Abstract
This study adopts a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to problematize the representation of victims in the online educational messaging on sex trafficking promoted in the US “end-demand” movement. The websites of 20 US anti-trafficking groups are analyzed. While these website-based messages are positioned to educate the public about sex trafficking, they are predominately framed toward problematizing sex work and essentializing women with racialized and marginalized identities in sex work, with no discursive recognition of intersectional structural inequalities (e.g., racism, sexism, poverty, homo/transphobia) that lead to trafficking. These ideologically charged messages, when presented as “facts,” further the anti-sex work sentiment among the public, powerfully (re)produce and sustain the public (mis)perception equating “anti-sex trafficking” with “anti-sex work,” and legitimize the carceral feminist anti-trafficking practice that primarily criminalizes, censors, and oppresses the agency, behaviors, and needs of structurally marginalized communities. This paper calls attention to how injustice may be (re)produced in the way trafficking is represented and how representational injustice may translate into material consequences, further subjecting already marginalized groups to criminalization and surveillance. Through incorporating representational justice into our conceptualization of racial and social justice, we may (re)build an anti-trafficking framework that is structurally competent, rights-inclusive, and centered on humanization.
Introduction
Since the United Nations (UN) Trafficking Protocol was adopted in 2000, movements against trafficking in persons, led by states and nonstate actors (e.g., nonprofit advocacy groups), have been expanding on a global scale. Despite the universal consensus over the criminality of trafficking in persons and the importance of fighting against trafficking, there have been ongoing contestations centering around trafficking for sexual exploitation (commonly referred to as “sex trafficking”), from what it is (and is not), to its magnitude, and to how trafficking for sexual exploitation should be intervened in and prevented (Baker, 2015). The “end-demand” movement has dominated the current anti-trafficking discourse and influenced much of the anti-trafficking efforts globally and in the United States. Advocates of the end-demand movement argue that curbing the demand for sex work is the key to eradicating trafficking for sexual exploitation (Berger, 2012). Digital platforms have been widely used by end-demand advocacy groups to promote anti-trafficking educational messages to the public. Organizational websites are one of the main mediums for disseminating to the public such educational information, which is often on pages titled such as “facts” and “about trafficking.” For instance, World Without Exploitation (WWE) is a US-based anti-trafficking network; on its website, a page titled “Human trafficking and sexual exploitation” contains a collection of statistics, on such topics as “the prevalence of trafficking” and “violence in the sex trade,” along with links that direct the public to other sources of information, such as a report titled “Get the facts” (WWE, n.d.). The general public, most of whom have no direct contact with people trafficked, may have to rely on publicly accessible sources of information to acquire knowledge related to trafficking. The educational information disseminated online, therefore, can become an important source of information for many and contribute to the construction of public perceptions and discourses of trafficking.
In recent years, efforts to promote the end-demand model have led to many anti-trafficking policies and practices built upon the stringent surveillance, policing, and control over persons (mostly women and sexual minority groups) who are in migration, of color, and/or involved in sex work industries (Blunt et al., 2020; Kempadoo et al., 2016; Shih, 2016). In this study, I conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the educational messages on sex trafficking promoted in the end-demand movement online. I consider these educational messages as a form of ideologically charged social practice through which particular versions of constructed “realities” are produced and presented to the public (Weiss & Wodak, 2007; Fairclough et al., 2011). CDA allows for a critical engagement with taken-for-granted information, linking “‘micro-analysis’ of texts to various forms of social analysis of practices, organizations and institutions” (Fairclough, 2013, p. 7). Specifically, I sought to analyze how “victims” are discursively represented and how the identified discursive patterns are mobilized to legitimize and sustain the end-demand movement and consequently to have material impacts on certain marginalized communities. As concerns over the negative consequences of the end-demand practices grow, using CDA as an analytical tool helps us raise critical consciousness of the textual representation of trafficking victims, consider discursive spaces as a crucial site of activism for social justice, and advocate for representational justice in the anti-trafficking field.
The “End-demand” Movement and Feminist Neo-abolitionism
The “end demand” movement for addressing trafficking for sexual exploitation has its strong ideological roots in radical feminism (Kempadoo, 2015; O’Brien et al., 2013; Weitzer, 2007). The core tenet of radical feminism focuses on institutionalized male dominance over women and sees sex work industries as an institution inherently violent toward women (Weitzer, 2020; Kempadoo et al., 2016). Anti-trafficking groups or advocates endorsing the end-demand approach often refer to themselves as “abolitionists” or “neo-abolitionists” 1 (i.e., calling for the abolition of sex work) (Ward & Wylie, 2017). Some Christian evangelical groups and celebrity activists, although with very different ideological or practical concerns, have also joined the neo-abolitionist alliance against sex trafficking (Haynes, 2014; Heynen & van der Meulen, 2021; Ward & Wylie, 2017). For example, Exodus Cry, a Christian anti-sex trafficking group based in the US, names their end-demand anti-trafficking approach “the abolition strategy” and calls the public to join them to be “a sex industry abolitionist” (Exodus Cry, n.d.).
