). Though he did not use these exact words, it felt as though he was describing a less triggering interview approach. Leslie, a youth services worker with an anti–­sexual violence organization, described using discretion to mobilize specific, “soft” strategies when questioning a trafficked youth: The cops told me, “Really, you have to interrogate them, because  [.  .  .] ­working with the very street-­smart person who’s probably been picked up on a criminal charge” type of deal. [. . .] If you don’t know how to do any interrogation, you’re probably not going to get anything at all. When I was a [law enforcement] agent, I did interrogation with my offenders and especially sexual abuse offenders and stuff like this, so there’s a certain way someone can really tell me. So, I go and interview her and had a probably two-­hour interview. She would never admit, and I don’t believe in interrogating our kids, but there’s a real soft interrogation. You can question and kind of get there without the whole TV thing. (interview 8/4/16) Leslie brings her expertise as a former law enforcement officer to her work, so it is unsurprising that she would be able to draw on those methods and practices in her work outside of this sector. At the same time, even a “soft interrogation” could pose harm to a victim-­survivor, especially if they have had encounters with these carcerally influenced methods before. These techniques reveal the implicit assumption that trafficked persons must be interrogated in order to gather information for a future criminal case, leaving out the very real possibility that



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victim-­survivors may not want to engage in a prosecution, punish their traffickers, or see the criminal legal system as a viable path to justice. Arrests, Detention, and Incarceration Arrests and detention often appeared as the next step after a trafficking case had been discovered or uncovered through an explicit referral or surveillance strategy. This could be the arrest of a market facilitator: a pimp, john, or trafficker. For example, in sheriff Tom’s earlier description of a “borderline” potential trafficking case, the outcome was an arrest for a lesser drug charge: “We ended up arresting him for, I think, a drug violation for marijuana and something else. He was released pretty quick pending the ongoing investigation” (interview 11/16/16). Law enforcement officer Vince described the discovery of DMST victim-­survivors and successful arrest of a violent pimp after a well-­investigated, well-­resourced sting operation: “And because of the work of our officers, [. . .] they got those girls out of there and this was a long time. This was not just they showed, and they arrested everybody, and everything was done” (interview 9/7/16). Regardless of the context—­potential trafficking that turned out to not meet legal parameters or solidly identified trafficking—­arrests are mobilized to facilitate the development of a fuller criminal case and prosecution, which I explore further in chapter 2. Trafficked persons were also subject to arrests themselves, often described in terms of safety or protection, an act done for their benefit, whether it was received as a positive encounter or not. Youth services worker Leslie continued her explanation of “soft” interrogation tactics with a subsequent detention: “She gave me everything except, ‘Yeah, I was being trafficked or sold,’ and so [I] sent that in. So she goes through the system. They decide to do the trafficking thing so they could hold her” (interview 8/4/16). The narrative of carceral protectionism is so clear here, even though the pieces are not functioning linearly and repeat themselves. Leslie responds to a referral from local police, conducts an interview in the spirit of questioning, and refers back to the officers in charge to guarantee detention for the youth victim-­survivor’s safety. The “trafficking thing,” the validated referral, opens access to some stable shelter, even if it is in a carceral space. Caroline, an antiviolence advocate, provided an anecdote from the law enforcement officers with whom she worked: “And I know some of our drug strike force guys have told me in the past, they’ll go from house to house because they do a lot of raids, and they’ll see the same girl at several houses. And, you know, he told me, ‘I know what they’re doing. I know.’ He says, ‘A lot of times I’ll arrest her, not because she did anything, but just to get her out of there. Just so I can get her out of there for twenty-­four hours’” (interview 9/28/16). In this example, being arrested and subsequently detained is offered as a break from a situation of assumed sex work or sex trafficking. The potential traumatization that could come from an arrest, even one that is presented with the best of

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intentions, is left out of the narrative, and the expertise of the strike force members remains unquestioned. Law enforcement officer Mitch presented a similar story when asked about the challenges of anti-­trafficking work. Arrests—­here, Mitch mashes together the criminalized act of prostitution with the “force, fraud, and coercion” shorthand of human trafficking—­are unfortunately necessary to counteract the coercive powers of substance use and interpersonal control: “You know, especially in our typical prostitution case, I don’t like that we have to arrest them, but I also know that there’s that force, fraud, and coercion. They’re providing them with just enough narcotics or that substance that is going to hold them at bay to force them or to coerce them into furthering that criminal enterprise” (interview 6/1/17). Mitch appears to be framing arrests in this specific context as a necessary evil, a buffer against drug use that spirals into criminalized commercial sex. Again, echoing Caroline’s example, the consequences of arrest are downplayed—­Mitch goes so far as to distance himself as an ambivalent agent of the carceral state—­in favor of their protective capacities. Street-­level bureaucrats often blurred the boundaries between these methods of arrests, detention, and incarceration in their retellings of anti-­trafficking work. As anti-­trafficking advocate Elizabeth explained, in her work with her local police department, the line between informal temporary detention and formal, permanent, record-­altering arrests was muddy: “They’re arresting teenagers involved in commercial sex. And even though that is the law, I mean, they have the right to arrest them. The detective [. . .] doesn’t arrest them anymore. He might detain them for their own safety, he might, but he doesn’t charge them” (interview 12/9/16). Individuals engaged in commercial sex under the age of eighteen years old fall under the legal rubric of sex trafficking as DMST victim-­survivors, but this definition does not foreclose their possibility of being arrested and subsequently forced to engage with the carceral system. Per Elizabeth’s explanation, this practice of detention was not related to a misidentification of these youth as criminal sex workers, a misunderstanding that could be potentially ameliorated with better identification training (Farrell, McDevitt, and Fahy 2010; Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014).4 Instead, detention was a tool that officers could mobilize at their discretion to protect victim-­survivors. What is left out of this analysis is the question of how arrests and detention may be unsafe for trafficked persons, especially those whose identities make them targets for increased surveillance and those with previous criminal records or negative experiences with the carceral state. Deportation In very limited discussions, service providers positioned deportations as a tool of protection. As I discuss in greater detail in chapter 4, deportation was



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more frequently described as a limit to justice—­or a harmful, failed response—­for trafficked persons. For those few interviewees who folded deportation into the carceral protectionist framework, it was described negatively, a tool that never conferred the care intended. Sylvia, the director of a migrant labor organization, used the example of “fall out people,” undocumented victim-­survivors who hovered in limbo between criminal prosecutions and deportation proceedings. While detained or securely housed in a shelter, they were able to access basic material resources during certain investigatory stages. If their cases did not make it to trial or they were not selected to serve as a witness, these victim-­survivors were released from detention with no support—­and no path to a T visa. A strange situation emerged, where detention was preferable simply because it conferred a stable, accessible bed: I mean, they just wanted to be deported as soon as possible. But when you’re not in detention, you’re not a priority for being deported fast. When you’re in detention and immigration is paying every single day for you in jail, they want to get you out as soon as possible. When you’ve gotten out of detention, [. . .] the criminals or people who are still in detention are their priority.  [.  .  .] I remember really well a woman that was in that group, who had worked at one of the hotels downtown. And she was just in a really, really, really traumatic situation and was very, very traumatized. [. . .] She really, really just wanted to go home. And I contacted her embassy [. . .] to see if there’s any possible that they would just help her get home, and they said no because she wasn’t in detention anymore. I called immigration to see if they would take her back into detention, and they said no, you know, she’s committed no crime; she’s the victim. (interview 11/1/16) The “victim-­offender” bind is powerfully resonant here. Sylvia’s client, as a victim, must wait an indeterminate amount of time—­in some cases, up to a year—­without the resources she would be able to acquire if she was instead labeled an offender. At the same time, her status as deserving of certain legal remedies only goes so far, as her ability to get a T visa was connected to the somewhat arbitrary nature of case selection. When detention and deportation are connected in this very particular way, we can see the limitations of carceral protectionism. The care of detention-­to-­deportation is temporally contingent on the whims and patterns of a single criminal prosecution. Carc eral M e c h a n ism s a n d Resourc e Co n st r a in t s Frontline work is consistently under/defunded, and my interviewees’ organizations and offices were no exception. In the two states where I conducted my

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work—­one led at the time by a moderate Democrat, the other led by a Tea Party Republican—­the health, social service, education, and foster care sectors faced radical budget cuts that seemingly crescendoed as I started my interviews. This bipartisan project of slashing “helping” resources while maintaining or exceeding funding for punishment through the law enforcement sector, prioritizing a “tough on crime” agenda (Gottschalk 2015; Simon 2007; Wacquant 2009), constrained how street-­level bureaucrats performed their daily tasks. As Lipsky (2010) writes, “The fact that street-­level bureaucrats must exercise discretion in processing large amounts of work with inadequate resources means that they must develop shortcuts and simplifications to cope with the press of responsibilities” (18). This could include parsing out or “difficult” clients per stereotypical framings, depersonalizing face-­to-­face encounters, or reducing the amount of time spent with each client, regardless of their individualized needs. One shortcut facilitated by carceral protectionism was using criminal legal mechanisms as the default solution or site of resource provision for trafficked clients. Over half of the service providers discussed the reliance on jails and detention facilities as safe temporary or emergency housing for identified trafficked persons, especially those under the age of eighteen. Theresa, a legal aid attorney, explained that this was a common occurrence for the exploited and trafficked youth she served: “The cases that we’ve identified are situations where youth are running consistently from placement. And so, when they do come back into custody, many times they’re sitting in detention until a foster home, or secure facility, or group home can be identified for them” (interview 9/13/16). Another attorney, Robin, described a similar situation with an undocumented minor: “[The child welfare system] actually didn’t have a place to take her, so they held her in the juvenile detention center, even though she didn’t do anything wrong. But they just literally had no place to take her” (interview 11/29/16). In both examples, detention is positioned as the last or only resort for trafficked youth—­the singular solution to the problem of limited, secure housing—­but still necessary to keep them safe. Implicitly, the use of carceral facilities as emergency housing points to the ways that, under carceral protectionist frameworks, service providers outside the law enforcement sector must collaborate and negotiate with law enforcement officers to gain access to resources for clients. Rose, a victim services coordinator, provided a complex narrative, positioning detention and incarceration as a net positive for a trafficked person who had begun exploiting others under the direction of her trafficker. Her legal status as both a victim and a criminal, trafficked and trafficker, opened her up to prosecution and jail time—­and material benefits she could receive while confined in prison:



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And it’s like, “You should never charge the victim.” Well, she has more benefits and in fact, in that particular case, had additional benefits by going to [prison] than she would have had had we not filed charges. Because at least in [prison], they provided her with GED training, she actually was able to complete her GED, and when she was released, she had a halfway house to go to while she integrated back into society.  [.  .  .] Well, if she began to recruit, even whether it be under oppression, she was recruiting other girls, so she should be held accountable.  [.  .  .] And I know that’s not the same view as a lot of other victim advocates, but I just see that [. . .] the prison system gives a better jump-­start for integration into society than our victim programs do. (interview 2/15/17) Here, the prison system is presented as the solution to both provide accountability for traffickers and resources for trafficked persons. Service providers do not need to reinvent an entirely different anti-­trafficking apparatus but can simply lean on the preexisting norms of the carceral state. As Musto (2016) emphasizes, under carceral protectionism, “antitrafficking efforts require retooled criminal justice solutions rather than an end to carcerally orchestrated antitrafficking interventions altogether” (39). Arrest, detention, and postincarceration supports (ostensibly though parole) are positioned as not exclusively punitive but instead a “jump-­start” for a better life. At the same time, Rose identifies two long-­term needs of trafficked persons that are echoed in other research: educational attainment and stable housing (Brennan 2014a; Clawson and Dutch 2008; Lutnick 2016). Instead of arguing for an expansion of these resources outside the carceral state, she fits trafficked persons into the criminal legal system as it currently stands. While this situation is unique to the complication of a trafficked person who may also be legally considered a trafficker—­a “good guy” and a “bad guy,” as I explore more in chapter 2—­this framing of the carceral state as the sole space for receiving resources was referenced by about one-­fourth of my interviewees. Carc eral P r o t e c t io n ism a n d “R es c u e” Carceral mechanisms are difficult to disrupt in anti-­trafficking interventions for two key reasons. First, as demonstrated above, carceral protectionist tools are easily deployed, mobilize preexisting or newly formed collaborative structures, and buffer against resource constraints. Second, they fit neatly into potent narratives of anti-­trafficking rescue. Someone who has been exploited needs to be extracted from harm and safely receive care in some (often carcerally inflected) secure space. My interviewees often fell into this pattern of framing rescue as the immediate result of carceral protectionism, even when this act of “saving” was ambivalently or negatively described.

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Law enforcement officer Dean used “rescue” in a straightforward manner when describing the more secretive elements of his work, investigating potential trafficking networks in his community: “It’s just like drugs, there’s a lot of stuff that you have to do secretively. [. . .] A lot of times, [. . .] if we rescue a group of people that are under this kind of oppression, what we might immediately recognize is there are two more camps of them. [. . .] So we’re not able to put it out there” (interview 10/26/16). Even though the rescue narrative carries an element of sensationalism (Small 2012; Vance 2012) that fits neatly into mainstream discourses, Dean explicitly stated he could not share his successes publicly without potentially compromising another criminal investigation in a different jurisdiction or state. Carceral protectionism’s emphasis on case closure is echoed here, as Dean’s tempered response comes from a desire to maintain the integrity of future prosecutions. Immigration lawyer Chelsea described rescue more problematically. She worked with victim-­survivors navigating T and U visas processes, complex legal mechanisms for trafficking and domestic violence, respectively. In contrast to her longer-­term work, Chelsea found the rescue narrative lacking, with its framing of rescue as the final step, not the start, of a post-­trafficking life: That is my big problem with some of the conversation that’s going on in [my state] is the idea of saving. Because I think when you start working with human trafficking victims, you realize it’s not about saving. Once you’ve physically pulled them out of the human trafficking situation, that’s not the hardest part, you know? The hardest part is overcoming all this trauma, and, you know, even just addressing that trauma. And so, I think that’s kind of the misinformation given is that, like, “Oh, well all we have to do is get them off the streets.” [laughs] And then everything’s great. Like, “We have rescued them; we have successfully rescued them.” (interview 2/17/16) While I dig into the role of trauma more in chapter 3, I want to focus here on Chelsea’s description of rescue and temporality. She is describing a practice aligned with the “raid-­and-­rescue” model popularized by law enforcement (Hill 2016; Schwarz and Grizzell 2020) and exported globally to nonstate actors (Jones, King, and Edwards 2018). This genre of rescue can be categorized by its immediacy: the trafficked person has been identified and plucked out of an ostensibly dangerous situation, so the “problem” has been “solved.” This narrative of closure, while popular in trafficking-­related media, is incomplete. Where do these trafficked persons go postrescue? What if they do not want to leave with their saviors? Though the rescue narrative requires an active savior and a passive victim, not every trafficked person is able—­or wants—­to perform the appropriate role of rescued survivor. As victim services coordinator Rose explained, sometimes women engaged in commercial sex and routed to anti-­trafficking resources were arrested after they spent weeks in a secure shelter or outpatient facility: “But the



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law enforcement gets discouraged to find the surviving women back into the game two and three months after they feel like they’ve rescued them. The rescue doesn’t feel like a rescue” (interview 2/15/17). The agential law enforcement officers who have completed their practices of carceral protectionism—­identification, detention, arrest, coordination with other stakeholders to negotiate resource provision—­have held up their end of the narrative. For these identified victim-­ survivors, rescue should mark a definitive end to whatever form of exploitation from which they were “saved,” even if they do not see their engagement in commercial sex as sex trafficking. Their return to sex work, which also facilitates a shift from victim to criminal, reveals the holes in a streamlined rescue narrative. Carc eral P r o t e c t io n ism a s “B l a c k B ox ” As these examples demonstrate, carceral protectionism directly, powerfully informs the practices and strategies of service providers attempting to work with trafficked clients. If we think about these frontline workers accessing a tool kit in their daily encounters with clients, arrests, detention, and incarceration are at the forefront—­because they facilitate the dissemination of specific resources and the perpetuation of the rescue myth. Particularly in the face of limited resources that can only be resolved through collaborative efforts, the turn to a carceral form of care and assistance, while troubling, makes sense. But just because these carceral connections are logical does not mean they are inherent to anti-­trafficking work. Hoang (2016) cautions us to think about the robustness and validity of our anti-­trafficking engagements: “Academics, policy makers, government bureaucrats, lawyers, law enforcement officers, NGO workers, and social activists have developed myriad solutions to ‘rescue and rehabilitate’ sex workers without a clear understanding of the scope, size, or nature of the problem” (22). This is not the interesting or “sexy” answer, and—­within very narrow parameters that ironically exclude sex workers’ solutions for liberation from violence (Shih 2021a)—­sex sells in the anti-­trafficking arena (Haynes 2014; Jones, King, and Edwards 2018). But it is the necessary one. To circumvent carceral protectionism, we must ask a host of questions: ▪ Whose voices need to be centered in anti-­trafficking rescue and rehabilitation efforts? In critiques and explorations of carceral protectionism? ▪ How will these voices be received? And how do we navigate perspectives that may, in our efforts to move beyond it, bolster carceral protectionism? ▪ How will funding mechanisms, political priorities, and nonprofit mission statements respond to these potentially contradictory statements? I realize this may feel solely housed in the theoretical (though these questions certainly inform the tangible possibilities beyond the carceral state I explore later), but so much of carceral protectionism is rooted in the space of what is taken for

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granted. And much frontline work is premised on this; Maynard-­Moody and Musheno (2012) describe how social norms shape workplace judgments as “so taken for granted that the individual worker may not be able to articulate the reason for his or her own judgments” (S20). My interviewees may not know why carceral protectionism is the sole tool in their tool kit, but they may take its presence for granted and continue to work under its conditions, even when they find it lacking. Assumptions about the safety of incarceration, the necessity of a certain kind of rescue, and the intentions of frontline workers within and outside the carceral state create a feedback loop of sorts where carceral protectionist ideologies—­even when ambivalently framed—­are the only frames to understand anti–­human trafficking work. If we think of anti-­trafficking service provision as a system that falls under Bruno Latour’s (1999) definition of a black box, we can see why these questions are a necessary place to start: “[The black box is] the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become” (304). At least in the particular context of my interviews, Latour’s definition rings true. The “success” of carceral protectionism as an easily accessible strategy for addressing (most) trafficked persons’ needs—­without pushing beyond service providers’ approaches to frontline work—­masks the complex harms and limitations of a criminal legal model to eradicating violence. The input of an identified survivor and the output of an appropriately managed initial encounter that ideally moves forward to a prosecutable case against a named perpetrator hides the variety of perspectives on desired service provision and paths to justice that frontline workers and victim-­survivors may hold. In the following chapter, I want to un–­black box the next steps these frontline workers must take in their path of service provision. If carceral protection requires a conclusion to its interventions, who must be identified as deserving of punishment? Where do we find accountability, justice, and closure? And for whom? Carceral protectionism is the first step in a larger punitive process, moving from the tools that street-­level bureaucrats can use in their initial encounters with trafficked persons to the carceral logics that bolster a reliance on prosecution—­and their attendant stereotypes of victimhood and criminality. Just as the rescue myth requires certain actors for its narrative to make sense, the punishment mindset of harsh criminal legal measures as the solution to social “deviance” (Kaba and Meiners 2014) needs legible heroes and villains.

Cha pte r 2

The Punishment Mindset T he In e v ita bility of C arcerali ty Early in my work on this book, I was invited to share a draft of this chapter at another university. Upon conclusion of my talk, where I emphasized the potent yet limited carceral frameworks that shape anti-­trafficking service provision and gestured toward prison abolition (which later became the conclusion of this book), an audience member asked what we would do about the “bad guys.” In the haze of my memory, I cannot recall if they referenced Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, but the implication lingers—­without jails and prisons, violent chaos is bound to reign. While I was admittedly flustered in the moment—­I unfortunately could not think of any immediate solutions to stop cult leaders or serial killers—­this genre of question is common in any discussion about punishment and justice. Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners (2020) even have an acronym for this argument, calling it TINA: “Skeptics sigh sympathetically, smile condescendingly, and deliver the verdict: yes, the current system has its flaws, but, alas, there is no alternative” (157). TINA is, at best, an acknowledgment that carceral practices should change, but this perspective also sustains the status quo of punishment as the only thing that can separate a threatened “us” from an unsafe “them.” While I do not share this anecdote with malice or ill intent—­I certainly did not read this question as a bad-­faith attempt to derail the conversation—­I do want to draw attention to this genre of whataboutism specific to punitive systems. Carcerality appears inevitable, particularly in anti-­trafficking efforts that historically center punishment (Baker 2013; Chuang 2014). Even with the explosion of police and prison abolition conversations in mainstream media outlets after George Floyd’s senseless murder in Minneapolis (Agbebiyi 2020; Kaba 2020; Illing 2020), certain kinds of punishment and incarceration remain unquestioned.1 If we as a society are increasingly gaining comfort with defunding the police or reducing jail and prison sentences, we are still trying to figure out what to do with the “bad guys,” the dangerous few (Carrier and Piché 2015) whose criminal acts are beyond our frame of reference for deterrence or recourse. What will we 51

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do with the violent murderers, rapists, and human traffickers? Can the victim-­ survivors of these crimes ever face some kind of justice outside of a successfully prosecuted case and incarcerated perpetrator? The most common narratives of sex and labor trafficking require “good guys” and “bad guys,” passive victims and active saviors, traumatized survivors and toxic perpetrators (Bernstein 2012; Hill 2016; Srikantiah 2007). The carceral protectionist frameworks used to disseminate resources and service provision compounds the primacy of this narrative, as law enforcement officers and their organizational standards—­their norms of interrogation, detention, and “rescue”/ extraction—­are centered in collaborative efforts. After the initial phase of identification, the mechanisms of carceral protectionism spin into action to facilitate another round of interventions contingent on the tropes of the carceral state: the distribution of punishment through a successfully investigated and prosecuted criminal case. In this chapter, I explore what happens in the space between rescue and rehabilitation in anti-­trafficking efforts. Though the lived experiences of victim-­ survivors are complex and resist a linear framework, the norms of service provision are more routinized, positioning carceral practices of accountability and justice as the inevitable next step. I use the theory of the punishment mindset (Kaba and Meiners 2014), in tandem with anticarceral feminist critiques of punitive justice (Bernstein 2007; 2010; 2012; Heiner and Tyson 2017; Law 2014; Levine and Meiners 2020; Whalley and Hackett 2017), to illuminate why carcerality is an inevitability in our current anti-­trafficking frameworks. As my findings demonstrate, the punishment mindset and its attendant norms of victimhood, agency, culpability, and accountability all emerge in anti-­ trafficking service provision. Much like the role of law enforcement interventions in carceral protectionist frameworks, carceral logics play a huge part in molding forms of anti-­trafficking justice. Frontline workers emphasized this during our interviews, particularly in their descriptions of increased policing strategies and harsher punishments for identified traffickers or exploitative figures, as well as their reliance on the aforementioned “good”/“bad” binary. The “bad” traffickers can be removed from society (at least temporarily) through increasingly punitive policies, while “good” survivors can play their role in a prosecution and then return to some semblance of normalcy. Against the messiness of their clients’ experiences and self-­described needs, my interviewees presented the picture of an anti-­trafficking ecosystem where victims and criminals could be appropriately categorized and managed through proper judicial pathways to accountability and justice. However, issues emerge when these lines blur—­when victim-­survivors may not be as blameless as the narrative needs them to be, when carcerality as an inevitability for one or both parties becomes tenuous. Service providers thus find themselves in an unenviable



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position, where their belief in the punishment mindset runs into the complex lived experiences their clients disclose. Carc eral Lo g ic s a n d t h e Punishmen t M in dse t In their 2014 article for Jacobin, “Arresting the Carceral State,” Mariame Kaba and Erica R. Meiners interrogate the connections between the criminal legal system and the public school system through a critique of the school-­to-­ prison pipeline (STPP). Importantly, they position the STPP—­and its mechanisms of control, force, and punishment—­as one of many pipelines or pathways toward carcerality across a range of frontline sectors: Starting in the 1970s—­despite a decline in the rates of crime (not always a measure of harm)—­states implemented “tough on crime” policies that built the world’s largest prison population and did not make communities stronger or safer. A carceral logic, or a punishment mindset, crept into nearly every government function, including those seemingly removed from prisons. Those seeking food stamps are subject to mandatory and/or random drug testing. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the largest enforcement agency in the US. Post-­secondary education applications ask about criminal records, and many states bar those with felony convictions from voting. (n.p.) Though Kaba and Meiners are not the first or only to use the term “carceral logic,”2 I find their particular use of this phrase necessary to understand the rigid norms of punishment that circulate broadly in our current network of service provision and specifically in the anti-­trafficking arena. The punishment mindset is not specific to prisons or law enforcement officers. It is a more nebulous ideology that implicates teachers, counselors, antiviolence advocates, and case managers in turning to punishment as a solution for issues of social justice and safety. In 2017, Kaba explained the punishment mindset even further in an interview with reporter Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted podcast. As she detailed, this framework assumes the necessity of punitive, legal responses (couched as “safety”) to inappropriate, illegal, or violent activities across behaviors and circumstances: Stop assuming that “safety” means imprisonment. It means more punishment. Start like getting the punishment mindset shifted in your mind so that when you see somebody who is other than you, that your fear factor that is like conditioned by all the messages you’ve gotten your entire life about who to be afraid of, like challenge that within yourself for real, and stop being at every point demagogued into locking up people, putting up walls, creating new borders. End that within yourself, and try to change people in your own circles’ ideas about who should—­and stop—­especially if you’re

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liberal and progressive—­stop calling for people to be locked up every day. Oh, so-­and-­so’s a war criminal and they should go to prison! Listen. Everybody shouldn’t be going to prison. That’s the point. Stop playing into those ideas that every time something happens, your first inclination is to think about the prosecution and court system as the way to solve that problem. We all do it instinctively. (n.p.) Kaba uses two powerful examples to contextualize the punishment mindset: Goldman Sachs executives, who fueled the 2008 financial crisis, and Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. These choices are deliberate: these are the “baddest” of the “bad guys,” the worst of the worst when addressing economic fraud and police brutality. Kaba knows our collective impulse, even in spaces that criticize the ubiquity of the criminal legal system, is to seek punishment and accountability through the carceral state: “You think that jailing some Goldman Sachs guys is what is gonna end capitalism? No, it’s not! And by the way, I don’t want Darren Wilson even locked up. Like, you know, like that’s hard for people to like fathom, because like, this is a killer cop. Of course he should go to jail. No, not even him” (Intercepted 2017, n.p.). Even if we identify and incarcerate singular “bad guys,” the systems that create Goldman Sachs and Darren Wilson continue unabated long after this carceral punishment. In short, as Theresa Anasti (2020a) elegantly summarizes, “Instead of understanding problems as being concerned with issues of economic or material deprivation, carceral logics involve the use of the criminal justice system as a conduit through which social issues are addressed” (52). The punishment mindset sees broader inequalities—­for example, the disproportionate effects of gender-­based violence, housing insecurity, or drug use on certain communities or populations—­as problems to be solved through increased policing, surveillance, jail sentences, and punitive policies. Implicitly, carceral logics bolster an assumption of deterrence: if we arrest every identified perpetrator of domestic violence, then this violence will disappear. And at the microlevel, yes, this specific manifestation of interpersonal violence may temporarily go away—­but the structures that perpetuate intimate violence against women, like gendered stereotypes that normalize male violence, persist across relationships and systems. As Angela Davis (1998) cautions, “Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings” (n.p.). With respect to human trafficking, an individual trafficker may be identified, arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated, appropriately disappeared away. But the broader network of inequalities that propel exploitation (economic precarity under unfettered global capitalism, identity-­driven social stigmatization and objectification, regressive migration policies, etc.) remains intact and often continues to impact victim-­survivors (Brennan 2014a) even after this instance of sex and/or labor trafficking.



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Carc eral Fe m in ism a n d t h e Punishmen t M in dse t Carceral logics fit neatly into a particular strain of feminist antiviolence advocacy, what Elizabeth Bernstein (2007; 2010; 2012) calls carceral feminism: “A cultural and political formation in which previous generations’ struggles for gender justice and sexual liberation are recast in terms of criminal justice” (21). These struggles can range from domestic violence and campus sexual assault to workplace harassment and rape. Thus, carceral feminism contains and expands beyond anti–­human trafficking advocacy and policy, the focus of Bernstein’s 2007 introduction to the term, to prevail particularly “around questions of sexual violence” (Bernstein 2018, 21). Carceral feminism can be understood in some ways as an appeal to the state for recognition. It does not seek to dismantle the status quo of antiviolence efforts connected to the carceral state but rather implores the state to fold gender-­responsiveness into its preexisting carceral frameworks. Lorna Bracewell (2020) identifies this impulse in the popular SlutWalks of the early 2010s: “The goal of these North American SlutWalks was not to highlight police and law enforcement complicity in sexual violence and rape culture but to figure the ‘slut’ as a supplicant before the law deserving of its benevolent protection as any other citizen” (75). What remains unspoken in this positioning of carceral solutions to sexual violence is that the law enforcement officers who address these concerns are also perpetrators of physical and sexual violence, both in their frontline roles as representatives of the state (Rabe-­Hemp and Braithwaite 2012; Ritchie 2017; Sankofa 2016) and their interpersonal conduct while off duty (Saunders, Prost, and Oehme 2016; Stinson 2020). Returning to Bernstein’s original formulation of sex work and sex trafficking as the target of carceral feminism, there have been seemingly endless examples of police violence entwined with commercial sex work and sex trafficking. Lizzy Starr’s (2018) extensive cataloging in Tits and Sass is a horrific reminder that appeals to the state for justice ring hollow when those tasked with disseminating justice are wantonly committing sexual harm: “The police are major perpetrators of violence against sex workers, whether as abusive individuals or as an oppressive system of state violence, and most of us are not in a position to speak out against them” (n.p.). Even beyond the interpersonal harms perpetuated by law enforcement officers themselves, criminal legal mechanisms like arrests, detention, or deportation are the source of violence for many women, particularly those whose identities complicate the tropes of “good” victimhood: women who are poor, disabled, transgender, undocumented, Black, or of color. As Victoria Law (2014) explains, “Carceral feminism ignores the ways in which race, class, gender identity, and immigration status leave certain women more vulnerable to violence and that

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greater criminalization often places these same women at risk of state violence” (n.p.). Echoing the introduction to this book, carceral feminism adds onto the longer pattern of antiviolence feminisms marginalizing already marginalized victim-­survivors and ignoring the real threat of incarceration, policing, and surveillance in their lives (Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012; Kandaswamy 2010; Richie 2000; Spade 2013). Though its rhetoric may claim a “color-­blind” or “neutral” application—­carceral feminism as a tool for women’s empowerment—­it is impossible to ignore the holes that emerge in its framework when applying an intersectional understanding of violence. As with the punishment mindset, carceral feminism focuses on the punishment of singular perpetrators at the expense of broader, macrolevel changes that could more radically eradicate violence. Hannah E. Britton (2020) elucidates this sentiment in her study of South African anti–­gender-­based violence efforts: “The carceral feminist fixation on criminalization aligns, consciously or unconsciously, with neoliberal strategies that shift attention away from the state’s failure to enact economic justice and racial equality” (10). Modes of restorative or transformative justice—­really, anything that can be considered noncarceral in its approach—­are impossible to imagine under these parameters. As Brady T. Heiner and Sarah K. Tyson (2017) explain further, “Dominant neoliberal logic delineates only one intelligible schema of accountability for violence—­that of an individual (non-­ state) agent—­and only one general form of legitimate response: state-­centric punishment” (2). This schema erases the state violence of policing practices and incarceration alongside the victim-­survivors whose desires for justice are complicated, multiplicitous, and not state-­centric (Kim 2013; Phillips and Chagnon 2020; Sered 2017). In its starkest terms, carceral feminism presents a more straightforward way for institutions and their representatives to appear gender-­responsive without addressing the root causes of violence, harm, and inequality. The state can perform care and concern with minimal effort through solely reactive responses; “they can address activist pressures of gender equity while further entrenching individual-­level solutions that are easier to implement, though they sometimes lack meaningful long-­term outcomes” (Britton 2020, 11). As I show more in chapter 3, these individual-­level factors frequently default to a management of the self—­self-­improvement, self-­esteem—­while macrolevel systemic oppressions proliferate. Beyond the effects of these oppressive inequalities on victim-­survivors, carceral feminism ignores how incarceration is an incomplete solution for perpetrators and may, in fact, perpetuate violence beyond jail cells or prison walls. Andrew Dilts (2017), in his own deliberations on the punishment mindset—­what he calls an unsatisfied “desire to see justice done according to the radically insufficient terms available under the law” (185)—­calls this acceptance of incarceration a



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Faustian bargain. In order to achieve recourse for some harms or harmed parties, we must be comfortable with a certain degree of harmful injustice enacted onto an identified perpetrator: “Again and again we find ourselves calling for justice from a system which, if it succeeds, would likely result in dangerous long-­term incarceration in overcrowded and deplorable conditions primarily reserved for members of marginalized communities” (186). While this is somewhat unsurprising, particularly under the punishment mindset’s harsh dehumanization of justice-­involved persons, it is worth noting that the harms perpetrators face while incarcerated (The Marshall Project 2020) often spill over into their lives after finishing their jail or prison sentences. Postincarceration life has ripple effects beyond the individual (Balfour, Hannah-­Moffat, and Turnbull 2018; Brinkley-­Rubinstein 2013; Daquin, Daimler, and Listwan 2016) to their families and other interpersonal networks (Charles, Muentner, and Kjellstrand 2019; Garcia 2016; Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman 2016) as well as their communities (Manza and Uggen 2008; Morenoff and Harding 2014). As Chloe Taylor (2018) writes, “Even if we were entirely unconcerned by the fate of prisoners, we would still have to be concerned by the violence, homophobia, and misogyny of the prison experience because of what it does to human beings who will eventually return to the outside world” (33). In an appallingly ironic twist, the same structural harms that create the conditions for sexual violence manifest, proliferate, and replicate in the incarceration-­to-­reentry pathway. Critics of carceral feminism often take issue with the fact that the term is unclaimed by activists and scholars. Do any feminists actually call themselves carceral feminists? And who are these carceral feminists? Nancy Whittier (2016) helpfully emphasizes the term as an analytic, not necessarily representative of a movement: “Carceral feminism is a term of critique meant to point out the dangers of relying on the state’s punitive power to advance women’s liberation. Few, if any, activists on any issue identify as carceral feminists” (729). As well, there is not a specific genre or labeled subgroup of feminism that can be immediately recognized as carceral. Feminists from a range of intersecting identities and ideological concerns may call upon an increase in sentencing and punishment for sexual violence, from anti–­sexual assault advocates pushing for increased mandatory minimums after Brock Turner’s highly publicized rape trial (Phillips and Chagnon 2020) to transexclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) seeking formal and informal policing mechanisms to remove the “threat” of transgender women from “women-­only” spaces like bathroom stalls (Hines 2019). The connective tissue between these disparate groups is their use of “a specific discourse growing out of liberal feminism and traditional liberal notions of justice” (Phillips and Chagnon 2020, 51). Regardless of the case’s specificities, carceral feminist approaches see carceral control as the logical, just, and justifiable response to sexual harms.

