Sex Slavery and Sex Trafficking of Women in the United States

Abstract

The sex trafficking of women has received attention by the U.S. social work profession as a contemporary human-rights abuse. However, trafficking is not an emergent issue but is historically situated within the profession. Sex trafficking is inextricably linked with the origins of professional social work, with Jane Addams playing a critical role in the Progressive Era fight against sexual slavery. This has impacted the contemporary understanding of sex trafficking by social workers and has had practice implications. This article examines historical and contemporary parallels, policies, and perspectives on the sex trafficking of women in the United States.

Although sexual slavery and trafficking of women has received significant attention from the social work profession in recent years (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012; Macy & Graham, 2012; Roe-Sepowitz, Hickle, Dahlstedt, & Gallagher, 2014) and has been depicted as a contemporary human rights abuse, it is not a recent issue for social workers but has a rich history in the United States (Smolak, 2013; Wahab, 2002) dating from the Progressive Era (1890–1920). Social reformers, including early social workers, were inspired by the abolition of the chattel slave trade (Donovan, 2006; Shah, 2011) and during the Progressive Era helped to organize the first movements against sexual slavery or “white slavery” as it was called. These movements were popular in both the United States and Great Britain with feminist organizations and social workers playing key roles in campaigns to eradicate the sex trade.

The parallels between the dominant discourse on sex work during the Progressive Era and contemporarily are notable. The history of the U.S. social work profession’s involvement in the fight against sexual slavery and trafficking is worthy of attention because this history has had implications for social workers’ framing and understanding of the sex trade and for current practice interventions, which are often grounded in a victimization discourse.

Early History of Sex Slavery as an Issue of Concern

Commercial sex work was first understood as a form of sexual slavery in the early 1900s in the United States. However, legislative attention on prostitution dates back to the middle ages (5th to 15th centuries) when it was considered to be a governable and taxable commercial activity (Lucas, 2013; Shah, 2011). During the Progressive Era, for the first time in the United States, sex workers were depicted as being trafficked against their will for prostitution by male pimps who were most often portrayed as being Eastern European Jews, Chinese immigrants, Italians or other foreign men (Joslin, 2002; Sloan & Wahab, 2000; Smolak, 2013), or African American men in cities such as Chicago (Donovan, 2006). The white slave narratives portrayed innocent, white, European girls who were drugged, tricked, or imprisoned and forced into prostitution (Doezema, 1999; Wahab, 2002) or rural American women being trafficked to urban areas, often based on false promises of marriage (Addams, 1912; Donovan, 2006).

The framing of sex work in this way allowed the distinction between the “innocent” and “fallen” woman, in which only involuntariness in the sex trade was rewarded with protection (Doezema, 1998). White “slaves” were in need of rescue and protection, and popular narratives by early reformers framed all white women engaged in the sex trade as sex slaves (Addams, 1912). The term “white” explicitly distinguished the sex trade from chattel slavery, although it also implicitly supported racism in U.S. culture by implying that sexual enslavement was that of white innocent women and was therefore worthy of alarm. Women of color, especially Asian women sold in California, were more likely to have been actual victims of sex slavery (Joslin, 2002; Wilson, 1932). The phrase also worked to compare and place white slavery on par with the wickedness of the chattel slave trade in the United States, and early reformers referred to white slavery as the “blackest” form of slavery in history (Bell, 1911) to make this comparison. The reformers’ stories of white slavery expose various “racial ideologies that made complex connections among whiteness, sexual morality, class, and citizenship” (Donovan, 2006, p. 56).

The ideologies that were imbedded in the white slavery movement were multidimensional but ultimately worked to maintain white Anglo-Saxon superiority and racial hegemony over newly arriving Italian, Eastern European, Chinese, French, Irish, and Jewish immigrants during the third U.S. immigration wave, which occurred between 1880 and 1914. Foreign and black men were portrayed as slavers, who exploited young white women and girls (Donovan, 2006). The term white slavery was purposively meant to be inclusive of white women only. White European and American women were construed as victims who were necessarily forced into prostitution (Doezema, 1999) and who were naturally “civilized” and “rational” (Lucas, 2013), while African American women and other women of color were seen as immoral, unchaste, and deviant (Lucas, 2013). “Women of color … were assumed to be promiscuous, indiscriminate in choice of sexual partner, and likely to be prostitutes” (Lucas, 2013, p. 56). This view of women of color, and in particular African American women, allowed them to be absent from the discourse on white slavery and forced prostitution—a severe human rights injustice, which made some women even more vulnerable to exploitation (Lucas, 2013).