The neo-abolitionist anti-trafficking voice has been influential in the policy-making domain. For instance, when the UN drafted the Trafficking Protocol, neo-abolitionist lobby groups, such as the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), promoted the ideological stance that commercial sex acts are equivalent to sexual violence against women, despite consent, and advocated for a distinction to be made between “prostitution” and other kinds of labor in the definition of trafficking (Doezema, 2002, 2005). In contrast, a few countries and human rights groups expressed concerns over this definitional separation that singles out sex work industries and instead advocated for a more inclusive definition for trafficking – treating sexual labor as a form of labor – so that consensual commercial sex among adults is not conflated with trafficking (Doezema, 2005; Wijers, 2015). The final UN Trafficking Protocol, however, adopts a somewhat ambiguous stance over how sex work should be positioned in relation to trafficking and listed “the exploitation of the prostitution of others” and “sexual exploitation” as distinct examples of the purpose of trafficking (UN, 2000), a definitional compromise that leaves much room for interpretation and for each country to operationalize it within their domestic laws (Wijers, 2015).
By having sex work “visible” yet ambiguously defined in the UN Trafficking Protocol, as Doezema (2005) stated, the laws “ended up rebounding on sex workers” (p. 78). This concern, long expressed by sex worker rights and human rights activists before and after the passage of the UN Trafficking Protocol, has been translated into continued neo-abolitionist anti-trafficking advocacy for end-demand policies. In addressing trafficking for sexual exploitation, the US government has taken a stance that closely aligns with the neo-abolitionist end-demand approach. For instance, the grant application guidelines for Services for Victims of Human Trafficking provided by the US Department of Justice (USDOJ) state explicitly that acts of “prostitution” are “inherently harmful” and “contribute to the phenomenon of trafficking in persons”; the guidelines further require non-profit organizations that receive US Government anti-trafficking funds not to use the funds to engage in advocacy for the decriminalization of sex work (USDOJ, 2020, p. 6). In addition, the end-demand movement has influenced much of the policy reform efforts on sex work policies, facilitating the promotion of the “partial decriminalization” model, also known as the Swedish Model, Nordic Model, or Equality model (New Yorkers for the Equality Model, n.d.). This model removes criminal penalties for sex workers but penalizes third parties who financially profit from sex work industries, such as clients, business owners, and managers. For instance, in early 2021, a new bill based on the Nordic Model, the Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act, was introduced by Senator Liz Krueger in New York (New York Post, 2021); Krueger proposes “[repealing] the crime of selling sex” but “penalizing the misdemeanor crime of buying sex with a fine” (New Yorkers for the Equality Model, n.d.).
Online Educational Messaging on Sex Trafficking as a Form of Social Practice
Discourse, in CDA, is seen as a form of social practice through which dominant views and certain social structures are being deliberately produced and presented to the public (Fairclough et al., 2011). Linguistic devices, such as spoken and written texts, are ways through which discursive social practices are realized. On the one hand, according to Fairclough (1993), “text production and interpretation are shaped by (and help shape) the nature of the social practice, the production process shapes (and leaves ‘traces’ in) the text, and the interpretative process operates upon ‘cues’ in the text” (p. 136). On the other hand, discourse practices are also “ways of controlling the selection of certain structural possibilities and the exclusion of others, and the retention of these selections over time, in particular areas of social life” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 24). Therefore, discourse practices play a critical mediating role that connects the text and the social structure. The present study considers online educational messaging on trafficking for sexual exploitation (or “sex trafficking”) used by neo-abolitionist anti-trafficking groups as a form of discursive social practice infused with certain ideological lenses and perspectives for particular social and political purposes.