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Some have taken umbrage with the extension of Bernstein’s case study beyond the anti-­trafficking arena (Terwiel 2020). Taylor (2018) summarizes this critique as one of slippage: “Sex work is a relatively easy case for a decarceral agenda, and Bernstein tends to generalize from this case to a critique of feminist campaigns for law enforcement more generally” (35). The most extreme cases that validate the punishment mindset, like Kaba’s (Intercepted 2017) Goldman Sachs executives, are mobilized here as the harder cases for a decarceral, abolitionist practice. While “law and order” may not be necessary for prosecuting market facilitators or sex workers, it is arguably still needed to some degree to address rape, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse. Taylor pushes back on this approach from a Foucauldian perspective on legal prohibitions, but I want to analyze the connection it reveals between carceral logics and carceral feminism. There will always be a harder case, a more horrifying figure of exploitation and sexual violence lurking in the shadows, that justifies the need for a relatively unchanged carceral approach. There can be a limitless well of gendered, sexualized violence standing in the way of female empowerment, and these examples can be summoned to make carceral feminism yet another taken for granted element of mainstream movements for equity. While critics may well be operating in good faith when questioning the generalizability of Bernstein’s frame, this line of thinking still assumes that carceral systems produce justice for victim-­survivors in some contexts. Davis (2003) talks about this as the taken for grantedness of incarceration: “It is as if prison were an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death” (15). I draw parallels here again with Bruno Latour’s (1999) black box, especially if we think about the carceral state as a technical work, a project to erase the most marginalized, deemed undesirable and in need of social control. If “perpetrators” are inputs and “justice” are outputs, then these carceral logics make sense, but they fall apart when questioning these categories and definitions. Dismantling the punishment mindset, especially within feminist projects to eradicate sexual violence, makes us ask why these expectations persist and what realities they muddle or mask—­namely, the reality that justice is only tenuously connected to arrests, detention, prosecution, and incarceration. T he Primac y o f Cr im in a l Le g a l Interventio n s in A n t i-­t r a f f ic k ing W or k With respect to human trafficking, the punishment mindset manifests when carceral practices that lead to punishment are presented as the first, or even only, solution to a case of exploitation or trafficking. Even though chapter 1 outlines the collaborative aspects of anti-­trafficking work—­and positions certain carceral tools as part of networked anti-­trafficking interventions—­there seemed to be an assumption that law enforcement officers, lawyers, and judges were the most



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critical actors in the steps between initial identification and longer-­term, more therapeutic interventions, such as those articulated in chapter 3. This assumption appeared in different patterns across my interviews. Some interviewees explicitly named law enforcement officials as the primary, necessary actors in anti–­human trafficking efforts because human trafficking is an inherently criminal act. Legal staffer Chris stated, “We need a law enforcement response to human trafficking because, ultimately, it’s a crime of greed and it’s a tremendously profitable crime. [. . .] Unlike drugs that you sell once, a human being you can sell again and again and again” (interview 10/6/16). If human trafficking is framed as a “crime of greed” as opposed to something else—­a public health issue (Chisolm-­Straker and Stoklosa 2017; Todres 2011), a human rights violation (Jordan 2002; Limoncelli 2009)—­then turning to the criminal legal system is a logical response. This is not to say that a different framing would induce a less punitive response; for example, the punishment mindset is well-­documented in medicalized antiviolence projects (Corrigan 2013; Mulla 2014). Rather, framing human trafficking exclusively or primarily as a criminal act erases the possibility for other models of intervention that may be less traumatizing and less reliant upon the violence of the carceral state. This primacy was not unequivocally positive, as revealed in a group interview with immigration lawyer Rachel and nonprofit administrator Wendy. Both expressed a grave concern that sex trafficking was the focus of trainings and public awareness events at the expense of labor trafficking, which they more regularly encountered in their clients’ experiences and needs. Wendy first identified a challenge in simply talking about labor trafficking in terms that made sense and resonated in her community: “And no one’s talking about it, and how do you address that? Because the sex part is, there’s crimes. There’s the underage crime, there’s the prostitution crime. [. . .] It’s supposed to be the johns prosecuted too. [. . .] Those are all already crimes. The whole working thing is harder.” Wendy’s phrasing here echoes Chris’s example, emphasizing sex trafficking and sex work as criminalized acts that can, logically, induce an appropriate law enforcement response: an investigated case, a prosecuted perpetrator. Labor trafficking, though it also falls under specific state and federal anti-­trafficking statutes, can be more easily rationalized away as simply a “bad” situation or less-­than-­ideal workplace. Our conversation continued further, with Rachel and Wendy noting frustration with the continued anti-­trafficking programming in their community focused almost exclusively on the identification of commercial sex: Wendy: Junk. Over and over again. I call it junk because I’m just irritated, because I wanna know what to do. Rachel: Well, and the people that have attended [. . .] that repeatedly probably can identify it. [. . .] And [a coworker] and I went, and she raised her hand,

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and she said, “What do we do after that, after we identify someone?” And they were like, “Oh, well, go to the ER.” Wendy: Or call the hotline.  [.  .  .] Call the police. I’m like, uh, you know, sometimes those aren’t really solutions that work. (interview 8/12/16) Though this may seem out of place here, as it could be construed as one of the limits to justice I explore in chapter 4, I read Rachel and Wendy’s exasperation with this “junk” as part of the punishment mindset. To use Levine and Meiners’s (2020) TINA acronym, there is no alternative to calling the police—­unless an identified victim-­survivor has pressing medical needs that set them on a more medicalized path. Rachel and Wendy’s clients, even though their experiences can fit into a carceral logic of anti-­trafficking interventions requiring law enforcement, may in fact be better served by a different framework for resources and assistance. Most importantly, Rachel and Wendy never go so far as to say that a carceral response should not exist; in fact, they see its utility for sex trafficking cases. The issue is the consistent, uniform application of the punishment mindset across all forms of exploitation and harm, the primacy of a criminal legal response over all other potential interventions. In contrast to some of the more vigilante anti-­trafficking surveillance narratives from chapter 1, like CPC director Rebekah’s firsthand observations inside strip clubs, a few frontline workers cautioned against direct anti-­trafficking efforts, emphasizing the necessity of a formal criminal legal process. These interviewees positioned police officers as holding more expertise, making them more prepared to adequately deescalate or investigate a potential trafficking situation. Karen, a state-­level government employee, explained that individuals who may suspect human trafficking—­she described a gut instinct she felt when seeing a much older man with a younger woman in designer clothing, which could indicate many things besides trafficking—­should first call the police and resist intervening themselves. Even if bystanders are able to recognize what she considered cues of human trafficking, they may not be able to handle the “dangerous people” who perpetrate trafficking (interview 3/23/16). CPC director Stuart also echoed this practice of deference to police authority. Though his client base experienced a more complex set of harms—­our conversation focused on the nuances and overlaps between domestic violence and sex trafficking—­Stuart pointed to more clear-­cut examples of “human sex trafficking” that occurred outside his CPC’s walls: “And we watched some exchanges taken place across the street. The police knew about it, but it was wrapped up, supposedly, in some investigation. And so, they had to have a hands-­off. And so, I think that’s kind of a struggle for us sometimes, when we know they’re out there but yet that there’s so little that we feel like we could really do to help” (interview 7/17/17). Stuart acknowledged the challenges of this approach, which required



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his employees to take a step back and resist intervening, even as suspected commercial sexual encounters played out in real time in front of them. The police’s ability to successfully investigate, while described as “supposedly” in-­process, is also respected, with CPC staffers maintaining their distance. Stuart does not express regret that he or his staff did not do something; rather, he sees that there is “little” to do from his vantage point as a frontline worker outside of the criminal legal sector. What is fascinating about these two examples is how they oppose a powerful strand of anti-­trafficking advocacy and awareness, what Elena Shih (2016) calls backyard abolitionism, “training citizens to seek out and identify victims of human trafficking as part of their everyday activities” (67). These identification and surveillance practices, while incredibly problematic in their reduction of trafficking to particular racialized and gendered embodiments, position average people as helping hands to the carceral state. It is up to these “individual citizens to restore social order in light of insufficient state response to trafficking rescue and rehabilitation” (Shih 2016, 70). Expertise here is more free-­floating, not tied exclusively to the law enforcement agencies formally tasked with the investigations and prosecutions that may not even be able to properly address the problem of trafficking due to perceived limitations in resources. In contrast, Karen and Stuart highlight another way of thinking about anti-­trafficking surveillance that reinforces a different aspect of the punishment mindset. You as a singular individual may be fully equipped to combat human trafficking, especially through norms of neoliberal self-­governance (Shih 2016). But these criminals are so “bad,” so thoroughly characterized as irrevocably deviant, that only the formal expertise of the police can stop them from committing further harms. Cultures o f D isp o sa b il it y Carceral logics need a target for their punitive interventions—­but more specifically, a target whose degradation and experiences of violence while incarcerated are seen as deserved and warranted. Enter disposability culture and “throwaway,” undesirable people. Tifanny Burks (2019), an activist with the South Florida Healing Justice Project, describes disposability culture as “the idea that punitive discipline is the only way to hold people accountable when they mess up or cause harm” (n.p.). Dean Spade (qtd. in Lee 2018) similarly names disposability culture as “the desire to throw people away” (n.p.). Much like the ways the punishment mindset connects any sort of deviance to prosecutorial, carceral justice, disposability culture makes any conflict—­from an interpersonal slight to violence that reaches the level of criminalized codification—­worthy of isolating, alienating, and discarding the perpetrator. “Throwaway,” undesirable people can take multiple forms: a young victim-­ survivor of neglect “whose parents would rather have them gone” (Levine and

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Meiners 2020, 40); a juvenile offender sentenced to life in prison for murder (Liptak 2012); vaguely defined “evildoers” spirited away into the “black hole” of prison (Davis 2003, 16). The term even resonates in human trafficking scholarship, as prominent (and prominently critiqued [Milivojevic, Moore, and Seagrave 2020; O’Connell Davidson 2015; Parenti 2009]) scholar Kevin Bales (2012) described “the new slavery” as marked by short-­term cycles of “disposability” (14–­15). Regardless of the context, the victimhood or criminality of “throwaway” people does not matter. In the cultural imaginary, they are easily disappeared, their fates unknown and unknowable. These terms call upon particular notions of worthiness, deservingness, and livability. The disposable lives of “throwaway” people are precarious, unintelligible, ungrievable, lives “whose loss is no loss” (Butler 2010, 24). More specifically, these lives are rendered disposable through the intersecting powers of racism, classism, sexism, ableism, settler colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia. These “-­isms” and “-­phobias” both erase the humanity of marginalized persons and transform their existence into something threatening, something that must be disposed of to maintain the order of the status quo. As Robin D. G. Kelley (2016) writes of the countless young Black men murdered by law enforcement officers and violated by the criminal legal system, “It is not simply that our lives don’t matter. We are a threat, an enemy, which largely explains why the police employ lethal force as a first resort” (18). Disposable lives do not get the luxury of understanding or empathy. Instead, as Judith Butler (2010) writes in Frames of War, they are marked for expulsion by any means necessary: “When a population appears as a direct threat to my life, they do not appear as ‘lives,’ but as the threat to life (a living figure that figures the threat to life)” (42). If “life” is embedded in systems of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2000), it is threatening and disposable if it simply exists outside of these normative parameters. These questions of disposability are both material and theoretical: the ideologies that make certain lives more livable than others fuel the conditions of violent carceral systems. In this vein, Kaba and Kelly Hayes (2018) connect disposability culture to the power of the prison industrial complex (PIC):3 The carceral system has always used sensationalized cases and the specter of unthinkable harm to create new mechanisms of disposability. Those mechanisms are what feed bodies to hungry dungeon economies while we are distracted by our own fears of “bad people” and what they might do if they aren’t contained. Of course, a system that never addresses the “why” behind a harm never actually contains the harm itself. Cages confine people, not the conditions that facilitated their harms or the mentalities that perpetuate violence. Yet, for some reason, even people who are well versed in the dynamics



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of the system often believe “Law and Order” moments are possible, when, just for a moment, an instrument of state violence can be made good. (n.p.) In order to fuel these systems of mass incarceration, violence, and disenfranchisement, the PIC needs the narrative of disposability culture for its adherence to the “good guy” / “bad guy” binary. If some people are just inherently, irredeemably bad—­even if those judgments are rooted in racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other marginalizing ideologies—­then we have to have prisons that contain their harm away from the average, normative, law-­abiding citizen. Any harm these bad people receive while incarcerated is simply par for the course, as “throwaway” people are so objectified and rendered inhuman that they become threatening figures who deserve violence and trauma. I think here of Wendy Chapkis’s (2003) critique of the gothic narratives of human trafficking and the larger context of anti-­trafficking sensationalism (Bern­ stein 2007; Kinney 2006; Small 2012; Soderlund 2013). The “bad guys” are so bad and the victims so victimized—­“portrayed as no more than unwilling goods exchanged between unscrupulous men” (Chapkis 2003, 930)—­that punishment becomes unquestionably necessary, and incarceration becomes the sole form of justice we can fathom for these figures of evil. Even though research on the perpetrators of trafficking is, unsurprisingly, deeply complicated (Horning and Marcus 2017; Lutnick 2016; Owens et al. 2014; Raphael and Myers-­Powell 2010; Surtees 2008; Troshynski and Blank 2008), the dominant narrative reduces this complexity to “the repeated stories of bad men, big guns, and bolted chains” (Bernstein 2007, 140). Closure, in these narratives, involves depositing these “throwaway” villains into the criminal legal system, where the punishment mindset affirms an assumption that the “problem” of trafficking will finally be addressed. “Good Kids” and “Bad Guys” The “good”/“bad” binary was a powerful tool my interviewees used to tell their stories of working with trafficked persons. I focus here on a specific genre of “goodness” related to trafficked persons, though, as detailed in chapter 1, there is robust scholarship that describes how anti-­trafficking stakeholders themselves are constructed as the “good guys,” the saviors whose daring endeavors result in thrilling rescues and recoveries (Agustín 2007; Chuang 2010; Haynes 2014; Hill 2016). This self-­construction felt more implicit or even silenced, as my interviewees were rarely so bold as to claim this role for themselves. Sylvia, the director of a migrant labor organization, bluntly stated, “We are not saviors” (interview 11/1/16). Instead, my participants were more likely to use the more active, agential components of the “good guy” construction in their description of anti-­ trafficking encounters. They were not saviors, but they did the act of saving; as

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youth services worker Leslie explained, “We say we can’t save them all, but we can save them one at a time, and that’s what it’s really about” (interview 8/4/16). “Good,” “bad,” and their attendant value judgments were more commonly reserved for clients and their identified perpetrators: “good” victims could be recovered and recuperated; “bad” traffickers needed to be disposed or deposited far away from others. State-­level government employee Karen gave a lengthy description of trafficking “red flags,” indicators that youth had been exploited or were at risk of experiencing the force, fraud, and coercion of trafficking. Though she noted commonly cited factors, like being involved in foster care or running away from home (Lutnick 2016), Karen also noted the concept of “good kids” from “good families” being groomed by online predators and lured into trafficking (interview 3/23/16). “Goodness” here means normalcy, adherence to certain tropes of respectable victimhood, which are inherently raced, classed, and gendered (Baker 2014; Kempadoo 2015; Small 2012; Srikantiah 2007). Karen explicitly used an example of a young woman who could fit all of these categories: she lived in a wealthy, predominantly white suburb; her nuclear family was still intact; she remained enrolled and involved in school during her grooming. Karen could not point to some trauma from a dysfunctional family or community-­level poverty to rationalize away the harm experienced. A “good kid” experiencing what happens more regularly to “throwaway” youth (Levine and Meiners 2020) is cause for concern, which leaves an uneasy feeling that certain youth are rendered inevitably exploitable in this framework. “Badness” emerged in descriptions of how traffickers enacted certain forms of violence and harm. My interviewees presented a litany of acts, from identifiably criminal harms to more insidious forms of emotional abuse: physical assaults, rape, brainwashing, threatening victim-­survivors and their family members, forced drug and alcohol use.4 Legal staffer Tyler offered an example of a “very disturbing” sex trafficking case that felt grotesque in its severity. This particular case combined a number of complicated, interconnected factors. The victim-­survivor was described as vulnerable due to a history of abuse and involvement in the foster care sector, while the identified trafficker, accompanied by his wife, engaged in practices of grooming and violent sex with multiple young women: “For the next six years, he tortured her in just ways that are just unimaginable, I mean, just horrible. [. . .] I’m talking beatings and hangings and electrocutings [sic] and horrible, horrible things. [. . .] I truly believe that girl would have died at some point if she hadn’t been rescued” (interview 10/6/16). This felt like a combination of Kaba’s (Intercepted 2017) punishment mindset and Chapkis’s (2003) intentionally gothic portrayals of human trafficking—­these perpetrators were the worst of the worst, engaging in violence that was beyond my interviewees’ purview before their experiences with anti-­trafficking work. Incarceration was the only solution that could adequately match the scope and severity of the harms these



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perpetrators committed. To quote youth services administrator Jenny, who summarized this impulse directly, “I hate to be so callous, but I’m like, ugh, the bad guys just need to be gone” (interview 10/27/16). Some stakeholders—­even within the criminal legal system—­resisted the dehumanizing aspects of this binary, which was particularly salient when discussing the “bad guys.” Juvenile justice worker Juanita questioned the perceptions of “throwaway” criminals, which she saw as an external force that could harm those youth in her care: “Because everybody thinks that when you work in corrections, it’s just these bad people coming in, and they need to be locked up, so lock ’em up and throw away the key. That’s not the case. And truly, if people understood, 93 percent of adult offenders get out of prison at some point in time. Do you want them to come out bitter or better? Our philosophy here is they come out better because that’s your choice, is bitter or better, and the officers make them that way” (interview 12/1/16). Juanita saw the youth in her care as not inherently “good” or “bad” but rather complex human beings who would respond accordingly to treatment while detained. Treating minors as “caged animals,” in her words, would only lead to negative outcomes: anxiety, outbursts, and irritable behaviors that could all be coded as deviant and lead to increased punishment. Coming out of juvenile detention “bitter” could lead to these youth simply replicating the violence and punitive actions they received while incarcerated (Taylor 2018). “Better” treatment that actually saw their lives as livable (a small bar to clear) could disrupt the punishment mindset’s reliance on detained lives as disposable. Passivity and Agency Within the “good”/“bad” binary, service providers offered value judgments associated with victimhood (as passive) and criminality (as agential). “Good” victims were often described as under the full control of “bad” perpetrators. For example, antiviolence advocate Caroline identified patterns of grooming and manipulation that started within her shelter, which housed female-­ identified victim-­survivors of domestic or sexual violence. An observable dynamic emerged between women she described as “planted in here to cultivate girls” and younger victim-­survivors, who were positioned as more naïve: “They get invited into parties, and then, you know, stuff starts happening. You see a change in them, and they get real quiet because now they’re getting controlled. ‘I’ll take care of you. Just stay with me, I’ll take care of you’” (interview 9/28/16). The situation Caroline describes here is fraught, at least from the perspective of the service providers involved. She and her colleagues interpreted this situation as one of “good” victims of violence becoming enmeshed in situations of potential sex trafficking through their innocent desire for caretaking, with “bad” victims exploiting these power dynamics.

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In a rare example of labor trafficking, law enforcement officer Dean explained how these processes of control manifested in meatpacking plants in his region: What are you trying to accomplish in a criminal process? If you have labor and you can get a place like [a national meatpacking chain] or something and you can bring in one hundred people that you’re controlling and put them out [. . .] and control their money and stuff, well then, you might be associating in a small town. [. . .] Because they are going to hide them in plain sight, but they’re going to control them, you know.  [.  .  .] Most people think criminals, a lot of those people have very high IQs and they work three times harder doing something illegal than they could make a living legally, but they have endless energy because they’re motivated by money and to make money, they’re doing what they shouldn’t be doing. (interview 10/26/16) Dean here is using the figure of an agential criminal figurehead with hundreds of exploited laborers under their control. The meatpackers remain vague in his retelling; they are described as being financially dependent upon their traffickers, but the graphic descriptions of violence and harm that accompanied my earlier examples of sex trafficking are absent. Instead, Dean focuses on the deviant intelligence of these perpetrators, who are using unnamed mechanisms of control to financially benefit. It is not just “bad” enough that these criminals are exploiting individual laborers. Their greed and intentional disregard for legal ways to earn money compound Dean’s negative value judgment. As with all binaries, this system fell apart when the complexity of trafficked persons’ experiences failed to fit into this framework. In particular, experiences where victimhood and criminality are blurred, where passivity and agency coexist, created difficulties for frontline anti-­trafficking work. Law enforcement officer Vince spoke at length about the interpersonal dynamics he had witnessed between sex workers and market facilitators, using language of “prostitutes” and “pimps.” While some of my interviewees unequivocally positioned these relationships as inherently exploitative and nonconsensual, particularly those operating from a sex work–­abolitionist stance, Vince offered examples that made victimhood and criminality more difficult to parse out: We do occasionally run into young women that have guys that are kind of their rides, bodyguard, pimp, but a lot of times it’s more of a business partnership than coerced. Now, it might have been at one point, but it’s evolved into something beyond that. [. . .] Just kind of anecdotally, some of the ones that I’ve dealt with that did have a male pimp, whatever you want to call it, sometimes at that point the prostitute is almost in the power relationship at that point. Because the male [. . .] has feelings for her even though he’s



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facilitating her sleeping with other guys. [laughs] You know, but he does, we do, we run into that. We just had one not too long ago. I was reading the reports. [. . .] It was an older guy and a young girl, well, not girl, but young woman. And it was so obvious reading the reports, and he’s got feelings for her. And they’re also both drug-­addicted and were doing this to fuel both of their addictions. [. . .] It’s not the traditional, you know, you watch 1970s era movies with the pimp with the big floppy hat. (interview 9/7/16) Alongside the troubling racial framing, which reinforces stereotypes of Black men’s sexuality and predation, Vince articulates something more complicated in line with scholarship on third-­party market facilitators (Hannem and Bruckert 2017; Horning and Marcus 2017). Coercion is potentially present, but it coexists on a spectrum of power dynamics alongside business relationships and interpersonal intimacy. Perhaps, as Vince speculates, a pimp may exert control, but that control is not static or stable. In these muddled scenarios, the punishment mindset may not be able to function as designed, as it requires a recognizably deserving victim and punishable perpetrator. Vince’s example serves as a space where both parties—­the exploitable sex worker and the controlling market facilitator—­could be subject to a carceral logic of incarceration and disposability through statutes that criminalize selling and purchasing sex. Youth services administrator Jenny described a tension between interpretations of DMST in more rural versus more densely populated communities. Though her own city was considered rural by census standards and colloquial understandings—­her county was located in a relatively isolated part of the state—­Jenny’s community was fairly racially diverse due to sectors that drew migrant laborers to agricultural and meatpacking work. Given the comparable size and economic stability of her city compared to smaller, even more sparsely populated towns nearby, Jenny’s work required her to engage with stakeholders whose understandings of trafficking were more polarized, more reliant on binary cues of passivity and agency: I hate to say this but, particularly in smaller communities, I don’t know that they have the same level of understanding of some of the issues, particularly when working with victims. How, you know, if a young girl is picked up for prostitution, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is a criminal. She should be also treated as a victim. Because there’s a reason why she’s in that situation. And some of those situations were by no choice of her own. She’s living; she’s able to have food to eat and a place to live and those types of things. So I think just some of that education piece is really, really important. And even if it’s not a young person, I think there’s times that, it’s a mind shift, I guess, so to speak, that you kind of have to look at it a little different way.

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And sometimes we have a little bit of a struggle with law enforcement doing that, I guess I would say. [laughs] (interview 10/27/16) An “understanding of the issues” related to human trafficking is, in Jenny’s narrative, an understanding that the lines between the criminalized act of prostitution and the coerced act of sex trafficking (DMST or otherwise) may not be clear-­cut. This feels different from a sex work–­abolitionist perspective that uncritically conflates all forms of sex work with trafficking. Rather, this highlights the arbitrary ways that “good” and “bad” distinctions are discretionarily parsed out by frontline workers. If someone is engaging in survival sex, are their actions agential and subsequently criminal? If a “young girl” is arrested for engaging in commercial sex but she is beyond the age of eighteen—­the legal bright-­line between DMST and a potentially prosecutable offense—­is her dual victimhood/ criminality acknowledged by the officer on duty? Conforming and Retrofitting Narratives of Victimhood If carcerality is inevitable, anti-­trafficking actors need a victim and a perpetrator for their narratives and practices to work appropriately and effectively. Thus, an element of the punishment mindset includes guiding trafficked persons to self-­identify accordingly, even if this definition does not match their own understanding of their lived experiences. As housing advocate Victoria explained, “Some of my ladies have no idea that, you say the word ‘trafficked,’ and they would be like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’” (interview 12/7/16). Similarly, youth housing advocate Ari noted a disconnect between what she saw as sex trafficking but her clients described as sex work: “We do have quite a bit of youth that are engaged in prostitution, not by their own will. Some of them will try to tell you it’s by their own will, but we have enough training to know that when you’ve got your pimp’s name tattooed on your neck, or [. . .] you’ve got seven phones” (interview 12/7/16). Though the target populations are different—­Victoria served exclusively legal adults in her work, while Ari’s client base encompassed both minors and individuals above the age of eighteen—­these concerns of naming exist across both contexts. Force, fraud, or coercion may be present, but clients may lack an understanding of the legal context that renders their experiences trafficking or actively resist them, tapping into earlier conversations about agency. CPC director Rebekah described this retrofitting as a challenging moment to navigate with her clients, as a refusal to self-­identify was the result of a history of failed involvement with other social service institutions: “Some of those that have been most vulnerable, even if they don’t realize they’re a victim, they have already been through the system with this, that, and the other and have so much distrust.” She specifically named the foster care and health care systems as spaces



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that her clients identified as previously harmful or overly controlling, invoking feelings of their previous exploitation: “That’s almost like I’m giving myself to a new pimp” (interview 6/1/17). In Rebekah’s retelling of these experiences, her own work guiding clients to self-­identify as victims of sex trafficking was left out of this critique, though these patterns could easily appear in the context of her CPC. Encouraging clients to name the violence and harm they experienced in terms that feel inauthentic or inappropriate to them—­under the guise of teaching or educating—­may be illuminating for some victim-­survivors and overly controlling for others. Sometimes that guidance does feel explicitly forceful, or at least connected to punitive mechanisms. Law enforcement officer Mitch explained that sting operations in his community had revealed a set of potential clients who could choose the route of carceral protectionism’s care or carceral logic’s punishment: “Ultimately, they have to decide whether they wanna be a victim or not. If they don’t, well, then sometimes we have to treat them as a suspect.” Treatment as a suspect is implied to be harsh, especially given Mitch’s later comments about perpetrators of sex trafficking and producers of child pornography, which he sometimes mashed into one category: “I just can’t even believe that these people even exist” (interview 6/1/17). This certainly points to the intensely traumatic, violent acts Mitch investigated as part of his policing, but it can also demonstrate a form of distancing and objectification. Seeing a suspect as a “bad guy” whose existence is unfathomable is part of the punishment mindset’s construction of criminality as something so deviant that disposability is warranted. Ac c ounta b il it y , Re t r ib ut io n , and Closu r e Another component of the punishment mindset is the narrative it provides about justice and closure. Accountability for any deviance or harm can only be disseminated through the carceral state, reinforcing what Kaba (Intercepted 2017) calls the instinctive response to turn to policy, prosecutions, and prisons. For example, foster care administrator Suzy described the legislative changes she thought would more robustly address the role of market facilitators: I actually would love to see something done for the pimps too. I know they’re working on stricter laws and guidelines for them, which I appreciate so very much that that’s happening. And I just saw something last week, and I was like, “Oh thank goodness. Finally we’re going to have some harsher laws.” I think more needs to be done on that side of the fence as well. You know, where we’re not just going in and rescuing people. That’s awesome and great and I want that one hundred percent, but I do think there needs to be some serious, “Let’s go after these people and shut some things down.” (interview 5/24/17)

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you can’t hide. sex buyers beware.

 

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Suzy first conflates sex work with sex trafficking, which thus equates market facilitators with traffickers, though the legal differences and criminal responses between the two are not consistent (Grant 2014). She then identifies an important aspect of the punishment mindset: to increase the punitive response to those identified as exploiters or traffickers. Suzy’s perspective also reflects the resonance of the “End Demand” movement and its corresponding rhetoric in midwestern anti-­trafficking policy. These approaches prioritize the harsh criminal punishment of those who purchase sex (almost always described as men), leaving the sale of sex decriminalized (Berger 2012; Bernstein 2012; Majic 2017; Vanwesenbeeck 2017) and ostensibly serving as a gender-­responsive way to avoid harming women in the sex trade further (Vuolajärvi 2019). As seen in this image from the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office, the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” who purchases sex must be unmasked, identified, and incarcerated. Suzy’s emphasis on “go[ing] after these people and shut[ting] some things down,” while not explicitly using the terminology of ending demand for commercial sex, still emphasizes the punishment of individual “pimps” as part of the solution to end sex trafficking. Though her language here feels proactive, in the intentionality of seeking out market facilitators, the reactivity of the punishment mindset is still salient. She discusses this punitive

Addl. Notes: None

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approach after mentioning the continued importance of rescue, which can only happen after some harm or violation has occurred and established the victim/ perpetrator binary. Law enforcement officer George took a slightly broader approach in his explanation of trafficking-­specific statutes and legal framings, though he echoed Suzy’s emphasis on the importance of strict laws. From his perspective, one of the challenges surrounding his work with trafficked persons was the community misunderstanding of the necessity of these punitive approaches: And I think because of the punishment that the state statute holds on it, which I believe in. [. . .] The community that’s involved with human trafficking and knows everything that comes with that understands it. But I think the rest of the community, they don’t, because [they aren’t] privy to a lot of conversations between suspects and their families or just different things. You know, everybody just says, “Oh, [. . .] that was just promoting prostitution, that’s a misdemeanor. [. . .] Why are you facing this fifty years?” Or whatever it may be. So I think the majority of the community doesn’t see the punishment’s as bad as it should be. Or that punishment’s too bad, too much, too much punishment for this set of circumstances. (interview 12/5/16) George identified an interesting tension between insiders and outsiders, those with direct anti-­trafficking knowledge and those who observe as laypeople. Anti-­trafficking stakeholders collectively understood the need for punitive laws to deter trafficking and achieve some degree of recourse for victim-­survivors. Though the punishment mindset translates across all sectors, individuals with less direct contact with human trafficking interpreted its logics differently. If it is “just” a misdemeanor (arguably carrying less moral baggage than human trafficking with its gothic portrayals [Chapkis 2003]), then does it require the harshness reserved for the “worst” of the worst? Interestingly, attorney Kyle, who worked in the same jurisdiction as George, offered a very similar example, which also emerged during a discussion of workplace challenges. Kyle’s specific caseload focused primarily on DMST, which added yet another layer of complication to the misperceptions of punishment in his community: “And there is the perception that, so the crime of aggravated trafficking when it applies to someone under eighteen doesn’t directly apply coercion. A lot of people view that as, ‘Well, this isn’t trafficking. This is basically prostitution, buying sexual relations or selling sexual relations.’ So that’s a problem too, because the aggravated human trafficking is a high-­rated crime, so that the people look at it and say, ‘Well, yeah this is bad, but is this really bad?’” (interview 11/3/16). Again, as with George’s distinctions between promoting prostitution and human trafficking, Kyle identified a disconnect between the formal, legal punishment for DMST and the perceptions of deservingness and

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disposability applied to victims and offenders in this context. I do not want to uncritically present this example as Kyle’s constituents offering a nuanced perspective on youth engaged in sex trades (Baker 2018; Lutnick 2016), as our interview also detailed the victim-­blaming he witnessed judges and juries apply to DMST victim-­survivors. The punishment mindset falters here on multiple levels—­perhaps the punitive response is deemed too strict for the perceived scope and scale of the criminal act or the impression of the victim-­survivor’s agency, culpability, or deservingness of carceral justice. If punishment is the ultimate goal of a criminal legal process, then it is also the conclusion of the story. The “bad guy” is locked up, removed from society through incarceration or deportation, and the particular situation of violence or exploitation is resolved. A successfully punished perpetrator is the logical and desired outcome in a system of carceral logic (Dilts 2017). In this vein, service providers, particularly those who worked closely with members of the criminal legal system, used a successfully prosecuted human trafficking case as a metric of closure and justice for both themselves and the trafficked clients they served. For example, youth administrator Jenny concluded her example of a domestic minor sex trafficking case she worked on with an excited exclamation: “The two guys [identified as traffickers] were, in fact, found guilty and went to prison, yay” (interview 10/27/16). This “yay” gives a celebratory feel to her retelling of this case, even though incarceration is a complicated victory. As with many other forms of interpersonal and sexual violence, like rape (Deer 2009; Larcombe 2011; RAINN 2020), trafficking conviction rates are low (Farrell et al. 2016; Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014). A successful prosecution is not always an affirming experience for all parties involved, particularly the formerly trafficked persons called to testify against their traffickers. Chapters 3 and 4 explore this phenomenon in more detail—­the ways victim-­survivors resist carceral forms of justice and the challenges to induce compliance in long-­term prosecutions, respectively. But this theme also emerges within the context of the punishment mindset. Attorney Ellen described the considerations she took in determining how to address youth victim-­survivors of sexual exploitation and DMST as they navigated the courts, because a prosecution was inevitable and necessary: Sometimes the best thing is not traumatizing a child to go through trial, sometimes. And if we can get somewhere where the child never has to be traumatized again by going over it and being revictimized by being on the stand and talking about it, but we can still get the person the help they need and obviously go to prison. I mean, because there needs to be some punishment for that. But also because they can get a lot of these services in prison. Sex offender treatment, they can get more things than they can in our county jail. Sometimes, that’s what makes sense. (interview 8/10/16)



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I struggled putting this quote here, as it feels quite similar to victim services coordinator Rose’s sentiments in chapter 1, positioning detention as a carceral protectionist shortcut to resources for victim-­survivors. What feels meaningfully different is Ellen’s application of this ideology to perpetrators. Unlike Rose’s example, Ellen’s identified perpetrator is not identifiable as a victim morally or legally—­this is a person who committed a sex crime against a minor. Perpetrators “obviously” have to receive some kind of carceral justice through a prosecution leading to incarceration, but this does not foreclose them from the ability to receive other resources that may be more therapeutic in nature (even if the validity of that therapy is empirically dubious [Levine and Meiners 2020]). In some ways, we could read this as the punishment mindset with a lessened degree of disposability—­perpetrators need to be locked up and removed from society, though this displacement is in their best interests, as it opens access to certain resources that are simply inaccessible outside of the carceral state. This is still a problematic framing, but it could easily be interpreted as “softer.” In an example that combines accountability and closure with both the need for harsh punishments and the construction of disposable “bad guys,” law enforcement officer Mitch and CPC director Rebekah identified the state court system as a problem for achieving meaningful recourse for perpetrators of sexual exploitation: Mitch: In what I see, through the court process, criminal defendants, there is no fear of our judicial system. There’s absolutely no fear. I don’t know what the answer is. I think the federal government has it better, because everything is fast-­tracked. Things do not, are not allowed, to linger. I get frustrated at when you walk into a state courtroom. It’s like a circus. If you’ve never been there, you should go. Or don’t, because you’d just be depressed because it’s like there’s no order. And the defendants are just, you know, they don’t care. The punishment or the outcome, even if they’re acquitted, I don’t care. I mean, I care if they did it, but that’s not my ultimate goal. The problem is the process is drug out so long there [. . .] that meaning is long since subsided. [. . .] I don’t know if it’s truth in sentencing, because it’s ridiculous. [. . .] I know that funding’s an issue. Prison overcrowding. Then you have, you know, the inmates have all these abilities to sue for anything. Because they’re overcrowded or they don’t get the right TV channel or whatever the case may be, and so  [.  .  .] there’s no fear in it.  [.  .  .] I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be afforded a fair trial and everything but, I mean, it’s just kind of absurd if you watch that. If you can actually see the process, how they manipulate that system, to me, it’s unconscionable. Rebekah: Yeah, I would say there is absolutely no fear of law repercussion for those that are in sexually exploitive situations, and they know how to use

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it. [. . .] Even amongst themselves, they will say, “Well, she can’t really afford rehab. So it’d be a good thing for her to go to jail now.” Well, like, the jails are gonna be a good rehab but that may be the only step that keeps her from killing herself with the substances. But there isn’t the follow-­through, so if I wanna go buy another hit and I’m caught, I’ll get off. I just go pay my time here. And so there isn’t any repercussion for a lot of those things in terms of court. Definitely in terms of life. (interview 6/1/17) While there is a robust conversation in critical, transformative, and abolitionist spaces about the role of incarceration and deterrence for “sex crimes” (Leon 2011; Levine and Meiners 2020)—­namely, if incarceration meaningfully lowers recidivism rates—­Mitch and Rebekah are operating in a different space. The criminal defendants described in this anecdote are so “bad” that even a successfully prosecuted case and subsequent incarceration can be twisted for their benefit. There is no other alternative to disseminate justice, there is no other space to dispose of these “bad guys,” but there is simultaneously no carceral system that cannot deter manipulation. I am particularly struck by Mitch and Rebekah’s continued emphasis on “fear.” The only way for justice to be disseminated is through such intense and threatening carceral mechanisms that the perpetrators are living in fear. In contrast to research on violence and substandard living conditions inside jails and prisons (Delaney et al. 2018), Mitch and Rebekah provide an image of trafficking masterminds waiting for a minor concern with prison amenities to prop up a lawsuit, manipulating jail time as rehabilitation for the women under their control. The accountability and closure promised by the punishment mindset is not enough nor is the well-­documented treatment these perpetrators will face in overcrowded, underfunded prisons—­the question lingers as to what level of fear-­ inducing treatment would be sufficient to count as justice here. Less Traffic k in g , M o r e P un ish m e nt In sum, the punishment mindset is a reactive, limited framework to use when seeking justice in anti-­trafficking projects. But it is the framework most readily accessible. For street-­level bureaucrats, whose work is defined by the tools at hand in the face of extreme resource deficiencies (Lipsky 2010), the punishment mindset carries particular weight and saliency. The value judgments and discretionary practices that are inherent to frontline work are shaped by these norms of “goodness” and “badness,” legibility and disposability. Compounding all of this further are carceral feminist impulses to continually return to the criminal legal system and punitive legislation for justice in the context of sexual violence—­which exacerbates the aforementioned problem of limited resources, as these efforts simply direct more power and funding to law enforcement and



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maintain scarcity in sectors that address housing insecurity, economic inequality, and educational access. Law (2014) describes this as a feature, not a consequence, of carceral feminism: “Carceral feminism abets the growth of the state’s worst functions, while obscuring the shrinking of its best” (n.p.). Though some midwestern cities have attempted to (modestly and controversially) defund their local police forces and reallocate funds to social programs like antiracist and mental health resources (Aris and Lewis 2021), legislation like FOSTA-­SESTA and the proposed EARN IT Act give even more surveillant control to police engaged in trafficking or trafficking-­adjacent sex crimes investigations.5 As Kate D’Adamo explained in an EARN IT Act breakdown from the Hacking//Hustling collective (2020), this approach “instead simply expands liability, expands the number of police actors to say, well, we’re [sic] just capture everyone and try to root out the people that we’re really going for and really not caring about the collateral damage that we leave in its wake” (n.p.). At local levels, conversations may be changing to revisit what Law (2014) called the “best” state functions, but federal-­level efforts are doubling down on the “worst” elements of the punishment mindset. If frontline workers are tasked with interpreting and implementing policy on the ground, then this increasingly punitive, carceral approach will certainly shape their work. Even if service providers do not recognize the punishment mindset in their client encounters, the constant, rationalized turn to the carceral state creates a climate where anti-­trafficking efforts feel inevitably, naturally punitive. As Kaba (Intercepted 2017) powerfully states, this is fully predicable: “I think we have to like reframe our thinking and get out of the criminal, like the punishment mindset that we have. It infects everything. It’s not just the criminal punishment system” (n.p.). The punishment mindset is designed to infiltrate all sectors of frontline work, making the turn from the hand of the carceral state to the “caring” hand of the social welfare state still fraught with punitive practices. In the next chapter, I show what happens when we move to this more therapeutic, “restorative” space, where service providers extend these norms of goodness, worth, and value into post-­trafficking life. The carceral logics that shape the short-­term expectations for punishment and justice set the stage for a new form of longer-­term control and management to induce an appropriate performance of victimhood, one that erases the complex legal, economic, and interpersonal terrains that formerly trafficked persons must navigate.

Cha pte r 3

Therapeutic Governance and the

Regulation of the Post-­t raff icking Self And I think, going back to the challenges piece, [. . .] ­getting people to understand how important prevention is [is] a challenge. It’s a hard sell, because [. . .] if we’re doing it right, you don’t see the Cinderella story. [. . .] And that’s what people want is, you know, “I want to see this kid turn around.”

—­Interview with anti-­trafficking advocate Laura, 6/30/17

The expectations for formerly trafficked persons in their lives post-­trafficking can often feel as rigid and predetermined as the stereotypical frameworks that shape iconic victimhood. After a rescue or daring escape, after someone has been prosecuted and punished, trafficked persons must begin to rebuild their lives. This rebuilding can take many forms, as seen by the range of examples found on prominent anti-­trafficking nonprofits’ websites—­Fight the New Drug (2020) describes a months-­long, trauma-­informed therapeutic strategy to “overrid[e] trauma-­related neural pathways” (n.p.); the International Rescue Committee (2019) offers an example of a formerly trafficked woman who now holds a visa, owns a home, and runs a business with her reunited family. Resisting this construction, the reality of post-­trafficking life is often far more complicated. Denise Brennan (2014a) meticulously details the ways victim-­ survivors must content with limited resources for assistance; contingent, flexible, or low-­wage labor; visa applications; child custody agreements; records expungement for crimes committed while being trafficked; language-­learning programs, trade schools, or college classes; and physical and mental health outcomes connected to the violence and trauma of their experiences. Compounding all of these external factors is the “pressure on survivors to present themselves as ‘good victims,’ worthy of reintegration assistance” (Brennan and Plambech 2018, 4). In some ways, the idea of “post-­trafficking life” itself is a kind of black box, a conceptualization that is only rendered stable and closed by ignoring these structural and internal factors “that which no longer needs to be reconsidered, those 76



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things whose contents have become a matter of indifference” (Callon and Latour 1981, 285). Mainstream discourses can vaguely mobilize a Cinderella story like anti-­trafficking advocate Laura notes, highlighting the visible markers of a narrowly defined “success,” while forms of everyday precarity and vulnerability persist without reconsideration. In this chapter, I explore the ways service providers talked about their clients’ lives as formerly trafficked persons using the norms of therapeutic governance (McKim 2008; 2014). The social problem of human trafficking, a violence propelled by structural inequalities and global disparities (Kempadoo 2015), is reduced to an individual pathology. Within the context of service provision, victim-­survivors face a new set of management practices and regulations to help transform their traumatic or exploitative experiences into a singular problem with clearly defined solutions. If clients can cultivate a more robust sense of self, make “better” choices, and perform “good” work—­all while complying with the norms of punishment and prosecution addressed in previous chapters—­then they are afforded a linear narrative of success. They are empowered and have overcome the harms of their past. When clients deviate from this system, which seems fairly reasonable given the competing expectations of frontline organizational standards and self-­conceptualizations of post-­trafficking needs, service providers must guide them back onto the path of success or risk “failure.” T herapeut ic Go ve r n a n c e Alison McKim (2008) developed the concept of therapeutic governance in her work on women in court-­mandated substance abuse disorder programs, specifically interrogating “how psychological models of women’s deviance, racialized visions of motherhood, and therapeutic techniques come into tension with expectations of responsible, autonomous citizenship” (304). Therapeutic governance describes a process where the external or structural factors that might contribute to some socially identified and defined deviance—­in McKim’s research, this would be substance use and social marginalization—­are instead understood in terms of the self: self-­care, self-­work, self-­worth, self-­esteem. These softer, more feminized outcomes give the perception that techniques of therapeutic governance align with victim-­centered responses to deviance (Musto 2019; Whalley and Hackett 2017), even though they still “impose controls on largely marginalized clients whose actions are further constrained by the penal system” (McKim 2008, 304). The emphasis on the interior work of developing a selfhood runs counter to the responsibilities and motivations that women in McKim’s observed programs expressed: regaining or maintaining custody of children, returning to a particular romantic relationship, earning a more stable income, or finding secure housing. These factors exist outside the self to some degree, making them incompatible

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with therapeutic governance’s singular focus on internalized improvement. The racism, sexism, economic precarity, and legal control that shape these women’s lives are left untouched, while the onus is placed on them to pull themselves out of this complicated entanglement of structural oppressions. In sum, therapeutic governance “not only psychologizes structural inequities, it also suggests that the solutions rest with the individual” (McKim 2014, 438). The language of empowerment and self-­confidence is critical to therapeutic governance—­an “empowered” individual is self-­reliant enough to navigate the afore­mentioned macrolevel challenges without prolonged assistance from the state. In her study of therapeutic governance in a domestic violence shelter, Amanda M. Gengler (2012) articulates the failure of empowerment rhetoric to address root causes of violence: “Yet the very notion of empowerment assumes that women have failed to take control of their lives and must be taught how to do so. This is particularly true for women who are seen as ‘victims,’ and implies that an inability to make ‘good life choices’—­rather than structural gender arrangements, economic exploitation, or both—­led to their victimization. The solution, then, was to teach them to make better choices and to learn ‘accountability’” (517). While there is nothing inherently wrong with focusing on the self, there is something deeply troubling about therapeutic services that perpetuate an implicit victim-­ blaming under the guise of self-­improvement. Women are positioned as both agential and passive, possessing enough agency to ideally make different, “better” life choices upon exiting services but first requiring the training and knowledge imparted by professionals with credentialed expertise. Frontline Co n t r o l a n d T herapeuti c Go ve r n a n c e Though McKim does not explicitly connect her service providers to Michael Lipsky’s street-­level bureaucrats, the links between the two are potent. Therapeutic governance is performed by those engaged in direct, interpersonal client interactions and manifests on-­the-­ground policies focused on client compliance and performance. The tangible receipt of services is but one element of frontline work—­how clients respond to those resources and the provider disseminating said resources is another important component. If client behavior is deemed improper in some way, even if that deviation is reflective of an unnecessary or inappropriate intervention, service providers have the authority to exercise a degree of control. As Lipsky (2010) emphasizes, client/provider encounters teach lessons about normative behaviors embedded in methods of resource distribution: “Street-­level bureaucrats indeed reprimand or otherwise sanction deviance from acceptable standards of client behavior. They dominate their interactions with clients. They cue and otherwise teach clients to behave ‘properly.’ They structure work