There were few documented cases of white slavery, but the moral panic against it were driven by fears of immigration and rapidly changing social and gender roles (Doezema, 1999; Wahab, 2002), such as the sharp increase in independent, wage-earning women in cities (Donovan, 2006). Although white slavery received significant attention during the Progressive Era as a prevalent crime, interviews of 6,309 Progressive Era sex workers revealed that only 7.5% of respondents listed white slavery or extreme coercion as a reason why they were involved in prostitution (Pivar, 2002, p. 84). One early feminist, Teresa Billington-Greig (1913), questioned the Progressive Era accounts and maintained that there was little evidence or verified statements to support the claims of white slavery.

The term white slavery was somewhat fluid during the Progressive Era. There was a conflation of sex slavery with sex work by some reformers such as Jane Addams; both voluntary and coerced prostitution were referred to as white slavery as well as any female sexual behavior that was considered to be immoral, such as kissing and/or dancing with unrelated men (Joslin, 2002; Smolak, 2013). White slavery was largely a cultural myth for understanding sex work (Doezema, 1999; Smolak, 2013) and also functioned to frighten adventurous women who might leave rural areas for other opportunities (Joslin, 2002). The conflation of sexual slavery with sex work became the dominant narrative in the prostitution discourse. The Progressive Era antisex work movement was mainly composed of Christian groups, feminists, social reformers, and physicians (Donovan, 2006; Smolak, 2013). Christian groups focused on sex work being immoral, while Progressive Era feminists and social reformers, including early social workers, found that all sex work was sexual exploitation of women by more powerful men (Addams, 1912), particularly corrupted police and politicians (Smolak, 2013).

Jane Addams and White Slavery

Jane Addams, one of the most notable and influential reformers during the Progressive Era, was deeply concerned about the white slave trade (Donovan, 2006). In 1912, Addams examined white slavery and sex work in her book A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, in which she described accounts of victims of white slavery during her work at Hull House. Addams believed that young rural American or immigrant “girls” who became sex workers were victims of sexual slavery, regardless of consent, and in need of rescue and reform. While Addams viewed all women involved in sex work as victims in need of rescue, other reformers made a distinction between victims of forced prostitution and sex workers. Bell (1911, p. 14) insisted that only women who were subjected to involuntary servitude were victims and asserted that the term white slave should not include all prostitutes.

Addams was opposed to legalized prostitution and used the term white slavery to move forward its abolition. Addams also used the perception of white slavery to bolster women’s suffrage, and Addams argued that “it is quite possible that an … energetic attempt to abolish white slavery will bring many women into the equal suffrage movement” (1912, p. 197). Addams also used white slavery to introduce new ideals such as social justice.

The Purity and Social Hygiene Movements and Sexual Slavery

The purity movement and social hygiene activism during the Progressive Era contributed to the development of early laws regulating white slavery and sex work. During the purity movement, feminists developed a coalition with moral reformists, including early social workers. This first-wave feminist movement, starting in the late 1800s, “pressed at the frontiers of equality and social justice” (Pivar, 2002, p. 84). As with the contemporary antitrafficking movement, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were involved in the earlier debates and battle against sex slavery, and “slavery revelations stirred the women’s movement to form the League for the Moral Protection of Women in 1910” (Pivar, 2002, p. 81). Groups such as the American Purity Alliance, formed in 1895, were opposed to state-regulated prostitution and pushed for the abolition of all legalized forms of prostitution.

Those in the social hygiene movement were concerned with the threat of prostitution to public health. Social workers were actively involved in the social hygiene movement, with Addams serving as an early vice president of the American Social Hygiene Association, which was formed in 1913. The “vigorous attention to social hygiene moved the prostitution debates out of the religious realm and into the realm of science and politics” (Wahab, 2002, p. 4).