CDA Through the Lens of Representational Intersectionality
The concept of representational intersectionality was used as a theoretical lens to guide the CDA in this study. With its origin in Black Feminist theory, intersectionality was coined to challenge a kind of identity politics that does not “transcend difference” and often “conflates or ignores intragroup differences” (Crenshaw, 1990, p. 1242). To understand the construction of social and political worlds, Crenshaw (1990) articulated three theoretical dimensions – structural, political, and representational – when considering intersectionality. Structural intersectionality refers to the multiple social and structural systems that jointly contribute to the complexity of one's overlapping identities and lived experience. Political intersectionality brings our attention to how situating oneself within multiple structurally subordinated groups may lead to the pursuit of “conflicting political agendas” and that “[splitting] one's political energies” among multiple (“sometimes opposing”) groups can be intersectionally disempowering (p. 1252). Building on the structural and political aspects of intersectionality, representational intersectionality, as the third crucial dimension of intersectionality, was proposed to challenge how individuals (or particular social groups) are stereotypically depicted through public discourses that ignore intragroup dynamics and differences (Haynes et al., 2020), and to reveal how “controversies over the representation” of a social group in popular culture can silence “the particular location” of the group and consequently become “another source of intersectional disempowerment” (Crenshaw, 1990, p. 1245). This concept of representational intersectionality offers an important theoretical perspective allowing for a critical examination of the issues of representation in the anti-trafficking movement, with a focus on whether, and how, particular social groups are diversely or stereotypically portrayed at the intersection of certain salient identities and whether, and how, their intra-group diversities are overlooked.
In recent years, scholars have expressed concerns about the misrepresentation and overrepresentation of particular social groups in dominant trafficking narratives. In these mis/overrepresentations, certain group identities, such as women, children, foreign migrants, and racialized groups, have been mobilized and woven into the prominent narratives of trafficking victimization, and particularly the trafficking that takes place in sex work industries (Bromfield, 2016). These narratives can be found across various “mainstream” platforms, such as news media, trafficking reports, and movies (Cheng, 2008; Pajnik, 2010; Rodrıguez-Lo ´pez, 2018; Uy, 2011; Wilson & O’Brien, 2016). For instance, by examining the representation of trafficking in the annual Trafficking in Persons Reports, Wilson and O’Brien (2016) revealed predominant “ideal” victim images of “weak” and “naïve” young women and children from “the global south” as well as an overrepresentation of victims migrating to be trafficked for forced commercial sex (p. 37). A recent study that examined trafficking victim narratives created by anti-trafficking service providers found a similar master narrative profiling trafficking victims as “disoriented” racialized women in sex trafficking, “locked in multiple circles of violence and exploitation,” and rather passively waiting to be “saved” by a service organization (Hu, 2019). Weitzer (2007) described the anti-sex trafficking campaign, led by the feminist neo-abolitionists and religious right groups, as “an influential moral crusade” (p. 447), and pointed out that many of its core claims have significantly coincided with the movement against sex work in the US. Through the moral crusade discourse, sex workers are often conflated with people trafficked for sexual exploitation; extreme or “horror stories” have been portrayed as “representative and generalizable,” and social stigmas deeply linked to women sex workers and other parties involved in sex work have been successfully mobilized to legitimize a master narrative depicting sex work and social actors in the industry as “symptomatic of wider threats to traditional sexual mores, to the family, to gender relations, to public health, and more” (Weitzer, 2020, p. 412). The present study concerns how victims are represented in the online educational massaging about “sex trafficking” in the “end-demand” anti-trafficking movement. Using critical discourse analytical techniques, I sought to unveil not only certain discursive patterns on how victims are represented but also how these patterned representations may serve to legitimize and sustain the anti-trafficking policies and practices greatly shaped by the “end-demand” ideologies.
Method
Sampling
To collect data, I first compiled a list of anti-trafficking groups in the end-demand movement. I used the list of member organizations posted on the website of World Without Exploitation (WWE, https://www.worldwithoutexploitation.org/about), an anti-trafficking coalition founded by a number of leading neo-abolitionist or anti-sex trade organizations in 2016. Since it was founded, WWE has been actively engaged in advocating for anti-sex trafficking policies oriented to the end-demand approach. The coalition has 116 member organizations, many of which are anti-trafficking groups whereas some are institutions that have rather broad missions, such as community service centers and universities. From the list of 116 organizations, I included only those that explicitly include anti-trafficking as part of the organizational mission and support the neo-abolitionist end-demand approach addressing trafficking for sexual exploitation. Both “anti-trafficking” and support of the end-demand approach (e.g., identifying as a neo-abolitionist anti-trafficking group and/or including statement supporting the end-demand model) needed to be explicitly mentioned on the website to meet the inclusion criteria. Although advocacy groups founded to abolish the sex industry have been strong allies to the end-demand movement, they were excluded if they did not explicitly claim anti-trafficking as part of their mission. As a result, 22 groups met the inclusion criteria. I then looked at the websites of the 22 groups, specifically, the webpages with titles that signify public education purposes, such as “what is sex trafficking,” “the problem,” and “facts.” Two groups did not have specific educational information on trafficking on their websites. Of the remaining 20 groups, a total of 46 webpages were retrieved. The NVivo NCapture was used to assist retrieving the webpages and importing them into NVivo for management and analysis.
