Just a few years in the past, after I was a full-time member of the school on the Naval Postgraduate Faculty, college and employees had been required to undergo numerous trainings. Considered one of them was on spot intercourse trafficking in order that we might flip in traffickers to the police.
I’m the sort of one who, throughout these trainings, will sometimes learn the fabric. That point was no exception. My reminiscence is hazy, however I do do not forget that one slide within the presentation confirmed an equivalence between being an grownup prostitute and being sexually trafficked. “That may’t be proper,” I assumed. I assumed that sexual trafficking concerned some quantity of coercion or, a minimum of, somebody who was beneath age. If it had a been a stay presenter, I’d have raised the difficulty. But it surely was an on-line video. Monitoring down whom to speak to was an excessive amount of work.
The expertise did make me marvel, although, whether or not there have been many different situations wherein adults voluntary participating in voluntary capitalist acts had been known as intercourse traffickers.
I used to be proper to marvel. On at present’s Motive website, Motive‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown interviews intercourse work researcher Tara Burns. The merchandise is titled “What Everybody Will get Flawed About Intercourse Trafficking Legal guidelines,” Motive, October 14, 2024.
Right here’s a key excerpt:
Burns: So, I assumed that there have been most likely folks on the market who had been being helped by all of this anti-trafficking rhetoric and the anti-trafficking legal guidelines. I knew at that time of two intercourse employees who had been arrested for intercourse trafficking after they weren’t intercourse traffickers, however I assumed, “We’re simply collateral harm and one thing good is definitely taking place for some individuals who really want it.” What I discovered after I did my information request to search out out all the instances that had been charged beneath the brand new trafficking legislation: At that time, it was solely intercourse employees who had been charged. And each intercourse employee who had been charged with intercourse trafficking had been charged with prostitution in the identical case that they had been charged with intercourse trafficking.
After I was designing the survey, I had put in there some questions to search out out if folks met the federal definition of a intercourse trafficking survivor or not. And after I filtered for the individuals who met the definition of a intercourse trafficking survivor, they had been two or 3 times as more likely to be sexually assaulted by police. And simply each different unhealthy factor on the survey—being turned away from providers at shelters or by counselors or being turned away from attempting to report a criminal offense—all of it was taking place to them two or 3 times extra typically than to different intercourse employees.
So I had thought that there have been victims who had been being helped, however really it was these victims who had been being probably the most harmed by the legal guidelines and the rhetoric. I believe the identical sorts of marginalizations that make folks weak to abuse throughout the intercourse business also can make folks weak to abuse by law enforcement officials and discrimination by shelters and stuff like that.
Notice the disgusting irony. We’re informed to look out for intercourse traffickers as a result of that may cut back the variety of folks pressured into prostitution. But when we cooperate, we’d effectively be serving to the police use drive in opposition to harmless non-coercive folks.
The entire thing is value studying.