Early Social Work Practice Responses to “Forced” Prostitution: Rescue and Reform

In The White Slave Traffic in America, published in 1911, Janney specifically noted the role of social workers in the fight against Progressive Era sex slavery, remarking that “there are many social workers who should know the facts [of sex slavery], and [should] have presented to them methods by means of which they may assist in the suppression of the evil” (p. 5). Involvement in solving the problem of “unfit” groups such as sex workers was used by early social workers to establish themselves as professionals (Abrams & Curran, 2000). Early social work interventions with prostitutes were grounded in a morally based agenda. Casework was the most widely used method of social work during the Progressive Era (Abrams & Curran, 2000), and interventions targeting sex workers were actively implemented with the goal being to abolish sex work (Smolak, 2013) and to rescue and remediate women in the sex trade.

The focus was on controlling women’s bodies by “exclusively targeting women through reform and rescue efforts” (Wahab, 2002, p. 44). Progressive Era caseworkers eager to apply the medical model used case studies of female delinquents to try to gain an understanding of female sexual immorality (Abrams & Curran, 2000). The diagnostic category of “feeblemindedness” emerged in 1910 and became a widely accepted explanation for deviant behaviors among women and became a justification for forced sterilization of women, which was a cruel yet common practice (Abrams & Curran, 2000) at the time. Deviant behaviors were also correlated with women considered to have low intelligence, masculine traits, and sexual preoccupation (Abrams & Curran, 2000).

The U.S. White Slave Traffic Act of 1910

The white slavery moral panic led to the passage of laws regulating prostitution with the Mann Act of 1910, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, being the most widely recognized federal law. The Mann Act prohibited the transportation of any girl or woman for immoral purposes or prostitution between countries or across state lines (Wahab, 2002). The term “immorality” was ambiguous, and the Mann Act was used to prosecute consensual behavior between adults that was deemed to be immoral, such as the prosecution and conviction of Jack Johnson, a famous African American boxer who transported his white girlfriend across state lines in 1912 (Shah, 2011). More than 1,000 people were prosecuted under the Mann Act between 1910 and 1918, with most of them having little to do with white slavery (Joslin, 2002). The Mann Act did not mandate any social services or protection but treated victims as criminals. This affected the services that were offered to those in the sex trade, with the focus being on remediation. The Mann Act was used to prosecute sexual slavery and trafficking cases in the United States, until the passage of U.S. human trafficking legislation in 2000.

Early International Agreements Related to Sex Slavery and the United Nations Protocol

The international community was also alarmed about sexual slavery during the Progressive Era, and in 1904, the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade was ratified by 13 nations, including the United States. Less than 20 years later, in 1921, the League of Nations adopted the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children. Notably, the term white slavery is replaced with trafficking in this convention.

In 1949, shortly after the United Nations was formed, and using language such as “dignity and worth of the person,” the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others was adopted by the United Nations. The next international instrument focused solely on trafficking in persons was drafted 51 years later, when in 2000, the United Nation adopted the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (United Nations General Assembly, 2000), known as the Palermo protocol.

Contemporary U.S. Trafficking Legislation

The United States continued to use the Mann Act to prosecute cases of sex trafficking until contemporary U.S. human trafficking legislation was enacted shortly after the United Nations Palermo Protocol. Human trafficking was addressed as a priority issue by the Clinton Administration in 1998. As with the attention paid to white slavery during the Progressive Era, the focusing event for sex trafficking’s appearance on the radar screen of modern U.S. law makers was an exposé featured in The New York Times in 1998 on the sex trafficking of white, Slavic women (Footen [Bromfield], 2007). There was a coordinated response against sex trafficking when it was seen as a wrong against European, white women and not merely an injustice against women of color, as in the Progressive Era.