Data Analysis
Results
How Is Sex Trafficking Definitionally Constructed?
To reveal the broader “victimization” context in which the “victims” are discursively situated, I first examined how sex trafficking is definitionally constructed. Across the 20 groups, sex trafficking is defined inconsistently. Specifically, only seven groups refer to “sex trafficking” as involving commercial sex acts imposed under “force,” “fraud,” or “coercion,” a definition that distinguishes between sex work and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Seven groups do not provide a definition for sex trafficking, whereas the remaining six reference the UN Trafficking Protocol in which trafficking is defined in a rather broad manner: A person is “trafficked” when this person's consent is achieved through “use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits” (UN, 2000). In this definition, “abuse a position of vulnerability,” as one of the trafficking means, is not given further clarity and hence becomes a highly fluid and malleable term (De Pérez, 2016; Munro & Scoular, 2012), allowing much discursive room for interpretation as to who is considered “vulnerable” or “being victimized” in the context of trafficking for sexual exploitation. For instance, LifeWay Network, in its statement supporting the end-demand approach, explicates that “the vast majority are in prostitution due to lack of choices and vulnerable circumstances” and that “the sex industry is built on inherent violence, abuse, and abuse of power.” The way the sex industry is depicted here frames “vulnerability” as a condition that brings the many into sex work. This framing is further built into the rationale for seeing the sex industry as a form of “abuse of power,” implying the equivalence of sex work and sex trafficking.
Across the online educational messages, when referring to sex work or to sex trafficking, both the adoption and the discursive arrangement of terms conflate people in sex work with victims of sex trafficking. First, the term prostitution is pervasively present as a discursive alternative to sex work which is a term that recognizes “the labor/work and economic implications of involvement” in varied sex service sectors (Benoit et al., 2018, p. 457). Although some sex workers may use the term prostitution in specific occasions or with other community members (Stella, 2013), when “prostitution” is used by non-sex workers in public or legal discourses in the context of the current trafficking-related politics, it often carries the “connotations of criminality and immorality” (McMillan et al., 2018, p. 1518; Open Society Foundations, 2019). Commonly used in criminal laws as an offense, the word “prostitution” unavoidably imposes a labeling and pathologizing effect that associates people in sex work with a negative and deviant moral judgement (McMillan et al., 2018). Further, the term “prostitution” is often discursively presented paratactically with “sex trafficking” and a rather ambiguous term – “sexual exploitation.” The use of parataxis made the two definitionally distinct social processes appear to be “grammatically ‘equal’ or ‘coordinate’” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 92). For instance, Breaking Free, a group that offers direct services (e.g., housing), describes their clients as “survivors of sex trafficking and prostitution.” On one of its webpages titled “Learn More,” Breaking Free states: “[t]he effects of prostitution and sex trafficking will impact a victim for life.” In these sentences, the use of coordinator “and” between “prostitution” and “sex trafficking” implies that they both are indiscriminately harmful conditions that victimize people. The following two excerpts were drawn from the webpages of Demand Abolition, all of which reflect a similar discursive arrangement. Enforcing laws criminalizing buyers and changing social norms around the harms associated with the illegal sex industry is the fastest and most just response to the problems of prostitution and sex trafficking. (Demand Abolition)
Prostitution, or commercial sexual exploitation, capitalizes on vulnerable women and children. (Demand Abolition)
In the first excerpt, “prostitution” is not only identified as an “illegal” industry that needs to be targeted by laws but also referenced as a “problem” together with “sex trafficking.” In the second excerpt, both “prostitution” and “commercial sexual exploitation” are discursively placed in parataxis, being connected with “or,” signifying that the two appear to be “equal.” The discursive use of “sexual exploitation” is inconsistent, however. Some groups use the term “sexual exploitation” to allude to a broader category of victimization. For instance, the CATW defines “prostitution” as a “particular form of sexual exploitation.” Similarly, Equality Now defines “sexual exploitation” as occurring “on a continuum that includes many forms of coercion and predatory actions”; this statement is followed with a list of examples including “trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation,” “commercial sexual exploitation,” “survival sex,” “transactional sex,” solicitation of transactional sex,” and “other exploitative relationships.” In other words, sex work and sex trafficking are represented as two variations on the “continuum” of sexual exploitation.