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patterns to maximize control over clients independent of any policy objectives” (58). In street-­level bureaucracies that mobilize techniques of therapeutic governance, the “acceptable standards” of client behavior may include the performance of an empowered, cultivated internal self. Though policy objectives may not state this standard outright, especially in more quantifiable metrics, service providers have the discretionary power to centralize these norms of selfhood through their interpersonal client contact. Therapeutic governance also carries an air of paternalism that is not uncommon to certain frontline workers’ self-­conceptualizations: the service providers tasked with developing their clients’ internal selfhood know this core is missing or underdeveloped (McKim 2008; 2014), positioning them as knowing better than the clients themselves. The women in McKim’s (2014) research do not yet know that the solution to “overcoming” their substance use lies in their ability to develop a “capable, self-­managing, distinctly feminine subject through gendered self-­care” (443). They must start practicing and performing such a subjectivity under the guidance of their properly trained case managers who understand these internal struggles. This analysis is in line with Steven Maynard-­Moody and Michael Musheno’s (2003) study of cops, teachers, and counselors on the frontlines: “Street-­level workers reveal themselves as agents, as wielders of power who know what is best for other citizens” (20). While this knowing may be interpreted differently at the encounter-­to-­encounter level—­what reads as condescending overreach by one client may easily be understood as empathy or care by another—­the idea of knowing better as a tool at frontline workers’ discretionary disposal to induce a certain client performance is necessary to understand. T herapeut ic Go ve r n a n c e in Anti- t ­ raf f ic k in g A g e n da s Anti-­trafficking efforts, especially those within the law enforcement and social service arenas, easily fit into this broader framework of therapeutic governance, even if they do not explicitly stake a claim in the self-­improvement arena. Trafficked persons may not be entering these spaces willingly, as many victim-­ survivors are identified through arrests or sting operations, so the conditions for a mismatch between victim-­survivors’ self-­defined needs and organizational modes of therapeutic governance are present. This can appear as continued deviance or failure to comply when, in actuality, it is a painfully simple miscommunication. Drawing parallels with Rashmee Singh’s (2018) study of specialized prostitution courts, individuals are positioned as the agents of their own change—­they themselves are “the forces that are ultimately the most responsible for overcoming their oppression” (572). Success, the demonstration of “resilience and full recovery” (577), is hyperindividualized, and the acquisition of certain markers of recovery—­educational certificates, stable employment outside of commercial

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sex—­leaves structural inequalities untouched. Singh (2018) evocatively calls these narratives “penal fables” and “court tales,” as they take on a mythic quality as they circulate among court participants and frontline workers enmeshed in these legal systems. If one person can overcome the oppression and violence of poverty, racism, sexism, and xenophobia after their engagement with these courts, then all participants are held to this standard without questioning the circumstances that make this kind of success impossible for some. Lastly, not all trafficked persons desire the “therapeutic” in therapeutic governance. The assumption of trauma, particularly in interventions centered on commercial sex (Anasti 2020a), can deepen the mismatch between a victim-­ survivor’s needs and an organization’s priorities. Chrysanthi S. Leon and Corey S. Shdaimah (2019) summarize this impulse in their study of prostitution diversion programs (PDPs): “Trauma is the coin of the realm” (578). If deviance is understood as a trauma response best ameliorated through internal self-­improvement, then frontline workers can follow a script in service provision that feels more caring or affectively attuned: “Professionals can recognize trauma, and (at times) provide therapeutic responses for behavior or attitudes that they might previously have interpreted as noncompliant and therefore responded to punitively” (563). Instead of removing someone from a diversion program because their lack of compliance is understood as a nebulous negative behavior, the trauma lens affords street-­level bureaucrats the discretion to instead interpret this as a problem of the self, rooted in past experiences that can be resolved through more self-­ reflection and self-­improvement. The emphasis on trauma, particularly those models of trauma rooted in childhood dysfunction or interpersonal exploitation, may regrettably silence those trafficked persons whose experiences do not align with this genre of psychological harm. As Brennan (2014a) writes, post-­trafficking life may be focused more on pragmatic acquisition of specific resources, not “overcoming” an inherent trauma: “While a variety of programs around the world that assist trafficked individuals use the language of recovery, not everyone feels the need to ‘recover’ or to ‘heal.’ The language of recovery and healing pathologizes individuals at a time of acute economic uncertainty and legal limbo. There is extreme dissonance between what formerly trafficked persons say they want and need and what some antitrafficking organizations claim they need” (116). Though the narrative construction of life after trafficking commonly starts with a return to an integrated internal self, it might be more effective—­and less traumatic, especially when thinking about the profound mental stress of economic precarity—­for some victim-­survivors to essentially “flip the script” and start with accessing stable, steady resources to meet their material needs. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I trace the various processes by which frontline workers attempt to cultivate a post-­trafficking success story. I



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begin with the cues and performances that hint at a more fully developed internal selfhood: improved self-­esteem through comportment and embodiment, morally regulated decision-­making strategies, and honest work. If these pieces coalesce neatly, then service providers can point to a success, what Laura calls a Cinderella story. If not—­if trafficked persons offer some degree of resistance to comply in this linear way—­frontline workers might risk a failed case. To counter this, discretion affords a degree of “tough love” that can be exercised in certain contexts and guide victim-­survivors back onto a normative narrative path. Norms of t h e P o st -­t r a f f ic k in g S el f Self-­Esteem and Personal “Enhancements” Therapeutic governance starts with the self, and self-­esteem emerged as both an implicit and explicit element to cultivate and buffer against the trauma of trafficking. Foster care case manager Jessica identified this kind of internal improvement as a major need for the youth with whom she worked: I’d say a lot of the more specific ones I see in regard to trafficked people is understanding their own value and worth. It’s a lot of that self-­esteem, and I believe that that’s where a lot of the work needs to begin, is the “you don’t need to be treated that way, and when you are treated that way, it’s not OK. And it won’t be accepted.” And because they just are so good, pimps and johns are just so good at making you feel like such, just an object, and I feel like if you can start there and build up that self-­esteem, you can then start to, because most of our girls are seeking a family they didn’t have. (interview 5/25/17) In Jessica’s description, DMST victim-­survivors are turning to commercial sex not to address a structural barrier or basic need (Lutnick 2016) but instead to fill an emotional gap produced by the lack of a present familial structure. These young women are vulnerable to exploitation or trafficking because of this misdirected self-­narrative: they do not deserve to be treated as commercialized, sexualized objects and must be taught to understand their core value. Foster care administrator Suzy described a subtler process of softening and shedding a tough exterior that could then be replaced with a more authentic self: Where the girls that are trafficked, or the kids that are trafficked, they’re kind of like, “Don’t tell me what to do. I’ve already been living my life, and I’ve done all of these things, and I’ve been way more places than this little home’s going to give me.” You know? [. . .] I mean, I think deep down inside, they want to be rescued, too, but they’re very hardened to that. I did meet with somebody once from the child advocacy center [. . .], but just putting them in a pair of sweats and getting them to wipe their makeup off. That always stood out to me as something like when they, they’re living this persona,

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getting to act and be this certain person over here. And then when all that comes off, and they actually are who they really are, and that vulnerability comes out, it does change. You get to see a little side of them that really wants to be rescued and wants to be safe and secure. (interview 5/24/17) Though Suzy is not explicitly saying this transformation connects to better self-­esteem, she is tapping into an important component of therapeutic governance: external disorder highlights internal confusion or even the lack of a stable, core identity. Excessive, improper femininity—­the makeup, the age-­ inappropriate clothes and shoes—­must be corrected as part of a larger process of self-­improvement. As McKim (2014) summarizes in her analysis of one organization’s emphasis on client beauty, “Normative femininity was an expression of the real self breaking through years of abuse” (442). Here, the “real” self is a young woman who does not need to perform the persona of someone older, engaged in commercial sex. Inside, she is actually someone who “really wants to be rescued,” a particularly fraught assumption knowing the problems of the rescue narrative detailed in chapter 1. What remains untouched in Suzy’s narrative are the larger systemic factors that may have made this DMST victim-­survivor acquire such a persona, as well as the assumption that her performance of femininity is not in alignment with an internal self. Though faith-­based anti-­trafficking interventions appear prominently in the United States (Bernstein 2007; McGrow 2017; Shih 2016; Zimmerman 2010; 2011) and globally (Bernstein and Shih 2014; Kinney 2006; Vanderhurst 2017), very few of my interviewees mentioned the importance of developing a religious self post-­trafficking. Service providers from the CPC sector, which skews politically and religiously conservative, and an evangelically affiliated nonprofit—­eight of my total fifty-­four participants—­were more inclined to mention practices like prayer and belief systems. Outside of this sector, anti-­trafficking advocate Elizabeth, immigration lawyer Chelsea, and domestic violence advocate Naomi all named and critiqued the faith-­based movements in their communities. Housing advocate Victoria and therapist Ruth neutrally presented the story of a client engaged in commercial sex who found religion after various rehabilitative programs. Victim services coordinator Rose stood alone in her belief that there were uncritically positive outcomes to finding a higher power while in an anti-­trafficking shelter. From her experiences in a midwestern metropolitan region, the material benefits conferred alongside religious programming in this organizational model were unparalleled: I mean, it’s educational. [. . .] To make an educated choice, you have to know about what Christianity is, and you have to know about what Christianity is



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not. And so, for people having a choice and closing the door on Christianity is [. . .] I think that’s a myth. Unjustice [sic] or it’s just inappropriate. [. . .] If you have a victim who says, “Well, I’m not gonna go to that Christian,” you know, [. . .] it needs to be clearly explained to them that this is an organization that will help you get back on your feet. Yes, they’re going to ask you to go to the spiritual classes, but those are in fact an enhancement to your knowledge base. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to ask you if in fact you wanna become the Christian and come back and sit at their church door every Sunday. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about education, and whether that education provides them education from the biblical standpoint or whether it provides them education, you know, to learn how to flip hamburgers or to learn how to sew or to learn how to budget their checkbook. Because they provide those services along with that.  [.  .  .] They ask them to come, I think, to a couple of sessions a day. So, you know, out of an eight-­ or nine-­hour day, of all the other things that they’re providing, they ask you to give up two hours? To listen to an enhancement of your education? And I think when people close the door, thinking Christianity is forced upon them, instead of reviewing that this is an enhancement, because if they wanted [to] research evolution, they’re not gonna say they can’t do that inside those doors. They’re just gonna say, “Look at that and look at this too.” But really, I was just blown away from their program and their design. (interview 2/15/17) Rose uses the word “enhancement” consistently throughout her framing of this program, which took a great deal of its frameworks from evangelical Christianity. Women, both sex trafficking victim-­survivors and individuals formerly engaged in commercial sex, received secure housing and extensive training—­at the time of this interview, this was arguably the most expansive slate of resources in the region—­in exchange for their participation in “a couple” of religious sessions. What is absent from Rose’s framing of these enhancements is the coercion or constrained choice that some victim-­survivors may feel. Their compliance in attending these programs and performing a normative, post-­trafficking self that does not resist Christian education is directly connected to vast material resources. What may be a welcome enhancement for one could feel like an intrusive or disrespectful intervention for another. As Amanda emphasized in her critique of “Bible Belt” anti-­trafficking efforts, these assumptions about the utility of religious programs also ignore the fact that victim-­survivors may have faced violence and exploitation within the church: “It’s difficult to kind of help [religious anti-­trafficking organizations] see that someone who’s been abused pretty much their entire life, probably by Christians, then they’re gonna come into your shelter and you’re gonna try to sell God to them. It’s not always gonna work”

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(interview 12/9/16). Religion is not a neutral institution—­it could be harmful to some formerly trafficked persons—­and turning to faith-­based interventions without any acknowledgment that victim-­survivors may understandably resist this programming feels like creating an inevitable environment of mismatch. Thus, norms of the post-­trafficking self may be understood as moral, vaguely shaped by mainstream religious ideologies but not tied directly to one faith system. In line with therapeutic governance, it seems less important in these on-­the-­ ground manifestations of service provision to induce an explicit conversion to one mainline Christian denomination than to compel a more mature, measured performance of self. For example, expanding on Victoria and Ruth’s neutral description of a successful client, “finding Jesus” is only one piece of a bigger self-­ improvement process: Victoria: And at some point, along the way of her journey here, she became very self-­sufficient and kinda took on her healing to be her own. Ruth: Right, as on the GED. Victoria: She went and got her GED, started doing NAMI [support groups with the National Mental Health Alliance], got kicked out of NAMI. [laughs] [. . .] Ruth: But [her] dress changed.  [.  .  .] She used to wear just high boots with very exploitive clothing, and she started to dress one day. Victoria: Yeah, I mean, like, she would put her hair in pigtails, very young, very youth. Her actual age and her mentality never really matched up. I mean, it was just like over time. Ruth: A confidence came about her. [. . .] There was a better confidence about her as a woman. [. . .] Victoria: And she had left our program to live in a camper and do some traveling. [. . .] But, I mean, by the time that she exited, she had followed the paperwork procedure, which was very outside of her character. She would not have done that when we brought her in. She was making all of her appointments; she brought me a Bible. And wanted me to have a Bible when she left. (interview 12/7/16) In this anecdote, self-­sufficiency is tied to a range of internal work processes. Ruth and Victoria’s client tapped into nearly every marker of post-­trafficking normativity: “healing” from a presumed trauma, educational training, substance use support, age-­appropriate embodiment, bureaucratic compliance, and development of a religious belief system. None of these appear to be ranked more highly than the other and, importantly, emerge as part of this client’s individualized “journey.” The systemic oppressions that led to her initial involvement in commercial sex may still be present in her day-­to-­day, but they are absent from this narrative of overcoming, progress, and self-­improvement.



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“Lifestyle Choices” Many in the mainstream anti-­trafficking and anti–­sex work movements refer to “the life” or “the lifestyle” when discussing potentially exploitative commercial sex. Shared Hope International (2020), a faith-­based anti-­trafficking nonprofit, includes “the life” in its online glossary of trafficking terms, synonymous with “the game”: “The subculture of prostitution, complete with rules, a hierarchy of authority, and language. Referring to the act of pimping as ‘the game’ gives the illusion that it can be a fun and easy way to make money when the reality is much harsher. Women and girls will say they’ve been ‘in the life’ if they’ve been involved in prostitution for a while” (n.p.). Shared Hope International is an evangelical, neoabolitionist group, and this terminology reflects a particular understanding of sex work that aligns with their ideology and mission statement. Notably, even though this term is defined to ostensibly help service providers and informal advocates better understand the populations they serve, “the life” may not carry as much currency as those positioned to be in “the life.” As a March 2017 Twitter exchange between Juno Mac and Melissa Gira Grant wryly highlighted, “I only hear ‘in the life’ from social workers” (@melissagira, March 14, 2017). Few of my participants explicitly mobilized “the life,” though those who did followed a general pattern of focusing more prominently on sex trafficking in our interviews and interpreting all forms of commercial sex as sex trafficking. For example, in talking about processes of identification in sex work–­focused sting operations, law enforcement officer Vince noted the importance of intervening with the young women discovered in these busts: “I would like to think that anytime we have kids that get caught up in that lifestyle, we do everything we can to get them out of that” (interview 9/7/16). Foster care administrator Suzy described how DMST victim-­survivors described “the life” in terms that felt chaotic, sometimes stretching the limits of what needs her organization could meet: “And then also, they’re used to this way of life too. I mean, like, if they say, ‘Hey I want a new pair of shoes,’ that’s how the pimp is paying them off too. So it’s a wild world. The needs seem to be different” (interview 5/24/17). The idea of “the life” as a subculture echoes here, as if these youth are acclimated to an entirely different, deviant way of acquiring goods and negotiating interpersonal relationships. Alexandra Lutnick (2016) resists and demystifies this framing in her own work—­in short, youth engaged in commercial sex “are creating sexual solutions to nonsexual problems” (26)—­but it is clearly a powerful shorthand in some frontline workers’ repertoires. An interview with Erin, another foster care administrator, directly opposed the resonance of “the life” in her midwestern community. After receiving a grant to support internal education and training for her case managers, her organization brought an anti-­trafficking advocate from a coastal nonprofit to focus on terminology and identification:

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We don’t hear that same type of language in the Midwest. We don’t hear girls referring to folks as like their daddy. We don’t hear that language. We don’t hear girls talking about the track. Those aren’t things we hear in the Midwest. What we tend to hear is a boyfriend, [. . .] and then a lot of what we see is kids on the run, and sex being expected, or some type of sexual act being expected in return for a place to stay or something to eat. That is what we see a lot of. And so even when we’re doing an assessment for human trafficking, [. . .] they won’t disclose that. They won’t. They don’t identify themselves as victims, number one. But they kind of dance around some information, but that is the piece that we can usually pick it up is, you know, [. . .] this person let you stay at their house for the last three months. How did you pay your way? [. . .] Did you have a bedroom? Did you have to answer to anybody? [. . .] Like one girl told me that the person expected her to give them a blow job in return, and she’s not that kind of girl, so she left. So we know the expectation is there. (interview 11/17/16) If frontline workers are tasked with mobilizing policy on the ground—­and the policies they are trained to implement fail to resonate with the clients they are supposed to serve—­then it is unreasonable to expect successful client/provider encounters. Erin describes how the youth in her care may be more willing to talk about their solutions to structural gaps, such as engaging in survival sex for shelter, than being a part of a more formalized subculture. Instead of using “the life” as a shorthand, my participants more commonly identified a complex network of “good” and “bad” individualized choices, echoing Gengler’s (2012) critique of the empowerment narrative, that led toward the trauma and harm of human trafficking. For example, though law enforcement officer Vince used the phrasing of the “lifestyle” when discussing DMST victim-­ survivors, he used a different framing when discussing the older sex workers caught up in his jurisdiction’s sting operations: It’s primarily women that we deal with, young women primarily. And honestly, by the time we deal with them, they’re pretty hard. They’re pretty hardened, and they’ve kind of turned the corner, and they know at some point they probably were victimized. You know, this happens, they didn’t just wake up. I mean, I’ve got a daughter, and  [.  .  .] as a young woman, I would think you just don’t wake up one day and say, “Hey, I think I’ll be a prostitute.” And if you look back when we do try to do a little bit of background, they come from challenging backgrounds and [. . .] I would guess, with the right intervention, they would not, you would hope, you know, some people are going to make bad choices no matter what. And you can’t save everybody. (interview 9/7/16)



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The differences in agency and consent—­being “caught up” in a “lifestyle” as a legal minor but making “bad choices” as a legal adult—­are profoundly apparent when contrasting Vince’s statements. While race is explicitly absent in Vince’s statements, his words call upon an implicit framing of deservingness that aligns with normative (white) childhood innocence. As Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners (2020) write, “These vulnerable, victimized children deserve compassion and leniency, protection and nurturing” (41). They can be saved while the identified adults are “pathologi[zed]  [.  .  .] as unable to make ‘good’ decisions” (Mac and Smith 2018, 47). Having transgressed these standards, which can only be applied to youth, legal adults cannot be given the benefit of the doubt in the “bad choices” they have made to engage in commercial sex. While describing the differences (and different challenges) between a standard sex crimes case and a sex trafficking case, investigator Jake noted that trafficked persons might feel a degree of control over their situation, as if they were “in charge.” He emphasized that if people were able to make “proper” choices and had more chances to exercise appropriate judgment, they might have the ability to choose something else and would not engage in commercial sex (interview 9/27/16). Jake’s comment supports Theresa Anasti’s (2020a) research on frontline workers engaged with individuals in the sex trade: “To respondents, all clients were considered ‘worthy’ of assistance because of the impact of trauma, and respondents decried those who perceived the sex trade as a ‘choice’ that individuals make” (57). As noted in chapter 1, Jake believed in trauma-­informed carceral care when interviewing victim-­survivors of sex trafficking, who would be confronting these past experiences during an interrogation. Here, he complicates the idea of “choice.” While it is not the classic neoabolitionist framing of sex work as never consensual, Jake sees commercial sex as a constrained or false choice. In the face of other options or modes of receiving money or resources, people simply would not choose sex work. While this is certainly applicable to some cases—­I think of Lutnick’s (2016) DMST victim-­survivors who stop trading sex when their basic needs are met by other means—­it is also incomplete. Using Mac and Molly Smith’s (2018) theorizing, Jake locates the problem in sex, but as I illuminate in a few pages, perhaps we should locate the problem in work (53). My interviewees also made efforts to complicate these narratives of choice by connecting their anecdotes to broader inequalities that could exacerbate precarity. For example, in discussing the challenges of prosecuting human trafficking cases, law enforcement officer George noted the nuanced decision-­making strategies that, while authentic to a victim-­survivor’s lived experiences, complicated norms of trafficking embedded in depictions of iconic victimhood (Srikantiah 2007): “I think in any human trafficking case, the hardest part is your victim. [. . .] They usually have a past, which is why things have happened to them or they’ve

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done things. And that’s why they end up in the vulnerable state [. . .], in these situations where they’re just making the best worst decision that they can make, or the [. . .] the best of the worst” (interview 12/5/16). The “best worst” decisions George references here align with a more systemic approach to human trafficking, as the victim-­survivors with whom he worked faced overlapping factors of poverty, housing insecurity, and familial instability, as well as stigmatized labels of criminality or deviance for their actions performed or induced while labeled as trafficked. The choices victim-­survivors made in particularly constrained circumstances may be clear to him but not relatable to a fellow law enforcement officer, a jury, or a judge, especially those more familiar with tropes of “the life” or ideal victimhood. Youth services administrator Jenny offered a similarly nuanced take on choice and structural constraints. In describing the DMST victim-­survivors her work had served, she explained, “There’s a reason why she’s in that situation. And some of those situations were by no choice of her own. She’s living, she’s able to have food to eat and a place to live and those types of things” (interview 10/27/16). Affirming Lutnick’s (2016) research yet again, Jenny’s statements are in line with an understanding of trafficking as a response to limited social service responses for safe housing and resources that do not compromise an individual’s self-­determination or autonomy. No one chooses poverty or housing insecurity, though they may choose to exchange sex to avoid the confines of (or explicit exclusions from) a shelter or the threat of policing and violence while unhoused on the street, forms of harm disproportionately felt by Black transgender women and transgender women of color (Greene 2019; Ritchie 2017; Yarbrough 2023). At the same time as I highlight George and Jenny’s words, I want to draw attention to the complexity of “choice,” which may not be the freely chosen liberal feminist configuration (Budgeon 2015) or the false consciousness of anti–­sex work abolitionists (Beloso 2012). Lorelei Lee’s (2019) “Cash/Consent” article articulates this decision-­making as “trad[ing] sex under circumstances that are coercive but not forced—­circumstances under which we did things intentionally but did not choose in the sense academic feminists usually mean” (n.p.). Similarly, suprihmbé (2019) offers a more complicated understanding: “Much of the time my experiences with erotic labor straddled the make-­believe line between consensual and coercive, in both an economic and physical sense” (n.p.). The discourse of “lifestyle choices” is contingent on a false binary where consent and coercion are polar opposites—­and indeed, in other forms of labor under late capitalism like the gig economies of ride-­sharing apps and delivery services (Snider 2018), the blurriness of choice is at least acknowledged. The framing of commercial sex as simply a “good” or “bad” choice that an individual makes when faced with economic precarity or instability ignores the way that choosing choices is far messier, contextual on systemic factors, and never wholly “good” or “bad.”



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Interpersonal Dynamics and Dignified Work Regulating the post-­trafficking self means reducing or eliminating opportunities to return to “the life” and its attendant patterns of exploitation. One way to circumvent its pull was through the reconfiguration of particularly toxic relationships. This was a meaningful deviation from therapeutic governance. As McKim (2008) deftly illustrates, much of the tension within therapeutic governance strategies emerges from the singular focus on clients’ selfhood versus their relationships with others: “The staff pushed clients to ‘focus on themselves’ and their internal emotional life rather than on other people, social roles, or obligations to combat the lack of self-­awareness that fueled their criminality” (309). Instead of, for example, understanding these women in substance use disorder treatment as mothers, sisters, romantic partners, breadwinners, or community members, they are just women—­with particular self-­esteem and self-­care needs—­before they can be anything else. In an extension of McKim’s framework, the service providers I interviewed acknowledged the coexistence of these roles while still emphasizing the importance of self-­improvement as a way out of problematic interpersonal relationships. For example, case manager Jessica melded a need to reevaluate unhealthy friendships with the aforementioned choice narratives: “We have a lot of kids that come from broken homes. And when I talk to them about these friends that I just don’t think are good choices, and bad things, they [say], ‘But they’re always there for me’” (interview 5/27/17). This statement weaves together almost all of the earlier themes. The youth with whom Jessica worked experienced some kind of trauma that disrupted their selfhood and followed them into the violence of trafficking; the choices they made about maintaining friendships that called them back into deviance and exploitation must be identified as a negative interpersonal role to work against. One of the major interpersonal dynamics mentioned in my interviews was romantic relationships, specifically between (usually young) women and their male partners, frequently called pimps. These men served as some sort of figure of violence or exploitation, be it through domestic instability or controlled engagement in commercial sex. Sticking with this “bad” boyfriend could indicate a lack of emotional growth or self-­improvement; finding a new, “good” romantic partner could show a victim-­survivor had successfully cultivated some internal core. Therapist Ruth shared an anecdote about a particularly challenging client at her housing organization, a young woman who had migrated to the United States as a child and found herself engaged in suspected DMST, cycling in and out of care. After a few months of services, this young woman left, leaving Ruth without any sense of closure or clarity. But in their smaller rural city, they randomly encountered each other in public: “Maybe she connected to somebody else, I don’t know. Not here. So and like I said, I don’t know what happened.

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I saw her down at the water park one day downtown, fairly clear-­eyed, with a young guy. Not an older guy. They seemed to actually be of the same age, which was kinda nice. But I don’t know what was going on. Just said hi, that was about it. They were swimming, doing what young people do” (interview 12/7/16). Ruth was clear to describe this case as unsuccessful, specifically for its lack of continuity and closure within her organization. However, I want to grant more nuance to her framing, as she intentionally describes this former client as “clear-­eyed” and engaging in some kind of interpersonal connection with a more age-­appropriate partner. Ruth may not know where this client did the internal work to get to this point of normalcy, “doing what young people do,” but it is clear that this step is something meaningful in the larger norms placed onto life post-­trafficking. Foster care case manager Jessica offered an example that pulled directly from the language of therapeutic governance. Much like Ruth, she selected a difficult client case to illuminate the power of relationship dynamics. Jessica worked with an entire family, where a wife and mother engaged in commercial sex (described as “selling herself” into trafficking) while simultaneously navigating drug use, domestic violence, and untreated mental health concerns. She entered a program for women formerly engaged in commercial sex / sex trafficking (conflated here) to great success, but her challenges reemerged upon returning home: [It was] a big turning point, which was funny because her husband, which we also believe to be her pimp, seemed like such a great guy and was really nice and not in that “I’m shady, I’m making it look like I’m so great because I’m super manipulative.” Like he honestly seemed like a good guy, but he then got out and everything hit. It was all of a sudden, “Well, OK, yeah he’s staying with me.” Well, he shouldn’t be staying with you, [. . .] this is probably not a good thing. We’re focusing on you and getting productive, and right now he’s not productive. (interview 5/25/17) Jessica uses the individualized language of therapeutic governance explicitly when mobilizing terms of the self and “focusing on you,” but it is also clear that her client’s role as a wife is important to this process of self-­improvement. She cannot do the internal work of self-­improvement if her romantic partner is dysfunctional. However, the husband’s initial characterization as a “good guy” presented him as a possible factor to aide her success, not a roadblock. Jessica’s concluding sentence also introduces an important element to these processes of self-­governance with its emphasis on “getting productive.” This can function in two ways: the forward momentum of internal work that produces better self-­esteem and self-­worth and the transition away from illicit economies to formal wage labor. Thus, another buffer against “the life” were opportunities to perform less exploitative, more dignified work.



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As briefly noted previously, discourses of commercial sexual labors, especially those from a neoabolitionist perspective, question the morality and “goodness” of sex work. Because sex is framed as an exceptional category—­something so affectively charged and embodied—­it cannot be considered dignified, valuable, “good” work. Mac and Molly Smith (2018) problematize this notion beautifully: Some workers are lucky enough to have good pay, meaningful work, and autonomy, but most of us feel the sharp edge of exploitation in some way. Perhaps your boss took a cut of your tips, or forced you to work on your partner’s birthday or during your grandfather’s funeral. Perhaps you’ve started to resent the way your time-­sheets always seem to entail an extra fifteen minutes of unpaid work at the end of the day, or how long you spend on your commute—­time that’s not only uncompensated but actively expensive. You’re paying to get to work, and the company you work for is absorbing the benefit. In an important sense, waged work is exploitation. [. . .] It is not reasonable to assume that any kind of work—­including sex work—­is generally good. (45–­46) Mac and Smith resist the notion of sexual labor as inherently and always “bad,” with nonsexual forms of work as “good,” devoid of exploitation. This is particularly important when the jobs accessible to formerly trafficked persons in their post-­trafficking life may be morally “good” but easily exploitable and poorly compensated (Brennan 2014a), particularly under global capitalism (Kempadoo 2015): childcare, retail, or housekeeping. Antiviolence advocate Caroline identified a stable job as a necessary next step for her clients, many of whom experienced some degree of sexual exploitation prior to engaging with her organization. While she was able to provide some stopgap measures—­funds for a month’s rent or utilities—­that money was finite: “Here’s our biggest problem: sustainability. It’s like, I see I’m doing this for you, but do you have a job? Because at a certain point, this money runs out, and then you’re still gonna be back here.” Returning to Caroline’s organization was a clue that these clients, primarily female-­identified victim-­survivors of interpersonal violence, had restarted survival strategies of exchanging sex for housing and shelter, “going from place to place and person to person,” in her words (interview 9/28/16). A post-­trafficked self that does not replicate a cycle of dependency on service provision requires a nonsexual form of work that goes beyond just meeting basic survival needs. CPC director Eleanor described a tension between dignified work and trauma in a specific client’s experiences after being trafficked by her husband. As Eleanor explained, “She acts like she’s been in the influence of heavy drugs for years and she just can’t get back knowing how to pay her bills. But she’s got a good job. She works at [a local mechanic’s shop], but she just can’t get back to

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normal” (interview 7/12/17). Though it is absent from the transcript, upon relistening to the interview audio, the surprise in Eleanor’s voice is palpable. A good job should be enough, and yet, it is not. Though this work is a marker of progress beyond the dysfunction and violence of her client’s former life—­the shedding of a toxic relationship and focus on herself and her children, all in line with this slightly modified genre of therapeutic governance—­dignified work itself may not be the exclusive solution for all of a client’s post-­trafficking needs. In a complex example, victim services coordinator Rose both acknowledged the immorality of sex work from a neoabolitionist perspective and questioned the livability of flexible, low-­paid labor her clients were able to access most easily. At various points in our interview, Rose slipped between sex trafficking, commercial sex, and prostitution: “I’m sure you’ve heard the adage, ‘Well, prostitution is the oldest crime in the world, you know, biblically.’ But that doesn’t mean that those prostitutes were a willing participant [sic].” Even with this conflated perspective, she bluntly acknowledged the reality of wage labor in her region: “You say, ‘Go out and make a living.’ At what? Minimum wage? Minimum wage? With nothing to make a deposit for a home. [. . .] And this is gonna sound really bold, but how do you tell a woman to go work at Burger King for minimum wage when she can go do a blow job for forty dollars? It doesn’t equate” (interview 2/15/17). While this complicates some of Rose’s earlier statements—­specifically, the utility of anti-­trafficking education and training that teaches women how to “flip burgers”—­she does highlight the paradox of dignified yet underpaid labor. While Burger King is ostensibly “good” work because it is not sexual,1 it also cannot sustain the acquisition of other material markers of post-­trafficking life, like a home and stable shelter. Only one interviewee described a specific element of what Elena Shih (2014) calls “the anti-­trafficking rehabilitation complex”: goods and services that emerge from the “cottage industry of ‘victim repair’ through vocational training” (n.p.). Local nonprofits and global NGOs commonly train identified victim-­survivors—­many of whom have been “rescued” or involved to some degree with criminal legal mechanisms—­to produce traditionally feminine goods like jewelry, scarves, decorative pillows, or makeup. The stated goal of this training is to offer formerly trafficked persons an outlet for dignified work outside of the degradation of commercial sex or, less commonly, exploitative labor. However, Sofie Henriksen (2018) describes the tension inherent in these market-­based frameworks to eradicate trafficking: “These campaigns do not advocate for the establishment of fair labour and trade conditions for the work people are already doing, but for the rescue and removal of people from sex industries. Thus, they appeal to consumers’ sense of compassion rather than fairness” (17). Because most of these campaigns are global in their orientation—­marketing products produced in an “othered” geographic location for consumers in the Global North



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(Fukushima and Hua 2015; Henriksen 2018; O’Brien 2018)—­I was both surprised to see them not referenced more frequently given their strong presence in the broader anti-­trafficking arena and unsurprised that a “solution” taken from the Global South would not translate into my midwestern context due to nationalistic, xenophobic stereotypes. Karen, a state-­level government employee, described the “temptation” of trafficking that emerged in the absence of legal work opportunities. The clients with whom she worked often carried previous criminal charges on their record incurred during their time engaging in sex work (Karen used “trafficking” to encompass all forms of commercial sex). Economic supports, like microfinancing efforts or victim-­survivor-­led businesses for things like essential oils, were, from her perspective, options to promote dignified work away from illicit or erotic labors (interview 3/23/16). The stability of these new economic endeavors was taken for granted in her framing of this more acceptable labor. Karen’s example illuminates what Elizabeth Bernstein (2018) calls the “shared commitment to neoliberal economic and cultural agendas” that shapes anti-­trafficking interventions and policies by focusing on “women’s (legitimate) reinsertion into market economies and their protection by state apparatuses of criminal justice” (19). Here, the latter element has failed, demonstrated by these formerly trafficked persons’ outstanding criminal records. They were not protected by the criminal legal system; they were clearly treated as perpetrators of some crime, predominantly prostitution. Yet the market can still provide through this very narrow band of what is considered appropriately—­often lower-­wage, flexible, service-­sector, and in the case of microloans, debt-­incurring—­compensable labor. Cinderell a S t o r ie s The anecdote that frames this chapter felt particularly emblematic of post-­ trafficking success stories—­service providers, organizational administrators, potential funders, the public at large all want to see a clear-­cut transformation. As anti-­trafficking advocate Laura described, Cinderella stories have a particular pull or resonance, especially as they conform to larger narrative expectations of trafficking (Srikantiah 2007; Hill 2016). After the work to develop a post-­trafficking self with improved self-­esteem, more informed decision-­making strategies, healthier relationships, and respectably performed wage labor, clients can shift into the role of a successful formerly trafficked person. Telling and retelling these stories is easier for service providers when they can access a linear narrative. For example, CPC director Rebekah identified a successful narrative in a subset of younger clients who straddled the line between exploitation and legally recognized trafficking: “Giving them options for GED and other career aspirations and just that investment [. . .], having someone look

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at them and say, ‘I believe in you, what are you doing in this place? Like we can, we can [do] big things’” (interview 6/1/17). The pieces of the Cinderella story, though brief, are present here, specifically the role of therapeutic governance strategies in developing self-­esteem (“I believe in you”) and accessing improved arenas of wage labor (“GED and other career aspirations”). These linear narratives were not always traditional, in the sense that they upheld particularly limited frameworks for “good” decision-­making or “healthy” relationships. Anti-­trafficking advocate Laura, whose deliberate critique of the Cinderella story starts this chapter, provided an example of client success that, while linear, complicated notions about bodily autonomy and sexuality. As this was a group interview, anti-­trafficking administrator Jo joined at the end to affirm Laura’s complex success story: Laura: I think for me, we had a girl that lived with us when I was a house mom that, when she moved in with us, her story reads like a Shakespearean tragedy. But she and I had lunch one day, maybe a week or two after she’d moved in. And she kind of started telling me what had been going on with her life and things, and she made the comment. She said, “You know, I’ve slept with guys for money or to have a place to stay.” And I said, “OK, we can deal with that.” [. . .] You could kind of see her shoulders relaxed, and she was like, “All right.” Well, she was with us probably four or five months and had a little hiccup here and there, but for the most part, I mean, she knocked her GED out in like nine days, it was unbelievable. But she worked, paid off some debt that she had and things like that. So all of that from the outcome side of things, like, she was our success story. Like, this kid, I teased her about having lists of lists because she was my checklist kid. But what was really cool to me, though, was probably three or four months after she moved in, we were having lunch again and she had kind of started seeing this guy. And I asked her how that was going. And she said, “This is the first time that I don’t feel like I have to sleep with somebody to get what I need. If I want to sleep with him, I can, but I don’t have to to have a place to stay.” And so, it was just this really cool realization for her that “my body isn’t a form of payment for things that I need to survive.” And it was just this, I don’t know, it was this really cool shift, and all the other stuff was important too, but it just changed her whole outlook on what she was worth. And that was really cool to get to see that happen, ’cause we don’t always see it, so every once in a while, we get those. Jo: That locus of control, though, to me, is the difference between staying entitled and disenfranchised and empowered in your life. That locus, because what she said at that moment is not “I can’t have sex,” or “I have to have sex.” It’s “It’s something I get to choose.” That’s, man, that’s amazing. (interview 6/30/17)



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This was a powerful moment to witness as a researcher. The raw emotion in Laura and Jo’s explicit, intentional framing of sexual autonomy as a success felt so oppositional to many of the earlier interviews I conducted, where Cinderella stories felt almost sanitized in their fairy-­tale retellings—­and to research that demonstrates how clients in antiviolence services are deemed successful when they perform a chaste, desexualized femininity (Sweet 2019). Laura could have stopped at calling this young DMST victim-­survivor the “checklist kid” for her adherence to a step-­by-­step process of rebuilding. However, Laura and Jo also want their clients to engage in sexual expressions in a safer way, still affirming some sort of internal core of self-­determination but resisting the judgments about what constitutes a “healthy” interpersonal dynamic. Sylvia, the director of a migrant labor organization, provided a brief, direct, and resonant description of client success rooted in self-­determination. Here, she emphasized the element of educational attainment: “There are other people who the successes are smaller: people who want to start a GED process, people who want to start into ESL [English as a Second Language] classes. And you have those available, you say, ‘In fact, we have class on Tuesday and Thursday, and we will pick you up, and we will get you there.’ Because you know that that’s going to be a skill that can’t be taken away from them, something that they can earn and hopefully use to their advantage in some way” (interview 11/1/16). As much scholarship demonstrates, for many victim-­survivors, post-­trafficking life involves acquiring further degrees or certificates (FIZ Advocacy and Support for Migrant Women and Victims of Trafficking 2018; Global Alliance against Traffic in Women 2018), which can lead to marginally improved financial outcomes (Brennan 2014a). Sylvia does not explicitly call this a route to access dignified or “good” work, but it is implicitly present in her framing of this education as an advantage to exercise a deeper degree of autonomy over their own labor. The clients she served worked in the agricultural sector, and their work was physically challenging—­harvesting fruit trees or “stoop labor,” picking rows of strawberries or cucumbers, all in fairly intense heat and temperatures. Sylvia’s intention is not to empower her clients to find “better” work outside the agricultural sector; success here means acquiring another skill that they can use to negotiate their pay, breaks, and other benefits on their work sites. Even though a Cinderella story presents the initial idea of individual, self-­ determined recovery, many interviewees did emphasize the importance of interpersonal connections, structural factors, and resource dissemination in creating client success. Attorney Mary used the example of a young woman trafficked between two states whose desire to maintain custody of her child propelled her successful process through a youth anti-­trafficking shelter. Her Cinderella story involved access to education and family unity: she graduated from a local four-­ year college, making her the face of success for this youth shelter. However, as

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Mary emphasized, this client’s success was because of this convergence of particular factors. She wanted her baby back, she was not “in the life” long (potentially only a few days, given Mary’s retelling), and she had supportive services in her city of origin when she exited “the life” (interview 9/8/16). Beyond a singular emphasis on the self, this Cinderella story requires interpersonal dynamics—­this victim-­survivor’s success was not encumbered by her role as a mother but heightened by it. As McKim (2008) articulates in her observed sites, “Normative expectations that mothers discipline, care for, and sacrifice for their children contradicted the program’s vision of an ideal, autonomous self” (310). The staff in these substance use disorder programs do not want their clients to extend beyond the self until their internal core is redeveloped and refined; the service providers I interviewed see this performance of motherhood and maternal obligations as part of a successfully redeveloped self. “T oug h Love ” The linearity of the Cinderella story risks erasing all of the labor, performed by both clients and service providers, that goes into cultivating the norms of the post-­trafficking self. For frontline workers, exercising “tough love” may be discretionarily applied when moving a client from the categorization of a difficult, potential failure to a successfully regulated survivor. Drawing from the scholarship on therapeutic governance and service provision, “tough love” can manifest in multiple ways, from sternly abrasive yet heartfelt advice (Kaye 2013, 219) to punishment and more intensive management phrased as “coaching up” to induce more client compliance and “hard work” (Singh 2018, 581). The examples of “tough love” from my interviewees matched more closely with what Leon and Shdaimah (2019) call “tak[ing] the tough ones”—­using their expertise as frontline workers, frequently enmeshed in carceral protectionist networks, to apply care and concern, resource provision and pressure, in a balanced, moderated system. Anti-­trafficking advocate Amy described how compliance—­here, sticking with programmatic efforts to avoid returning to “the life”—­required a degree of emotional involvement on the part of her and her staff: “It takes time, and time is sometimes not our friend when we have to make sure to keep them safe and try to keep them from going back to [commercial sex]. But I think it’s sometimes a tough love road you have to go down, but you have to be very careful going down that road, so to speak, because that’s the road they’re going down with their trafficker” (interview 10/6/16). Compliance requires both formerly trafficked clients and service providers to walk a fine line. “Tough love” must be administered to guarantee safety and protection but not too tough or else clients may feel as though they lack the agency they were unable to exercise while being exploited.