During the making of U.S. federal human trafficking legislation, there were intense debates among policy players involved, which were grounded in the feminist sex wars starting in the late 1960s (Bromfield & Capous-Desyallas, 2012). One point of debate was on the definition of trafficking (Footen [Bromfield], 2007). Feminists, who viewed all forms of sex work as exploitation of women, and conservative Christian groups, conflated human trafficking and voluntary sex work and focused on the development of legislation that would apply only to a broad definition of victims of sex trafficking (Markon, 2007), while labor trafficking victims would be ignored (Bromfield & Capous-Desyllas, 2012). As in the Progressive Era, these groups depicted the image of hypothetical large-scale crime networks moving women and girls around the globe as sexual slaves, although there was no proof of such large-scale activity in the United States (Agustin, 2005; Jordan, 2011; Vance, 2012; Weitzer, 2014). On the other side of the debate were the more pragmatic groups and individuals who focused on developing legislation to assist both victims of sex trafficking and labor trafficking and made a distinction between forced sex trafficking and voluntary sex work (Bromfield & Capous-Desyllas, 2012).

Eventually, the United States enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) which has been reauthorized several times. The TVPA provides assistance only to undocumented immigrants who are victims of severe forms of trafficking, unless they are under the age of 18. The TVPA has been problematic since its development. There were no sex workers or sex worker advocates involved in the discussions during the making of the TVPA (Footen [Bromfield], 2007), although “to develop effective, evidence-based, do-no-harm policies, advocates and policy makers must work collaboratively with persons who may be helped or harmed by the proposed laws and policies” (Jordan, 2009, p. 3). Unfortunately, the focus on sex trafficking resulted in the narrow application of the TVPA to mostly sex trafficking cases, while empirical reports from service providers found that the majority of trafficked clients reported being workers trafficked into domestic work (Chang & Kim, 2007) or other forms of labor.

Trafficking Victims in the United States

Reliable estimates of the number of victims trafficked to the United States are unavailable partially because of the hidden nature of trafficking (Macy & Graham, 2012) but also because the United States initially published estimates of victims who were significantly inflated (Markon, 2007; Weitzer, 2014), just as the estimates of white slavery were ostensibly exaggerated during the Progressive Era. Weitzer, a sociologist, noted in Markon that

the discrepancy between the alleged number of victims per year and the number of cases they’ve been able to make is so huge that it’s got to raise major questions. It suggests that this problem is being blown way out of proportion. ( p. 1)

U.S.-based antitrafficking NGOs perpetuate the exaggeration of the scope of sex trafficking in the United States, partially because “leading a moral crusade is … lucrative” (Moore, 2015, ¶ 14), with the 50 most prominent U.S. antitrafficking NGOs sharing US$686 million (Moore, 2015) from grants and donations. The use of the term “trafficking” by groups instead of prostitution or sex work has been successful in motivating governments and NGOs to put attention, financial resources, and public support on antiprostitution or so-called “abolitionist” efforts (Shah, 2011), and the claim to combat trafficking is used to initiate and justify restrictive policies against sex workers worldwide (Doezema, 1998). In an investigation by Truthout (Moore, 2015), it was found that U.S.-based antitrafficking NGOs interchanged the term trafficking, with sexual exploitation, prostitution, porn, and other-related terms, which allowed antitrafficking NGOs to bolster the numbers of “trafficking victims” while forwarding antisex work agendas.

The numbers of U.S. trafficking victims continue to be inflated by antitrafficking NGOs and as Moore (2015, ¶ 32) noted, “challenging faulty data in a field that offers great economic incentive to exaggerate truth gets to be like a rousing game of Whac-a-Mole. Organizations habitually link to or cite other groups’ dubious lists of facts.” Moore (2015) also disputes the claim that trafficking is a growing problem, as antitrafficking NGOs maintain.

There is no uniform data collection system that tracks the number of human trafficking victims in the United States (Logan, Walker, & Hunt, 2009). Further obscuring the ability to estimate or track the number of victims is that there is a misperception as to what constitutes a victim of human trafficking. If there is no force, fraud, or coercion used to exploit an adult person’s labor for gain, then by definition, there is no human trafficking.

