"Human Trafficking" Has Become a Meaningless Term
Sexworkers can be arrested for trafficking themselves when they place ads.
Highlights from New Republic 10/30/2015
Politicians and activists often abuse it to push for punitive laws or to incite moral panic.
Trafficking, in practice, is less a clear-cut crime than a call to moral panic. The vagueness of the definition allows or even encourages governments, organizations, and researchers to claim that there are tens of millions of trafficking victims worldwide on the basis of little more than hyperbolic guesses.
Politicians use trafficking rhetoric to portray themselves as defenders of the downtrodden, and generate laudatory press coverage, as Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has done with his crusade against Backpage.com and other sites advertising adult services. And some high profile figures have used trafficking narratives to gain fame. Somali Mam, the celebrated Cambodian anti-trafficking advocate, was exposed for making fraudulent claims about herself and other women she helped.
Donna Hughes's seminal 2000 article "The Natasha Trade" defined trafficking specifically as "any practice that involves moving people within and across local or national borders for the purpose of sexual exploitation."
But anti-prostitution activists like Hughes often use “sexual exploitation” to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—in fact, Hughes insists in her article that "trafficking occurs even if the woman consents.”
When you say “trafficking" people still think sexual slavery.
"The public seems to believe that sex trafficking means forced prostitution,” researcher Tara Burns told me, “but when you sit down and read charging documents for sex trafficking charges, that is very very rarely the case." Sex workers are often charged with having trafficked themselves, Burns said. "Under different state laws, sex trafficking can also mean sex workers advertising for their own services or renting their own hotel rooms.
"Trafficking" can also be used to make anti-prostitution laws seem compassionate rather than punitive, as in the New York trafficking courts, which frames those arrested as trafficking victims in need of help, even though in practice you still end up with police arresting people on prostitution charges. In either case, the word is a way to target marginalized groups like immigrants and sex workers in the name of a (confused or cynical) humanitarianism.
If we're talking about underage sex workers with few other options for survival, we should say that we're talking about underage sex workers with few other options for survival—a discussion that should focus on resources and social service help, not law enforcement. Similarly, if the focus is forced labor conditions, then more attention should be paid to the main industries where that occurs. If the issue is about consensual sex work by adults, then legislators should be honest about using police to harass people for consensual sex work. They shouldn't pretend they're on a noble crusade against "trafficking."