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Law enforcement officer Mitch explained how incarceration could facilitate an awakening, a light bulb moment, for detained sex workers who were initially resistant to carceral interventions. Per his framing, after this carceral protectionist strategy of arresting those individuals he believed were trafficked persons, the solitude of detention could lead women toward what he saw as the more affirming choice to seek more therapeutic or health-­based resources with CPC director Rebekah: “And so maybe by me arresting them, and they’re just held for a day or two, might maybe just give them that one moment of brief clarity to say, ‘You know what, I’m gonna take them up on their offer.’ And then come and see Rebekah” (interview 6/1/17). Here, incarceration is both the tool of carceral protectionism and the “tough love” that creates the conditions for a successful client story: a transformational moment of internal clarity that leads women toward the service provision and self-­work needed to leave sex work behind. For noncitizen victim-­survivors, the added layer of potential deportations complicated notions of compliance and failure, especially when expulsion from the United States was framed as “tough love.” My interviewees who worked with undocumented persons were in line with Erlend Paasche, May-­Len Skilbrei, and Sine Plambech’s (2018) research in Norway: “Migration control is framed as both tough and kind” (34). T visas may offer a path forward for formerly trafficked persons to maintain residency, but their existence alone was not enough to remove the looming threat of deportations. Attorney Robin emphasized the affective components of her work in assisting victim-­survivors of violence to apply for U visas and T visas: So there’s that sort of fear that I’m here in the United States, and I’m undocumented, and I run a risk of being found, certainly. But that risk is a lot lower if I don’t avail myself to immigration and basically hold up a giant beacon that says, “Hey! I’m here! I would like this. But I also know that if you don’t give it to me, I’ve basically told you where I live, how to get a hold of me, how to find me, my employers, all of my family members, all of that type of stuff.” So it can be tough to get people to overcome that fear and take a chance on doing those types of things. And it takes time. [. . .] T visa cases tend to move a little bit quicker, but quicker means twelve months. So when you have a person that can’t work because they don’t have work authorization, that can’t access health insurance or other types of services, it’s easy for us, our place of privilege, to just kind of sit here and go, “Well, you know, it’s twelve months. That’s how long it takes.” But that’s a year of sitting around with nothing and probably also fearful of what’s happening with the folks that trafficked them in the first place. And things that are going on with that criminal case, even after that closes, what’s happening? Fear for family members and folks that are overseas. (interview 11/29/16)

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Getting on the radar of migration control, even if it is during the humanitarian process of applying for a T visa, could lead to future “tough” treatment for noncitizen victim-­survivors, their families, and their community networks. Narratives o f Fa il ur e Sometimes the cultivation (or reclamation) of internal fortitude or the compliance engendered by “tough love” strategies was not enough. Some clients simply failed to meet the formal or informal metric of success as cultivating a normative post-­trafficking self. This is different from the limits to justice articulated further in chapter 4, which are more about the institutional limitations of the carceral state: the difficulties of maintaining client engagement in a long-­term prosecution, the lack of resources that are not tied to some kind of carceral protectionist framework. The narratives of failure presented here are more in line with an SLBT understanding of client performance or engagement. As Lipsky (2010) explains in the context of frontline work, “If clients refuse to continue interacting with street-­level bureaucracies, the fault may always be attributed to the client” (56). It is not about the clients’ needs that may not be met through engagement with these particular frontline sectors, nor is it about cultivating a post-­trafficking self outside of institutional engagement. These are moments of explicit or implicit resistance, challenging the norms associated with victimhood. For example, Ruth described a client who teetered between success and failure because of her continued relationship with an abusive partner. She used the example of a successful client—­the woman who began to dress more age appropriately, seek therapeutic services, and find religion—­as the standard against which she measured her current client’s potential for failure: “And that’s the change that I hope will continue with the person that I’m working with. [. . .] The guy she’s been with for quite a while now, I mean, there’s lots of sexual exploit, sexual coercion, shouldn’t say exploitation but whatever you wanna call it. And his need to do all these really very crazy things sexually and her doing those things just to somehow save this marriage, which is not worth saving, to me. And now finally is not to her” (interview 12/7/16). Though the norms of the post-­trafficking self here do not fully erase the importance of interpersonal relationships, they do emphasize the need to have less dysfunctional partnerships. The problem is not the client’s role as a wife but rather her inability to fully long-­term commit to a different dynamic or standard of treatment. Ruth identifies these behaviors as on the cusp of sexual exploitation, but she does not identify how her client understands these sex acts as abusive or something else. Investigator Jake described a “worst-­case scenario” regarding identified victim-­survivors who have no intention of moving forward with a prosecution, resisting the cultivation of an internal self who says, “Enough is enough”



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(interview 9/27/16). While this easily connects to the ubiquity of punishment in chapter 2, it also illuminates the way self-­esteem and decision-­making strategies are positioned in these narratives of failure. Even though there is a complex range of valid reasons trafficked persons may not want to involve the criminal legal system in their post-­trafficking life, these are erased in Jake’s retelling of the challenges of client encounters. Instead of sharing the limits of justice in a carceral model or the harms that can be enacted by police, prosecutors, and judges, Jake notes a moment of resistance that does not fit into the normative narrative of a victim following a prescribed path toward internal betterment. They do not say, “Enough is enough,” with respect to their sexual exploitation; they remain in toxic interpersonal dynamics that perpetuate their engagement in commercial sex; they do not choose the “good” choice to defer to the control of a police investigation and development of a prosecutable case. Failure and resistance do not always manifest as intentional or deliberate, as in Jake’s example where client agency is positioned as antithetical to cultivating an empowered post-­trafficking self. Domestic violence administrator Olivia offered a nuanced example of client behaviors that result in a narrative of failure, even when these actions are more understandable (from a service provider perspective) as a trauma-­driven response: The stories that really dig at me, we find that many survivors of human trafficking—­and when I say many, I’m referring to a little less than half—­who have stayed in our shelter typically do not end their experience at the shelter well. So, many of the folks that we house in a domestic violence shelter are actually leaving on not great terms. They’ve violated confidentiality, they’ve violated the violence rule, they’ve violated our drug and alcohol policy. [. . .] I mean, that’s one less safe place for them to be able to stay. And so I think when you’ve already got those limited resources, and then someone—­and it could be as a result of their trauma; it could be as a result of a lot of things—­violates one of those agreements, from a shelter perspective, it has to be a safe place. I mean, what are we doing if it’s not a safe place? But from a human trafficking perspective, it’s very difficult then to have any other resources available to them. It’s like, “Well, crap, you can’t stay here. I don’t know where you’re going to stay.” (interview 10/5/16) This is not resistance from the perspective of a client who wants to avoid carceral mechanisms. This is resistance coming from a disconnect between perceived trauma responses, institutional norms, and available resources. There is no linear narrative of successfully completing therapeutic services in a secure environment, as we have seen with the Cinderella stories, nor is there a “tough love” mechanism that can undo the violation of multiple rules, especially those that might make other residents unsafe.

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“Creaming Out ” o f S e r vic e P r o vi s i on Olivia’s description of failed service provision highlights the consequences of a singular narrative of post-­trafficking normalcy. Not every formerly trafficked person will be able, or even want, to cultivate a post-­trafficking self by these standards. Yet these are the standards that indicate self-­improvement and successful reintegration into society at large—­and the standards against which service providers determine the clients who can be more easily guided toward success versus those who may be preemptively removed from assistance as a future failure. From an SLBT perspective, the power of Cinderella stories and its attendant client expectations can result in what Lipsky (2010) calls creaming: “Confronted with more clients than can readily be accommodated street-­level bureaucrats often choose (or skim off the top) those who seem most likely to succeed in terms of bureaucratic success criteria. This will happen despite formal requirements to provide clients with equal chances for service, and even in the face of policies designed to favor clients with relatively poor probabilities of success. Employment counselors, for example, may send to jobs people who have the greatest chance to gain employment anyway, to the neglect of people who are more difficult to place” (107). Frontline workers are always navigating the tension between “too much” and “not enough” with growing caseloads and incommensurate resources. In many ways, creaming is a disappointingly logical response to this ever-­present institutional flaw—­of course, street-­level bureaucrats would mobilize a tool that enables a swifter, more straightforward processing of people into clients. The sticking point in the anti-­trafficking context emerges when considering the more humanitarian elements of anti-­trafficking interventions that rely on a figure of the trafficked client as abjectly pitiable (Aradau 2004). If this construction of victim-­survivors is so affective, so emotionally fraught, how can street-­ level bureaucrats cream out these docile, damaged clients? Lipsky yet again gives us the framework for thinking through what might seem to be cruel (or cruelly automated) decision-­making strategies: “If all clients are equally worthy but all cannot be served, increasing the rate of personal or agency success becomes primary” (107). Without a dramatic increase in resources and people power—­or a sharp contraction of caseloads to a manageable amount—­frontline workers must navigate these determinations. Those clients who may be discretionarily skimmed off the top may not be any more or less of a “deserving” survivor. In fact, these difficult or more challenging clients may have faced identical forms of violence and exploitation. But in an anti-­trafficking environment influenced by therapeutic governance, the ability—­or assumed ability—­to cultivate a robust internal core, to resist the pull of dysfunctional interpersonal patterns or immoral labor, could push these



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potentially “more successful” clients toward more post-­trafficking resources. Success begets success; these individual stories can then feed forward and bolster the impression that certain service providers and street-­level bureaucracies are simply “better” at guiding victim-­survivors toward appropriate post-­trafficking life. And what do we make of formerly trafficked persons whose experiences resist linear narratives of closure and completion? In shifting from a model of therapeutic governance that exclusively prioritizes the self to a more holistic approach that attempts to meet victim-­survivors’ material, self-­defined needs, we cannot perpetuate the same generalized assumptions about what frontline workers think all formerly trafficked persons need. For example, Juli Juabsamai and Ileana Taylor (2018) complicate notions of family reunification as an unequivocal “good,” as individuals need time to reacclimate to their family units: “For some survivors, family reunification can be consolation for the trauma that they have endured, but not the end of the trauma. Time has passed, children have grown, and lives and relationships have changed” (123). Service provision in these circumstances resists a uniform approach, and frontline workers must be prepared to think beyond the scripts and schemas that streamline workplace practices. In short, the solution is not to replace therapeutic governance strategies with a new form of management and control that flattens yet another part of clients’ complex lived experiences. Discretion and its attendant stereotypical framings of clients will emerge even in the most lenient, “hands-­off” approaches to resource dissemination. As I will explore in the next chapter, these current modes of service provision and their deep entanglements with the criminal legal system are bound to produce moments of failure. The norms of the post-­trafficking self, even if cultivated to their fullest capacities, may not be enough to counter the moments when the law itself simply fails to produce a just, equitable outcome.

Cha pte r 4

Limits to Justice T he Co mpl ica tion s of the C arceral Sta te Though the first three chapters of this book have painted a mostly coherent picture of the carceral landscape of anti-­trafficking interventions in the midwestern United States, my interviewees were not consistent in the values they placed on this mode of service provision. The criminal legal system was positioned variously as a necessary evil, a powerful solution, or an ambivalent tool for disseminating justice, sometimes within the same interview. Case manager Jessica colorfully described these disorienting shifts: “So it’s taking this black-­and-­white court system and this gray, rainbow area of social work, of wanting to help people, and trying to mesh those together. And it doesn’t work, but it has to work in some sort of way” (interview 5/25/17). The criminal legal system is imperfect, but to return to Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners’s (2020) lack of alternatives, it is all frontline workers have to use. It has to provide some degree of justice for the linear narrative of recovery, retribution, and restoration to flow properly, or at least be rationalized into working appropriately. In a carceral protectionist network, where the only ways of providing any resources are connected to policing and punishment, frontline workers are routinely confronted with the limitations of this system—­and the real harms victim-­ survivors may face when justice is disbursed discretionarily, even when they have played by the rules of the carceral state. An ideal victim (Srikantiah 2007), while certainly useful in developing a case against an identifiably deviant perpetrator, may not be enough to work against competing norms of victimhood and criminality embedded in the larger criminal legal system. If policing, courts, and jails have a well-­documented history of marginalizing along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship (Alexander 2010; Armenta 2017; Ben-­Moshe, Chapman, and Carey 2014; Gómez Cervantes, Menjívar, and Staples 2017; Schenwar and Law 2020; Stanley and Smith 2015; Vitale 2017), can we truly expect these institutions to achieve justice for victim-­survivors whose identities often fall along these same lines of othering and oppression? As Andrew Dilts (2017) argues, 102



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the “success” of the criminal legal system is always already failing—­because any prosecution or closed case is “an injustice that reproduces conceptions of responsibility predicated on questions of narrow liability, a reinforcement of practices of policing and hyper-­incarceration that target marginalized communities with concentrated harm” (186). The metrics by which our society measures accountability and justice instead reaffirm the necessity of carcerality and nothing more. I did not ask my interviewees for their perspectives on prison abolition or alternative models of restorative or transformative justice, as these were frameworks I did not even consider until my norm-­shaking interview with victim services coordinator Rose referenced in the introduction. But I did ask them to share the challenges of their work and cases they would define as “failures.” Though their thoughts on the complexities of the carceral state—­its incompleteness, its inherent failures—­stretched beyond these two questions, they were particularly concentrated in these responses. This subset of doubts, ambivalences, and outright anger at the criminal legal system serves as the backbone of this chapter. While the dominant nar­rative across service providers centered and affirmed law enforcement solutions to the problem of human trafficking, a counternarrative emerged that questioned the punishing hand of the carceral state in its treatment of trafficked persons who could not or would not conform to the norms of recognizable victimhood (Chapkis 2003; Majic 2014; Plambech 2014; Srikantiah 2007) that influence the discretionary practices of anti-­trafficking interventions. In this chapter, I explore what I am calling the normative path to justice in the criminal legal system, thinking about the antiviolence arena broadly and the anti-­trafficking sector specifically.1 If we take this path at face value, we can identify logical, linear steps. A victim-­survivor first reports a crime to law enforcement, officers take this crime seriously and investigate, the victim-­survivor testifies against their perpetrator, a jury and judge disseminate carceral justice that matches the victim-­survivor’s desires and the best possible outcomes for frontline workers in the criminal legal system. While this path makes sense theoretically, it is rife with barriers from the start. Bruno Latour (1999) again proves useful here. Much like the academic papers that describe scientific discoveries, where “some experiments are backgrounded and blackboxed while others are made the focus of attention and are allowed to go through changes” (130), the normative path to justice foregrounds where the system “works.” There may be some dynamic deviances here or there—­an investigator reconsidering their victim-­blaming ideologies, a victim-­survivor shifting from resistance to testifying to assertively naming their truth—­but the criminal legal experiment still plays out successfully. In my own attempt to take what has been black boxed into the light, I trace the scholarship on the ways the normative path to justice twists and deviates. I

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juxtapose this with interviewees’ perspectives on carceral limits from a subset of critical responses. From their perspective, anti-­trafficking approaches that mobilized the criminal legal system failed to capture the nuance of the victim/criminal binary, the violent ramifications of migration policy, and the restrictive expectations of compliance and cooperation placed on victim-­survivors. While this structure may create the appearance of order and regularity, these themes revealed themselves in messy, complicated ways. Service providers would praise the law enforcement officers with whom they worked after decrying the inherent injustice of the carceral state. Police officers would bemoan the more public health or social service elements of their work before proudly sharing a story of a successfully assisted trafficking survivor who benefited from these elements. Thus, though these data make sense across interviews, they sometimes oddly resist classification within the context of a single participant’s perspective. To me, this demonstrates the implicit inability of frontline workers to “solve” the problem of inequality or social marginalization through a system that creates those same oppressions. How can street-­level bureaucrats make meaning and implement policies that work at cross-­purposes? At the same time, I also believe that many of my interviewees would resist this notion, returning to the figure of the trafficker as one of the dangerous few (Carrier and Piché 2015) who can only be adequately managed and controlled through incarceration. Even in their potent critiques, erasing the carceral state—­and its methods of fueling violence and oppression—­remained outside the scope of our conversations. W hat Are t h e Lim it a t io n s o f t h e Criminal Le g a l S y st e m ? Though there are many paths to take when exploring the complications of the carceral state, I focus here on the criminalized acts of sexual violence that animate carceral feminism. Domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, and human trafficking are not neatly and clearly “solved” within the criminal legal system, despite popular sentiment and media depictions (Bumiller 2008; Lonsway and Archambault 2012; Ilea 2018). The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit–­ification of sexual harms “offers viewers an alternate reality where sexual assault survivors are taken seriously and justice is obtainable thanks to a crack team of well-­trained detectives, each one fluent in the language of sexual assault” (Hughes 2016, n.p.). This is a particularly seductive narrative because the current landscape for victim-­ survivors is so bleak, with their attempts to navigate the criminal legal system compounded by victim-­blaming, bureaucratic roadblocks, evidence backlogs, and limited frameworks for conceptualizing justice.



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Reporting a n d B e l ie va b il it y Starting with a victim-­survivor reporting a crime, we encounter our first issues with the frontline police officers tasked with taking this statement. Law enforcement officers are not immune from the victim-­blaming and shaming that more broadly affects victim-­survivors of sexual violence (Maier 2012; Page 2010; Shaw et al. 2017), what has been deemed the “secondary victimization” that accompanies filing a report and sharing details about victimization (Patterson 2011). Internalized assumptions about power dynamics, violence, and complicity—­the misconceptions that victim-­survivors behave in a gendered, sexualized manner indicating they are “asking” for violence to happen to them—­can result in a police “investigation [. . .] marked by disbelieving, victim-­blaming reactions to her disclosure” (Greeson, Campbell, and Fehler-­Cabral 2016, 92). Amy Farrell, Colleen Owens, and Jack McDevitt’s (2014) research on human trafficking investigations and prosecutions shows that “victims were blamed for not leaving the trafficking situation” if it was perceived to be less forceful and more fraudulent or coercive (159). To be blunt, regardless of how a victim-­survivor performs or retells their experiences, they are immediately confronted with stereotypical assumptions that undercut their first level of involvement with the criminal legal system. In addition to this unfair treatment that could dissuade further involvement in the justice process, police do not consistently and accurately report these crimes. A study of reporting misconduct from the New York Police Department (NYPD) revealed that 55.5 percent of retired officers who worked during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure from 2002 to 2012 reported “personal knowledge of manipulation ‘to make crime numbers look better’” (Eterno, Verma, and Silverman 2016, 822). Though this is limited to the NYPD’s jurisdiction, external pressures to “prove” a decrease in crime could result in a broader application of discretionary practices that actively discourage victim-­survivors from reporting or quietly reclassify reported criminal acts as “lesser” harms. Lastly, this starting point does not even take into account the harmful reality that some victim-­ survivors will be first interpellated as criminals, such as the sex worker, the person using drugs, or the woman of color (Grant 2014; Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017; Sanders 2016; Starr 2018). The disconnect between idealized victimhood and lived experiences may instead result in “bad” survivors immediately facing arrests or detention instead of engaging in their first step toward (albeit limited) justice. Even some sex work abolitionists, the anti-­trafficking group most deeply embedded with carceral actors, have expressed concerns with the role policing plays in anti-­trafficking interventions. Though law enforcement officers are positioned as key actors in anti-­trafficking interventions, their discretionary judgments can run counter to assumptions about victim-­centered approaches. Specifically, critiquing the practice of arresting and jailing victim-­survivors of

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DMST—­either for their assumed legal age and participation in criminalized commercial sex or their complicity in larger patterns of trafficking, exploitation, or crime—­has served as a tenuous thread connecting abolitionists to other, less SWERF-­influenced anti-­trafficking groups.2 For example, activism surrounding Cyntoia Brown—­a young woman who initially self-­described her own experiences as survival sex, though the conditions simultaneously met the legal parameters of DMST—­and her 2017 clemency united a surreal group of celebrities, prison abolitionists, and anti-­trafficking activists. Brown was incarcerated at sixteen years old for murdering a man who solicited her for sex, which she describes as an act of self-­defense. Tweets from Rihanna and Kim Kardashian can be found alongside op-­eds from prominent prison abolitionists (Kaba and Schulte 2017) and blog posts from evangelical, anti–­sex work, anti-­trafficking organizations (Baraka 2019). The language used across these disparate groups clearly reflects their ideological orientations—­and notably, the anti–­sex work, anti-­trafficking rhetoric perpetuates norms of ideal victimhood that emphasize the raced, classed, and gendered tropes of innocence3—­ but the core message is the same. Victim-­survivors should not be criminalized, full stop. Blurring t h e Vic t im /Cr im in a l B i na r y Across all the previous chapters, I have touched on the “victim-­criminal” (Majic 2014) or “victim-­offender” (Musto 2016). This figure appears in the punitive mechanisms of carceral care in chapter 1, the tension between passivity and agency in chapter 2, and the management practices to induce empowerment and “better” decision-­making strategies in chapter 3. Unsurprisingly, it reappears here in the context of this first step, the retelling of harm to an agent of the carceral state. However, unlike the earlier chapters, these examples of the blurred boundaries between victimhood and criminality—­and the treatment induced by each label—­came from a space of critique or affective resonance. Frontline workers both within and outside the criminal legal system described the difficulties of ascertaining an initial disclosure of trafficking. While this is not an explicit blurring of the victim/criminal binary, it implicitly demonstrates that these disclosures are embedded in larger stereotypes that punitively cast doubt or derision on victim-­survivors of sexual violence. Service providers, even those with expertise in the arena of anti–­sexual violence work, frequently worked with clients who struggled to articulate the harms they experienced. Youth services worker Leslie, who had decades of knowledge to draw from as a former law enforcement officer investigating sex crimes and her current role working primarily with child abuse victim-­survivors, still found norms surrounding victim-­ blaming that led to silencing: “Because it has to do with sex, it’s shameful and we still blame the victim. You know, ‘Why didn’t you get up? Why didn’t you say



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no?’” (interview 8/4/16). Attorney Mary offered a similar example that extended this critique to the police tasked with anti-­trafficking identification. In her experiences, victim-­survivors of trafficking did not self-­identify, and absent training, law enforcement were predisposed to victim blame and vilify them (interview 9/8/16). Even though trafficking, especially sex trafficking, is positioned as exceptional, a “unique type of vulnerability and harm” (Peters 2013, 222), it is not immune from the stigmas against victim-­survivors of sexual violence, broadly defined (Greeson, Campbell, and Fehler-­Cabral 2016; Maier 2012; Page 2010; Patterson 2011; Shaw et al. 2017). Law enforcement officers claimed they had to combat misconceptions of police as untrustworthy or corrupt when navigating early interactions with trafficked persons. Investigator Jake described this as a “victimology-­related insight.” In working with individuals involved in commercial sex (blurred in his narrative between sex workers and sex trafficking victims), law enforcement officers had to work against “narratives and stereotypes” to convince them this was a different kind of carceral encounter. Unlike previous experiences, “they’re not going to just arrest you” (interview 9/27/16). Jake implicitly acknowledges the reality that arresting assumed trafficked persons is not just a carceral protectionist mechanism used to guarantee a degree of “safety,” as described in chapter 1. It is also a response to victim-­survivors whose identities may fall into their own narratives and stereotypes that foreclose them from acquiring the label of victim, such as the criminalized sex worker (Grant 2014; Sanders 2016; Starr 2018) or the racially stigmatized Black woman (Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017). Law enforcement officer George attributed this distrust to the identity-­ based factors of citizenship and age. His partner, Matt, was describing the stigmas attached to commercial sex that complicated their investigations. George extended this reflexively back onto their roles as police officers: I think added with the stigma is the stigma on us, as in law enforcement. Because, you know, from young or foreign or whatever, these people [. . .] have either grown up in a different environment where the law enforcement are bad guys and are, you know, ruthless and violate peoples’ rights and do all that, whatever it may be, if they’re from a different country or just growing up, you know. Police have always been the ones that took Mom and Dad or that put me in [a juvenile detention facility] or whatever it may be. So one of the biggest obstacle [sic] was, for us, in any of these cases, to get them to trust us. To understand that we’re there to try to help them and understand that. (interview 12/5/16) George is asking a fair and necessary question of himself here. If the only lessons you have been taught are lessons that highlight the violence, harm, and control of the police, then why would you go to them willingly in the case of

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your own victimization? While George isolates this to two very specific groups with particular histories of violence—­foreign nationals from locales with corrupt policing and justice-­ or foster-­involved youth—­I would argue this skepticism extends well beyond the populations he identifies. Within this strain of criticism, service providers were explicit in their anger or disappointment in a system that, in their own words, treated victimized or exploited persons like criminals. Youth services administrator Jenny provided an example of a trafficked youth who faced a carceral protectionist shortcut—­detention as emergency housing—­as described in chapter 1: We had a young lady that did not speak any English. She was being trafficked from here to Honduras and back. And because the system didn’t really know what to do with her, they didn’t have an emergency placement for her, they placed her in the juvenile detention center. Appalling. That is not ever where she should have been as a victim. And again, it was, I think it was lack of resources and lack of knowledge. After the fact, of course, everyone realizes, “Oh my gosh, what did we do? We shouldn’t have done that.” But at the time, it was an emergency situation. You need to find a place for this child. And it just wasn’t handled correctly, let’s just put it that way. (interview 10/27/16) Jenny’s words here feel very similar to the service providers of chapter 1 with a particular edge—­she is outright, openly, bluntly expressing the “appalling” ways that carceral protectionism blurs the lines between victimhood and criminality. The TINA mindset (Levine and Meiners 2020) marks this use of carceral facilities as logical but not moral. Even though it technically makes sense with services practices that prioritize secure shelter, it fails to encapsulate the affective dimensions of treating victim-­survivors similarly to perpetrators of crimes and the harms that could easily come from such treatment. Juvenile justice worker Juanita extended this question of carceral protectionism as logical or moral, juxtaposing the safety of detention with the fairness of holding youth in criminal facilities when they have not committed crimes. In her experiences, trafficked youth were detained in her juvenile justice facility for exceedingly lengthy stays, up to ninety days in some instances. When contrasted with an average stay of seven to eight days, she saw this as an injustice: Twice this year, we’ve had victims of human trafficking who were in here for more than sixty days because they were victims of human trafficking, not because they committed a crime but because they were victims of human trafficking. That’s wrong that a victim is being locked up and punished, and yet the perp is not. And that’s a huge problem. And so when we’re talking sixty to ninety days of that youth’s life, I mean, yes, we’re trying to help them work on some of those issues so that they don’t go back and get back in that



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same situation, but that’s not what a juvenile detention center is for. You know, we’re to just be a short-­term lockup place for kids who have committed a crime. [. . .] Everybody that I talk to always says, “Well, at least they’re locked up and safe.” Well, yes, they’re safe, but is it fair to lock them up? And so the last one that we had, she actually got lucky and got to go to [a human trafficking shelter], but she was here ninety-­two days, so I don’t know if that’s lucky or not. You know, it just, it just seems so unfair what we’re doing with human-­trafficked kids. (interview 12/1/16) While this quote offers layers of meaning—­the carceral protectionist practices of service provision, the lack of legal repercussions for traffickers themselves, the role of short-­term versus long-­term care—­I want to focus on what this reveals about justice versus fairness. The tools of detention facilities may be just in an abstract sense, but they may not necessarily be the fairest, most equitable tools in practice when working with exploited or trafficked persons. Under a system of anti-­trafficking efforts inextricably linked to the criminal legal system, these tools may be all some service providers can access in their communities to provide a base level of services to their clients. But what does it mean when those services are disseminated in this environment of ambivalence and potential harm? Investig a t io n a n d P r o se c ut io n Next, provided those encounters with law enforcement were not harmful or discouraging—­or if they were not classified as a criminal and denied access to this path—­a victim-­survivor’s case is investigated and moves further in the criminal legal system to a court case. Another step forward offers another opportunity for systems failure. For domestic violence cases, the numbers drop as individuals move further through the investigation process. Based on data aggregated between 2006 to 2015, officers called to the scene of a domestic violence incident took a report 78 percent of the time, victim-­survivors or witnessing parties signed complaints 48 percent of the time, and 39 percent reported complaints resulted in arrests or filed charges against the perpetrator (Reaves 2017, 1). Though individual officers are tasked with bridging the investigation and prosecution stages for sexual assaults, “73%–­93% of reported  [.  .  .] cases are never prosecuted” (Campbell et al. 2014; Lonsway and Archambault 2012; Shaw et al. 2017, 603). Human trafficking data are, as my introduction briefly addressed, messy at best (Gallagher 2017; Merry 2016), not only for the vagueness of its current quantitative practices but also for the levels at which justice is disseminated.4 Using only federal-­level data from the 2020 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, federal law enforcement officers opened 1,830 human trafficking–­related investigations, with only 220 cases leading to initiated prosecutions (U.S. Department of State 2020, 515). Compared to anti-­trafficking nonprofits, many of whom use

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a moral panic-­inflated rhetoric and untraceable statistics (Agustín 2014; Feingold 2010; Weitzer 2007), these numbers look drastically different from the dominant discourse. As suggested in chapter 2, even if a victim-­survivor contributes willingly, professionally, and normatively in a prosecution, the discretion of lawyers, juries, and judges shifts how carceral justice is disseminated (Ellison and Munro 2009; Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014; O’Neal, Tellis, and Spohn 2015; Romain and Freiburger 2013). Jennifer Temkin and Barbara Krahé (2008) call this phenomenon the justice gap: “The gap between the large number of cases reported to the police and the tiny number which result in conviction” (9). If you believe in conviction as a metric of successfully disseminated justice, this should be a concerning occurrence; feminist legal scholars have offered a counterargument that this is more indicative of the limited effectiveness of a legal solution to a more nuanced problem of violence, power, and gender (Goodmark 2018; Gruber 2009; Larcombe 2011). Conviction rates vary between forms of sexual violence and are reported differently across institutions, making comparisons tricky,5 contradictory, and potentially unhelpful. Kimberly A. Lonsway and Joanne Archambault (2012) bluntly make this assessment in their analysis of sexual assault cases: “Conviction rates are meaningless if they are computed based on a starting point where most of the attrition has already taken place” (155). Knowing that each step of the process causes victim-­survivors to withdraw or mobilizes the discretionary choice of a legal authority to avoid pursuing further efforts—­and compounded by the countless cases that are never reported, as addressed in a few pages—­casts this metric of success into even further doubt. Challenges f o r A n t i-­ traffic king P r o se c ut io n s Even after navigating earlier concerns with disclosure, many service providers addressed the complications of following a prosecutorial model of justice specifically in the anti-­trafficking arena. The standard practices and processes of frontline work simply could not work—­or could not adapt easily—­to a client base populated by formerly trafficked persons. Legal staffer Tyler explained how human trafficking investigations challenged the normative investigative process: Law enforcement, we sort of get locked into the “who/what/where/how”-­ type issues. And then this one, you have an individual that has been sort of broken and you have to help that individual in a way that you don’t, in law enforcement, that you’re not normally used to. You’re not normally used to the whole hand-­holding, giving the victim as much time as they need before they’ll tell you the truth. [. . .] And so, if you’re not of the mindset that that



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is what’s likely going to happen, I think you risk the possibility of not really understanding what happened to the individual and not necessarily presenting that individual’s case in a good manner. [. . .] You have to allow the victims an opportunity to reach a level of stability in their life so that they are able to be the good witnesses that you need. (interview 10/6/16) These complications mirror Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt’s (2014) research on prosecutorial challenges in human trafficking cases. Testimony is crucial, but the paths by which victim-­survivors disclose “with regard to providing accurate and consistent accounts of their experience contribute to the perception that they are not ‘legitimate’” (162). The justice system offers a limited window of legitimacy, confined to those who can serve as good witnesses. Law enforcement officers involved in trafficking cases must work even harder to facilitate a victim-­survivor’s ability to disclose as much information as possible to meet an adequate level of testimony. Others focused on the affective, emotional challenges that accompanied an anti-­trafficking investigation and prosecution. Because trafficking is often described as more traumatizing than other forms of violence or, in the case of sex trafficking, sexual harm, frontline workers were attuned to the retraumatizing aspects of victim-­survivor disclosure and testimony. State-­level government employee Karen explained how these processes could be “touchy” because of the balance between getting information from a victim-­survivor to benefit a case and asking questions that can feel dangerous or triggering—­and that sometimes what could be “good” for a prosecution is not “good” for a victim-­survivor (interview 3/23/16). Foster care administrator Jenny echoed this concept of balance in a self-­ described successful trafficking case, where the local district attorney seemed to take great care in getting two young victim-­survivors through prosecution “as unscathed as possible.” As she stated, “You don’t want to further traumatize them [. . .] by going through the prosecution portion. [. . .] I mean, they were integral witnesses to the case. But they were also very much victims, so trying to balance that out. It was, it was a great outcome” (interview 10/27/16). Importantly, this awareness of increased trauma or potential for trauma does not correlate to different expectations about victim-­survivor cooperation. Rather, because prosecutions “have to depend on statements of victims about their experiences” (Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014, 158), those service providers enmeshed in this stage must balance the threat of excessive retraumatization—­that could make a victim-­survivor turn understandably noncompliant—­with the legal needs of the case at hand. “Justic e” I s S e r ve d At the end of all this, accessible services are woefully inadequate. Victim-­ survivors may have a complex array of needs, from therapy and physical health

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care to orders of protection and secure housing, that require navigating multiple labyrinthine bureaucracies. In the normative narrative, this is where a friendly survivor-­advocate, pro bono lawyer, or case manager enters, usually through their connection to an organization designed to assist victim-­survivors of violence. However, according to a 2019 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report by Rachel E. Morgan and Barbara A. Oudekerk, “Assistance from a victim-­service agency was received in response to 11% of violent victimizations” in 2018, which includes rape and sexual assault. Intimate partner violence victimizations are higher, at 18.1 percent (3). While the 2019 BJS report does not speculate on why victim-­survivors of violence may not utilize victim service agencies, research on domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers illuminate the gaps in accessible or useful resources (McKim 2008; 2014; Sweet 2019), stigmas against gender identity (Koyama 2006; Seelman 2015), and managerial control mechanisms (Bumiller 2008; Gengler 2012; Zweig and Burt 2007) that make these spaces unfriendly or outright exclusionary for some victim-­survivors. Ironically, a 2011 BJS report shows that “victims who received direct assistance from a victim service agency were more likely to experience a follow-­up criminal justice system action related to the crime, such as an arrest or contact from a judge or prosecutor” (Langton 2011, 2). This resource arguably helps meet outcomes that are considered “successful” by carceral metrics, yet in practice, they remain minimally accessed. For formerly trafficked persons without citizenship, the T visa has long been upheld as one of the benefits of participation in prosecutorial efforts. In exchange for testimony against an identified trafficker, victim-­survivors of trafficking gain access to certain federally funded refugee benefits, like food stamps and job training, as well as lawful immigration status and employment authorization for up to four years postauthorization. Importantly, T visa applicants can also petition for family members’ citizenship under certain circumstances, such as a victim-­survivor’s age or immediate threats of violence (Kamhi and Prandini 2017). Critiques of the T visa abound, from its coercive capacities as a mechanism of the carceral state (Chapkis 2003; Srikantiah 2007)—­what if victim-­survivors do not want to testify against their trafficker?—­to its discretionary application in favor of sex trafficking over labor trafficking cases (Peters 2013). Trump-­era policy memos have shifted access to these delayed, limited benefits even further. As Melissa Gira Grant (2018b) reported, through a June 2018 memo that became Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy in November 2018, trafficked persons whose T visa applications are rejected can now be queued up for deportation proceedings, placing them in a deeply constrained environment: “Now immigrant trafficking survivors are left with these choices: risk deportation by applying for the T visa and being denied, or risk deportation



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by not applying at all” (n.p.). While it is too early to see the full effects of this policy change, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (2020) reported lower approval numbers and higher rejection numbers in the 2019 fiscal year, the first facing the ramifications of this deportation-­centered policy, with only 500 applications approved and 365 denied (n.p.). Again, if the dominant trafficking narrative posits millions of victim-­survivors just within the United States, these numbers bear out a very different story. M igratio n Co n t r o l a n d I n j ust i c e Immigration policies and deportation were frequently mobilized in service providers’ discussions of workplace challenges and client “failures.” If an interviewee discussed undocumented persons’ experiences with the carceral state vis-­à-­vis legal or judicial institutions, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and DHS to local courts, it was overwhelmingly positioned as unfair, exasperating, or violent. Much like the normative path of justice’s foreclosure of certain possibilities for those whose identities are immediately interpellated as criminalized, victim-­survivors with a lack of documentation or appropriate visa status faced the trauma of life post-­trafficking and the threat of invasive migration control mechanisms. Sometimes the sheer threat of deportation was enough for victim-­survivors to intentionally avoid a normative path to justice that involved the police. Attorney Robin served a unique role, as her legal practice was embedded in a public hospital through a medical-­legal partnership. Doctors could, with consent, refer patients to her practice for assistance with a variety of legal needs, including immigration relief. Robin found, much like the way victim-­survivors are removed from statistical representation by never reporting a sex crime in the first place, trafficked persons did not seek out her clinic’s legal services, even if there was no immediate threat of deportation when working with her: I think a couple of times we’ve seen where they [emergency room doctors] have sort of poked around a little bit about the trafficking, and patients have bolted from the [emergency department]. And you know, obviously that could be for a fear of retaliation from the person that’s inflicting that upon them. It could also be a fear of the legal system and immigration. There is a lot of rampant misinformation that doctors report undocumented folks to ICE. Unfortunately, I think some of that is perpetuated by our own medical providers, so that’s obviously very unfortunate. But overcoming that is going to be a big piece of it. (interview 11/29/16) In addition to this intentional self-­removal—­be it a preservation strategy to maintain residency without carceral investigation or a response induced by the threat of a trafficker—­we also see a classic component of SLBT at play.