Overall, both the definitional inconsistency and the interchangeable use among the three terms – “prostitution,” “sex trafficking,” and “sexual exploitation” – construct the “victims” in a rather unnuanced and stereotypical manner, including people in sex industries disregarding intra-group differences and the intersectional experiences of an individual as to how consent, agentic choices, and coerciveness manifest in people's lived experiences. This representational choice is a manifestation of the feminist neo-abolitionist/prohibitionist ideology that “draws an equivalence” between sex work and sex trafficking and considers both as “founded on violence and the impossibility of consent” (Ward & Wylie, 2017, p. 6). Such a definitional conflation produces and perpetuates a rather static and essentialist view of individuals in sex work industries, a view that is not grounded in the complexities and lived realities of people involved in many different sex work sectors, as documented in ample empirical work (e.g., Berg, 2021; Smith & Mac, 2018; West & Horn, 2021) and that leaves no intersectional representational room for those with experiences of both (consensual) sex work and trafficking. People in sex work who do not identify with the trafficking victim identity not only are discursively erased from the narrative but also are the ones bearing material consequences brought about by the conflation. For instance, imposing a “sex trafficking” victim identity onto sex workers reinforces a “victim-needing-rescue” narrative that has long been mobilized to legitimize the ongoing law enforcement operations in sex service venues (Kulig & Butler, 2019). These policing-rescuing operations have often led to workers being mass arrested and forced to attend mandated “rehabilitative” social services as “victim-defendants” – “painted as victims” yet often treated as “criminals” (Global Health Justice Partnership, 2018, p. 65). In addition, the conflation of sex workers with trafficking victims has perpetuated an unhelpful divide between activists in sex workers’ rights and advocates in anti-trafficking work (Uy, 2011).
The Passive, Feminized, and Infantilized “Victims” of Color
The greatest myth is that a victim is in control of her situation, when in fact she is under the complete control of the trafficker… Women are trapped by forced addictions, homelessness, economic abuse, emotional manipulation, violence and threats of violence, and threats to turn victims over to law enforcement. They are isolated and have little access to the outside world. (Breaking Free)
…even victims themselves who often do not believe or understand that they are a victim of a crime. (Awaken)
A large percentage of the people trafficked are women and children… Many of them are used in the sex industry…They need to be identified and recovered. (Truckers Against Trafficking)
…89% of women and girls used in prostitution wanted to get out but did not know where to turn for help. (Breaking Free)
[Victims are] too young and naive to realize what's happening. (Shared Hope International)
The overwhelming majority of prostituted women and girls around the world are of color, from disenfranchised communities, homeless or in the care of the state, of low socio-economic class or caste, have histories of sexual abuse, incest and sexual violence, and lack choices and alternatives in life. (CATW)
Truckers Against Trafficking, a group that provides anti-trafficking education to workers in the trucking, bus and energy industries, presented to bus drivers the assertion that traffickers may “use a bus to take victims to and from places where they will be sold.” Although this discursive representational choice to a great extent coincides with an actual trafficking condition in which trafficked persons are passively brought into the situation, across the online educational texts, “being sold” was more often used in a rather broad and ambiguous manner alluding to all women's experiences in the sex industry. For instance, the following excerpt was drawn from Amirah's statement opposing the full decriminalization of sex work. In this excerpt, “being sold for sex” refers to being in the sex trade. Those being sold for sex are in an inherently vulnerable situation because the sex trade is inherently violent. Whether or not a trafficker is present, extreme acts of sexual violence, rape, and murder are committed by buyers regularly.
As long as people can buy and sexually exploit women, children and other vulnerable communities, there will continue to be a market for them. It is critical to eradicate these new forms of slavery, as human beings used in this way are often physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually devastated. (Global Centurion)
In addition to being “bought” and “sold,” women are discursively arranged to be subjected to other types of processes (e.g., to use, to consume) that typically refer to (or act upon) non-human objects, terms such as “being consumed” and “being used.” For example, CATW describes “the sex trade” as “a slave ship” and stated that the sex trade is “where the bodies of women and girls are consumed for the entertainment of men and the profit of exploiters.” In this case, women and girls are discursively dehumanized through the description of being “consumed”; further, the emphasis of their “bodies” being “consumed” “adds a touch of alienation” as if these women and girls were detached from their holistic beings as humans (Van Leeuwen, 2008, p.47).