Contemporary Social Work Practice Responses to Sex Trafficking

The social work profession has increasingly focused on trafficking as a human rights abuse since the passage of the TVPA in 2000, and much of this attention has been on the sex trafficking of women (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012). Unfortunately, some academic discourse on trafficking has fueled the moral panic on sex trafficking and sometimes “justifies the use of regressive practices” (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012, p. 147). In every period from the Progressive Era to the present, social work practice has been “threaded with beliefs about what constitutes reasonable, and indeed moral conduct, particularly for women” (Wahab, 2002, p. 40). This is especially true for female sex workers, who have historically and contemporarily been viewed as not being able to care for themselves but are in need of rescue, protection, and reformation by social workers (Wahab, 2002). Since the Progressive Era, “social work has a long history of engagement and practice with sex workers, which reinforces notions of social workers as agents of social and moral control” (Wahab & Panichelli, 2013, p. 347). Some social workers have supported a moral argument against sex work, which poses barriers to harm-reduction efforts and structural approaches to reduce risk factors for those in the sex trade (Smolak, 2013). There has also been a conflation of sex trafficking and sex work among some social workers, who view voluntary sex work as a form of violence against women (Wahab & Panichelli, 2013).

Despite the abundant funding of U.S. antitrafficking NGOs, their focus is often on trafficking awareness or “rescue operations” outside the United States (Moore, 2015). There is a shortage of social services for those in the U.S.-based sex trade; only 14 states and Washington, DC, have services specifically targeted to meet the needs of sex-trafficked adults and sex workers. These services mostly include intensive residential sex work exiting programs or prostitution diversion programs, in which participants participate in “rehab” in lieu of jail time, and these programs are affiliated with the criminal justice system and considered to be harmful by participants. In a community-based participatory research project conducted by the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (2012), it was found that girls and young women in the sex trade found social service agencies to be one of the primary sources of harm for them.

An infamous example of the social work profession’s role in this harm is one school of social work’s collaboration with Project Reaching Out to the Sexually Exploited (ROSE), a prostitution exiting and diversion program for sex trafficking victims and prostitutes. In 2013, Project ROSE conducted raids targeting sex workers for arrest unless they agreed to participate in a 6-month long prostitution diversion program, of whom many were ineligible because participants could have no prior arrests for sex work (Wahab & Panichelli, 2013). This intervention strategy was a critical social injustice, human rights violation, and a form of structural violence that violated standards of the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics (Wahab & Panichelli, 2013).

Best practices in interventions with sex workers and trafficking victims suggest a rejection of a criminal justice response (Young Women’s Empowerment Project, 2012) and include harm reduction programs such as HIV/AIDS prevention (Shah, 2011) as well as case management services including connecting clients to individual counseling, housing assistance, medical care, and law enforcement advocacy (Busch-Armendariz, Nsonwu, & Heffron, 2011; Siniscalchi & Jacob, 2010).

Some social work scholars have contributed to identifying best practices with trafficking victims (Busch-Armendariz et al., 2011; Busch-Armendariz, Nsonwu, & Heffron, 2014; Roe-Sepowitz et al., 2014), and while an exhaustive review of this literature is outside the scope of this article, some notable examples are provided. Busch-Armendariz, Nsonwu, and Heffron (2011) evaluated the social service needs of trafficking survivors and their children, using in-depth interviews, and found four broad themes including (1) basic communication needs, (2) long-term needs, (3) self-efficacy, and (4) looking forward to the future. The study’s authors also noted that it is “important that practices and policies are developed to address the unique needs of parent [trafficking] survivors and their children with an eye toward positive outcomes for safety, support, well-being and self- sufficiency” (Busch-Armendariz et al., 2011, p. 15). Another study conducted by the same researchers (Busch-Armendariz et al., 2014) found that the ecological perspective in social work, strengths-based practice, and victim-centered approaches were a benefit to both trafficking survivors and service providers.

Roe-Sepowitz, Hickle, Dahlstedt, and Gallagher (2014) focused on the similarities and differences among victims of domestic violence and those of sex trafficking and found that both groups experience violence, grooming, secrecy about the abuse, psychological abuse, dominance, and extensive rules that must be followed. This study is particularly important because the needs of domestic violence victims and sex trafficking victims are generally considered to be “wildly different” (Roe-Sepowitz et al., 2014, p. 894), while this study suggests that both groups have similar service needs.