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The medical providers who choose to perpetuate this rumor of violence and looming deportation are using a discretionary tool to draw the boundaries between clients deserving and undeserving of legal assistance. We might understand this as creaming (Lipsky 2010), in line with Olivia’s anecdote in chapter 3. Knowing that immigration cases and visas take a considerable amount of time, as Robin herself described in chapter 3, this could be a (misguided) effort to decrease the amount of labor required of the medical-­legal partnership and guarantee more “success” through the metric of “easier,” less time-­consuming applications. I am perhaps more persuaded by another SLBT understanding of the moral components of frontline work. In the dissemination of limited resources under tight deadlines and constrained interpersonal contact, “evaluations of social worth locate and reaffirm the place of clients in a moral stratification system that determines their rights and claims to scarce resources” (Hasenfeld 2000, 330). Social worth as a concept is not immune from xenophobic rhetoric that positions undocumented persons as expendable, disposable, and inherently criminal, save those who can ascribe to some kind of “respectability politics” of assimilation and upward mobility (Cházaro 2015; Sharpless 2015). If a medical provider in Robin’s public hospital sees undocumented persons as falling lower in their moral stratification system instead of interpreting them as clients “believed to have the capacity to repay the investment” of their time and assistance (Maynard-­ Moody and Musheno 2003, 106), they may never be informed about the presence of the medical-­legal partnership or offered to grant consent for a call. Other moments were more confrontational, explicitly perpetuating harmful migration control mechanisms. As a frontline worker tasked with interpretation services across an entire midwestern state, domestic violence advocate Naomi shared a great deal of experiences shaped by a general climate of xenophobia and stigma against marginalized groups. The victim-­survivors of violence with whom she worked—­some facing domestic violence, some facing both sex and labor trafficking—­could not guarantee being taken seriously or treated with dignity when disclosing their exploitation and harm, even in the context of a court hearing: Oh judges, I think in [the major city] they are better at using interpreters, and the judges are a bit more experienced in terms of not asking about immigration status. But in [the] southwest [part of the state], we’ve had survivors call who say that the judge will ask them in court, “Are you legal?” at an ex parte hearing. If you have an attorney, legal aid is starting to say, “Judge, do you remember the Violence against Women Act says that that’s not relevant.” But if you don’t have an attorney, what do you say? [. . .] You say yes, and you lie. You say no, or you say yes, and you get detained. (interview 9/23/16)



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Naomi’s clients are caught between the legal standard of honesty and the material consequences of judicial discretion. Importantly, this quote reveals how frontline workers can potentially expand access to justice in the criminal legal system. For the victim-­survivors who have access to representation through legal aid, this irrelevant questioning is treated as it should be—­irrelevantly—­which empirically leads to improved outcomes for maintaining residency (Eagly and Shafer 2016). However, without this intermediary present, Naomi’s clients are left with limited options for engaging effectively with a legal system discretionarily positioned to value “crimmigration over humanitarianism” (Dingeman et al. 2017, 298). Sylvia, the director of a migrant labor organization, provided one of the most challenging examples of the limitations provided by the carceral state. In her experiences with undocumented migrants, those who were identified as trafficked persons had to undergo a certification process to be deemed qualified for particular legal remedies, like T visas and temporary housing: Once the certification determination is made, then the ones who haven’t been certified are not allowed to stay [in shelters] anymore, which is really troubling because the certification process by the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office is to determine who will be the best witnesses in the case. [. . .] They want to convict the people who have been the organizers of this, so they want to have the best witnesses possible. But that usually ends up being the best educated, the ones who speak some English, the ones who are put together better and can explain what happened. [. . .] I’m not trying to denigrate what’s happened to them, but sometimes they end up being the people who have been less traumatized. The ones who are totally incoherent and traumatized by this whole situation are not going to be your best witnesses if they’re just up there on the stand crying and carrying on. They’re not gonna be able to tell the logical story of what happened. And so I think that that system is inevitable that it’s gonna happen that way, but I think it loses out on the people who may even need the support services more. Because often, then they’re just put back, given back to immigration to be deported. Or they just say, “Oh, well you were here for two weeks, now you know go and have a good life. We don’t need you as a witness anymore.” [. . .] So I think that system of having this money, government money flowing for people who are certified really ends up helping the people who are then certified as witnesses. Which is good, because they want to keep those people happy and with housing and with work permits. They want to keep them happy so that they’ll still testify against these criminals that have been trafficking. But then there’s kind of the fallout people.  [.  .  .] And I’m like, I mean, something’s wrong. There’s something wrong with this way of handling this. (interview 11/1/16)

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This quote brings up a number of complicated issues that carceral logics introduce to anti–­human trafficking service provision. Namely, if criminal legal practices are the exclusive prioritized models of justice, there will inevitably be a group of victim-­survivors who cannot access justice through this path. This is not because they do not meet the legal threshold for victimization, nor is it because they do not wish to comply with building a case. Instead, it is because they cannot perform as the best witness possible for the case by telling their story in a cogent, linear manner to be easily digestible for judges and juries and provide individual credibility (McKinnon 2009; Tomkinson 2018). Though I conducted this interview before the November 2018 policy shift in deportation proceedings for rejected T visa applicants, Sylvia demonstrates how these discretionary practices may predate codification. Even with this temporal difference, her experiences point to a different narrative about the convergence of anti-­trafficking justice and migration injustice. Mobilizing SLBT here, I am struck by how closely Sylvia’s words align with Lipsky’s (2010) description of policy creation at the frontlines: “Street-­level bureaucrats make policy in two related respects. They exercise wide discretion in decisions about citizens with whom they interact. Then, when taken in concert, their individual actions add up to agency behavior” (13). The wide discretion in treating trafficked persons as victims deserving of paths toward citizenship or as collateral damage in a larger prosecution to be disposed of through deportation could easily be interpreted as one part of a cumulative accretion into a xenophobic, formal policy memorandum just two years later. Disrupting t h e Ca r c e r a l Na r r a t i v e Conviction rates do not take into account the “hidden” victim-­survivors who never engage in this carceral path.6 Returning to the BJS data, violent victimizations are generally underreported, with only 43  percent of these crimes reported to police in 2018. When this statistic is broken down by type of crime, the numbers are comparably low: only 24.9  percent of rapes / sexual assaults, 47.0  percent of domestic violence incidents, and 45.0  percent of interpersonal violence incidents were reported to police that year (Morgan and Oudekerk 2019, 8). Low reporting numbers do not necessarily correspond to lower rates of particular harms occurring; this same data set revealed that “the rate of rape or sexual-­ assault victimization increased from 1.6 to 2.7 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older from 2015 to 2018” (Morgan and Oudekerk 2019, 3). As these statistics show, the normative path to justice described above may not reflect the reality of victim-­survivors’ encounters with the carceral state. There is no uniform way that victim-­survivors respond to sexual violence (Kim 2013; Goodmark 2018; Phillips and Chagnon 2020; Sered 2017). Similarly, there is no single way victim-­survivors define justice. Clare McGlynn and Nicole



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Westmarland (2019) call this “kaleidoscopic justice,” a conceptualization that resists the linearity of conventional criminal legal mechanisms: “Justice is complex, nuanced and a difficult to (pre)determine feeling. Justice is a lived, ongoing and ever-­evolving experience and process, rather than an ending or result” (186). While the aforementioned statistics and data support a narrative of justice as closure, convictions, and disposed perpetrators, there are other elements of justice that victim-­survivors might desire but may also run at odds with the criminal legal system. For example, members of communities who already face the troubling dynamic of over/under policing—­like Black women in hypervisible communities (Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017), sex workers (Grant 2014; Sanders 2016; Starr 2018)—­may refuse to report to the officers who brutalize them and their friends, family, and neighbors. A 2008 study from the Alliance for a Safe & Diverse D.C. revealed that sex workers in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area do call the police when they experience a crime, including those unrelated to sex work, yet “respondents overall reported no better than a 50% chance of actually receiving help and being satisfied with police response” (2). This dissatisfaction ranged from law enforcement simply never showing up after being called to propositioning sex workers when they arrive to investigate the reported crime. In terms of kaleidoscopic justice, these sex workers want justice as recognition and dignity, being acknowledged as “a worthy member of society” (McGlynn and Westmarland 2019, 189) who deserves to be treated equitably by representatives of the state, not subject to further violence or sexual exploitation. Others may never want to engage the carceral state because their own ideas of justice simply look different. For example, what happens when a prison abolitionist experiences sexual harm? What do processes of accountability look like beyond the carceral state? To use Adina Ilea’s (2018) necessary questions, “What do abolitionists propose for the individual who refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer, or who plies his date with so much alcohol that she is incapable of consenting? What about the uncle or the grandfather, the coach or the teacher who molests the children in his care?” (359). Turning to grassroots, community-­led projects with an orientation toward transformative justice,7 we can see a range of options with varying degrees of “success,” broadly defined yet specific to community and interpersonal dynamics. This could include—­but is certainly not limited to—­engaging in a community accountability process to request a perpetrator write a letter of apology or pay for physical or mental health care (Philly Stands Up! Collective 2020), turning to pods of trusted friends and community members to assist in navigating an experience of harm without state assistance (Mingus 2020a), or asking a perpetrator to avoid sharing certain public spaces with a victim-­survivor as part of accountable boundary settings (Dixon and Piepzna-­Samarasinha 2020).

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At its core, transformative justice processes are aligned with a kaleidoscopic justice of voice, “a process of speaking out and making sense of the harm experienced in a way that is truly heard by perpetrators, family members and friends” (McGlynn and Westmarland 2019, 191). Because it is victim-­survivor-­led and community-­based, each transformative justice process will look different and may not, to outsiders, appear to be rigorous or thorough. And sometimes transformative practices simply do not work out (Dixon and Piepzna-­Samarasinha 2020). But particularly for people who wish to operate outside of the harms of the state, transformative justice is a valid, valuable option. Some may want a degree of carceral justice but not what is currently afforded in the criminal legal system. And even this group of victim-­survivors is diverse, ranging from those who seek a lighter criminal penalty to those who desire a harsher sentence. Chanel Miller’s 2016 victim impact statement in the Brock Turner case—­arguably the most famous of its kind in #MeToo-­era discourses on rape and campus sexual assault—­powerfully highlights this tension: I told the probation officer I do not want Brock to rot away in prison. I did not say he does not deserve to be behind bars. [. . .] As this is a first offence I can see where leniency would beckon. On the other hand, as a society, we cannot forgive everyone’s first sexual assault or digital rape. It doesn’t make sense. The seriousness of rape has to be communicated clearly, we should not create a culture that suggests we learn that rape is wrong through trial and error. The consequences of sexual assault needs [sic] to be severe enough that people feel enough fear to exercise good judgment even if they are drunk, severe enough to be preventative. (qtd. in Baker 2016, n.p.) Miller’s statement went viral for its directness and affective resonance, but less attention was given to her profound articulation of this challenging paradigm for victim-­survivors who want some kind of carceral recourse. She does not see Brock as disposable, as her first sentence highlights, but she simultaneously sees him as deserving of punishment, something “preventative” that would deter future harms. If victim-­survivors are only given the options to lock up their perpetrators indefinitely to “rot away” or set them free with a “slap on the wrist” (language frequently invoked in the Turner sentencing), many of them will be left unsatisfied. This is not to say that carceral solutions are the answer, nor is this to say that Miller’s requests for justice are naïvely seeking vengeance. Rather, if what Miller is seeking is accountability, yet another element of kaleidoscopic justice, we must ask if incarceration is actually holding perpetrators to account for their harms. As she writes, Turner denied her any baseline respect: “What has he done to demonstrate that he deserves a break? He has only apologized for drinking and has yet to define what he did to me as sexual assault, he has revictimized me continually, relentlessly” (qtd. in Baker 2016, n.p.). Knowing



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that carceral spaces offer limited rehabilitative resources or accountability practices (Levine and Meiners 2020; Schenwar and Law 2020), it is not impossible to imagine a world where an increase in Turner’s jail time still results in no apology, no definition of Miller’s assault as assault. Leaving t h e No r m a t ive P a t h t o J u s t i c e Service providers offered examples of uncooperative victim-­survivors who, for a variety of reasons, simply refused to participate in punitive practices, effectively removing themselves from these processes. In these stories, the limits to justice are flipped. Frontline workers’ own expectations about taking a case from initial investigation to court to final hearing are skewed when trafficked persons resist continued involvement in a prosecution. As law enforcement officer George explained, “It’s just getting them to court to testify is the hard part.  [.  .  .] We haven’t been able to get our victims to court. It’s always been a struggle, last minute, trying to run around, search, find them, use resources” (interview 12/5/16). This feels like an ironic pivot away from the stereotypical perception of trafficked persons as lacking agency, in need of control and management (Srikantiah 2007), as they determinedly avoid court. And if this passivity is the primary schema through which frontline workers interpret their client base (Maynard-­ Moody and Musheno 2012), then the challenging mismatch between client performance and service provider expectations becomes an inevitability. Some victim-­survivors explicitly articulated they did not want to be involved in a criminal case; others felt a sense of loyalty to the person identified as a trafficker and did not want to implicate that individual through their testimony. Attorney Ellen described the conclusion of the human trafficking case she worked on in her community, where the identified victim-­survivor did not comply with the needs of the investigation: She had refused all services from us. We attempted to get her down here to testify because we needed, well, we wanted her to testify. We didn’t need her testimony; we wanted her testimony because it created the full picture regardless of what she said. And wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it. [. . .] She could not in her mind justify helping the state. Even if her testimony was going to be the same, whether it was the state or defense that called her, in her mind, would be helping the state and then she would have been betraying her pimp, so to speak. (interview 8/10/16) Unlike most legal cases involving trafficking, where “victim testimony is virtually an absolute necessity” (Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014, 157), Ellen is describing a unique context where testimony is simply an added benefit to an already secure case. What she wants runs counter to what the victim-­survivor in question is perceived to want—­to not help the state, to not speak against

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the person identified as her pimp, to not (for whatever reason) work within the confines of a carceral, punitive system. Running away to avoid taking part in a prosecution was described as a somewhat common occurrence, frequently enough that it became an almost mundane finding (or that I became desensitized to this expression of resistance or noncompliance). Law enforcement officer Shawn, who investigated a human trafficking case at a massage parlor in his jurisdiction, described how one key witness “within a few, like a week or so of us doing our search warrant at the business, [. . .] took off back to California” (interview 9/22/16). Similarly, attorney Kyle offered an example involving interstate travel: “We had one [case] yesterday that we had to dismiss. [. . .] She ran away from home in Florida and [. . .] was involved in the human trafficking here, and we tracked it. We found her in Florida, flew her up here. The hearing got continued, so when we tried to get her back, she had run away again in Florida. So there was no way to go forward because you can’t go, you absolutely cannot proceed without her testimony” (interview 11/3/16). In both Shawn and Kyle’s stories, I am struck by the literal, geographic lengths victim-­survivors took to circumvent the normative path to justice. While their motives here remain unknown—­Shawn and Kyle avoided speculating on the affective or pragmatic reasons why these particular formerly trafficked people chose to run away pretrial—­their actions illustrate that victim-­ survivor testimony cannot be taken for granted, that people do “opt out” even after facing violence and harm. The pressure to testify can sometimes outweigh the potential benefits, either the material effects of carceral protectionism or the more nebulous feelings of justice served. As human trafficking advocate Amy explained in her experiences with one identified victim-­survivor, her client’s perceived fear of change led her to leave her organization without testifying in an upcoming case: “She fell back into what she knew. All the changes that were coming up, as far as with law enforcement and having to testify and then having to leave something that she knew so well was really scary to her. And so she decided to go back. Whether she went back to her pimp or back to living the life on the street, I’m not sure. But I was really sad because I knew she had so much potential to get out there if we could just get over this scary hump” (interview 10/6/16). From her stance as a service provider, Amy described a situation where the stress of engaging with the carceral state can be more challenging for individual victim-­survivors than the situations of exploitation or trafficking they were leaving. This is a powerfully important finding, as escape and rescue have become valorized concepts within the anti-­ trafficking movement (Agustín 2007; Brennan 2014a; Hill 2016). As noted in chapter 3, postrescue life brings a host of new concerns, and this reliance on the carceral state makes compliance with a criminal an undesirable inevitability for some trafficked persons.



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In an example that weaves the threat of migration control with witness cooperation, victim services coordinator Rose described what she classified as an unsuccessful moment, a human trafficking case that had to be dismissed due to lack of corroborating evidence that also demonstrates the potent stress of negotiating carceral forms of justice: [The trafficked person] did not speak good English, and the advocacy program that was working with her, [. . .] they had asked for someone else to come in and become her advocate that spoke Spanish. Which was [. . .] not communicated. I mean, I trusted them making that decision. Well, come to find out,  [.  .  .] when we’ve had the first grand jury hearing, the victim was to come. And the advocate persuaded the victim to go back to Mexico because the advocate convinced the victim that [. . .] all we were gonna do with her anyway is send her back to Mexico when it was said and done and over with. Well, ultimately, we needed her for our evidence to support the evidence, because we didn’t have enough to corroborate her evidence without her testimony. And so, the case was dismissed. And that was the direct result of a misinformed advocate who was brought in [. . .] because of her language, her bilingual ability, but not a clear understanding of the criminal justice system. So, you know, engaging individuals who’re really not trained in the whole component can be very problematic. And it was in that case. (interview 2/15/17) There are so many ways of reading Rose’s example. We could return to Robin’s medical-­legal partnership and attempt to place this translator’s convincing (coercive?) communication into the SLBT framework of morality and social worth. Did this victim-­survivor receive a message that indicated she was still disposable and deportable, even after her compliance in offering testimony? Or we could align this with Sylvia’s examples of “good” witnesses and the tension between certification and deportation. I also want to think through another explanation here. The collaborative components of carceral protectionism are ripe for competing norms of justice battling for primacy. Shannon Portillo and Danielle Rudes (2014) emphasize that street-­level bureaucrats “wield enormous power in shaping citizens’ understandings of their relationship with the state and the justice or injustice created within that interaction” (328). Rose described this bilingual advocate as misinformed, lacking a “clear understanding of the criminal justice system”—­but what if she was instead informed of the challenges or incompleteness of justice within carceral mechanisms? Rose’s understanding of her own relationship with the state was one of coordination and collaboration. She received notice from federal officers and sprang into action to disseminate resources and promote “good witnesses” testifying

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against their traffickers. Her encounters with trafficked persons were going to reflect her reality of the state as a protective mechanism that operates with some degree of fairness (though Rose certainly thought the state could do more). This unnamed advocate may have operated from a space where the state was a specter of injustice, especially if she held extensive experience with undocumented persons. The “enormous power” she wielded in describing the posttestimony practice of deporting victim-­survivors—­be it factually inaccurate or not—­reflected a reality where the state is an arbiter of punishment and expulsion. Both of these cases can be true at the same time, and both of them understandably come into conflict in a network of service provision that may incorrectly assume that all frontline workers have the same understanding of anti-­trafficking justice and affinity for the state. Can Street-­L e ve l B ur e a uc r a c ie s Offer K aleido sc o p ic J ust ic e ? In parsing through both the statistics that shape the normative story of justice and the interviews that complicate this path, I could not help but feel intensely unmoored. Across quantitative and qualitative metrics, the story is clear—­the justice afforded by the criminal legal system is incomplete at best and violent and exclusionary to some degree in its most common applications. And yet, it is this system of justice that we keep returning to even when, as Dilts (2017) and Mariame Kaba (Intercepted 2017) so powerfully remind us, this instinctive, almost primal response must be disavowed for accountability to truly manifest. If there is no other alternative, then it seems logical to want to reform these prosecutorial-­focused systems to be more victim-­centered, more responsive to individuals’ needs. My interviewees did speak about reforming or retooling certain elements of the process to be more affirming, in addition to the “softer” interrogation techniques noted in chapter 1. We might consider this, in the parlance of Levine and Meiners (2020), a reformist reform: the carceral state itself remains unquestioned and unsettled, but the practices within systems of detention and deprivation are made nominally more livable. Similarly, Jennifer Musto (2019) describes this softening as misdirecting focus onto “individual experiences of enforced carceral ‘care,’ without also challenging the commonsense logic and policies that undergird its adoption” (41). Carceral logics still reign supreme. The criminal legal system still remains the best-­resourced option compared to decimated social welfare systems, and individual victim-­survivors still find themselves entangled in carceral protectionism. For example, juvenile justice worker Juanita offered examples of ways to decrease or minimize (“soften”) the aesthetics of carcerality in her detention facility. Though most staffers, excluding educators, were trained law enforcement,



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they did not wear the traditional uniforms associated with police: “We don’t dress like officers, we took that out a long time ago. That just set the kids up to not like us and to fail, in our opinion” (interview 12/1/16). Juanita had instituted massive changes in her facility to work against the literal confines of a juvenile detention center, from reducing the opportunities of locking youth in their cells as a punishment to shifting the nutritional plan from including junk food to fresh fruit. Lest we forget, this is still a detention facility. Youth are still remanded in care for committing a criminal act or requiring access to secure shelter. Juanita is describing reforms to make that trauma of incarceration less traumatic, less confining, from her perspective as a worker in this carceral system: “They’re already locked up because they don’t get to get outside of this building. There’s no sense in us locking them up in here” (interview 12/1/16). Anti-­trafficking advocate Laura described practices to cultivate a welcoming environment from victim-­survivors’ first points of contact with her frontline organization. Because her organization worked more as a liaison between the social service and criminal legal systems, she had a bit more wiggle room to push the boundaries of placing clients’ needs first over paperwork, processing, or investigative practices: And I think even just [. . .] some of the environmental things that happen here, as far as being a welcoming place for them to come into, they’re always offered a snack and a drink. Or, you know, we’ll run through the drive-­ through and get something to eat if they haven’t eaten or whatever. They’re always given the option of having a fresh start bag if they need clothing and hygiene and things like that. So I think right from the time they walk into either our doors or the hospital or wherever that first point of contact is, it’s just, how do we first start with meeting those basic needs and kind of build that trust and help them see that we’re on your side from the minute you walk in the door. (interview 6/30/17) Though Laura does not explicitly state the carceral paths to justice these victim-­survivors may take (or may be primed to take in a carceral protectionist network), I find her last statement quite powerful and potentially subversive: “We’re on your side from the minute you walk in the door.” Laura’s organization worked tightly with law enforcement officers, so I do not want to oversell her commitments to collaborating with this particular brand of punishment in mind—­but this particular sentiment demonstrates the ways that frontline workers could find discretionary practices to work outside conventional models of justice. What if that trafficked person’s desires and requests were misaligned with a standard, prosecutorial process? Would Laura and her team be on a client’s side if they only wanted a meal from the drive-­through and a bag

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of supplies? Or does the long arm of the punitive anti-­trafficking intervention extend here too? Alongside these ostensibly more responsive examples, I am cautioned by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s (2020) work on the prison nation (Richie 2012) that reform is often just re-­form: “In so many cases, reform is not the building of something new. It is the re-­forming of the system in its own image, using the same raw materials: white supremacy, a history of oppression, and a tool kit whose main contents are confinement, isolation, surveillance, and punishment” (17). Steven Maynard-­Moody and Michael Musheno (2012) underscore this caution further with a note about the inherent conservatism of frontline work: “Far from rogue agents, street-­level bureaucrats are, in most instances, conservers of institutional norms” (S22). If institutional norms are not transformative but instead focused on returning to some kind of status quo, then the punishment mindset may find itself further entrenched even in the most reformed anti-­ trafficking processes. At the same time, though, Maynard-­Moody and Musheno (2012) open space for more resistant or radical manifestations of service provision within even the most rule-­constrained street-­level bureaucracies. They write, “But for many of the frontline workers we observed, the mismatch between rules and problems encourages the street-­level worker to improvise and innovate or, in the words of one social worker, to ‘be creative’” (S19). If the “rules” are carceral and the “problems” resist the criminal legal system, then perhaps a new mode of resource dissemination is possible, provided frontline workers are given improvisational tools that can create another alternative. So is another form of justice possible? Returning to the tenets of kaleidoscopic justice, I want to conclude this chapter with some seeds to germinate further in chapter 5. McGlynn and Westmarland (2019) emphasize that, for some, “conventional” punishments like incarceration are desired and pursued—­and I certainly do not want to erase how victim-­survivors interpret justice, even if my next chapter seeks to move beyond carcerality. While honoring that configuration of justice, I stress that we have to ask for more because, right now, some victim-­ survivors are not getting any form of justice, especially those who intentionally opt out of the criminal legal system. McGlynn and Westmarland (2019) themselves argue this: “Even were the conventional criminal justice system to improve, to better meet the interests and expectations of victim-­survivors, it would not in itself be sufficient to generate a sense of justice” (196). If justice is something that cannot be achieved through time spent in a jail cell, if justice means something different to each person experiencing violence and harm, we must use bold, transformative approaches to justice that circumvent these standard paths and divest from the punishment mindset.

Cha pte r 5

Beyond Carceral Logics Shiftin g fr om the “Puni s hi ng” S tate to the “ He lp in g ” State I want to return to the group interview that started chapter 1, which has stuck with me in many interesting, complicated ways since its completion. Most relevant here, our concluding exchanges engendered a sense of hope that felt necessary then and still resonates now. Perhaps this hope comes from the affective potency of this interview. It was clear, from start to finish, that this group of six service providers genuinely liked one another and enjoyed working together. They made waffles for team meetings; they shared inside jokes and found moments of lightness and levity during our interview. When one shared her self-­described failure around a particularly difficult client’s case, the others rallied to affirm her feelings and reframe “failure” as part of the process when working long-­term with youth experiencing trauma and carceral interventions. To be frank, at the stage of the research process where this interview landed, I was truly burnt out. I was exhausted after hearing example after example of the failures of the carceral state. And as I share more in the conclusion, I had moved from somewhat skeptical of the criminal legal system to fully doubtful of its even minor utility as a tool for justice. Four months had passed since victim services coordinator Rose had called into question my own taken-­for-­granteds with respect to anti-­trafficking interventions. I wanted to think more about ways to exist outside and beyond the carceral state. Though I had not yet put a name on it, I wanted to hear stories of communal support, stories of success that did not start or end with calling the police, stories that validated and affirmed the autonomy of trafficked persons. So I was genuinely shocked to hear my own desires echoed back, albeit far less cynically and still entrenched in managing institutions, at the very end of this interview. When discussing the unique challenges of anti-­trafficking work, the group engaged immediately: Laura: [. . .] And I always tell people, helping fight trafficking doesn’t have to have a trafficking label on it. [. . .] You know, be a mentor, be a foster parent, 125

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be a Sunday school teacher, whatever. You know, like you were saying, just look at the kids that are around you and figure out how you connect with them. But that’s a hard sell. Nora: And one thing that I remember you saying too, I’ve heard you say it a couple times in presentations, and I love it. You know, even if you’re the one who’s not the foster parent, [. . .] but you’re the one that once a week will take a casserole over to that family because you know they’ve got four foster kids in their house or [. . .] they’re a respite or whatever, you’re that neighbor that’s gonna help support them in what they’re doing, and the kids see that too. And so that, again, teaching communities to really, you know, where is it that you fit? [. . .] And what can you plug into? Laura: There’s not small pieces. [. . .] I mean it. It all adds up in helping people understand that. [. . .] You don’t have to go open a program or, you know, whatever. Nora: Right. Laura: Go take your neighbors a pizza. [table laughs] Just be nice. (interview 6/30/17) In some ways, we can understand this conversation as an un–­black boxing of anti-­trafficking interventions themselves (Latour 1999). Inputs and outputs do not have to even exist in the system labeled “anti-­trafficking,” which functions so smoothly that the internal complexity of various co-­occurring structural inequalities—­which appear in other institutional responses—­are rendered invisible or obscure. Combating human trafficking does not require every concerned citizen or frontline worker to work under the explicit label of sex or labor trafficking. It simply needs individual actors to work toward a more equitable world in whatever ways they see most appropriate for their skill sets and personal affinities. These small actions can be context specific and contingent on what needs should be met within individual communities. And perhaps most importantly, these actions can (and should) be disconnected from the punishing arm of the carceral state. In short, doing anti-­trafficking work from this perspective means engaging in community-­level practices to address poverty, housing insecurity, and limited access to social welfare systems, among other systemic inequalities. With these ideas guiding this chapter, I want to present some possible recommendations to shape anti-­trafficking efforts in the Midwest and beyond. These recommendations are not all-­encompassing and, frankly, do not include recommendations that I would offer from a critical trafficking studies perspective. Specifically, decriminalizing sex work is absent from the list, even though I would argue alongside others in the field (Albright and D’Adamo 2017; Mac and Smith 2018; Musto 2016; Vance 2011)—­as well as sex workers and sex workers’ advocacy



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groups (Daring 2018; DECRIMNOW D.C. 2018; Decrim NY n.d.; Mia 2020), public health professionals (Rekart 2005; Lancet Editorial 2015), state and federal legislators (Ramos and Salazar 2019; Grant 2020b), and legacy NGOs (Amnesty International 2016; Holson-­Zannell 2020; Human Rights Watch 2019)—­that it is long overdue. However, decriminalization did not emerge in my interviews, even if some service providers did implicitly frame sex work as work, or at least steer away from a neoabolitionist conflation. Following a fairly linear process, from identifying trafficked persons to providing resources and sustaining their post-­trafficking lives, interviewees expressed the pressing need for the following: ▪ Move beyond introductory, awareness-­focused anti-­trafficking trainings and programs ▪ (Re)build and maintain an adequate social service “safety net” ▪ Provide a more holistic understanding of justice Unlike the earlier chapters, these recommendations are not inherently or obviously baked into the carceral state, though they may certainly be punitive. The “punishing” state and the “helping” state, in fact, look quite similar, and I do not wish to valorize one over the other. At the same time, I do find it meaningful to turn to the policies and practices my interviewees intentionally articulated. Just as chapter 4 described the different paths toward justice—­carceral or otherwise—­some victim-­survivors of violence may want to follow, frontline workers in carceral protectionist networks are not automatons uncritically following a punitive path. They do envision ways to move beyond carceral logics, even when their work is still constrained by patterns of law enforcement referrals, arrests, and detention. T ensions b e t w e e n t h e “H ands” o f t h e S t a t e Before turning to the data, I want to briefly interrogate the ways that the “left” and “right” hands of the state may be at odds, particularly in frontline efforts to eradicate violence. Pierre Bourdieu (1999) uses the left and right hand of the state to distinguish between “social workers” on the frontlines of defunded or underfunded state sectors and administrative or political figures, what he calls minor and senior state nobility: “They constitute what I call the left hand of the state, the set of agents of the so-­called spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past. They are opposed to the right hand of the state, the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks and the ministerial cabinets” (2). Though Bourdieu is not using the Lipskian language of street-­level bureaucracies, he is illustrating the tension that inherently shapes frontline service provision: “helping” sectors that directly

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encounter and engage clients are subject to larger, “right hand” impulses and whims to defund, deregulate, or in the case of the shift toward a deeper entrenchment of the carceral state, redefine work in terms of its punitive elements. Loïc Wacquant’s (2009) Punishing the Poor elucidates this further as part of a neoliberal turn that folds the standard figures of the carceral state—­“the quartet formed by the police, the court, the prison, and the probation or parole officer” (15)—­into the larger mechanisms of the right hand: The regulation of the working classes through what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the Left hand” of the state, that which protects and expands life chances, represented by labor law, education, health, social assistance, and public housing, is supplanted (in the United States) or supplemented (in the European Union) by regulation through its “Right hand,” that of the police, justice, and correctional administrations, increasingly active and intrusive in the subaltern zones of social and urban space. And, logically, the prison returns to the forefront of the societal stage, when only thirty years ago the most eminent specialists of the penal question were unanimous in predicting its waning, if not its disappearance. (6) These “helping” sectors, though not immune from mechanisms of control even as they attempt to protect and expand livable lives, must increasingly contend with a “punishing” hand of the state empowered by carceral logics. I find Wacquant’s concluding sentence here powerfully important to consider in the wake of the repeated TINA refrain (Levine and Meiners 2020) across the earlier chapters. While we may now be unable to consider any alternative to the carceral state as we now know it, and while the punishment mindset affirms its existence as the only logical response to criminal acts and social disorder, the historical record does not bear this out (Davis 2003; Knopp et al. 1976). For my own interest in street-­level bureaucracies and anticarceral feminism, I want to use this metaphor of the left, “helping” hand and the right, “punishing” hand to explore new ways of imagining frontline work while also addressing the problematic undercurrents that still fuel current antiviolence and anti-­trafficking service provision. Elizabeth Bernstein (2012) provides her own expansion of Wacquant, among others, in her thorough interrogation of the “particular, dense knot of sexual and carceral values” (243) that fuel carceral feminist approaches to anti-­trafficking interventions and create law-­and-­order coalitions between ostensibly mainstream feminist movements and evangelical conservatives. As she writes, “Contemporary anti-­trafficking discourse situates the family as a privatized sphere of safety for women and children that the criminal justice system should be harnessed to protect” (246–­247). The neoliberal turn toward increased carcerality that Wacquant describes cannot move so seamlessly without a parallel movement in feminist spaces to reestablish what Bernstein (2012)



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calls “feminist family values”: maintaining the supremacy of the heterosexual, nuclear family unit against the threat of the commercial sex trade, rehabilitating women “harmed” by prostitution / sex trafficking (nearly always conflated) through restoration to middle-­class norms while simultaneously arresting the male “demand” for commercial sex. If this is the climate in which anti-­trafficking service provision operates, where “helping” sectors are implicitly or explicitly guiding their clients toward these particular notions of safety and normalcy, then the left hand of the state is still a controlling one, even as it opens up resources to promote more (sometimes narrowly defined) livable lives. At the same time, research across human trafficking scholarship shows that funding these “helping” institutions can buffer against the structural inequalities that perpetuate exploitation and violence (Brennan 2014a; Clawson and Dutch 2008; Lutnick 2016; Musto 2016)—­which could undercut what Bernstein (2012) describes as the current anti-­trafficking framework of shifting “the responsibility for trafficking [. . .] from structural factors and dominant institutions onto individual (often racially coded) criminal men” (244–­245). We can thus understand the tension between these hands of the state as the tension between macrolevel, systemic solutions to trafficking and microlevel, individual punishment for perpetrators. In practice, this could look like a representative of the “helping” sector, such as a housing advocate, securing an apartment for a young client experiencing homelessness and exchanging sex for a place to stay versus a police officer arresting the perpetrator of what is legally defined as domestic minor sex trafficking. After arresting the identified trafficker, where does that youth go? Are they placed into a secure shelter or detention facility, yet another mechanism of the “punishing” right hand of the state, or are they directed toward a longer-­term solution? What mechanisms of control and management accompany this longer-­ term solution, like rules against certain visitors or proof of wage labor to maintain housing? And what components of this youth’s identity—­and attached stigmas or stereotypes—­led this advocate to disseminate resources from a position of maintaining client autonomy versus fueling the carceral state? Even though these systemic solutions are themselves disseminated in ways that lead to a discretionary application of rights, resources, and justice, I argue that they can put us on a path toward equity, especially if frontline workers are willing to divest from the punishment mindset. M oving be y o n d A w a r e n e ss Within anti–­human trafficking efforts, awareness is centrally positioned as a silver bullet to stop trafficking, a buzzword employed by advocacy groups, a light illuminating the exploitation and violence hidden in our societies. Even with its presence in campaigns, curricula, and fundraisers, awareness is often

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simply meeting the bare minimum standard for education or knowledge. As Dina Haynes (2014) writes in her research on the phenomenon of celebrity ambassadors in anti-­trafficking efforts, “A large part of the responsibility rests with a public content to learn only a minimum about an issue—­the elevator pitch—­when seeking ‘awareness’” (38). Often, this “elevator pitch” is reliant upon the same social constructions of trafficked persons as young female victims of sexual exploitation (Baker 2013; Small 2012; Srikantiah 2007). Erin O’Brien (2013) explains further: “Victims of trafficking emerge from this mix as those deemed most worthy of public sympathy and government protection, yet in garnering this sympathy for a very specific type of victim, awareness campaigns can undermine these protection efforts” (316). If the definitions and impressions that emerge from generating awareness are overly simplistic and fail to encapsulate the varied manifestations of trafficking, then frontline workers may discretionarily—­or inadvertently—­exclude some clients from much-­needed services. Concerns and contention around the concept of “awareness” can be understood as a conflict within and between service providers tasked with working in the “helping” state. Unlike a push and pull between degrees of social control or punishment, this desire to move beyond awareness felt more like a desire to use the right hand of the state’s ability to disseminate resources more effectively. With respect to anti-­trafficking efforts in the Midwest, interview participants demonstrated a general awareness of human trafficking, especially sex trafficking, often to the point of feeling comfortable and confident identifying a victim-­survivor. However, upon identification, those same frontline workers felt unmoored going beyond that first step. Domestic violence administrator Olivia took an ethical approach when considering the role of awareness and identification practices. Though her managerial role was not exclusively one of frontline work, she had the opportunity to both attend and lead anti-­trafficking training programs in her community. As Olivia described it, her presentations were more explanatory about the role that advocates took at her shelter: “The definitions and things, but it’s kind of surface level of sorts, which I’m not sure that I would recommend that we dig in any deeper.” She intentionally kept this information introductory to avoid scaring participants away from considering the use of her organization’s resources or alienating them from developing their own internal outreach efforts. Later in our interview, Olivia returned to the larger question of anti-­ trafficking identification and resource dissemination, specifically orbiting around whether advocates should induce disclosure from potentially trafficked persons: It’s not that I don’t want to ask the question, but once I ask the question, then I have to do something with that information. And if I don’t have the financial resources, if my community isn’t equipped to be able to help this



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family in the best ways that they can, it might actually be more detrimental for me to ask the question than to not ask the question to begin with. And I’m not saying that that’s an internal conversation that people are having where they’re like, “Oh, don’t ask. Don’t say anything.” But I think that that is a valid resistance to that. “What the heck do you want me to do when I find out this is going on?” (interview 10/5/16) If frontline workers are being trained on how to identify trafficked persons but not given the infrastructure to support their needs, this awareness training may not be providing an educational service but instead be creating a new conflict for service providers. Expanding their caseloads to identify trafficked persons without a comparable development of resources may only create more stressors and increase mismatch or “failure,” in the sense of being unable to meet their clients’ needs. Rachel and Wendy’s description of “junk”—­repetitive, elementary programming—­in chapter 2 also finds a home here. Unlike Olivia, who raised concerns about even introducing anti-­trafficking awareness in certain contexts, these two frontline workers questioned how anti-­trafficking awareness is packaged and repackaged. In the lead-­up to Wendy’s exasperation, both she and Rachel described the seemingly endless cycle of training and awareness programs in their rural county: Wendy: All I keep saying is there’s gotta be a ton of grant money out for it because people are doing it all the time, and they’re putting on these seminars all the time. And so, someone’s getting paid to do it and trying to drag people in on this. Someone’s getting money to do it. [. . .] I get frustrated because I go and it’s the same stuff over and over again. [laughs] And it’s like, OK, I get it. Rachel: And it’s not only the same group that’s putting on the same thing over and over. Wendy: And every time I go, I keep thinking of that. [. . .] I’ll read the syllabus, and I’ll go, “Think this one might be it?” And so I’ll send someone and go, “OK, did you learn anything?” So far, we’ve not had any hopeful learning. (interview 8/12/16) As Rachel and Wendy’s programming fatigue demonstrates, highly trained professionals in street-­level bureaucracies are increasing their capacity for identification but not for next steps. “Hopeful learning” might include those more complex elements of anti-­trafficking work: where to direct a trafficked client to specific resources like secure housing or mental health services, whether to loop in or keep out law enforcement officers, how to conduct an interview or questionnaire without retraumatizing a victim-­survivor.