Overall, these representational patterns jointly construct victims and groups at risk of sex trafficking as feminized and racialized, with highly constrained capacity to exercise agency in understanding and navigating their circumstances, all of which contribute to the discursive infantilization of women of color in the sex industry regardless of their trafficking status. These discursive patterns function to essentialize all women's experiences in the sex industry, irrespective of age, consent, mobility, and agency, failing to fulfill representational intersectionality. The discursive focus on the passivation and objectification of women reproduces the weak and ignorant “ideal victim” image in dominant trafficking discourses (Rodrıguez-Lo ´pez, 2018; Sanford et al., 2016; Wilson & O’rien, 2016). According to Uy (2011), making “female victims” the focus in the sex trafficking narrative “contributes to an overall discourse that essentializes certain characteristics of women” (p.210), and the “ideal victim” image “fails to take into account personal agency” (p.211). The widespread discursive repetition of “women bought and sold” becomes a form of interpretive resource that normalizes the objectification of women. This ideal victim image and the objectification of women have also been found in other mainstream media outlets, such as sex trafficking films and documentaries (Stiles, 2018), newspaper coverage focused on sex work and trafficking (Reynolds, 2020), and evangelical Christian anti-sex trafficking narratives (Twis & Praetorius, 2021).
The (re)production of these essentialist narratives that objectify and infantilize women, women sex workers, and those experiencing trafficking, consequently, works in tandem with the discourse equating sex work to sex trafficking, not only targeting women sex workers of marginalized and racialized identities in victim-rescuing operations but also legitimizing structural and interpersonal violence against these same social groups. In a report released in 2017, Polaris, a nationwide anti-trafficking group in the US, typologized 25 types of “modern slavery,” in which many sex work sectors were profiled as sex trafficking “hotspots,” such as escort services, massage parlors, and online sex work, (Polaris, 2017). Essentializing these highly diverse and dynamic workplaces into “sex trafficking hotspots” makes people – especially women of color and migrants – in these workplaces highly vulnerable to being targeted by law enforcement in raids and anti-trafficking rescue operations under the laws that criminalize sex workers and those profiled as such. A report by the Urban Institute showed that, based on an analysis of 1,400 individuals (93% cisgender women, 5% transgender women, and 2% cisgender men) in New York City between 2015 and 2016 who were arrested for prostitution and received legal defense, 83% of the defendants were from racial minority groups, 98% were women including cisgender and transgender women, and over one-third were foreign-born immigrants (Dank et al., 2017). These arrests were framed as “trafficking interventions” and resulted in the arrested women being sent to mandatory “rehabilitative” programs (Global Health Justice Partnership, 2018).
Following a recent mass shooting incident that took place in three Atlantic-based Asian massage parlors, CATW immediately stated in a press release that Asian massage parlors “are some of the highest risk venues for the sex trafficking of undocumented, immigrant women, who are often from Korea or China and frequently in debt bondage” and thus urged the City of Atlanta to investigate their “possible connections to sex trafficking” (CATW, 2021). This type of advocacy, aligning with the feminized and racialized representation of sex trafficking victims by neo-abolitionist groups, is extremely concerning, as it shifts the focus and blame to Asian-owned businesses indiscriminately while erasing many intersecting structural inequalities that make Asian women massage workers vulnerable to interpersonal, structural and state-sponsored violence, and trafficking. As Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) commented following the shooting incident, framing Asian massage parlors as “illegal and immoral sites” justifies “criminalization, surveillance, raids, and deportation” and exposes workers to safety concerns without being able to rely on police for protection (AAPF, 2021).
Discursive Relations Between Victims and Other Actors: “Sex Buyers” as the Problem
Social actors never exist alone in textual representations but rather are placed to form relations with others. Therefore, it is critical to examine how victims are discursively constructed in relation to other social actors and what types of social relations are (intentionally) made visible (or invisible) to the reader. Throughout the textual data collected, sex service customers (described as “sex buyers”) and traffickers are the social actors with whom victims are commonly discursively placed in social relations. Although “sex buyers,” “pimps,” and traffickers are very distinct social groups, “sex buyers” and “pimps” are each frequently presented paratactically in clauses together with “traffickers,” discursively blurring the differences among them. For instance, Exodus Cry, on its webpage titled “The problem,” describes “the entire global sex industry” as being “fueled by the demand of men and predatory stakeholders like pimps and traffickers.” Similarly, the following excerpt was drawn from CATW's webpage, titled “The Sex Trade,” where the message that “the sex trade” needs to be addressed to “end sex trafficking” is conveyed. Specifically, “traffickers,” “pimps,” and “the men who buy [women and girls]” are placed in a paratactic relation and are assigned with the same negative characteristic of “not caring.” In addition, more than “traffickers” and “pimps,” “buyers” are more often depicted with details, such as their demographics and their behaviors and attitudes. For instance, in this excerpt, a concrete example of “buyers” being “not caring” is presented in the text, that is, not asking women's “age or origin.” However, no details are visible about the “not caring” of “traffickers.” The traffickers and pimps who sell women and girls and the men who buy them don’t care whether she was trafficked or not. No sex buyer asks the age or origin of the woman he just bought. (CATW)
The vast majority of young women and youth in the sex trade are women and girls of color, including LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth of color. By contrast, the majority of sex buyers are white men… (Rights4Girls)
Buyers have money, stability, education and power; in marked contrast to the women and children they buy. (EVA Center)
In both excerpts above, a relation is constructed between “buyers” and “women and girls” through the verb “buy”; in such a relation, women and girls have their human qualities discursively taken away and are reduced to non-human objects that could be traded to those who “buy” them. Similar to the way that “buyers” are depicted with more concrete details than traffickers, a similar representational pattern observed across many texts is to make visible the blaming of “sex buyers” for trafficking while omitting the responsibility of “traffickers.” In the following excerpt, “sex buyers” are explicitly referred to as “the key driver” for sexual exploitation and sex trafficking, while “traffickers” are completely elided from who is responsible for the trafficking of “vulnerable women and men, girls and boys.” The last part of the excerpt, “when buyers stop… to a halt,” constructs “buyers” as the “only” barrier to ending sex trafficking.