At the macro level, Jani (2010) developed a model to analyze trafficking policies which focuses on the following domains: (1) historical factors contributing to antitrafficking legislation, (2) policy goals and objectives, (3) interest groups involved, (4) eligibility criteria for funding, and (5) intended and unintended consequences of policies. The development of this model is a starting place for an assessment by macro-level social workers of current antitrafficking policies at local, state, and federal levels as well as for a development of policy alternatives to fight trafficking and providing supportive interventions for trafficking survivors and their families.

Implications for Social Work: Research, Practice, and Education

All forms of human trafficking are a severe human rights abuse and social injustice, which underscores the need for trafficking to be on the U.S. social work profession’s agenda. Although the profession has given significant recent attention to trafficking, the primary focus has been on the sex trafficking of women, while neglecting more prevalent forms of trafficking, such as forced labor. Social work scholars must engage in a more critical discourse on U.S. trafficking and interrogate the dominant narratives on trafficking, including those of the federal government, media, and antitrafficking NGOs. All too often, and without skepticism, these narratives are cited and supported in the normative social work literature. Participation in the moral panic on sex trafficking, a lack of understanding of the political context of trafficking as a vehicle to move an abolitionist agenda, conflating forced sexual trafficking with consensual sex work, equating sex work with violence and exploitation, or focusing on the ideological debates grounded in the feminist sex wars, will not move our profession forward in identifying best practices for work with trafficking victims or consensual sex workers at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels.

In addition to challenging the current normative discourse on U.S. trafficking, social work scholars need to engage in a more nuanced discussion that supports a human-rights framework grounded in a distinction between forced trafficking and consensual sex work, while recognizing that trafficking includes a broad spectrum of coerced and exploited labor and that people’s experience of trafficking ranges from partial consent to extreme coercion (Chang & Kim, 2007). We must also acknowledge that not all people experience sex work as violence or exploitation, while recognizing our profession’s historical role in the moral and social control of women in the sex trade.

In research on best practices with sex trafficking victims and consensual sex workers, social workers should use community-based participatory models, which include the voices of trafficking survivors and sex workers in framing research to inform best practices for harm-reduction efforts at all practice levels. Social workers need to support sex workers in ways in which they have identified are important to them, instead of focusing on a discourse of victimization, which has led to harmful initiatives such as Project ROSE. It is important that social workers challenge prostitution diversion programs and other programs aimed at the moral and social control and criminalization of individual women for their sexual behaviors, which interferes with a person’s right to self-determination and violates basic human rights.

As social workers work with trafficking survivors to develop micro- and macro-practice interventions, we must fully consider all forms of trafficking. Sensationalized imagery of sex trafficking has flourished in academia (Vijeyarasa, 2009), meanwhile experiences and protection of vulnerable and undocumented migrants, both male and female and often people of color, who may be victims of labor exploitation—such as Mexican or Central American migrant workers in the United States—have been pushed off the radar (Vijeyarasa, 2009). The internal trafficking of U.S. citizens who are often marginalized, and sometimes transgendered, street youth who may be victims of sex trafficking (Miko & Park, 2002) has also not been given enough attention. These youths have commonly been treated as juvenile delinquents by both the criminal justice system and social service providers and are often African American, Latino/Latina, or other young Americans of color (Schisgall & Alvarez, 2008). As with the historical invisibility of sex slavery victims who were women of color, young Americans of color who are coerced into sex trafficking scenarios are left out of the mainstream trafficking discourse and instead are treated as criminals who are fined and jailed and not able to access harm-reduction programs or trafficking victims assistance programs (Schisgall & Alvarez, 2008).

Finally, social work educators have a responsibility to work with students in the building of a critical and nuanced lens on trafficking and sex work within the United States. We should facilitate a conceptualization of the historical and political forces that have influenced the social work profession’s dominant framing of sex trafficking, including discourses that equate sex work with violence and exploitation, the conflation of sex slavery with consensual sex work, and the social and moral control of women. We also need to challenge students to be critical of the dominant narratives on trafficking in the United States and to conceptualize trafficking within a human-rights–based framework, which includes all U.S. trafficking victims.