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Moving beyond awareness requires a redistribution of state-­level trafficking resources and reconfiguration of training curricula. While I do not wish to completely eliminate awareness-­generating programs focused on initial the identification of trafficked persons, I want more out of this resource. First, we cannot overlook the misinformation and stereotypes that are disseminated in these training programs. As explored in the introduction, human trafficking policy and practice in the United States has a specific racialized context, from the historical “White Slave Panics” of the early twentieth century (Donovan 2006; Doezema 1999; Goode and Ben-­Yehuda 2009) through the perpetuated tropes of ideal or iconic victimhood (Baker 2014; Kempadoo 2015; Small 2012; Srikantiah 2007). This context appears in anti-­trafficking identification tools that, for example, equate “provocative,” overly expensive clothing or generalized distrust with signs of human trafficking (Shih 2021a; Stoklosa et al. 2017). Whose definition of “provocative” or inappropriate is mobilized here? Are these standards using a particular kind of white, middle-­class respectability as the baseline? And knowing the relationship between communities of color and frontline sectors, from police to medical professionals, is distrust really that shocking? As a 2020 report from SWAN Vancouver explains, “It is not always the red flag itself that indicates risk but who the indicator is applied to” (19). When compounded with a generalized identification tool—­with indicators “so broad they are practically meaningless” (Mackenzie and Clancey 2020, 19)—­anti-­trafficking outreach can look a lot like the harassment and surveillance of groups along lines of race, class, and gender (Lam and Lepp 2019). Elena Shih’s (2016) work on vigilante outreach offers one example of this, with self-­appointed rescuers seeking out “suspicious activity, which included everything from homeless individuals sleeping at bus stations, a group of migrant workers gathered together eating in front of a taco truck, or most perilously, an attractive Asian or Latina woman walking alone” (79). The breadth of some identification protocols, especially those that focus on external markers of clothing or interpersonal relationships, simply means that frontline workers are being trained to seek out people who seem out of place against the status quo. A woman of color dressed for a night out with friends could be considered “trafficked” because of the collision of her clothing, her perceived race, and a street-­level bureaucrat’s discretionary application of these identification strategies. As well, there needs to be some kind of support for a second level of programming focused on developing plans and strategies for assisting trafficked persons. As my research revealed, midwestern states are fairly successful with a “Human Trafficking 101” program focused on awareness of the potential markers of trafficking—­even with their problematic undercurrents—­and there needs to be a “Human Trafficking 102” to help frontline workers determine what next steps are appropriate and ethical in their communities. If, as Olivia notes, frontline



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workers are hesitant to even probe for disclosure because they cannot do much more than identify trafficking, a continued focus exclusively on anti-­trafficking identification strategies is not serving anyone well. This could take the form of a series of meetings or programs with the ultimate goal of creating a service provision plan, bringing together key stakeholders in a region or county to brainstorm and workshop what resources they can provide and what gaps need to be filled. As Wendy stated here and in chapter 2, the current awareness-­generating meetings already have a networking capacity, and the energy in these spaces needs to be harnessed and directed to a tangible plan of action. I do not see a “Human Trafficking 102” as a panacea to these service provision challenges. Anti–­human trafficking task forces and coalitions, be they focused on policy or practice, frequently exclude formerly trafficked persons or sex workers in favor of the professional expertise of law enforcement, victim advocates, and increasingly, representatives from technology and corporate spaces (Farrell and Pfeffer 2014; Musto and boyd 2014). The absence of these individuals who can share from lived experiences, particularly those shaped by both state and interpersonal violence and control, could create a series of next steps that reflect what frontline workers, not their clients, think is ethical and appropriate (Anasti 2020b). Alexandra Lutnick’s (2019) case study of San Francisco–­based efforts to promote the “Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers Policy” across a disparate range of stakeholders with different ideological orientations to safety, exploitation, and policing could be a useful guide for future endeavors in this vein, though some of it may be contingent on the unique history of sex worker activism in the Bay Area. In short, bringing all affected voices to the table and finding a common cause—­in Lutnick’s study, stakeholders “were all united in wanting to reduce the violence experienced by people who sell sex” (146)—­could be one path toward a more equitable postidentification strategy that does not isolate or alienate those most impacted by anti-­trafficking interventions. Building a M o r e Ro b ust Soc ial Saf e t y Ne t Upon developing these strategies, service providers need the actual services to support their trafficked clients’ needs. This means a reinvestment in the social service system. In order to move from awareness and identification to the more tangible practice of appropriate, ethical service provision, frontline workers must be able to access certain resources embedded within social safety net programs. Anti-­trafficking scholars have consistently argued that more robust social welfare programs—­such as poverty alleviation services, housing assistance, and education and jobs training—­create the circumstances for less vulnerability and risk as well as offer supports to trafficked persons who have left situations of violence and

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trauma (Brennan 2014a; Clawson and Dutch 2008; Lutnick 2016; Musto 2016). As Heather Berg (2015) summarizes, “Crumbling social safety nets (including foster care systems), labour policies that degrade wages and conditions in jobs across all industries, and repressive immigration law are policy areas that should be of interest to those concerned with exploitation in sex industries” (152). Though these structural elements are not explicitly about human trafficking, they create the material conditions for exploitation. Hannah E. Britton (2020) goes so far as to include poverty as a form of gender-­based violence (38) for its role in constraining individual choice. Because anti-­trafficking legislation in the United States prioritizes punitive criminal legal responses (Chuang 2014), the importance of fostering social safety nets to buffer against trafficking (Todres 2011) or assist those exploited persons who face economic insecurity and constrained labor choices (Brennan 2014a) is routinely divorced from the mainstream anti-­ trafficking policy discourse. With respect to the Midwest, the defunding of the social welfare state has created a climate where street-­level bureaucracies are facing increased budget cuts as their responsibility to trafficked clients also increases. In the face of austerity and growing caseloads, a few interviewees did explicitly acknowledge the role of the political and ideological climate in their workplace. Victim services coordinator Rose—­ironically, one of the biggest proponents of a carceral approach to eradicating human trafficking—­offered the suggestion that the federal government should play a bigger role in addressing victim-­survivors’ needs: “I think they really need to invest in an infrastructure that can really provide a long-­term integration program back into society” (interview 2/15/17). Her words are focused more on the reactive components of post-­trafficking service provision, but the same pieces of “integration” that she referenced (housing, stable, living wages and employment) are also preventive. Foster care case manager Jessica noted how the budget cuts in her state directly affected the ability of street-­level bureaucracies to provide services. She referenced a policy change regarding juvenile justice that was ostensibly positioned to be a less punitive strategy for rehabilitating youth offenders alongside this resource gap: Funds are cut constantly, and it’s always battling that. And it’s putting more on social services and then cutting the funding. Like when they put in place to remove juvenile justice. [. . .] And so they were like, you know, “We did this because we believe that those juvenile offenders need to have that community wraparound, and community mental health. Community services need to wrap around. [. . .] Oh, by the way, we’re going to cut 4 percent across the board.” That doesn’t make sense, and that’s a unique thing, I think. And I don’t doubt other states deal with that, but here [. . .] you see it. [. . .] Don’t



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want to get into a political rant, but that is definitely a unique battle I find. (interview 5/25/17) This contradiction demonstrates the challenges of working within a political environment that does not acknowledge the discrepancies between requiring more responsibility of frontline workers and decreasing their funding to provide said responsibilities. Again, while this policy change could have a positive impact on vulnerable youth within the juvenile justice sector, it does not have teeth without the resources to back it up. A much smaller thread emerged across a cluster of interviews, primarily service providers in rural communities, that highlighted the ways local citizens stepped up to fill in service gaps. Juvenile justice worker Juanita provided a rare example of a philanthropist in her region who, in addition to grant funding and fellow nonprofits, helped maintain the robustness of her juvenile detention center’s programming and supplemental supports, even in the face of her state’s self-­described “money problem.” As she explained, “We have, he’s a multimillionaire. [. . .] If you call him up and say, ‘[. . .] I need $5,000 for this.’ ‘I’ll put it in writing, and you’ll have it.’ As long as it goes for kids, [he] has a blank check. But if it doesn’t go for kids in [our region], he’s not gonna support it” (interview 12/1/16). While this generosity is certainly exceptional to note—­Juanita was the only interviewee who mentioned having this level of donor support—­it is restricted to a specific part of one state and a specific population in need of services. Other juvenile detention facilities across the Midwest may not have access to a similarly open pocketbook. Police chief Bill saw this community-­driven initiative as a benefit unique to the interconnectedness of daily life in rural locales: People here know each other, where in a large city they may not. So, I have contacts that I could call on to help me at a moment’s notice, and they’re here. [. . .] There might be three to five people that I know that I can call to come help me.  [.  .  .] You probably know those people from other aspects of things in the community. You know, maybe you go to school together, church together. You belong to a civic club together, or you work on other projects together. So, you develop strong relationships with those people. You can call upon them to help when you see a crisis. [. . .] So, getting the goods and services that you need for someone might be limited [in a bigger city] simply because of it being more bureaucratic, and here we wouldn’t see the bureaucracies. Like, “Ahh, forget that hick. I’m going to go down the grocery store and buy somebody a sack of groceries.” That probably wouldn’t happen in the city, but here you would see it. [. . .] In [the nearest major city], you would have homeless shelters. You would have places that provide hot meals where people can come in. We don’t have that here;

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we can’t afford that. [. . .] It doesn’t exist. So, comparing the two again, the larger community [. . .] would have more resources better able to serve larger numbers or masses than we are in the isolated rural area. And the rural area, I think that we would probably be able to meet their needs more quickly and certainly on an individual basis by comparison. (interview 9/29/16) During our interview, it was hard not to feel entranced by Bill’s description, this almost idyllic community solidarity and support that thrived in the small-­ town Midwest. And certainly, operating outside of bureaucratic restrictions and policies to meet people’s immediate material needs gets closer to the spirit of mutuality I want to encourage. But at the same time, I worry about the sustainability of these practices, especially if they are tied so intimately to tiny, interpersonal circles that may be disconnected from other organizing or redistribution efforts in a community. What if one of Bill’s three to five crisis supports cannot afford to buy another person’s groceries one month, moves away from their rural community, or disapproves of the person identified in need of assistance? The history of “voluntary civil society” efforts points to these moments of disruption and discretion (Konczal 2014), and the mutual aid framework of “building new social relations” cautions against projects that look more like charity with certain power dynamics and economic inequalities held in place (Big Door Brigade n.d., n.p.). This is not to ignore the problems with state-­supported welfare systems nor to scuttle community-­driven efforts to support vulnerable members. But private citizens can only do so much in socioeconomic conditions that seek to deprive anyone—­especially those in precarious conditions—­of basic resources and perpetuate broader stigmas of “deservingness” and “undeservingness.” To prevent human trafficking from occurring and provide post-­trafficking services to victim-­survivors, the social safety net—­including accessible, better resourced health care, foster care, education, housing assistance, nutrition programs, and paths to citizenship—­cannot continue to be underfunded at its current rate or shifted to the responsibility of private citizens or philanthropic donors. This is a bigger ask, as it requires the cooperation of legislators at the state and federal levels, which is particularly ironic given the number of elected officials who simultaneously position themselves as anti-­trafficking advocates and implement policies that defund these critical sectors of frontline service (Grant 2018a; Zimmerman 2010). However, it is the necessary ask, especially if these sectors of frontline work continue to be the primary site for anti-­trafficking identification and assistance. Alongside increased funding, the street-­level bureaucracies that make up this social safety net need to grapple with their histories of punishment and social control. As conversations around the defunding and abolition of policing and



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prisons circulate in the United States, many have turned to state-­based or nonprofit sectors—­such as foster care, mental health care, and school systems—­as the solution to the violence of the criminal legal system. But these sectors are not without their own harmful pasts and presents. Take the school-­to-­prison pipeline (Meiners 2010), the involuntary commitments of rehabilitative or mental health crisis care (Ben-­Moshe 2013; Schenwar and Law 2020), or the targeting of Black mothers through foster care and child protective services (Roberts 2014), to name only a few examples. If this increased funding is simply being directed toward more school resource officers, more therapists in detaining health care facilities, or more child protective services investigators, then we are simply reproducing and escalating conditions of harm for those already marginalized. A more robust social safety net is not only an adequately funded system—­it is a more ethical system that, while perhaps still discretionary in the ways that frontline workers navigate interpersonal encounters, does not solely disseminate resources due to stigmas informed by racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. I think here of Paul Kivel’s (2007) binary framing of service provision: “Social service work addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence. Social change work challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence” (129). Social service work is both necessary and reactive. In its most cynical forms, it simply works to maintain the status quo and protect the existence of service provision in the first place. Social change work involves a political orientation toward radical transformation, ending the “isms” and “phobias” that perpetuate violence in the first place through collective action. This orientation also means ceding power and being accountable to those communities most directly impacted, not donors, administrators, or executives. I realize the tension and awkwardness here. I am essentially advocating for the left hand of the state to both grow in its capacity through better funding and shrink in its punitive, controlling mechanisms while I am asking for the right hand of the state to divest of its own power. This feels contradictory—­knowing the harm and control that can emerge through even the most “helping” aspects of the state, knowing the “punishing” hand of the state has shaped the ways social services are disseminated and yet still asking for more of the state.1 But at the same time, a structural understanding of anti-­trafficking work requires us to attend to the conditions that broadly perpetuate harm and exploitation, not just the narrow band of policies designed to exclusively address trafficking. Berg (2015) rightly states that “laws governing trade, wages and social supports may play more significant roles in shaping the conditions of ‘sex trafficking’ than interventions targeting the phenomenon” (149). It is thus incumbent upon us as anti-­ trafficking advocates and scholars to both push for more funding to address the

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immediacy of social service work while agitating, organizing, and thinking transformatively about social change work that unsettles the status quo. New Under st a n din g s o f H olistic Ju st ic e ? As I noted in chapter 4, justice can mean vastly different things across and between victim-­survivors, as well as the frontline workers tasked with disseminating resources and guiding them through some kind of post-­trafficking process. But justice is not the exclusive terrain of the criminal legal system. Returning to Clare McGlynn and Nicole Westmarland’s (2019) kaleidoscopic justice, I want to extend their framework, which is rooted in victim-­survivors’ perspectives, to how street-­level bureaucrats may take cues from their clients or even conceive themselves of justice beyond carceral logics. In their analysis of connectedness as justice, the authors share a quote from Alice, who described justice as a process centered on “making the victim of sexual violence whole again.” For some, being made whole can be understood as both material and affective: “Connectedness is about belonging in society, being recognized, being treated with dignity, having a voice. It is about receiving societal support in the aftermath of trauma, including financial assistance” (194). I see this as the space for frontline work to move toward a broader conceptualization of justice as attending to the whole person and their self-­determination, not just mobilizing the same (sometimes thwarted) pattern of arrest, detention, prosecution, and incarceration. I do not wish to overstate these service providers’ words here. Much like how decriminalization did not emerge in our interviews, we did not address abolition beyond a sex work–­abolitionist, anti-­trafficking framework. The limits of the criminal legal system were posed, but its existence remained unquestioned. Even with this caveat, some service providers offered examples of approaches to justice that felt more holistic, kaleidoscopic, or at least expanded beyond the immediate purview of the carceral state. Interestingly, investigator Jake echoed the language of justice as connectedness almost identically, though he was simultaneously deeply embedded in the carceral state as a law enforcement officer. He said his “bread and butter” was talking to victim-­survivors, making sure they were “made whole” in some way. Even if they fell out of engaging in a criminal prosecution and were subsequently unable to get a “judicial” form of justice, Jake wanted to make sure their desires to just receive services were fulfilled (interview 9/27/16). This ability to access resources is constrained by carceral protectionism—­talking to an investigator who may or may not be building a case against them or a perpetrator of trafficking—­but Jake at least acknowledges that being “made whole” might not be facilitated every time through a criminal legal process. Attorney Ellen similarly acknowledged that incarceration might not be the best solution for all cases, even when an identified perpetrator is moving linearly



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through a prosecutorial process: “Success is not getting convictions all the time, obviously.  [.  .  .] It’s about making sure there’s a just result. A lot of times we deal with a lot of mental health with the defendant, and then to jail or prison. That doesn’t help. It’s more helpful to get them services they need” (interview 8/10/16). Again, like Jake, Ellen is deeply entangled in the carceral state through her role in prosecutions, yet she resists the generalization of “bad guys” deserving of only incarceration, as described in chapter 2. Much like McGlynn and Westmarland’s (2019) description of justice as prevention and reeducation, Ellen here describes a process of rehabilitation and resource dissemination that could potentially reshape perpetrators’ lives outside of whatever punishment comes through the criminal legal system. Police officers and jails may have become de facto replacements for a robust mental health care system in the United States (Vitale 2017), but that does not mean that mobilizing them does anything to facilitate meaningful change or improved health. In short, a “just result” may not be (or cannot be facilitated by) retributive justice. Frontline workers from the “helping” hand of the state echoed these conceptions of justice in ways aligned with their workplace practices. For example, foster care administrator Suzy used the language of trauma and therapeutic overcoming as an analog for Jake’s “making whole”: “You want justice for them. [. . .] You wish you could undo the wrong, and you can’t. And you want so badly to fix that, and how do you fix that? I mean, that is one of the questions that goes through my mind all the time. How do you fix this trauma? How do you help them overcome this daily battle and these images that they have to see over and over again in their head for the rest of their life? How do you help them move forward in that?” (interview 5/24/17). Suzy’s work was explicitly connected to trauma-­informed practices, so her emphasis on justice as overcoming an assumed trauma fits with her own organizational orientation. While Suzy notably and intentionally worked with law enforcement, emphasizing “End Demand”–­style punishments for market facilitators in chapter 2, she opened up space for a different kind of justice here. It is “undoing the wrong” through access to particular resources and services to address mental health needs, which may be useful for some victim-­survivors at a particular moment in their post-­trafficking life. Anti-­trafficking advocate Amy, another frontline worker who frequently worked in carceral protectionist networks with law enforcement, also articulated a different understanding of justice as connectedness “to regain a sense of belonging and connection with society” (McGlynn and Westmarland 2019, 194). Much of her work, as she described it, was focused on being a direct line for trafficked persons to share even the most mundane elements of their lives: “But a lot of them I would say, especially two of them right now I can bring to mind, that they talk to me just about every day, if not every day. They call to check in. They feel proud when they call to tell me they got an A on a test or there’s an upcoming

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dance. Or it’s just about people are looking at them like they’re normal, and they haven’t had that in a while. You know, people aren’t downgrading, degrading them, or looking at them like they’re meaningless” (interview 10/6/16). Though Amy went on to explain the need to maintain some professional boundaries when navigating these friendlier or more casual points of contact, she also emphasized the power of these moments, especially for youth who may have limited familial networks or community supports. Justice here is recognizing someone within and beyond their identity as a trafficked person. It is also noting their humanity and need for connection beyond resource dissemination. So what does holistic justice do to the “punishing” and “helping” hands of the state? I believe that, when applied consistently, this framework could help facilitate a divestment from the punishment mindset that drives a misunderstanding of carceral results as “just results.” Consistency here does not mean that all frontline workers who collaborate together or work in one community share the same definition of justice, but they honor the possibility of different definitions at both the organizational and individual-­level—­and actually act in accordance with these possibilities. This becomes difficult to fathom when juxtaposed against the role of carceral protectionism described in chapter 1 and the primacy of the criminal legal system described in chapter 2. We know punishment, both formal and informal, is positioned as the immediate response to a discovered case of human trafficking; we know the “helping” hand of the state is often reacting after some kind of carceral intervention. But even those representatives of the “punishing” hand acknowledge other forms of justice are possible and necessary. Even if there is no current alternative, a “just result” may not be something they are able to offer. When we only think of justice as the criminal legal mechanisms of arrest, detention, prosecution, or incarceration—­or protection from those tools, in the case of victim-­survivors being unjustly treated like criminals—­we fail to see the complex interplay between the two hands of the state. I return here to Bernstein’s (2012) “feminist family values,” particularly the ways it locates protection in the nuclear family unit and harm in “sexually improper men” beyond the safety of the home (244). Though the “stranger danger” myth in trafficking narratives is empirically dubious (Albright and D’Adamo 2017), it carries purchase in a carceral feminist ideology that links the fear of disrupted heteronormative relationships (familial or romantic) with the crime control of the bolstered carceral state. Foster care worker Erin, whose work with law enforcement was limited due to self-­described gaps in communication, presented a lengthy example of a case that felt unsuccessful and mismatched with her own ideology: I had a teen that [sic] I worked with, and she was at the highest risk one could even imagine for human trafficking. And her parents were able to understand



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that and have some education around that. [. . .] After a year of consistent therapy, I was the one providing therapy, a year of consistent therapy and intervention, her risky behaviors persisted, if not increased. So, that’s not successful, doesn’t feel successful, and I worry for her. [. . .] I’m a feminist, and it really sucks, for lack of a better word, of having to have a conversation with a teenage girl in which you’re having to explain to her, not because you agree with it—­I don’t agree with these things; I think that our society should not be this way—­but there’s also a reality that people need to be aware of. And having to have a conversation with a teenage girl that if you lead with something, so if you’re leading on your Facebook post with pictures of you in your bra and underwear, or pictures of you where you don’t have much clothing on, unfortunately it invites a certain response. And I don’t support or condone a society in which that occurs, but that is the society that we live in, and it really doesn’t ever feel good to me to have to have a conversation with a teenage girl in which there is a message that I’m also sending her that she has a role in her own victimization or not. Because I don’t believe that in my heart. I don’t believe that to be true. I think we live in a society that allows those things to happen and encourages it, and you can see that socialization, gender socialization, and how that occurs from infancy forward. Those things are problematic in our society, and I can identify them as societal problems. And at the same time, I feel a responsibility to educate young women that [sic] I’m coming into contact with that [sic] are at really high risk of something of how to protect themselves and to try to safeguard their own safety when the conversation that I want to be having is with perpetrators. And that doesn’t feel good. That never feels like a success because I feel like I compromise my own morals and values when I have that conversation. I always preface it with “I don’t agree with this. I don’t agree that our society operates this way. I don’t agree that men are raised from infancy seeing women as less than. I don’t agree; that’s a problem. And this is the reality of the society we live in.” That feels like a huge failure every time. (interview 11/17/16) Upon first reading, I interpreted Erin’s example as one of “prevention as enabling a feeling of justice through education and social change to reduce harm and prevalence” (McGlynn and Westmarland 2019, 194). Any figures of the “punishing” hand of the state were absent in her retelling. The focus of her story was the conversation about gender norms and their problematic structural framing. And yet, another reading of this quote tilts this more kaleidoscopic interpretation, as McGlynn and Westmarland (2019) emphasize the liberatory capacities of their theory: “Kaleidoscopic justice, therefore, has a broader notion of social

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justice, beyond the individual ‘case’ or experience of victim-­survivors, at its heart. It is about envisioning a world free of violence against women” (196). Erin is not describing a world where violence against women and girls through exploitation and trafficking does not exist. Rather, this threat of harm from men outside the home does exist, but women and girls are educated about risks and (hopefully) perform their femininity in a way to protect themselves. I include Erin’s words here not to castigate her—­the end of our interview was focused on the profound discomfort of navigating her work “when you’re saying something that is a violation of your own belief system because it is the reality of the world around you”—­but to highlight how even encounters wholly within the “helping” hand of the state animate and crystallize the power of the “punishing” hand. This process of pragmatically explaining the reality of gender-­ based violence implicitly maintains the status quo, which, as noted in chapter 4, positions the carceral state as the ultimate (though limited) arbiter of justice in cases of sexual harms. Here, we see Bernstein’s (2012) “feminist family values” emerge as a response to “the demise of the welfare state and the ascendance of law and order politics, both premised upon the promotion of ‘personal responsibility’ and the condemnation of public disorder” (250). While it is not as prominent in this excerpt of Erin’s interview, the foster care sector in which she worked was dramatically underfunded and underresourced. Given our conversations surrounding employee turnover and limited access to certain interventions, I was frankly shocked to learn she was able to give consistent therapy for a full year. That degree of long-­term connection felt outside of the norms of foster care service provision in this state, at least described by other interviewees. Erin’s client did not shift her vaguely described “risky” behaviors (posting suggestive or explicit photos on Facebook) even after therapeutic interventions informed by Erin’s self-­identification as a feminist. Her client’s “personal responsibility” to change her actions and performances of femininity was ignored. The threat of public disorder emerged through the appearance of a perpetrator in Erin’s narrative—­and that mobilization of terminology implies that someone has committed a crime, someone has been harmed, someone has been identified as a victim and an offender. The “punishing” hand of the state emerges implicitly through the assumption that some kind of exploitation will inevitably occur, and their presence will be warranted to undo the harms of whatever violation emerged out of this particularly gendered context. By addressing the whole person, holistic justice allows us to step away from the crime framing of human trafficking toward something more macrolevel, more focused on addressing the structures that perpetuate violence—­moving beyond awareness to an understanding of the need for broader social safety nets, perhaps. Much like Laura and Nora’s description of anti-­trafficking projects to promote a more ethical community, anti-­trafficking advocate Elizabeth described



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her own approach to “chip away” at the problem of human trafficking through collaborative means: I say this a lot, especially when I’m talking to youth who are really wanting to get engaged in a social justice issue. And I tell them, “Your passion doesn’t have to be human trafficking. If you have a passion about homelessness or poverty or sexism or any other ‘ism,’ fight that.” Because when you fight that, you fight trafficking. Cause all of these things are interconnected, and all of these play into each other, and if you affect one, you will affect the others. So, you don’t have to have my passion. Find your own and work toward justice in that realm. (interview 12/9/16) Notably, across all three of these interviewees, the “punishing” hand is quieter. This is not to say that any of the sectors they name are devoid of control, management, or carcerality (thinking of the ways that housing insecurity and poverty have been criminalized [Vitale 2017], for example), but they do not default to justice only in a criminal legal sense. Elizabeth uses the language of social justice here, which is more closely aligned with a critical trafficking studies articulation of human trafficking as the consequence of the compounded effects of racism, classism, sexism, ableism, settler colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia (Kaye 2017; Kempadoo 2015). Taking these service providers’ words into consideration, I want to think beyond carceral logics in what may be the most engrained, entrenched element of anti-­trafficking interventions: conceptions of justice and punishment. If this understanding of holistic, even kaleidoscopic justice is present in some of the most politically conservative midwestern regions or bureaucratically constrained sectors, there must be some way to reconceptualize anti-­trafficking efforts at the level of client-­based encounters and interventions. This requires bold, creative action that, as I argue in my concluding chapter, can only come about through the imagination afforded by police and prison abolitionist, antiviolence agendas.

Co n cl u sion

Anti-­t raff icking Futures Ju stice w itho u t P o li ci ng and Pri s ons Since I started this project in 2016, I have thought about its ending. Or more clearly, I have thought about the conclusion I wanted to write. At various moments, perhaps mistakenly, I believed I could present some kind of tangible, specific solution to the problem of human trafficking that could be immediately plucked from my text and implemented as policy. Even though my scholarship intentionally lives in more nuanced analyses of trafficking and resists a single narrative, I was seduced by the clarity of closure. The longer I have sat with this work, the more I have realized that these solutions are systemic, messy, and politicized, not the neat and clean bipartisan project that so many United States–­based anti-­trafficking efforts aspire to be. This messiness is challenging to engage. For example, it feels daunting to claim that eradicating trafficking means, in great part, eradicating capitalism. Even though this is a robustly researched (Bernstein 2016; Chuang 2010; Kempadoo 2015; Rioux, LeBaron, and Verovšek 2020; Zimmerman 2011) empirical position to take, it can still be politically dismissed away or discredited as utopian, impossible. Similarly, when talking to students and colleagues about carceral feminism and its exacerbation of violence (Law 2014), I have been called an idealist divorced from the reality of antiviolence work. I share this not to dismiss these perspectives but to highlight how deeply the TINA refrain (Levine and Meiners 2020) has entrenched itself in even the most introductory conversations about human trafficking. There is no alternative to carceral approaches, at least one we can currently imagine, and attempts to think beyond these systems of carceral protectionism, carceral logics, and carceral justice are threatening, ignorant, or unwise. Where I am now, at the conclusion of this book, is focused more on anti-­ trafficking efforts as a process, not as an end goal in and of themselves. To be frank, I do not know if I will see the end of human trafficking in my lifetime. But I also do not know if I will see an end to gender inequality, and I do not question my work as a feminist. What I do know is that human trafficking’s root 144



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causes—­the “isms” and “phobias” that make certain people more expendable and disposable—­are the same root causes that any project to end inequality must address. The solution is not what the punishment mindset gives us, that clarity of closure in an identified perpetrator who faces retribution. The solution is the long, slow haul of building a different world. I feel privileged to write in the world of anti–­carceral feminism and critical trafficking studies, two fields with rich traditions of reflexivity that allow me to openly share the ways my stance on anti–­human trafficking efforts developed and refined into one informed by abolitionist strategies to eradicate policing and prisons. I take my cues here from Leigh Goodmark and Jennifer Musto, whose writing on their own ideological evolutions with respect to antiviolence projects guides my thinking here. In a July 2020 blog post, Goodmark offered an illuminating reconsideration of her 2018 book, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence. She concludes Decriminalizing Domestic Violence with an outline of alternatives to a criminalized approach from economic, public health, communal, human rights, and decarceral perspectives. Her approach here does not seek to replace the carceral state fully but instead offers ways to think about leading an antiviolence effort without first turning to the punitive mechanisms of the criminal legal system. There are alternatives, and some should be pursued in the path toward justice, but certain elements of a carceral approach linger: “But the complete decriminalization of intimate partner violence is unlikely, and probably unwise. It is unrealistic to believe that there would be widespread support for repealing laws addressing intimate partner violence. [. . .] Arrest and prosecution play an important role in securing safety and justice for some people subjected to abuse” (142). Goodmark instead asks readers to “rethink the current criminal legal regime” (143), to shift from the binary construction of punishment (the “good guys” and “bad guys” of chapter 2 in this book) to a continuum that offers more thoughtful (some might say reformed) approaches to carceral justice. By the publication of her 2020 blog post, Goodmark’s position had changed. As she explained, two years of learning from Black feminist abolitionists gave her the capacity to reconsider her own final remarks to Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: But I would end the book very differently now. I would argue that the criminal legal system serves no useful purpose in addressing intimate partner violence. I would acknowledge that victims of violence continue to be invested in using that system—­in part, because it is the only justice that we offer them. I would contend that justice can be so much more than retribution and suggest that we explore what justice really means to people subjected to abuse

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so that we can deliver the justice that they need. And I would conclude that whatever benefits one might argue result from criminal system intervention can be replicated and provided outside of that system, and that “reform” simply means allowing an unjust, ineffective, destructive system to continue to harm those it is meant to help. (n.p.) Goodmark is staking a bold and necessary claim: the “justice” of the criminal legal system is only enshrined as such because we, as a society, valorize it. Unsurprisingly, some victim-­survivors will also valorize this mode of justice, because what else do they have—­or what else have they been told they deserve? Knowing the problems with victim-­blaming and assumptions of deviance discussed in chapter 4, criminalized interventions are primed to create more harm, not only for perpetrators but also for victim-­survivors. But those harms are glossed over when thinking about retributive justice. Someone has to be locked up, someone has to be removed from society, and whatever happens to those in the orbit of this criminal legal process is collateral damage. I want to connect Judith Levine and Erica Meiners’s (2020) TINA and Bruno Latour’s (1999) black boxing here, as I see these two concepts running tandem in Goodmark’s blog post. First, if there is no other alternative to prosecuting and incarcerating perpetrators of violence, then all we can do is reform the criminal legal system into something kinder and gentler (Whalley and Hackett 2017), or at least something that looks like it might be more receptive to victim-­survivors and more prepared to generate accountability. Levine and Meiners (2020) describe this mentality as “treat[ing] the criminal legal system like an old car. We need transportation. The car is basically sound, but it has a few broken parts. So we should fix the brakes, get a new muffler. Then it will be fine” (157). It would be unlikely or unwise, folding in Goodmark’s words, to think about traveling without a car at all. Even if some individuals enmeshed in these systems think a new mode of transportation is possible, it would be framed as a fringe position. Latour’s (1987) black box is “one unbreakable whole” (132), an automaton of “elements [. . .] made to act as one” (131). The inevitability of carcerality can only be one unbreakable whole if all elements, including victim-­survivors of violence, are made to act as one retributive force. Victim-­survivors are invested in the criminal legal system because their investment is required for the criminal legal system to appear to function. Their inputs of a desire for retributive justice might lead to outputs of an incarcerated perpetrator (a tangible proxy of justice) or, more powerfully, the presumption of the criminal legal system as the only arbiter of justice. The more this black box of justice is successfully mobilized (“the complete decriminalization of intimate partner violence is unlikely” [Goodmark 2018, 142]), the more “opaque and obscure” it becomes (Latour 1999, 304). I see Latour’s opacity cycling back to Levine and Meiners’s TINA: there is no other



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alternative because the black box of criminal legal justice has reinforced itself into existence. We are unclear about how its individual components work together to emphasize the punishment mindset, and without this clarity, proposing any new forms of justice appear irresponsible and illogical. Musto’s (2016) appendix to Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States offers a similarly powerful moment, questioning the assumptions embedded in our own understandings of anti-­trafficking as a descriptor or framework. I am affirmed by her assertion that anti-­trafficking frameworks may not actually be the most effective mode of assisting trafficked persons, especially in their current carcerally influenced iterations. While observing a sting operation ostensibly set up to identify DMST victim-­survivors and direct them to services, Musto (2016) noticed the practices of the operation were actually policing and arresting adult women engaged in commercial sex: Suffice it to say that after the operation I was compelled to question my own commitment to antitrafficking as a framework with the capacity for reform and the ability to deliver justice to those who experience its effects most directly. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, coming to this realization made me more fully aware of the daunting and arguably impossible task of requiring actors directly affiliated with the carceral state, including but not limited to local police officers, to step up as protectors of victims of sex trafficking, all the while continuing to enforce laws related to commercial sex. [. . .] And as long as the public and different private and nonprofit interest groups demand more investment in law enforcement as the primary system of first response, more arrests or recovery efforts or police training alone will not necessarily produce lasting change. (151–­152) Musto is asking us to challenge the now-­routine impulse to see human trafficking as a criminal legal problem first. While it may be viscerally satisfying to see identified traffickers arrested and successfully prosecuted (Dilts 2017; Intercepted 2017)—­and while these modes of justice offer the cleanest, most linear path toward closure for victim-­survivors—­these carceral solutions are themselves a form of violence that do not stop the structural, systemic inequalities that perpetuate exploitation and trafficking. If we as anti–­human trafficking advocates and scholars want to take seriously ending sex and labor trafficking in our communities and globally, we must commit to a transformative vision of the future that looks beyond the carceral state for justice and accountability (Shih 2021a). My own “ah-­ha” moment unfolded over a period of years in the aftermath of my interview with victim services coordinator Rose. As astute readers may have noticed, Rose appears in every chapter of this book, either quoted directly or

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referenced casually. This is not because our interview was particularly lengthy or methodologically fascinating—­it is because our interview reshaped the trajectory of my research. Rose firmly believed in greater anti-­trafficking infrastructure development, particularly with respect to criminal intelligence gathering and post-­trafficking resource dissemination, which I briefly note in chapter 5. When explaining how these programs would work, she mentioned a diversion program strategy, much like the therapeutic systems that frame chapter 3: We [could] have a facility that gives [trafficked persons] an option. And make it in a criminal component of—­and I know that’s kind of anti-­victim—­but in a criminal component of a diversion program. You know, they have those all across the country. They have it in speeding tickets, if you successfully complete the program, there’s no charges filed. It’s like it never existed. And offer them a diversion program so that when they get out of it, they have a new life start. And they only get to do that once. I just think that it’s better than drug court. It could be, [laughs] you know? (interview 2/15/17) Framing this strategy as “anti-­victim” recalls the power of the “victim-­ offender” in anti-­trafficking work (Musto 2016). Placing victim-­survivors into a program that mobilizes the specter of criminalization—­“complete the program or see your charges on your record”—­may induce compliance in ways that feel coercive and extend the reach of the carceral state. Even if Rose is couching these diversion programs in more funding from the federal government (which could fit into the larger argument of developing a larger social safety net), there are elements here that raise questions for me. What about those trafficked persons who do not successfully complete the program? Are they punished, given a second chance, or something else? And what about those who perhaps become trafficked again later? Trafficking may not be a singular moment of exploitation but include repeated experiences and polyvictimization (De Vries and Farrell 2018). Later in our interview, I asked Rose how she navigated her workplace challenges, both in the day-­to-­day routines that shape service provision and the larger issues that may emerge when working directly with formerly trafficked persons. She took a cue from the Golden Rule in her explanation: “I think that navigation just comes from treating people like you’d wanna be treated. I think that’s the bottom line. You know, I mean, how would I feel if I was in their shoes?” (interview 2/15/17). As I sat in my car, I kept thinking about this statement. How are we treating people like we want to be treated if we keep placing them in contact with the carceral state? I was conducting my research in a post-­Ferguson world where critiques of criminal legal systems and policing strategies were becoming increasingly mainstream, even bubbling up in a few of my own interviews with law enforcement officers who vaguely mentioned Black Lives Matter protests and



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anticop sentiments. Between the rich history of abolition efforts from Black feminist theorizing, the constantly evolving trajectory of antipolicing and antiprison activism, and the mainstream media’s reinvigorated attention to these ongoing projects, we had (and continue to have) frameworks for understanding justice without carceral mechanisms. We could also access very specific moments to call upon when arguing that direct encounters with police officers were not safe for everyone, including trafficked persons and sex workers. Months before my interview with Rose, the Oakland Police Department exploded in controversy after a young woman revealed she engaged in commercial sexual exchanges with thirty-­two law enforcement officers as a minor, a textbook definition of DMST (Brown 2016). And yet, even when my interviewees shifted to think beyond carceral logics, the punishment mindset was omnipresent. Human trafficking is a crime, and crimes require specific, punitive responses. To even think about suggesting otherwise felt impossible and risked downplaying the severity of the harms wrapped up in trafficking. But what harms were we allowing to slide in the name of rescue and safety? If carceral protectionism is just maintaining the status quo, especially in midwestern states where resource provision is routinely constricted in the face of budget cuts, how can we begin to practice something outside of the carceral norm? Even if we fail, even if our efforts do not work on the first try, my conversation with Rose showed me that a new way of doing the work of anti-­trafficking work was necessary. I keep returning to Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) when thinking through anti-­trafficking futures. As she writes, the antiprison movement has the challenging task of dismantling the carceral state without further harming those currently ensnared in its webs of punishment and detention: “[It] calls for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system” (103). Reforms to carceral modes of anti-­trafficking justice still entrench the carceral state. While it is necessary to think about the immediacy of violence faced by incarcerated persons, our short-­ term efforts to improve their material conditions cannot be done at the expense of long-­term reorientations to justice that mean others like them will not be sitting in jail cells in the future. At the same time, shifting modes of justice exclusively to the social welfare state without any consideration of the ways we have weaponized social safety nets will just entrench punitive practices in this context. Critical Resistance (n.d.) uses the case of police abolition to highlight this tension, which they describe as negotiating between “reformist reforms which

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continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact” (n.p.). They use four questions to understand if a particular intervention—­from body cameras and community policing to withholding pensions—­reinforces or undercuts the primacy of policing: Does this reduce funding to police? Does this challenge the notion that police increase safety? Does this reduce tools/tactics/technology police have at their disposal? Does this reduce the scale of policing? (Critical Resistance n.d., n.p.) While certain “solutions” to the problem of police brutality might emerge out of a desire to create more “humane” encounters with law enforcement, they still “bolster the permanence” of carceral approaches by widening the scope of concerns and community issues that fall under the purview of policing. Take more training for law enforcement as an example. In the face of grotesquely underfunded, inaccessible mental health care, police have essentially become first responders to mental health crises, and people experiencing these crises are de facto criminalized. Calls to increase mental health training for officers may be “realistic” in the current conditions of law enforcement—­and the difference between life and death, given the countless stories we can share of officers killing people with mental illnesses (Fuller et al. 2015)—­but they do not come without consequences. Critical Resistance (n.d.) argues that more funding simply “further[s] the idea that police are the go to [sic] for every kind of problem” (n.p.), from social disorder to clinical health care. Alex Vitale (2017) adds that police should not be the go-­to for every problem because of the “warrior mentality” of law enforcement training that instills a threat orientation: “Studies show that standard police approaches actually tend to escalate and destabilize encounters. Yelling commands and displaying weapons may cause a mentally ill person to flee or become more aggressive” (82). The best practices that a medical provider might use in engaging a patient experiencing mental health concerns can be taught to a law enforcement officer. But as we know with discretion, it is simply one tool in their professional kit that might not be easy to access in the moment, especially if it has to override every “warrior” message in an officer’s training before that point. Levine and Meiners (2020) explore this tension as well, arguing that reforms are not uniformly problematic if they maintain a future orientation to abolition. They use a single question to assess the function of particular interventions: “Does this reform move us toward or away from the goal of the campaign or project, and ultimately the vision of the movement of which it is part?” Reformist reforms might make the abolitionist future foggy. In our short-­term efforts to ameliorate the immediate violence of the carceral state, our long-­term efforts to undercut its efficacy and supremacy might get bogged down or dragged to the



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side. Citing André Gorz, Levine and Meiners use the phrase “non-­reformist reforms,” which does similar work as Critical Resistance’s “abolitionist steps” to avoid the retrenchment of criminal legal systems and “make material differences in the lives of people under its control” (158). To return to the previous example of mental health care, in contrast to the reformist reform of more police training, a nonreformist reform might look like redirecting 911 calls for mental health crises from law enforcement to trained clinicians or case managers. Technically, the criminal legal system is still intact—­911 is still called; the assumption that police grant safety is still present—­and the efficacy of this shift is dependent on an adequately resourced health care response (that still may be punitive and managerial). But this approach chips away at the idea that police can and should address all concerns in a community. Davis (2003) asks us to “imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions” that present a continuum of alternatives to the criminal legal system (107), and we can extend this constellation to anti-­trafficking projects. The same solutions Davis positions as potentially useful for a project of decarceration—­recasting education as accessible, not rooted in punishing or regulating bodies; making health care widely accessible; reinterpreting justice as providing reparations and reconciliation—­would also address some of those root causes of human trafficking. As we work on this project and create new tools for justice, we must find ways to make do, get creative, and think ethically (beyond reform as reform, placing abolition on the horizon) with the tools the state has given us. So in the spirit of pragmatism, what does this mean in practice? What is the anti-­trafficking future we should be striving toward without the violence and terrorism of the carceral state? I offer frameworks that may be instructive as we imagine a world that prioritizes collectivity and communal support over the punishment mindset’s carceral problem-­solving. These are not the only examples we can draw from in this world-­building process, but I find them particularly illuminating and energizing. M utual A id Mutual aid is not a new or novel suggestion, though its mobilization as a counter to COVID-­19-­induced precarity has catapulted it into the mainstream. Jia Tolentino (2020) detailed mutual aid groups from Bed-­Stuy, Brooklyn, to the University of Minnesota in the New Yorker; Lucy Diavolo (2020) highlighted how Google Docs and Twitter can be harnessed to mobilize soap drives and Lysol donations from a social distance in Teen Vogue. Both Tolentino and Diavolo also point to Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which argues that the foundation of society is a sort of cooperative affinity for each other, “the close dependency of everyone’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and [. . .] the sense

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of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own” (xvi). Instead of the individualism that shapes American self-­conceptualization or the hierarchical network of service provision, mutual aid meets people where they are at with little to no barriers to entry, no discretionary parsing of “deserving” from “undeserving.” From rental assistance and grocery deliveries to disrupting ICE arrests (Farzan 2019) to community-­led rescue efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey (Ayer 2017), mutual aid efforts can be mobilized to meet local needs in however those in community deem necessary or critical. Mutual aid efforts often emerge out of a context where people have experienced harms because they are not legible—­or are actively targeted for eradication—­within the state, like sex workers raising funds for each other because they were explicitly excluded from federal COVID-­19 economic supports (Herrera 2020) or No More Deaths providing water and medical care at the U.S.-­ Mexico border for migrants facing the threat of violent border policing (No More Deaths n.d.). Trafficked persons fit into this paradigm, particularly those whose identities mark them for more invasive criminalized responses. Victim-­survivors of color, transgender victim-­survivors, disabled victim-­survivors, undocumented victim-­survivors, sex working victim-­survivors, and victim-­survivors with previous criminal records may not be legible for the networks of service provision afforded by carceral protectionism, nor may they wish to seek to interface with a criminal legal response to their exploitation. As earlier chapters have highlighted, anti-­trafficking service provision is fraught with particular power dynamics that may in fact replicate the force, fraud, and coercion associated with human trafficking. Mutual aid can be a way to work around this. As Dean Spade (2020a) writes, “Mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian, demonstrating how we can do things together in ways we were told not to imagine, and that we can organize human activity without coercion” (16). If compliance in a prosecutorial investigation is required to get access to stable, even temporary housing, then there is a coercive element to anti-­trafficking service provision at play. What about simply giving a formerly trafficked person access to shelter, no questions asked? And what if, instead of being placed in a shelter far away from friends, family, or other supportive networks—­which can be framed as a placement focused on safety and recovery, though this is debated within anti-­ trafficking service provision (Clawson and Goldblatt Grace 2007)—­trafficked persons were given the first month’s rent to stay in a neighborhood of their own choice? I think about how many of my interviewees talked about clients, especially youth, running away from services, with an implicit fear or judgment that they were running toward harm, negative relationships, or unhealthy environments. While this is certainly valid, I also wonder if these clients were running away from institutional coercion or management that felt harmful in some way.