Sexual exploitation and sex trafficking are complex problems with many causes, but the key driver are the sex buyers. Without their money, pimps and traffickers have no incentive to force vulnerable women and men, girls and boys, into the illegal sex trade. When buyers stop buying, the whole system comes to a halt. (Demand Abolition)
Similarly, the following excerpt was drawn from Amirah's website where an organizational statement to support the end-demand approach is presented. In this excerpt, “buyers, brothel owners and pimps” are given discursive visibility as the social actors held accountable for survivors’ victimization of trafficking while traffickers are elided from the text.
Amirah supports partial decriminalization so that survivors of sexual exploitation, trafficking and prostitution are supported in their vulnerable circumstances while holding buyers, brothel owners and pimps accountable. (Amirah)
Overall, the discursive focus is placed solely on constructing the relation between sex service clients and those providing sex services (consensually or forced). In the discursive construction of such a relation, sex service clients are stereotypically portrayed as a monolithic group being equivalent to traffickers. Meanwhile, the role of traffickers and key structural inequalities – such as sex work criminalization, racism, colonialism, sexism, and economic disparities that create the intersectional vulnerabilities – that have given rise to trafficking was erased. The lack of discursive recognition of these structural issues is another form of misrepresentation of trafficking.
These representational patterns contribute to the overall anti-sex work discourse and blames sex service customers for the harms to women in sex work and for the prevalence of trafficking. These customer-blaming discourses naturally direct the public and legal attention to the urgency of deterring people from paying for sex services and saving women from men customers and sex industries, all of which justify and promote carceral feminist strategies against sex trafficking, especially in the US context of sex work criminalization. Bernstein (2010) coined carceral feminism, a term initially referring to the neo-abolitionist feminist activism built on the reliance on, and commitment to, punitive strategies (e.g., criminalization and incarceration) to solve sex trafficking and now expanding to critiquing different forms of feminist anti-violence work that collaborates with multiple carceral systems, such as police, courts, and correctional institutions (Kim, 2018). The carceral intervention paradigm against sex trafficking has not only directed increasing attention and resources to criminalizing parities in the sex industry but also, in reality, exposed sex workers and those profiled as involved in sex work (often people of color, migrant women, and/or sexual minorities) to increased policing and surveillance (Dank et al., 2017; Fehrenbacher et al., 2020; Global Health Justice Partnership, 2018; Kaye, 2017; Pickering & Ham, 2013). For instance, under the Trump Administration, in 2017, Public Law 115–164 (commonly referred to as FOSTA-SESTA), was signed by the then-President; while the bills intend to fight against “online sex trafficking,” they in fact impose criminal penalties on websites that allow sex workers to advertise online, making the workplaces of sex workers more dangerous, sending potential trafficking even more underground, and creating more barriers to conducting online rights activism among sex workers and activists (Blunt et al., 2020; Blunt & Wolf, 2020; Chamberlain, 2019; Russo, 2019).