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Mutual aid also aligns with a critical antiviolence lens, and specifically a critical anti-­trafficking approach, that sees violence as the consequence of systems, not just an interpersonal dynamic that can be deterred through more arrests and more policing. Under our current frameworks of service provision, certain elements of the status quo are maintained or rendered invisible. The “problem,” for example, is not the economic precarity and lack of reasonably accessible wage labor that creates the context for an individual to engage in commercial sex to afford rent or the xenophobia and immigration policies that empower a construction company to pay meager wages to undocumented workers under the table without recourse. The “problem” is the aftermath: a traumatized victim, a villainous perpetrator, each facing particular applications of “justice” that keep exploitative economic and violent migration policies intact. Mutual aid flips this, creating an environment where individuals are not “bad actors” but instead shaped by larger systems of inequality and oppression. As Spade (2020b) explains further, “Getting support in a context that sees the systems, not the people suffering in them, as the problem can help combat the isolation and stigma” (137). If, for example, a victim-­survivor of trafficking is supported in an environment that does not use blaming and shaming (“You should have known better than taking that sketchy job or picking up that creepy client”) or language misaligned with their own self-­conception (“You had no choice, you need to be restored, you need to heal”), then perhaps they might actually feel better about working with a group or collective. What if their choices and behaviors were not pathologized as a response to unaddressed trauma or emotional lack but instead placed in the larger context of what it means to survive under the “isms” and “phobias” that mark them as unlivable, ungrievable, inherently precarious (Butler 2010)? Importantly, mutual aid is not meant to replace or supplant some kind of social welfare state; its existence is predicated on being outside the state and its attendant processes of normalization, containment, and violence. When formalized or absorbed by preexisting organizations, mutual aid practices can become more beholden to institutional norms and metrics of service provision. This can result in the exclusion of the most vulnerable or marginalized and potentially even perpetuate violence through collaboration with representatives of the “punishing” state (INCITE! 2007; Spade 2020b). At the same time, mutual aid may mask the transformative potential of some state or state-­adjacent actors, as Ellie Vainker (2021) powerfully argues in her dissertation on nonprofit disability funding in Seattle, Washington. The discretionary wiggle room baked into the various levels of street-­level bureaucracies—­in Vainker’s case, a community loan fund and financial coaching nonprofit for disabled residents of the Pacific Northwest—­could shepherd in reimagined service provision under the legitimacy of a state-­recognized service provider:

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To dismiss the nonprofit form as incompatible with mutual aid imaginings is to dismiss a potent tool in gathering and dispensing resources that works within this system of financialized capitalism that we cannot remove ourselves from, however much we might wish to. It is to limit our imagination, to place an unnecessary burden on the grassroots, and to overlook the creative possibilities of the present moment. It is also to sideline those who have no choice but to interface with bureaucratic maze-­like systems to meet their needs, those whose participation in interdependent dreaming is premised on a level of access that can often only be met through state and state-­funded systems. (231) In some ways, Vainker’s words remind me of the tension between reformist reforms and abolitionist/nonreformist reforms outlined by Critical Resistance (n.d.) and Levine and Meiners (2020). What can we do “work[ing] within this system” that does not seek to create a kinder, gentler nonprofit (or anti-­trafficking) industrial complex but instead seeds the collectivity and communal care needed in mutual aid efforts? Nonreformist reforms within this space would still point toward a future where these “imbrications with the state” (Vainker 2021, 230) are needed not to survive but to meet individual victim-­survivor’s needs as ethically as possible, without imposing the “deserving”/“undeserving” binaries that currently shape service provision. T ransform a t ive J ust ic e In chapter 4, I briefly introduced transformative justice (TJ) in the context of victim-­survivors who opt out of engaging the carceral state in their own paths toward justice. As noted in that chapter, TJ “seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence” (Mingus 2020b, n.p.). In contrast to restorative justice (RJ), which is frequently mobilized in U.S. contexts as a diversionary practice nested within law enforcement or criminal legal systems (Kim 2018), TJ is resolutely outside the parameters of the state. Much like mutual aid’s emergence in spaces where the state has absolved its duties or predicated extreme violence, TJ interventions carry particular salience in communities or networks where law enforcement and state control are historic and ongoing threats: communities of color, queer communities, communities of mixed immigration status, and radical communities of anarchists, feminists, and abolitionists. There are many different strategies, approaches, and tools that could be considered part of a TJ process or informed by TJ, some that may be considered preventive (avoiding any initial contact with carceral representatives) and others reactive (addressing a harm after it has occurred). Community-­led crisis interventions that do not involve calling 911 (Trans Lifeline 2020; Oakland Power Projects



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2020), observation strategies and “bad date” / “bad encounter” lines monitored and directed by individuals engaged in sex trades (Gallant 2020; Young Women’s Empowerment Project 2012), cultivating and turning to “intimate networks” of nonstate actors for accountability and support (Mingus 2020a, 120), and using processes of community accountability that “seek [. . .] to transform the roots of violence” (Rojas Durazo 2011/2012, 79)—­all these practices are arguably part of a TJ orientation to accountability, communality, recourse, and “making things right” (Mingus 2020b, n.p.). TJ is not a magic solution or a guarantee of justice in all cases. There are no quick fixes here. Mariame Kaba even cautions against positioning TJ as a replacement for the larger carceral state, describing it instead as “an ideology, a framework, a political vision, a practice [. . .], a way to shift and transform our relationships to allow us to build the conditions under which we will no longer need prisons and surveillance and policing” (Dixon and Piepzna-­Samarasinha 2020, 296). TJ resists institutionalization and generalized applications. Because it is so contingent on the networks of community members collaborating within each neighborhood, circle, or pod, what “works” might vary from city block to block. Even in our well-­intentioned responses to exchange the violence of the criminal legal system and prison industrial complex for something different, TJ cannot be packaged and formulated to “treat harms uniformly” (Dixon and Piepzna-­Samarasinha 2020, 297). What TJ can do is offer a set of strategies for us to test, reflectively assess, and recalibrate. One of the most important components of TJ, to me, is its emphasis on process. Doing something (and making sure that something is informed by core TJ tenets of accountability, antioppression, and harm reduction) is necessary, even if it “fails” by some metric. Per Levine and Meiners (2020), “Are these practices always perfect, effective, or ‘right’? No. But they are taking us in the right direction” (182). From my perspective, the right direction for anti-­trafficking interventions is away from the criminal legal system, away from arrests, detention, prosecution, and deportation. I know this is a difficult direction for many of us, even those who are deeply skeptical of current anti-­trafficking efforts embedded in the carceral state. The message that human trafficking is the worst of the worst, the most horrific crime a person can commit, is powerful and shapes even the most fundamental, baseline knowledge of trafficking in mainstream discourses. And yet, even in the face of all this, we have to try something different. Human trafficking is not going away under our current modes of intervention and justice. If anything, the discourse around trafficking is metastasizing into something exceedingly distressing, as the disturbing union of QAnon conspiracy theorists and anti-­trafficking moral panics prove (Grant 2020a). In short, both mutual aid and TJ foster collective responsibility. They start shifting the locus of power from institutions (like street-­level bureaucracies) to

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networks of community members with some kind of shared commitment to eradicating violence and minimizing proximity to harm. This is not to say that mutual aid and TJ fully absolve the state from providing any material resources, though perhaps, in the “building [of] new social relations that are more survivable” (Big Door Brigade n.d., n.p.), an abolitionist future will not require the state as we know it. I still want the more robust social welfare system in chapter 5, even though I know the discretionary ways its funding mechanisms can get warped and become oppressive (and perhaps this is my own version of a Spivakian desire for what I cannot not want, to borrow from Andrew Dilts’ [2017] own application of this lens). But I also do not think throwing money at the “helping” state is enough. We have to, much like Kaba (Intercepted 2017) asks with the punishment mindset, divest from a mentality that is laden with value judgments about individuality and deservingness, as well as the exclusivity of bureaucratized, professionalized processes to assist and support trafficked persons. Mutuality and collectivity are necessary to cultivate in the face of the more mainstream impulse to default to the crime framing, making human trafficking only the problem of the criminal legal system (Baker 2013; Chuang 2014), or turn to invasive vigilantism and surveillance (Shih 2016; 2021a; 2021b). Mia Mingus (2010) talks about this communal orientation to the world as interdependency, a way to resist the myths of “ableist heteronormative racist classist” individualism as the only way of being a person in this world: Interdependency is not just me “dependent on you.” It is not you, the benevolent oppressor, deciding to “help” me. It is not just me who should be grateful for whatever I can get. (and we can think about this as it relates to service provision, as it relates to political organizing, right?) Interdependency is both “you and I” and “we.” It is solidarity, in the best sense of the word. It is inscribing community on our skin over and over and over again. It is truly moving together in an oppressive world towards liberation and refusing to let the personal be a scapegoat for the political. It is knowing that one organization, one student or community group is not a movement. It is working in coalition and collaboration. Because the truth is: we need each other. We need each other. And every time we turn away from each other, we turn away from ourselves. We know this. Let us not go around, but instead, courageously through. (n.p.) What would it mean to think about anti-­trafficking efforts as a project of interdependency? What would it mean to think about service provision more as mutual exchange and less as one-­to-­one resource dissemination? What would it mean to think about my survival under oppressive systems as connected to everyone’s survival, including trafficked persons, including those identified as perpetrating trafficking? I think back to the question Rose asked herself when



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navigating client workplace challenges: “How would I feel if I was in their shoes?” I want to believe that thinking interdependently through this question would reveal something more than just how I would feel as a discrete individual replacing another—­even if I would want retributive, carceral justice, is that what every victim-­survivor would want? And how does that desire foreclose other possibilities of living together, mutually, turning toward each other and away from violence? While perhaps not as thrilling as the dominant narrative of rescue and recovery, I do think these final thoughts can be a site of unity as they strive toward a more equitable future in the broadest strokes. I emphasize strive here, as there is no instantaneous fix to miraculously increase funding for frontline service provision or reframe justice beyond its most violent, punitive manifestations. Especially for those sectors facing increasingly dire budget cuts across the Midwest, immediate organizational survival—­and the continued reliance on well-­worn tool kits for discretion and resource dissemination—­may feel more necessary. But we cannot stay with this status quo. The process of agitating for new trafficking policies and practices—­specifically those that resist carceral frameworks, prioritize client agency over a cleanly closed case, and require more financial support from state institutions—­is a necessary project for anti-­trafficking advocates, scholars, and activists. If we seek to stop the violence of human trafficking, we must first take a step back to analyze the practices and norms that led us to this point—­and then move beyond these frames to create a mutually beneficial, interdependent future without the trauma of exploitation and trafficking. In talking about the end of prisons, Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law (2020) describe abolition as an adventure: “It may feel daunting to have no rulebook, no constitution, and no prescription. But it is also exciting! When you’re on a quest, anything is possible” (238). It is our responsibility to go on this quest, to collectively envision a world without the harms of human trafficking and the violence of carceral attempts at justice—­really, any violence—­and to mobilize our efforts (even when they fail) in service of building this new world.

Ack n o wl e d g m e n t s

It is a strange and surreal process to finish writing a book during a global pandemic alongside a mass movement for racial justice with certain exclusionary practices being exploded while others get even more retrenched. As these struggles for health, solidarity, and freedom continue, I do carry some trepidation about the anti-­trafficking futures I imagined in September 2020, when I completed the first draft of this book manuscript. I finished this book in a pre-­QAnon world, before human trafficking had become even more conspiratorial and sensationalized in its rhetoric. But as Mariame Kaba powerfully, patiently reminds us, hope is a discipline. In researching and writing this book, I had the honor of cultivating that hope by citing transformative feminist and abolitionist thinkers, learning about models for mutual aid and transformative justice, and creatively envisioning different worlds. First, I would like to acknowledge the labor of the fifty-­four service providers interviewed for this project. Even with heavy caseloads and busy schedules, these frontline workers spent time with me, generously offering their expertise and insights on exploitation and trafficking. Without their words, this book simply would not exist—­and I would not have gotten the opportunity to reconsider my own assumptions about violence, justice, and power. Because this manuscript stemmed from my dissertation work, I must first enthusiastically thank my dissertation adviser, Hannah Britton, who gently nudged me toward researching human trafficking over mommy blogs. Since then, Hannah has been my copilot and guide, and I am still in awe of the ways our friendship continues to grow. Hannah continues to model ethical, feminist engagement in antiviolence work, and it is from her that I have learned how to navigate the difficult terrain of anti-­trafficking scholarship. I also thank my committee members Alesha Doan, Dorothy Daley, Steven Maynard-­Moody—­who changed my life with our Street-­Level Bureaucracy Theory seminar in Spring 2015—­and Megha Ramaswamy. I am so grateful to still call 159

160 Acknowledgments you all colleagues and friends. I cannot forget the deep bench of support beyond my dissertation committee: Tami Albin, Katie Batza, Brian Donovan, Shannon Portillo, Akiko Takeyama, Dave Tell, Stacey Vanderhurst, and Travis Weller. At KU, I was so lucky to work and play alongside so many smart, sharp people. Though not everyone listed here is a Jayhawk, I credit their friendship for helping me think deeply, laugh hard, and grow: Chip Badley, Brendon Bankey, Abby Barefoot, Allie Chase, Melinda Chen, Clare Echterling, Aster Gilbert, Chelsea Graham, Trevor Grizzell, Elise Higgins, Cat Jacquet, Sean Kennedy, Liam Lair, Sam Lyons, Ashley Mog, Tyler Morgenstern, Liz Stigler, and Ellie Vainker. Their fingerprints are all over this work, whether they can see it or not. KU’s institutional and financial support let me begin this project and gave me the time to plant ideas that I was able to develop in this book. Thank you to the Department of Political Science; Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Office of Graduate Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Institute for Policy & Social Research; and Hall Center for the Humanities. Lastly at KU, I have to thank all of the past and present collaborators with the Anti-­slavery and Human Trafficking Initiative: Kira Anderson, Madeline Caywood, Jennifer Chappell Deckert, Séan Coffey, Pat Colloton, J. D. Cowden, Katie Cronin, Paula Cupertino, Ryan Daugherty, Don Haider-­Markel, Michelle Haider-­Markel, Paul Johnson, Emily Killough, Jennifer Montgomery, Patrick Miller, Andrea Nichols, Emily Rauscher, Erik Unruh, Vivian Van Vleet, Sherry Warren, Sierra Watt, Xan Wedel, Marcus Williamson, and Chong Xing. This team effort helped with everything from testing survey questions to transcribing interviews and simply talking about trafficking. I have been fortunate to find intellectual communities beyond Lawrence, Kansas, both with fellow faculty and students. At Marquette University, I want to thank Calista Lopez, Aimeé Navarro Villegas, Linnea Stanton, and all of the students in my Spring 2019 Gender, Labor, and Human Trafficking course. Though I have not been at Oklahoma State University for long, I have already found such a solid, supportive group across the gender, women’s, and sexuality studies program and sociology department. Thank you to Lu Bailey, Jen Borland, Reanae McNeal, Tammy Mix, Kelley Sittner, and Jessica Turcat. Jonathan Coley, Jared Fitzgerald, and Rachel Schmitz did the hard work of editing my introduction in our junior faculty writing group. Leigh Welch’s title as “undergraduate research assistant” fails to capture how much she served as a co-­author, colleague, and critic (in the best sense of the word). Lindsay Wilhelm joined me at many book proposal work sessions and kept me from too much procrastination. Since this book has been simmering in some capacity since 2015, I have taken it on the road at many different scholarly venues. I have to thank so many organizers, panelists, students, and audience members in attendance at KU, Oregon State University, Oklahoma State University, St. Louis University, University of

Acknowledgments

161

Hawaii-­Manoa, and University of Oklahoma, as well as years of National Women’s Studies Association and Law and Society Association meetings. All of these presentations helped me work out the “ah-­ha” moments I write about here. Working and thinking closely with Liz Chiarello, Chrysanthi Leon, Erin O’Brien, and Corey Shdaimah has led to similarly transformative intellectual moments. I also owe a great deal to the accountability groups I have joined through the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity to keep my writing and editing on pace. Special thanks to Julia Kowalksi for our Monday meetings and for managing our shared book publishing stress. At Rutgers University Press, I want to first thank my editor Peter Mickulas, who made the process of writing and editing nearly painless for a first-­time book author like myself. At Scribe, Cathy Denning and Taylor Anhalt offered critical production and editorial support. Sam Martin completed this index and generously answered my questions during that process. I also want to thank Molly Dunn and Jennifer Musto for their feedback on my proposal and full manuscript. As someone whose perspectives of critical trafficking studies were foundationally shaped by Jennifer’s work—­and whose career as a junior scholar has already benefited from her generosity—­I am deeply appreciative of her thoughtful attention to this text. In addition to all the amazing people listed above, many of whom still play a daily part in my life, I have to thank all my friends outside of KU, Marquette, and Oklahoma State University who helped me maintain some semblance of balance, especially John Fernandes-­Salling, Alex Seubert, Stephanie Smith, Jenna Stark, and Renee Whaley. The Schwarz family has seen me through the stress of a dissertation prospectus, a book proposal, and a final draft. Thank you first to my mom, Mary, who I knew I could call at any moment when this project felt beyond me. She has helped me cultivate my initial love of learning, teaching, and writing that all culminated here. My dad, Tom, put up with so many conversations about problematic workplace anti-­trafficking trainings. My brother, Nick, offered levity alongside political takes and pop culture recommendations. Across time zones, my sister, Molly, and her fiancé, Chris, sent me plenty of dog photos, let me vent when needed, and gently poked at my overreactions (mostly Molly here). During the early years of this project, I gained more family, first with Cheryl Baley, my favorite indecisive Libra, and Craig Beaumont. Craig did not get to see the end of this book, and I am still surprised about the care and interest he showed in my weird academic job. And last but not least, Jacob perhaps deserves the biggest thanks of all. He fed me when I was too stressed to make a dinner decision, told me to put the laptop away at night, encouraged me when I felt stuck beyond belief, and reminded me to get some sunlight. Jacob saw this book from its first failed grant proposal

162 Acknowledgments to the last edit, which means he has been talking to me about human trafficking and the carceral state for almost eight years now. Words really fail to capture how much I love our life, our Jasper and our Dot, our dinner table conversations that turn into chapters, and our future adventures. Financial support was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences, Oklahoma State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1624317. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Ap p e n d i x A R es ear c h M e tho d o l o g ie s Project Hi st ory

Though this book focuses exclusively on interviews from February 2016 to July 2017, that timeline fails to capture the multiple, overlapping research projects that led to my interest in anti-­trafficking service provision and honed my theoretical orientation toward critical trafficking studies. Since October 2013, I have been a member of the Anti-­slavery and Human Trafficking Initiative (ASHTI) at the University of Kansas. I started my work with ASHTI as a graduate research assistant (GRA), working with Dr. Hannah Britton and fellow GRAs Daniel Alvord and Andrew Zarda to launch a qualitative study of service providers in Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. We conducted semistructured interviews with thirty-­six frontline workers over twelve months, addressing the issues frontline workers faced in their anti-­trafficking efforts and service provision in this unique metropolitan area. Being part of the ASHTI pilot project was truly foundational for my own academic development, resulting in a change of dissertation topics and a specific commitment to qualitative methodologies. As well, this book was shaped by what ASHTI learned during the pilot project phase. Most importantly for me, networks of carceral protectionism (what I first understood as a more neutral collaboration) and the competing concepts of who “counts” as a trafficked person first emerged in these initial interviews. I conducted the research described next as part of my dissertation project. After defending in April 2018, I knew I wanted to do more with what I had written; namely, I wanted to pursue the uncomfortable feelings that had emerged as part of the “ah-­ha” moment I describe in my conclusion. I had written a dissertation that gestured toward abolition (of the prison variety, not the sex work exclusionary anti-­trafficking kind [Lewis 2017]), and my own emerging political commitments were coinciding with larger, national conversations about police brutality and racial justice. I became a student of abolition, and the process of expanding my dissertation into a book was deeply informed by these processes of self-­directed learning. 163

164

Appendix A

Case Study Lo c a t io n In line with ASHTI’s initial focus on a single urban cityscape, I used a microlevel case study approach (Weitzer 2015) to uncover the nuances and challenges of anti–­human trafficking work in two midwestern states. While there is a growing body of literature on human trafficking in midwestern and rural communities (Cole and Sprang 2015; Heil and Nichols 2015; Ozalp 2009; Schwarz and Britton 2015; Williamson and Prior 2009), this region is generally considered “flyover country,” a space where human trafficking does not occur. Focusing my research in two midwestern states allowed me to gauge both the perceived scope of human trafficking as a widespread humanitarian concern and the dominance of particular human trafficking discourses. To maintain confidentiality, I do not reveal the names of the states where I conducted my research. I believe this level of protection was necessary to conduct my research. These two states are small enough in terms of sheer population, and anti-­trafficking service networks are small in general (Musto 2016), so providing the state name could lead to some participants being more easily identifiable. However, I also lost the ability to make arguments about specific, state-­level policies regarding exploitation and trafficking. Each state has slightly different approaches to defining and punishing sex and labor trafficking. Given the differences across each state’s policies, if I made reference to this legislation, readers would be able to identify these locations with ease (e.g., searching for all states that use a particular punishment for domestic minor sex trafficking or a specific definition for traffickers). With these caveats in place, I selected these two midwestern states for some shared commonalities in state budgeting and differences in anti-­trafficking climate. During the time I was conducting my interviews, both states were engaged in some degree of defunding their social service and education sectors. At the same time, both were also increasing their anti-­trafficking efforts through state-­ level policies, work groups, and task forces. Both states have major city centers, suburban spaces, and rural communities, offering an interesting regional comparison both within and across states. A major difference between these two states is the historical focus on human trafficking—­one state took pride as a leader in anti-­trafficking efforts while the other was attempting to implement some collaborative teams for the first time. Defining the S a m p l e : “T r a dit io n a l ” Street- L ­ eve l B ur e a uc r a c y I used an organizational perspective to understand exploitation and human trafficking in my research. For larger ethical reasons, I did not seek to interview trafficked persons themselves, who may have had to tell and retell their stories of trauma for law



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enforcement officers, case managers, and public audiences. As a critical trafficking studies scholar who seeks to work outside of the sensationalized, exploitative frameworks of some trafficking discourses, I did not want to create an environment where I replicated those same patterns in my research methodologies (Schwarz 2022). I also recognized that some formerly trafficked persons work in a frontline context, especially those involved in victim-­survivor-­led advocacy. Thus, I did expect to find some participants who had experience with violence or trafficking, but I wanted to speak to them primarily about their relationship to street-­level bureaucracies and service provision. Overall, I was interested in understanding the systems and processes through which trafficked persons are identified and directed to appropriate services. Individuals within street-­level bureaucracies are key to addressing these questions, as they are the workers involved in the practices of identification and service provision with exploited or trafficked persons. Based on the ASHTI pilot project’s sampling structure, I selected the medical, legal/law enforcement, nonprofit, social service, and foster care sectors as the organizations that would most likely have the frontline workers who engage with vulnerable, exploited, or trafficked persons. I set out to interview individuals who fit into the “traditional” model of street-­ level bureaucracy because of their proximity to those seeking services and their inherent discretion in disseminating services. As my project progressed, I found that the lines between frontline workers and managerial/administrative workers were blurrier than expected. Some requests sent to frontline workers were forwarded to managerial/administrative workers due to their expertise with exploitation and trafficking; other organizations did not have strict boundaries between the work of lower-­level and higher-­level employees. For example, Erin served in an administrative role but indicated she engaged in direct client services—­on top of her preexisting responsibilities in her foster care organization—­“to keep her skills sharp” (interview 11/17/16). Smaller organizations, especially those in rural communities with limited resources in a geographic region, often had smaller staff sizes and, subsequently, all employees engaged in direct encounters with citizens, regardless of their role within a traditional street-­level bureaucracy. For example, sheriff Nicholas stated that more complex crimes were generally covered by himself or other senior officers in his rural jurisdiction, regardless of who discovered the case or had the time to work it (interview 12/8/16). In sum, even if an interviewees’ official job title was more supervisory, they often performed aspects of frontline work in their daily practices and are thus represented here. Additionally, many interviewees described how budget cuts, funding concerns, and small staff sizes affected their workloads and workplace practices. While none of the interviewees explicitly stated that these issues caused them to shift their role, many did state that they took over projects, practices, or direct service

166

Appendix A

work to help ease the burden on lower-­level or part-­time staff (Schwarz 2021). With these factors taken into consideration, I believe this project reflects the complexities of current frontline work; namely, that the increasingly defunded social welfare state often requires a flexible workforce that can cross between the normative roles of “traditional” street-­level bureaucrats and more managerial roles. Anti-­trafficking advocacy and assistance may be added to administrators’ caseloads because of their previous expertise or their ability to take on more face-­to-­ face work compared to their fellow frontline staffers. Survey Pha se Though my book focuses exclusively on semistructured interviews, this research project actually began with a survey. As part of the ASHTI team, I worked to launch a Qualtrics and paper survey, running from July to September 2016. We gathered frontline workers’ perceptions of trafficking “red flags,” the more material or physical identification markers of trafficking; risk factors, the structural inequalities that can perpetuate vulnerability and trafficking; and community resources, the local supports that can buffer against or even prevent trafficking. Those individuals who worked on cases of perceived labor or sex trafficking were asked a series of questions about their estimated number of trafficking cases, their satisfaction with how the case was handled organizationally, and the resources or organizations they accessed to address the specificities of the case. As readers may have noticed, I do not reference the survey beyond explaining my project phases here, not because it is faulty or methodologically unsound, but because the semistructured interviews were so rich and so detailed that they demanded the full space of this book. This survey was necessary to see the scope of anti-­trafficking perspectives and assumptions, as well as generate interest among a select group of stakeholders who wished to share their thoughts more. As part of the ASHTI team, I worked collaboratively with quantitative specialists to focus on the survey data in three publications, and I proudly direct you to those texts for more nuanced, detailed information on this phase of the project.1 Semistruc tur e d I n t e r vie w P h a se I conducted interviews in two phases between February 2016 and July 2017, resulting in forty-­two total interviews with fifty-­four participants. First, from February 2016 to August 2016, I conducted interviews with eleven service providers across seven organizations in an initial phase with a narrow subset of service providers holding expertise in rural frontline work. Two participants were located through an internet scan specifically targeted at statewide service providers with connections to rural communities, one participant was located through an internet scan targeted at rural service providers from one region, and three participants were located through snowball sampling methods. The remaining



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five interviewees happened to be present at their organization when I arrived for a scheduled interview and joined the interview upon the invitation of the original interviewee. Next, from September 2016 to July 2017, I conducted interviews with forty-­ three frontline workers across thirty-­six organizations. Thirty-­four of these interviewees had participated in the online survey. If respondents who took the survey indicated they wished to take part in a follow-­up interview, I contacted them and scheduled an interview. I removed one interviewee from this list because of their inability to communicate further based on legal troubles, as well as seven interviewees from faith-­based organizations who indicated in their survey responses that they did not have frontline contact with clients. Eight interviewees were found via snowball sampling. One interviewee joined upon invitation in the middle of an in-­person interview. During this phase of the semistructured interviews in April 2017, ASHTI released our survey findings in a self-­published white paper (Schwarz 2017). I met with sixteen interviewees after this publication date. While I cannot guarantee they read this white paper, it is important to note for my methodology, as this could have affected their responses. All interviewees gave their informed consent for the interviews, per the Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval of the research project. Interviews lasted twenty to ninety-­five minutes, with the majority of the interviews being conducted at an office location or place of work. Two interviews were conducted in public. Additionally, the majority of the interviews were with one representative of an organization. Seven of the forty-­two interviews were with groups of two to six individuals. Conduc tin g t h e I n t e r vie w I asked interviewees questions from a semistructured interview protocol informed by narrative theories of qualitative research. Steven Maynard-­Moody and Michael Musheno (2003) describe narratives as “the embodiment of the storyteller’s interpretation” (26). Just as frontline work is contingent on social scripts and norms, narratives demonstrate how participants make meaning of their work within a particular cultural and social context (Portillo 2012). With respect to this project, service providers described the meaning of their anti-­ trafficking efforts within the context of their organization and their perceptions of human trafficking. The interview began with open-­ended questions about frontline workers’ general experiences with sex and/or labor trafficking. I then asked a series of questions about the more traditional aspects of street-­level bureaucracies, such as managing caseloads and coping with workplace challenges. The questions returned to human trafficking, specifically asking about collaboration across multiple sectors engaged in anti-­trafficking work and regional differences that may be unique

168

Appendix A

to midwestern communities. The interview concluded with a set of narrative questions asking participants to describe encounters with clients—­trafficked or not—­that they would describe as successful and unsuccessful. This open-­ended structure afforded service providers the space to provide examples and anecdotes of encounters with clients who they perceived to be exploited or trafficked. Data Analysis S t r a t e g y a n d P r iv a c y I transcribed interviews alongside two IRB-­approved transcribers, undergraduate research assistants Madeline Caywood and Séan Coffey. For the transcriptions I did not work on personally, I listened to the interview audio while going through the document to check its accuracy. Upon transcription, I de-­ identified all interviews myself to remove personal and location-­based information about my interviewees. For my dissertation, I coded the transcript text in line with codebooks unique to each chapter’s themes and foci with Atlas.TI coding software. This hybrid methodology, “employ[ing] both inductive (ground up) development of codes, as well as a deductive organizing framework for code types (start list)” (Bradley et al. 2007, 1763), was necessary for how I thought about data analysis in this first articulation of my research—­I wanted that assumed degree of control afforded by predetermined codes. As I have progressed further with this project, I have become less enamored of codebooks as the exclusive marker of rigor. Especially for this book, I began and halted so many iterations of new codebooks, new structures, new schemas. The levels of nuance and contradiction I wanted to convey resisted some kind of mapping or typology. Thus, I followed a pattern of reading each transcript in NVivo once for content and initial notes, followed by a more focused, fine-­grained analysis for the second round (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011). I refer to quoted interviewees with a pseudonym, gendered pronouns, and a generalized job title (e.g., law enforcement officer, immigration advocate, etc.). This is to guarantee and maintain confidentiality. As noted earlier, the anti-­ trafficking community in these sampled midwestern states is small, with many individuals working in coalition across state lines. Many interviewees knew one another well and worked on cases together, frequently referencing one another in the interview text. All quotes in the dissertation are edited lightly for grammar and clarity but otherwise presented verbatim. I use bracketed ellipses ([. . .]) to indicate moments when I cut words from the quoted passage, often used in the case of repetitive phrases or lengthier segments to keep the quoted material focused on the topic in the text. In the case of interviewees who consented to the interview but could not be audio recorded—­for legal or personal reasons—­my own transcription notes are used. These notes consist of me rereading the handwritten notes I took during the interview verbatim.



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These privacy practices of de-­identification and generalized references are reflective of the human subjects approval I received from the University of Kansas Institutional Review Board for Study #00004033. All data were stored securely on a KU-­housed server and backup server that required password protection. Demograp h ic Re sul t s In line with my IRB-­approved practices, I only gathered limited demographic data for my interview participants. Table 1 aggregates one of these data points, interviewees’ role within their street-­level bureaucracy. For this categorization, I used Michael Lipsky’s (2010) framework to determine whether or not my respondents were traditional frontline workers—­meeting directly with clients to provide services—­or administrators who took on service provision in special circumstances. Slightly over half of my interview sample represents normative street-­level bureaucrats, which demonstrates how much frontline work is performed by those in more senior roles. As addressed earlier, these managers and administrative officials offered a range of perspectives on why they were continuing to engage in direct client service provision. Table 2 provides an overview of the generalized job titles represented by my interview participants. I offer this to show the scope and range of work afforded in my qualitative data. In the case of frontline workers whose jobs encompassed a range of activities, I selected the job title that represented the majority of their work (e.g., domestic violence advocates who also wrote grants and reports for donors in addition to their case management duties). Demograp h ic Ca ve a t s For both the survey and semistructured interview participants, I only asked for participants’ job titles and regional scope of services, demographic factors that could easily be generalized and thus limit the potential to identify my participants. I believe my participants were so willing to share information and disclose their experiences with trafficking because of this level of confidentiality, but this also restricted the levels of analyses I could perform with respect to my data. I cannot make certain arguments about identity within frontline encounters because I simply do not know how my participants identified with respect to their gender and race. I can make assumptions based on the ways they referred to themselves in the context of our interview and surrounding communication, assumptions that guide me toward using certain pronouns for my participants, for example. But beyond that, I cannot add to scholarship on how race and gender play a role in how street-­level bureaucrats stereotype their clients (Lara-­Millán 2014; Portillo and Rudes 2014).

170

Appendix A

Ta b l e 1 Street-Level Bureaucracy Role by Sector Sector

Street-­level bureaucracy (SLB) role

Legal/law enforcement (n = 19)

“Traditional” SLB (n = 12) Manager/administrator (n = 7)

Medical (n = 10)

“Traditional” SLB (n = 5) Manager/administrator (n = 5)

Social service (n = 7)

“Traditional” SLB (n = 4) Manager/administrator (n = 3)

Nonprofit (n = 13)

“Traditional” SLB (n = 7) Manager/administrator (n = 6)

Foster care (n = 5)

“Traditional” SLB (n = 4) Manager/administrator (n = 1)

All sectors (n = 54)

“Traditional” SLB (n = 32) Manager/administrator (n = 22)

Ta b l e 2 Interview Job Titles by Sector Sector

Participant job titles

Legal/law enforcement

Law enforcement officer (includes sheriff, police chief, and detective) Immigration lawyer Legal staffer Attorney (includes state-­level officials, legal aid, and nonprofit lawyers) Juvenile justice worker

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center (CPC) staff Crisis pregnancy center administrator Public health nurse Public health administrator

Social service

Victim services coordinator Government worker Youth services worker Youth services administrator

Nonprofit

Nonprofit administrator Anti-­trafficking advocate Domestic violence / antiviolence advocate Domestic violence administrator

Foster care

Case manager Foster care administrator



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Additionally, my sample of participants may not be wholly representative of the frontline workers who actually engage with exploited or trafficked persons. Across both the ASHTI pilot project and my dissertation research, I constantly heard from potential participants that they did not wish to be interviewed because they did not work with trafficked persons. I do not doubt their experiences, but I wonder if some of this came from a misperception about human trafficking, that trafficking is only sexual exploitation or only takes the form of extreme violations. I attempted to work around this issue by emphasizing that I was just as interested in those frontline workers who had not encountered trafficked clients, that vulnerability, exploitation, and risk are central concerns to my project. While this framing worked for some individuals—­even leading to interviews where they described their experiences with trafficking when they initially did not believe they could speak to it—­other key frontline workers self-­selected out of the research process.

Ap p e n d i x B I nt er v i ewe e P se u d on yms Pseudonym

Interview date

Sector of service

Generalized job title

Chelsea

2/17/16

Legal/law enforcement

Immigration lawyer

Karen

3/23/16

Social service

State-­level government employee

Diane*

7/25/16

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center director

Elijah*

7/25/16

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center staffer

Gladys*

7/25/16

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center staffer

Sarah*

7/25/16

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center staffer

Leslie

8/04/16

Social service

Youth services worker

Ellen

8/10/16

Legal/law enforcement

Attorney

Eric

8/10/16

Legal/law enforcement

Sheriff

Rachel*

8/12/16

Legal/law enforcement

Immigration lawyer

Wendy*

8/12/16

Nonprofit

Administrator

Vince

9/07/16

Legal/law enforcement

Law enforcement officer

Mary

9/08/16

Legal/law enforcement

Attorney

173

174

Appendix B

Pseudonym

Interview date

Sector of service

Generalized job title

Theresa

9/13/16

Legal/law enforcement

Legal aid attorney

Shawn

9/22/16

Legal/law enforcement

Law enforcement officer

Naomi

9/23/16

Nonprofit

Domestic violence advocate

Jake

9/27/16

Legal/law enforcement

Investigator

Caroline

9/28/16

Nonprofit

Antiviolence advocate

Bill

9/29/16

Legal/law enforcement

Police chief

Olivia

10/05/16

Nonprofit

Administrator

Amy

10/06/16

Nonprofit

Anti-­trafficking advocate

Tyler

10/06/16

Legal/law enforcement

Legal staffer

Dean

10/26/16

Legal/law enforcement

Law enforcement officer

Jenny

10/27/16

Social service

Administrator

Sylvia

11/01/16

Nonprofit

Director

Kyle

11/03/16

Legal/law enforcement

Attorney

Tom

11/16/16

Legal/law enforcement

Sheriff

Erin

11/17/16

Foster care

Administrator

Robin

11/29/16

Legal/law enforcement

Attorney

Juanita

12/01/16

Legal/law enforcement

Juvenile justice worker

George*

12/05/16

Legal/law enforcement

Law enforcement officer

Matt*

12/05/16

Legal/law enforcement

Detective

Ari

12/07/16

Nonprofit

Youth housing advocate

Pseudonym

Interview date

Sector of service

Generalized job title

Ruth*

12/07/16

Nonprofit

Therapist

Victoria*

12/07/16

Nonprofit

Housing advocate

Nicholas

12/08/16

Legal/law enforcement

Sheriff

Elizabeth

12/09/16

Nonprofit

Anti-­trafficking advocate

Rose

2/15/17

Social service

Victim services coordinator

Suzy

5/24/17

Foster care

Administrator

Jessica

5/25/17

Foster care

Case manager

Ruby

5/31/17

Medical

Public health administrator

Mikayla*

6/01/17

Nonprofit

Anti-­trafficking advocate

Mitch*

6/01/17

Legal/law enforcement

Law enforcement officer

Rebekah*

6/01/17

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center director

Bobbi

6/06/17

Medical

Public health nurse

Allison*

6/30/17

Foster care

Case manager

Jo

6/30/17

Social service

Administrator

Laura*

6/30/17

Nonprofit

Anti-­trafficking advocate

Mia*

6/30/17

Foster care

Case manager

Molly*

6/30/17

Social service

Therapist

Nora

6/30/17

Social service

Manager

Summer

7/11/17

Medical

Public health nurse

Eleanor

7/12/17

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center director

Stuart

7/17/17

Medical

Crisis pregnancy center director

*

*

*

175

Research Methodologies

Indicates presence in a group interview

N o te s

I n trodu c tion “O h, Traffi cki ng? Th at Hap pens Here?” 1. When referring to the Midwest, I use the Census-­defined region of twelve states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics n.d.). 2. As a note on language, I intentionally use the term “victim-­survivor” when referring to trafficked persons generally, knowing that the choice around this language can be fraught and complex for individuals (Boyle and Rogers 2020). When I use “victim” or “survivor” exclusively, I am talking about the stereotypes and perceptions harnessed around those terms, not individual actors themselves. 3. In my research, I use the definition first codified under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) because of my study’s location in the midwestern United States. The TVPA is the federal mandate under which my participants worked. However, it is critically important to address the parallel construction of trafficking in the UN Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons. Similarly passed in 2000, this international definition is slightly more expansive. It maintains the central framework of force, fraud, or coercion, but it includes organ trafficking as a potential harm alongside sex and labor trafficking. Additionally, it explicitly states that an individual’s consent is irrelevant if any force, fraud, or coercion was used to induce their commercial sex, labor, or organ donation. 4. Throughout this book, I will use the terms “street-­level bureaucrat,” “frontline worker,” and “service provider” interchangeably to discuss my participants. In the context of my research, few participants self-­identified as frontline workers—­and none described themselves as street-­level bureaucrats—­so I retained their language of “service providers” to reflect how they described themselves, while including the first two terms to reference the academic research on this work (Lipsky 2010; Maynard-­ Moody and Musheno 2003; 2012). 5. I also do not want to run the risk of resisting conflation to the point of uncritically valorizing sex work as “empowerment,” as Melissa Gira Grant (2014) and Juno Mac and Molly Smith (2018) have thoughtfully argued against. Claiming sex work is work does not deny the violence that does exist in both commercial sex and many other forms of labor under our current strains of capitalism—­but violence can be at the hands of the state through invasive policing practices and perpetuated structural inequalities, not just the specter of the violent “john” that undergirds much anti–­sex work abolitionist rhetoric.

177

178 Notes 6. Sex workers are in a double bind within many anti-­trafficking frameworks. They may be engaged in commercial sex and face intensified scrutiny from state agents who use a neoabolitionist approach to interpret all sex work as sex trafficking. Conversely, if they are compelled to engage in commercial sex under force, fraud, or coercion, but these factors are ignored because of the criminal label attached to sex work in the United States, they may be excluded from victim services or means to justice. 7. I do not name my two states in-­text, in line with my IRB-­approved privacy practices, to maintain as much interviewee confidentiality as possible. Appendix A: Research Methodologies explains this in more detail. 8. Sally Engle Merry (2016) describes the terrain of quantifying human trafficking as a “swamp of competing ideas and categories” (124). Attempts to measure or estimate trafficked persons must negotiate the organizational, ideological, and political differences in how to define trafficking, as well as the hidden populations of victim-­ survivors who are challenging to locate. Anne T. Gallagher (2017) advocates against using quantification practices until they are more refined: “We don’t yet have universally accepted diagnostic criteria or credible tools of measurement—­which means that universal, reliable calculation of the size of the problem, while an important goal to strive for, is not yet possible” (91).

Chapter 1  Ca r c e r a l P r o t e c t io ni s m

1. For more on the power of definitions in anti-­trafficking frontline work, see Corinne Schwarz (2019). 2. This is not the only element taken for granted in Jenny’s quote here. Ironically, even though Jenny powerfully advocated for nuance in anti-­trafficking approaches, she also used examples of female-­identified victim-­survivors consistently throughout our interview. While some of this was reflective of her workplace experiences, I would be remiss not to emphasize the gendered power of anti-­trafficking narratives (Baker 2014; Small 2012; Srikantiah 2007), even in contexts attuned to nuance. 3. I conducted these interviews in two midwestern states with major abortion restrictions even before the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Though media attention on formalized, medicalized CPCs seemed to coincide with a post-­Roe loss of bodily autonomy (Kitchener and Reinhard 2022; McFadden 2022), CPCs—­with support from federal grant programs and state budgets (McKenna and Murtha 2021)—­have long been attempting to offer more expansive health care alongside the distribution of material resources (Kelly 2012; Lin and Dailard 2002; Swartzendruber et al. 2018). This effort does not negate the vast disinformation, like “abortion reversal” medications or increased risks of breast cancer after abortions (Kimport 2019; Swartzendruber et al. 2018), also promoted during CPC service provision. 4. Training itself can be a problematic anti-­trafficking intervention. For example, Elena Shih’s (2021a) incisive interrogation of various state and nonstate anti-­trafficking trainings reveals how participants may be learning not how to spot human trafficking but instead how to racially profile and perpetuate the racist hyperpolicing of marginalized communities.

Chapter 2  T h e P un ish m e n t M in d s et

1. For example, in response to Breonna Taylor’s 2020 murder—­yet another example of police brutality and terrorism against Black women (Ritchie 2017)—­cries across social media and public activist spaces echoed with the refrain “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” While this request in and of itself is complicated when thinking

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

179

about an abolitionist perspective, it was further marred by the memeification of her death (Sung 2020). Popular meme formats involving step-­by-­step notes for plant care, recipes, and daily wellness routines were coopted to include a step calling for the arrest of Louisville law enforcement. By the time four officers were identified and federally charged with Taylor’s death in August 2022 (Bowman 2022), these memes had virtually disappeared. For example, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness (2015) explore carceral logics within the context of incarceration and confinement and the specific ways autonomy is constrained by the norms within the prison walls. Jonathan Simon (2014) parallels carceral logic (and later names it as such [2016]) when describing “total incapacitation,” the ideology behind mass incarceration that “defines custody in a prison as the only meaningful incapacitation” and desired punishment for any and all criminal acts (41). I appreciate Critical Resistance’s (2020) concise definition of the PIC: “The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems” (n.p.). I am remaining intentionally broad here, as the retelling of these violent examples can be themselves a form of voyeurism that perpetuates harmful stereotypes (Bernstein 2007; Schwarz 2022; Small 2012; Vance 2011) and reinforces trafficking as the most extreme cases (Chapkis 2003). The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) were combined and signed into law together by President Donald Trump on April 11, 2018. FOSTA-­SESTA faced wide bipartisan support and critique from sex workers, trafficking victim-­survivors, law enforcement, and digital security activists (Grant 2018a). Because FOSTA-­SESTA shuttered digital spaces for advertising commercial sex, like Backpage, sex workers were left without accessible platforms for client screening. In a report focusing on the effects of FOSTA-­SESTA on sex workers, Danielle Blunt and Ariel Wolf (2020) found that this law against human trafficking increased harm and precarity, with 72.45 percent of their survey participants noting “increased economic instability” and 33.8 percent “reporting an increase of violence from clients” (18). The EARN IT Act functions similarly to FOSTA-­SESTA in its focus on online platforms, creating a federal commission “to create online speech rules” under expanded criminal liability (Hacking//Hustling 2020, n.p.). Knowing the patterns established by FOSTA-­SESTA, speech about sex—­including advertising, promoting, or sharing information about sex work—­would be on the chopping block.

Chapter 3  T h e r a p e ut ic Governanc e a n d t h e Re g ul a t io n of the Post -­t r a f f ic k in g S e l f

1. Though this theme did not emerge in our interview, the pervasive reality of sexual harassment in the fast-­food sector (Hatic 2016; Ryzik 2019) casts doubt onto its framing here as wholly nonsexual or nonexploitative.

Chapter 4   Lim it s t o J ust ic e

1. Part of going on this normative path involves using normative tools. In this section of the chapter, I use statistics on reporting and conviction rates, which are not objective measurements—­numbers tell stories too. I am aligned with Levine and Meiners’s (2020) use and critique of statistical measurements of sexual violence: “Moreover,

180 Notes









simply counting the number of instances in which one person coercively uses the body of another person leaves the story of sexual violence largely untold” (7). 2. SWERF stands for sex work exclusionary radical feminists, who are often aligned with trans-­exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) in their strictly held, oppressive definitions about womanhood, femininity, and sexuality. To quote Sophie Lewis’s (2017) necessary unpacking of these terms in her article “SERF ’n’ TERF,” these two groups may appear ideologically disparate but “are perpetuating a bourgeois myth about the relationship between capitalism and individual selves/bodies. It’s a myth that says that we can and must protect our selves and bodies from commodification and technological contamination, the better to do healthful productive work” (n.p.). 3. Brown’s story is not uncommon, as ongoing work from organizations like Survived & Punished demonstrate. The 8 to Abolition (2020) tool kit includes her name in a list of similarly criminalized victim-­survivors of violence: “Black people who are women, trans, gender non-­conforming, sex working, and queer are often criminalized for actions they take to survive gendered violence, as we have seen in the cases of Tracy McCarter, Chrystul Kizer, Alisha Walker, GiGi Thomas, Marissa Alexander, Bresha Meadows, Cyntoia Brown, and many others” (1). What is uncommon about Brown’s story is how readily it was picked up by conservative anti-­trafficking outlets, perhaps because of the easier ways Brown could be rehabilitated into an idealized victim role through her youthfulness (Kaba and Schulte 2017). 4. State-­level laws ostensibly compliment the TVPA’s framework, whose investigative and prosecutorial responsibilities are divided between the Department of Justice—­the sole federal prosecuting body—­and the investigating capacities of Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, and Department of Defense. The Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report—­the annual Department of State documentation of international anti-­trafficking prosecution, protection, and prevention efforts—­only documents federal investigations and convictions with allusions to the existence of state-­level statutes and frameworks. As well, research shows that state-­level prosecutions are quantitatively increasing (Bouche, Farrell, and Wittmer 2016), though qualitatively, service providers still express concerns about applying relatively “new” anti-­trafficking laws (Farrell et al. 2012; Farrell and Pfeffer 2014). 5. Perhaps going too far into the weeds, I attempted to parse through the statistics to determine some kind of consensus on the prevalence of “low” conviction rates. Given the conflicting time frames and data sources, it feels quite difficult to make any meaningful comparisons beyond the level of descriptives. For example, according to a 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study using data from fifteen large urban counties in 2002, “prosecuted [. . .] domestic sexual assault defendants had a higher overall conviction rate (98%) than non-­domestic defendants (87%)” (Smith, Durose, and Langan 2008, 2). Those percentages sound quite high, but they also only reflect the sliver of cases that made it to prosecution. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) developed an infographic from BJS and FBI data that posits only five of every one thousand perpetrators of sexual assault will face conviction and incarceration (RAINN 2020, n.p.). The TIP Report does not even offer a percentage to understand the proportion of federal trafficking convictions, instead stating that the Department of Justice “secured convictions against 475 traffickers” in 2019 (U.S. Department of State 2020, 516). In some contexts, perpetrators may be convicted of a different criminal act than the reported sexualized harm or exploitation; for example, a trafficker who is convicted of tax evasion or promoting prostitution could contribute to the impression of lower conviction rates and “hides within the justice system’s records the prevalence of human trafficking” (Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014, 152). To be frank, I find this

Notes

181

distressingly confusing to interpret and navigate, even as an “insider” within the academic research community. 6. Special thanks to Kate D’Adamo for her comments on the challenges of “hidden population” terminology at the 2019 Beyond Discourse conference at the University of Kansas. Sometimes these groups do not want to be found due to the larger violence of surveillance and extractive research practices. 7. I appreciate Mia Mingus’s (2020b) definition of transformative justice for beginners: “Transformative Justice (TJ) is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse. At its most basic, it seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence. TJ can be thought of as a way of ‘making things right,’ getting in ‘right relation,’ or creating justice together” (n.p.).

Chapter 5   B e y o n d Ca r c e r a l Lo gi c s

1. I want to thank my colleague Elise Higgins for thinking through this tension alongside me, with help from Women, Race & Class (Davis 1983). In chapter 13, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-­Class Perspective,” Angela Y. Davis explicitly directs the wages for housework movement to collective anticapitalist strategies. The solution to isolated, exploited work inside the home is not simply compensating individual women for their private labor. It is placing these forms of work and care under the purview of some kind of state-­directed social programming: “Child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized—­and all these services should be readily accessible to working-­class people” (232). Imagining a state with some kind of orientation to a better-­defined social good (not just for those who fit the mold of a “deserving” citizen) is part of this asking for more I describe here, beckoning toward what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-­Samarasinha (2018) calls “some kind of non-­fucked up non-­state state” (65) that can serve as a caring, not controlling, force.

Appendix A   Re se a r c h M e t h o dol ogi es

1. See Corinne Schwarz (2017), Schwarz et al. (2020a), and Schwarz et al. (2020b) for the survey-­specific publications.

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Index

Page numbers followed by f and t refer to figures and tables, respectively. abolitionism, commercial sex, 85, 91, 105–­ 106, 127; backyard, 61; neoabolitionism, 5, 70, 70f, 85, 91, 138–­139, 178n6 abolitionism, prison/police, 26, 51, 58, 103, 106, 136–­137, 145, 149, 157; incarceration for law enforcement and, 54, 178–­179n1 (chap. 2); vs. reform, 5, 149–­151, 154. See also incarceration; law enforcement abortion, 178n3. See also health care accountability, 47, 52, 56, 69–­71, 73, 78, 117, 118–­119, 155 agency/passivity, of victim-­survivors, 15–­16, 65–­68, 78, 79–­80, 87, 98–­ 100, 119–­122. See also resistance, of victim-­survivors Agustín, Laura, 6 Alliance for a Safe & Diverse D.C., 117 Anasti, Theresa, 54, 87 Anti-­slavery and Human Trafficking Initiative (ASHTI), 163 Are Prisons Obsolete? (Davis), 26, 149 “Arresting the Carceral State” (Kaba and Meiners), 53 arrests. See incarceration Asian people, 18, 132 awareness campaigns, 2–­4, 3f, 70f, 129–­133 Backpage, 179n5 backyard abolitionism, 61

Baker, Carrie N., 19 Bales, Kevin, 62 Barnes-­Brus, Tori, 18 Ben-­Yehuda, Nachman, 18 Bernstein, Elizabeth, 8, 20, 21, 55, 58, 93, 128–­129, 140, 142 binary. See “good”/“bad” binary black box, 50, 58, 76, 103, 126, 146–­147 Black Lives Matter, 148 Black people, 13, 17, 88, 180n3; men, 19, 62, 67; policing of, 62, 148–­149; women, 55, 107, 117, 137, 145, 149, 178–­179n1 (chap. 2) Bloomberg, Michael, 105 Blunt, Danielle, 179n5 bodily autonomy, 94–­95, 178n3, 180n2 Bourdieu, Pierre, 127–­128 Bracewell, Lorna, 55 Brennan, Denise, 76, 80 Britton, Hannah E., 56, 134 Brodkin, Evelyn Z., 10 Brown, Cyntoia, 106 Brown, Michael, 54 Brown, Wendy, 13, 15 Bumiller, Kristin, 15, 17 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 112, 180n5 Burks, Tifanny, 61 Butler, Judith, 62

207

208 Index Calavita, Kitty, 179n2 capitalism, 54, 88, 91, 144, 177n5, 180n2 carceral state: alternatives to, 26, 49–­50, 51–­52, 103, 117–­118, 151–­158; carceral protectionism, 20–­23, 29–­50, 69, 108, 120–­122, 138; as “inevitable,” 4, 21, 29, 31, 32, 49, 50, 51–­52, 56, 58, 146; tools of, 35–­37, 41, 47, 49–­50, 58–­59, 109, 132, 140; trauma and, 42, 43–­44, 72–­73. See also criminal legal system; feminism: carceral; justice; punishment mindset; “softer” carceral mechanisms; violence care, 87, 122, 140; vs. punitive efforts, 35, 37, 42 “Cash/Consent” (Lee), 88 Chapkis, Wendy, 8, 20, 22, 27, 37, 63 children. See family “choices,” of victim-­survivors, 84–­88, 99, 142 Christianity, 82–­83, 84 Chuang, Janie A., 19, 33 Cinderella stories, 76–­77, 93–­96, 100. See also narratives, anti-­trafficking / sexual violence citizenship status, 18–­23, 44–­48, 97–­98, 107–­108, 112–­116, 121–­122 closure, 34, 63, 72, 73, 89–­90, 144, 145 clothing, 132 coalitions, of frontline workers, 20–­21, 37–­39, 41, 113, 153–­154 commercial sex. See sex work community support, 125–­127, 135–­136. See also resource access; transformative justice control, dynamics of, 39, 65–­68; between frontline workers and victim-­survivors, 78–­79, 121. See also relationship dynamics Control and Protect (Musto), 147 conviction rates, 110, 116, 179–­180n1 (chap. 4), 180n5 COVID-­19, 151 CPCs. See crisis pregnancy centers CR10 Publication Collective, 26 “creaming out,” 100–­101, 114

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W., 14 criminal legal system, 53, 55–­56; as best resource/resourced sector, 19, 21, 29, 37–­38, 58–­62, 105, 108, 122, 150; justice and, 16, 103–­104, 110, 122; limitations of, 102, 104, 107, 111, 113. See also carceral state; incarceration; reform, of criminal legal system; sex work: criminal legal interventions; violence: of criminal legal system criminals. See perpetrators, criminal crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), 41–­42, 60–­62, 82, 178n3. See also medical workers Critical Resistance, 149–­150, 179n3 critical trafficking studies, 4, 7, 11–­12, 143, 145, 153, 165 D’Adamo, Kate, 75, 181n6 Davis, Angela, 26, 54, 58, 149, 151, 181n1 (chap. 5) decarceration, 5, 151. See also abolitionism, prison/police; incarceration decriminalization, 5, 127, 138; of domestic violence, 145, 146. See also abolitionism, commercial sex Decriminalizing Domestic Violence (Goodmark), 145–­146 Department of Defense, 180n4 Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 112, 113, 180n4 Department of Justice, 180n4 Department of State, 180n4 deportation, 23, 44–­45, 97, 112–­116, 121–­122. See also citizenship status; immigrants “deservingness,” 17, 62, 71–­72, 87, 136, 156. See also disposability culture detention to prosecution pipeline, 9. See also incarceration Diavolo, Lucy, 151 differentiation, 36 Dilts, Andrew, 16, 56–­57, 102–­103, 156 discretion, of frontline workers, 10–­ 11, 31–­35, 42, 78–­79, 101, 110, 116,

Index 209

123–­124; definitions and, 32–­33, 36, 85–­88, 142, 178n1 (chap. 1); judgments and, 9, 11, 24; as violence, 12–­13, 21 disposability culture, 61–­63, 64–­65, 73, 114–­116, 118, 139. See also “deservingness” DMST. See domestic minor sex trafficking Doezema, Jo, 18, 19 domestic and sexual violence, 13–­14, 15, 17, 54, 60, 62–­63, 142; Brock Turner case, 57, 118–­119; feminism and, 13–­16, 20, 55, 104–­105; prison/police abolitionism and, 58, 145–­146; statistics, 109, 112, 116, 179–­180n1 (chap. 4), 180n5. See also shelters domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST), 2, 71–­72, 85, 105–­106, 129, 147, 149; identification and, 39, 44, 67–­68; stings targeting, 40, 43; survival sex and, 9, 81–­82, 87, 88 Donovan, Brian, 18 dress, normative, 81–­82, 84 drugs. See substance use Dubois, Vincent, 10 EARN IT Act, 75, 179n5 economics, 19–­20. See also structural inequalities education, 47, 53, 82–­83, 84, 95 8 to Abolition, 180n3 empowerment, 78, 86, 94–­95, 177n5 “End Demand” movement, 5, 70, 70f, 139 failure narratives, 98–­99, 103, 113, 125. See also “creaming out”; narratives, anti-­ trafficking / sexual violence family, 64, 81, 101, 129, 140; child custody, 77, 95–­96; “values,” 13, 20, 140–­142 Farrell, Amy, 34, 105, 111 Feldman, Martha S., 10 femininity, normative, 79, 81–­82, 84, 92, 95–­96, 105, 140–­142

feminism, 13–­16, 19, 128–­129, 140–­142, 180n2; Black, 145, 149; carceral, 20–­23, 55–­58, 104–­105, 128, 140, 144 Ferguson, Missouri, 54, 148 Fight the New Drug, 76 Floyd, George, 5, 51 FOSTA-­SESTA, 179n5 foster care, 28, 64, 68–­69, 107 foster care workers, 35, 69, 85–­86, 111, 140–­142; on relationship dynamics, 89, 90; on resource access, 28, 134–­135; on trauma, 81–­82, 102, 139 Frames of War (Butler), 62 frontline workers, 9–­10, 12, 32–­33, 165–­166, 177n4; as creating policy, 4–­5, 6, 10, 31; vs. laypeople, 71–­72, 130; as pragmatists/improvisors, 12, 32, 123–­124; professions of, 11, 35, 170t; views on criminal legal sector’s primacy, 19, 29, 38, 58–­62, 122, 150; views on justice, 121–­122, 138; views on victimhood, 2, 80. See also coalitions, of frontline workers; discretion, of frontline workers; foster care workers; legal/law enforcement workers; medical workers; nonprofit workers; resource constraints, of frontline workers; social service workers; street-­level bureaucracy theory; training, of frontline workers funding, 46, 129, 133–­138; of law enforcement, 51, 74–­75, 135, 150; of social services, 24, 46, 134–­138, 142, 156, 164. See also community support; mutual aid Gallagher, Anne T., 178n8 GED, 47, 84 gender, 13, 22, 54, 56, 79, 134, 140–­141, 142, 178n2; transgender people, 57, 88. See also feminism Gengler, Amanda M., 78, 86 Global North/South, 92–­93 Golden Rule, the, 148, 157 Goldman Sachs, 54, 58

210 Index “good”/“bad” binary, 8–­9, 52, 64, 68, 145; “bad guys,” 21, 63–­65, 69–­72, 129; “choices,” 86–­88; critiques of, 106–­109; disposability culture and, 63, 64–­65; “good” work, 91–­93, 95; race, 17, 19; witnesses, 22, 115–­116, 121–­122. See also narratives, anti-­trafficking / sexual violence; victim-­survivors Goode, Erich, 18 Goodmark, Leigh, 145–­146 Google Docs, 151 Gottschalk, Marie, 13, 18 Grant, Melissa Gira, 85, 112

identification, of victim-­survivors, 21, 31–­ 32, 61, 130–­131; biases of, 22–­23, 106, 132; self-­vs. state, 68–­69, 86 Ilea, Adina, 117 immigrants, 18, 19, 23. See also citizenship status Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 53, 113 incarceration, 31, 39, 43–­45, 56–­57; juvenile, 28, 65, 107, 108–­109, 122–­ 123, 135; for law enforcement, 54, 178–­179n1 (chap. 2); life after, 57, 65; prison industrial complex, 62–­63, 155, 179n3; as resource access, 28–­29, 30, 45, Hacking//Hustling collective, 75 46–­47, 72–­74, 107, 108–­109, 112; as “hands” of the state, 127–­129, 130, 137. “safe”/“rehabilitating,” 50, 53, 72–­73, See also “helping”/“punishing” state 97, 107, 108. See also carceral state; Hayes, Kelly, 62 criminal legal system Haynes, Dina, 130 individualism, 152, 156. See also health care, 68–­69, 97, 113–­114, 117, 139, selfhood 150, 178n3; CPCs, 41–­42, 60–­62, 82, Intercepted (podcast), 53 178n3; mental, 150, 151; reproductive, interdependency, 156 42, 178n3. See also medical workers International Rescue Committee, 76 Health Insurance Portability and Account- interrogation. See questioning/ ability Act (HIPAA), 41 interrogation Heiner, Brady T., 56 “helping”/“punishing” state, 33, 37–­38, Jacobin, 53 46, 126–­130, 137, 139, 140–­143, 153, Jacobs, Leah, 5 156. See also state Jacquet, Catherine O., 16 Henriksen, Sofie, 92 jail. See incarceration Higgins, Elise, 181n1 (chap. 5) Jenness, Valerie, 179n2 Hill, Annie, 8, 20, 34 “johns,” 34, 40, 43, 59, 81, 177n5. See also Hoang, Kimberly Kay, 34, 49 perpetrators, criminal housing, 28, 29, 45, 46, 47, 99, 107, 108–­ Juabsamai, Juli, 101 109. See also shelters justice, 124, 138–­143, 145–­146; carceral, human trafficking, 2, 7, 35, 178n8; defini16, 72, 74–­75, 103–­104, 110, 118, tions of, 7, 177n3; focus on sex vs. labor, 122; vs. fairness, 108–­109, 111–­113; 7, 8, 19–­20, 59, 112; post-­trafficking frontline workers’ understandings of, lives of victim-­survivors, 76–­77, 80–­84, 121–­122, 138; kaleidoscopic, 117, 89–­92, 93–­96, 99–­101. See also labor 122–­124, 138, 141–­142; normative path trafficking; sex trafficking to, 102–­104, 113, 116, 119–­122, 179–­ 180n1 (chap. 4); restorative, 56, 154; ICE. See Immigration and Customs structural vs. carceral, 20, 75, 86, 126, Enforcement 129, 137, 143

Index 211

juvenile detention, 28, 65, 107, 108–­109, 122–­123, 135. See also transformative justice Kaba, Mariame, 53, 62, 69, 75, 155 Kandaswamy, Priya, 13, 14, 15, 17 Kansas City, Mo., 163 Kelley, Robin D. G., 62 Kempadoo, Kamala, 23, 33 Kim, Mimi E., 5, 20 Kivel, Paul, 137 Krahé, Barbara, 110 Kropotkin, Peter, 151–­152 labor: “good” work, 91–­93, 95; nonsexual exploitation, 177n5, 179n1 (chap. 3), 181n1 (chap. 5) labor trafficking, 40, 66–­68, 95; vs. sex trafficking, 7, 8, 19–­20, 59, 112 Latour, Bruno, 50, 58, 103, 146 law. See legislation Law, Victoria, 55–­56, 75, 124, 157 Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (TV series), 104 law enforcement, 2, 18; funding of, 51, 74–­75, 135, 150; race and, 54, 107–­ 108, 117, 148–­149, 178n4, 178–­179n1 (chap. 2); raids/stings, 9, 34, 37, 40, 48, 69, 86; as “saviors,” 9, 21; violence/ misconduct of, 14, 16, 54, 55–­56, 62, 105–­106, 148–­150, 177n5, 178–­179n1 (chap. 2). See also criminal legal system; legal/law enforcement workers Lee, Lorelei, 88 legal/law enforcement workers, 37–­38, 134–­136, 138–­139; on anti-­police sentiment, 107–­108, 148–­149; on “bad guys,” 64, 65, 70–­71; on closure, 73–­74, 95–­96; critiques of criminal legal system, 107, 113; on identification, detention, and prosecution, 35–­37, 39–­40, 43, 44, 46, 69, 72–­73, 110–­111; on “rescue,” 48–­49; on “tough love,” 97–­98; on victim-­ survivor agency/passivity, 66–­67, 98–­99,

119–­120; on victim-­survivor “choices,” 85, 86–­88. See also law enforcement legislation, 19–­20, 69, 73–­74, 180n4; harshness of, 69; against sex work, 179n5 Leon, Chrysanthi S., 80, 96 Levine, Judith, 51, 60, 122, 146–­147, 150, 179–­180n1 (chap. 4) Lewis, Sophie, 180n2 “life, the,” 85–­88; post-­trafficking, 76–­77, 80–­84, 89–­92, 93–­96, 99–­101 Lipsky, Michael, 11, 78–­79, 98, 100, 169; on policy at the frontlines, 4–­5, 9–­10, 31, 116; on resource access, 36, 46 Lutnick, Alexandra, 85, 133 Majic, Samantha, 22 Mann Act, 18, 19 marginalized identities, 16, 62, 88, 154; surveillance and, 56, 132; victimhood and, 17, 22, 55, 152. See also citizenship status; race Maynard-­Moody, Steven, 9; Michael Musheno and, 10, 11, 12, 32, 50, 79, 124, 167 McDade, Tony, 5 McDevitt, Jack, 34, 105, 111 McGlynn, Clare, 16–­17, 124, 138, 141–­142 McKim, Alison, 77–­78, 79, 82, 89, 96 medical workers, 41–­42, 60–­62, 68–­69, 73–­74, 91–­92, 93–­94, 97 Meiners, Erica R., 51, 53, 60, 122, 146–­ 147, 150, 179–­180n1 (chap. 4) Merry, Sally Engle, 178n8 methodology, 23, 24, 163–­171, 178n8. See also critical trafficking studies; street-­ level bureaucracy theory #MeToo, 118 Midwest, 24, 75, 85–­86, 93, 134–­136, 164, 177n1; human trafficking awareness, 2–­4, 3f, 70f, 130, 132 Miller, Chanel, 118–­119 Mingus, Mia, 156, 181n6 Morgan, Rachel E., 112

212 Index Musheno, Michael, 10; Steven Maynard-­ Moody and, 11, 12, 32, 50, 79, 124, 167 Musto, Jennifer, 7, 39–­40, 122, 147; on carceral protectionism, 20–­21, 29, 30, 35, 47 mutual aid, 151–­154, 155–­156. See also community support; funding; resource access; transformative justice Mutual Aid (Kropotkin), 151–­152 narratives, anti-­trafficking / sexual violence, 8, 79–­80, 104, 167–­168, 178n2; “bad guys” in, 21, 63–­65, 69–­72, 129; noncarceral, 144, 157. See also Cinderella stories; failure narratives; rescue narratives National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), 84 Nebraska, 70f neoabolitionism, 5, 70, 70f, 85, 91, 138–­139, 178n6. See also abolitionism, commercial sex neoimperialism, 23 neoliberalism, 56, 128 New Yorker, 151 New York Police Department (NYPD), 105 No More Deaths, 152 nonprofit workers, 59–­60, 96, 114–­116, 123; on identification, detention, and prosecution, 43, 44, 68, 130–­131; on justice, 139–­140, 142–­143; on post-­ trafficking life, 89–­90, 91, 94–­95; on secure housing, 45, 99; on victim-­ survivor agency/passivity, 65, 120 normativity. See dress, normative; femininity, normative; justice: normative path to Oakland Police Department, 149 O’Brien, Erin, 130 Ohio, 3f, 4 Operation Underground Rescue, 4 othering, 19 Oudekerk, Barbara A., 112 Owens, Colleen, 34, 105, 111

Paasche, Erlend, 97 passivity. See agency/passivity, of victim-­survivors perpetrators, criminal, 17, 69–­70, 72–­73, 139; agency of, 65, 66; as “bad guys,” 21, 63–­65, 69–­72, 129; race and, 17, 19. See also “johns”; “pimps” Piepzna-­Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, 181n1 (chap. 5) “pimps,” 18, 34, 39, 43, 66–­67, 70–­71, 81, 85, 90, 98, 119–­120. See also perpetrators, criminal Plambech, Sine, 97 police. See law enforcement policy, as created at the frontlines, 4–­6, 9–­10, 31–­33, 116 politics, 24, 46, 82, 135, 143; anti-­ trafficking as bipartisan, 20, 144, 179n5 Portillo, Shannon, 9, 121 pragmatism, 12, 32 prison. See incarceration prison industrial complex (PIC), 62–­63, 155, 179n3 “productivity,” 15, 90. See also labor prosecution, 9, 19, 29–­30, 72, 109–­111. See also carceral state; criminal legal system; punishment mindset prostitution. See sex work prostitution diversion programs (PDPs), 80 protection, 19, 29–­30, 140 public school system, 53 Punishing the Poor (Wacquant), 128 punishment mindset, 53–­58, 70, 145; pushing against, 67, 72, 140. See also carceral state; criminal legal system; incarceration QAnon, 155 quantification practices, 24, 178n8 questioning/interrogation, 114–­115; strategies, 39–­40, 41, 42 race, 8; criminalization of, 17, 19; policing and, 107–­108, 117, 148–­149, 178n4,

Index 213

178–­179n1 (chap. 2); white female victimhood, 14, 17, 18, 19, 23; white slavery panic, 18–­19, 22, 132; white supremacism, 16, 23, 62, 124; women of color, 14, 23, 33, 88, 132. See also Black people; marginalized identities raids, by law enforcement, 9, 34, 43, 48. See also sting operations rape, 57, 118. See also domestic and sexual violence; sex trafficking Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 180n5 referrals, 35–­37 reform, of criminal legal system, 26, 103, 122–­124, 137, 145–­148, 154; vs. abolitionism, 149–­151, 154. See also “softer” carceral mechanisms regulation. See surveillance/regulation relationship dynamics, 44, 89–­93; normative, 20, 140; between victim-­survivors and perpetrators, 39, 65–­68, 89, 90, 98, 119–­120. See also control, dynamics of; family religion, and anti-­trafficking, 82–­84, 85, 128 report filing, 1–­2, 33, 105, 113, 116, 179–­ 180n1 (chap. 4) rescue narratives, 23, 33–­35, 47–­49, 82, 120; frontline workers as “saviors,” 9, 21, 34, 63–­64. See also narratives, anti-­ trafficking / sexual violence resistance, of victim-­survivors, 68, 72, 81, 98–­100, 119–­122. See also agency/passivity, of victim-­survivors resource access, 8, 15–­16, 36–­37, 80, 115–­ 116, 139; through incarceration, 28–­29, 30, 45, 46–­47, 72–­74, 107, 108–­109, 112; survival sex as, 9, 68, 80–­82, 86–­88, 106, 178n6 resource constraints, of frontline workers, 21, 29, 36, 45–­47, 88, 100, 114, 131, 134–­135. See also “creaming out” respectability politics, 17, 114, 132 Roe v. Wade, 178n3. See also health care

Rudes, Danielle, 121 running away, 28, 64, 120, 152 “safety,” 34, 38; of incarceration, 50, 53, 107, 108–­109 San Francisco, Calif., 133 “saviors,” 9, 21, 23, 34, 63–­64. See also rescue narratives Scahill, Jeremy, 53 Schenwar, Maya, 124, 157 school-­to-­prison pipeline (STPP), 53, 137 selfhood, 77, 81–­84, 89–­92, 96; self-­vs. state identification, 68–­69, 86 “SERF ’n’ TERF” (Lewis), 180n2 service providers. See frontline workers sex trafficking, 2, 40, 60, 69, 130; conflation with sex work, 9, 41, 49, 68–­69, 85, 92, 147, 178n6; vs. labor trafficking, 7, 8, 19–­20, 59, 112; unique harm of, 8, 63, 64, 69, 71, 107, 155. See also domestic minor sex trafficking; human trafficking sex work, 33, 59–­60, 126–­127, 133, 177n5, 178n6; conflation with sex trafficking, 9, 41, 49, 68–­69, 85, 87, 92, 147, 178n6; criminal legal interventions and, 9, 39–­40, 117, 179n5. See also abolitionism, commercial sex; labor sex work exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs), 106, 180n2 Shared Hope International, 85 Shdaimah, Corey S., 80, 96 shelters, 15, 99; domestic violence, 1, 38, 65, 78, 99, 112. See also housing Shih, Elena, 61, 92, 132, 178n4 “show-­me-­your-­phone” tactic, 39–­40 Simon, Jonathan, 179n2 Singh, Rashmee, 79 Skilbrei, May-­Len, 97 slavery, 4, 18–­19, 22, 132; “modern-­ day”/“new,” 19, 62 SLBT. See street-­level bureaucracy theory SlutWalks, 55 Smith, Mac, 91 Smith, Molly, 91 social change work, 137

214 Index social services, 68, 105–­106, 133–­138, 149, 181n1 (chap. 5); funding and, 24, 46, 134–­138, 142, 156, 164; role in transformative justice, 153, 156; service gaps, 28, 35–­36, 135. See also structural inequalities social service workers, 1, 48–­49, 64, 92, 106–­107, 121–­122; on criminal legal sector’s primacy, 37–­38, 60, 108; on identification, detention, and prosecution, 40–­41, 42, 43, 46–­47, 67–­68, 111; on post-­trafficking life, 82–­84; on reform, 122–­123, 148; on resource access, 88, 108–­109, 134 “softer” carceral mechanisms, 27, 42, 43, 73, 77, 122–­124, 145–­146. See also reform, of criminal legal system Soss, Joe, 17 South Florida Healing Justice Project, 61 Spade, Dean, 16, 61, 152 Srikantiah, Jayashri, 22, 23 Starr, Lizzy, 55 state: as “helping”/“punishing,” 33, 37–­ 38, 46, 126–­130, 137, 139, 140–­143, 153, 156; violence of, 30–­31, 34, 55–­56, 63, 105–­106, 137, 153, 177n5. See also carceral state; individual entities sting operations, 37, 40, 43, 69, 86. See also raids, by law enforcement “stranger danger” myth, 17, 140 street-­level bureaucracy theory (SLBT), 4, 36, 98, 100, 113–­114, 121; critical trafficking studies and, 11–­12; on discretion, 10, 34; on policy at the frontlines, 9–­10, 31–­33, 116 street-­level bureaucrat. See frontline workers strip clubs, 41–­42 structural inequalities, 5, 14, 57, 95, 134, 140–­142, 177n5; vs. “bad guys,” 21, 129; as gaps, 9, 68, 81, 86–­88; as ignored, 33, 77–­78, 79–­80; solutions to, 20, 75, 126, 129, 137, 143; as violence, 4, 15, 20, 21, 77, 126, 129, 143. See also

justice: structural vs. carceral; social services substance use, 44, 77, 79, 89, 96; as metaphor, 48, 59, 76, 91 Suchland, Jennifer, 19–­20 suprihmbé, 88 surveillance/regulation, 14–­16, 35, 39–­42, 43, 60–­62, 75, 156, 181n6; of marginalized communities, 16, 56, 132 survival sex, 9, 68, 80–­82, 86–­88, 106, 178n6. See also resource access Survived & Punished, 180n3 survivor. See victim-­survivors SWAN Vancouver, 132 Taken (film), 4 Taylor, Breonna, 5, 178–­179n1 (chap. 2) Taylor, Chloe, 57, 58 Taylor, Ileana, 101 Teen Vogue, 151 Temkin, Jennifer, 110 temperance movements, 19 testimony, 110, 111, 112, 119–­120, 121 therapeutic governance, 76–­84, 89–­92, 94, 100–­101 “there is no alternative” (TINA), 51, 60, 74, 108, 122, 128, 144, 146–­147. See also carceral state: as “inevitable” Thuma, Emily L., 13–­14, 16 Tits and Sass (Starr), 55 Tolentino, Jia, 151 tools, of carceral protectionism, 35–­37, 41, 47, 49–­50, 58–­59, 97, 109, 132, 140 traffickers. See perpetrators, criminal trafficking. See human trafficking; labor trafficking; sex trafficking Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, 180n4 training, of frontline workers, 131, 132–­ 133, 178n4 trans-­exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), 57, 180n2 transformative justice, 26, 56, 103, 117–­ 118, 151–­158, 181n6. See also community support

Index 215

transgender people, 57, 88, 180n2 trauma, 48, 68–­69, 80, 83–­84, 99; from carceral interventions, 15, 42, 43–­44, 72–­73; testimony and, 111, 164–­165; practices informed by, 42, 76, 87, 139 Trump, Donald, 112, 179n5 Turner, Brock, 57, 118–­119 Twitter, 85, 151 Tyson, Sarah K., 56 undocumented people. See citizenship status; deportation United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, 113 UN Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, 177n3 Vainker, Ellie, 153 victim-­blaming, 72, 78, 103, 104, 105, 106–­107, 153 victim-­centered approaches, 1, 105–­106 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), 19–­20, 22, 36, 177n3, 180n4 victim-­survivors, 2, 116–­117, 177n2; age and, 64, 86–­87, 89–­90, 107–­108, 130, 135, 180n3; as “bad,” 2, 98–­99; citizenship status and, 22–­23, 45, 46, 97–­98, 107–­108, 113–­116, 121; criminalization of, 105–­106, 180n3; gender and, 22, 178n2; “ideal” victimhood and, 17, 21–­23, 30, 36, 100–­101, 106, 115–­116, 132, 180n3; marginalized identities and, 8, 22, 55–­56, 152, 180n3; post-­trafficking lives of, 76–­77, 80–­84, 89–­92, 93–­96, 99–­101; as “victim-­offenders,” 34–­35, 38, 40, 45,

65, 106, 148; white female, 14, 17, 18, 19. See also agency/passivity, of victim-­ survivors; “good”/“bad” binary; identification, of victim-­survivors; resistance, of victim-­survivors violence: of criminal legal system, 30–­31, 34, 55–­56, 63, 105–­106, 137, 153, 177n5; discretionary, 12–­13, 21; structural inequalities as, 4, 15, 20, 21, 77, 126, 129, 143; as unique in trafficking, 8, 14, 63, 64–­65, 69, 71, 107, 155. See also domestic and sexual violence; law enforcement: violence/misconduct of Violence against Women Act (VAWA), 13 visas, 22–­23, 36, 45, 48, 97–­98, 112–­113, 116. See also citizenship status Vitale, Alex, 150 Wacquant, Loïc, 128 Washington, D.C., 117 Weaver, Vesla, 17 Weitzer, Ronald, 24 Westmarland, Nicole, 116–­117, 124, 138, 141–­142 white female victimhood, 14, 17, 18, 19 white saviorism, 23 white slavery panic, 18–­19, 22, 132 white supremacism, 16, 23, 62, 124 Whitfield, Darren L., 5 Whittier, Nancy, 57 Wilson, Darren, 54 witnesses, victim-­survivors as, 22, 110–­ 111, 112, 115–­116, 119–­120, 121–­122 Wolf, Ariel, 179n5 Women, Race & Class (Davis), 181n1 (chap. 5) Yellow Peril, 18

Ab o ut t h e A u t ho r

Corinne Schwarz is an assistant professor of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at Oklahoma State University. She received her PhD in women, gender, and sexuality studies from the University of Kansas in 2018. Her research uses sociolegal approaches to understand narratives of gender, sexuality, and violence within frontline work.

217

Ava i l a b l e T i t le s i n t h e C r itic a l I ssu e s in Crime and Society Series:

Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-­Nathe, Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C Laura S. Abrams and Diane J. Terry, Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood among Formerly Incarcerated Youth Tammy L. Anderson, ed., Neither Villain nor Victim: Empowerment and Agency among Women Substance Abusers Miriam Boeri, Women on Ice: Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women Christian L. Bolden, Out of the Red: My Life of Gangs, Prison, and Redemption Scott A. Bonn, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, eds., Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror Henry H. Brownstein, Timothy M. Mulcahy, Johannes Huessy, The Methamphetamine Industry in America: Transnational Cartels and Local Entrepreneurs Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic, Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements, revised and expanded edition Kim Cook, Shattered Justice: Crime Victims’ Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations Alexandra Cox, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People Anna Curtis, Dangerous Masculinity: Fatherhood, Race, and Security inside America’s Prisons Hilary Cuthrell, Luke Muentner, and Julie Poehlmann, When Are You Coming Home? How Young Children Cope When Parents Go to Jail Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz, Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson, Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict Jamie J. Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth Luis A. Fernandez, Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-­globalization Movement Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy, and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement Mike King, When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland Ronald C. Kramer, Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes Timothy R. Lauger, Real Gangstas: Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment Margaret Leigey, The Forgotten Men: Serving a Life without Parole Sentence

219

Andrea Leverentz, The Ex-­prisoner’s Dilemma: How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance Ethan Czuy Levine, Rape by the Numbers: Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence Clara S. Lewis, Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes Michael J. Lynch, Big Prisons, Big Dreams: Crime and the Failure of America’s Penal System Liam Martin, The Social Logic of Recidivism: Cultural Capital from Prisons to the Streets Allison McKim, Addicted to Rehab: Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer, eds., State-­Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government Susan L. Miller, Victims as Offenders: The Paradox of Women’s Violence in Relationships Torin Monahan, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds., Schools under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education Ana Muñiz, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries Marianne O. Nielsen and Linda M. Robyn, Colonialism Is Crime Leslie Paik, Discretionary Justice: Looking inside a Juvenile Drug Court Yasser Arafat Payne, Brooklynn Hitchens, and Darryl L. Chambers, Murder Town, USA: Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 40th anniversary edition with an introduction and critical commentaries compiled by Miroslava Chávez-­García Lois Presser, Why We Harm Joshua M. Price, Prison and Social Death Heidi Reynolds-­Stenson, Cultures of Resistance: Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-­terror Age Diana Rickard, Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., The Globalization of Supermax Prisons Dawn L. Rothe and Christopher W. Mullins, eds., State Crime, Current Perspectives Jodi Schorb, Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–­1845 Corinne Schwarz, Policing Victimhood: Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State Susan F. Sharp, Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused Susan F. Sharp, Mean Lives, Mean Laws: Oklahoma’s Women Prisoners Robert H. Tillman and Michael L. Indergaard, Pump and Dump: The Rancid Rules of the New Economy Mariana Valverde, Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths Michael Welch, Crimes of Power and States of Impunity: The U.S. Response to Terror Michael Welch, Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror Saundra D. Westervelt and Kimberly J. Cook, Life after Death Row: Exonerees’ Search for Community and Identity