Discussion and Implications for Social (Justice) Work
Through this study, I sought to problematize the representation of victims in the educational messaging on sex trafficking used in the “end-demand” movement in the United States and to unveil how specific representational patterns of victims are deployed and mobilized discursively to legitimize and sustain the “end-demand” anti-trafficking social and policy practices. While these website-based messages are positioned to educate the public about “sex trafficking,” they are predominately framed toward problematizing sex work as well as essentializing and infantilizing racialized women in the sex work industries (consensually or trafficked). These ideologically charged messages, when presented as “facts,” further the anti-sex work sentiment among the public, powerfully construct and sustain the public (mis)perception equating “anti-sex trafficking” with “anti-sex work,” and legitimize the end-demand and carceral feminist anti-trafficking practices that primarily police, censor, and oppress the agency, behaviors, and needs of structurally marginalized women. As Ditmore (2015) noted, the anti-sex work and end-demand discourse is built upon “a moral high ground” and comes “at a very high human cost” (p. 123). As social (justice) work practitioners and researchers become increasingly invested in confronting the injustice of trafficking in persons, we must give analytical attention to and continually reflect on the multiple possible ways through which our alleged “social justice work” is built on the cost of the safety and rights of other social groups and further marginalizes these groups in material ways. We must see misrepresentation as a critical dimension of social injustice and strive to understand how representational injustice may be (re)produced and perpetuated through the use of language and narratives in discursive spaces, especially in those platforms highly visible to the public (e.g., in this study, websites of anti-trafficking groups). To this end, a very important step is to acknowledge the constructedness of “social” issues and how social and political powers operate in tandem with linguistic devices to legitimize particular voices and discourses while dismissing alternative ones. For instance, although no one doubts the criminality of trafficking in persons and the importance of anti-trafficking work, we must critically engage ourselves with the historical and political dynamics that facilitate the construction of trafficking discourses and how such a construction furthers particular social and policy practices. One example is the construction of the definition of trafficking in the UN Trafficking Protocol where “sex trafficking” becomes distinct from “labor trafficking,” and how subsequent anti-trafficking narratives and policies have been built around further stigmatizing, dehumanizing, and policing women of color in sex work industries and/or in migration and those who are profiled as belonging to these social groups. This paper joins a growing body of critical works to show that critical discourse analytical techniques can serve as a powerful tool to assist us in surfacing and confronting the representational injustice in the production of essentialist narratives that erase contexts, diversities, and human agency.
The lens of representational intersectionality, used as a central organizing concept directing my analysis, shows great promise for challenging the misrepresentation of marginalized social groups. Although the concept of intersectionality has been widely engaged as both a theoretical and an analytical framework guiding much empirical social sciences research (Nichols & Stahl, 2019; Pugach et al., 2019), the conceptual use of intersectionality has been primarily on the structural dimension which concerns one's complex lived realities and identities shaped by multiple social and structural systems of privileges and oppressions. As we adopt an intersectional lens in anti-oppressive practice (Mehrotra, 2010; Simon et al., 2021) and critical reflection (Mattsson, 2014) in social work, we must attend to all three dimensions – structural, political, and representational – of intersectionality to fully deconstruct and challenge intersectional marginalization and oppression. For instance, much of the anti-trafficking educational texts examined in this study are centered around stereotyping, essentializing, and infantilizing people in the sex work industries (including those trafficked into commercial sex), all of which allow little room for the representation of the agency and subjectivity of people in structurally constrained conditions, the complex realities of people situated across diverse sectors of sex work, and the possible intersectional experiences of both forced and consensual labor in commercial sex. Such a failure to address intersectionality at the representational dimension, in addition to legitimizing many current anti-trafficking practices and policies with an “end-demand” orientation, has not only subjected already marginalized sex workers to more structural marginalization and oppressions in their daily lives (structural intersectionality) but also highly constrained the involvement of sex workers and sex worker rights activists in social and political advocacy against trafficking, violence, and harassments (political intersectionality). For instance, the dominant discursive profiling of women in sex work as victims has made the involvement of sex workers and activists in anti-violence (including anti-trafficking) advocacy very challenging, as they must confront and navigate both the multiple forms of violence at work and the misrepresentations of their lived experiences of violence. In a recently published book, We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival (West & Horn, 2021), Selena The Stripper commented powerfully in its Foreword on sex workers’ involvement in the 2017 MeToo Movement:
[Y]ou may not have heard much from sex workers. […] Those of us on the front lines of the fight for decriminalization often hesitate to admit to the abuses we have faced, for fear that our opponents will use our trauma against us to further crack down on our industry. (p. ix)
As social work positions itself as a “helping” profession with ending social injustice in its core mission, it is critical that we, as practitioners and researchers, give ongoing attention to representational injustice and see this form of injustice as part of our larger conceptualization of racial and social injustice. Problematizing and disrupting the misrepresentations in dominant discourses allow us to support and advocate for the storytelling, interventions, and policies that are structurally competent, rights-inclusive, and centered on humanization. Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming the very source of oppression and injustice that we strive to dismantle.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professor Eunjung Lee and Roz Spafford for their suggestions and feedback on several drafts of this manuscript as well as the two anonymous reviewers whose review comments and insights have greatly strengthened this work.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
