A number of years in the past, after I was a full-time member of the school on the Naval Postgraduate Faculty, school and employees have been required to undergo numerous trainings. One in all them was on tips on how to 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 usually 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, at the least, somebody who was beneath age. If it had a been a stay presenter, I might 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 cases during which adults voluntary partaking in voluntary capitalist acts have been known as intercourse traffickers.
I used to be proper to marvel. On at present’s Purpose web site, Purpose‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown interviews intercourse work researcher Tara Burns. The merchandise is titled “What Everybody Will get Incorrect About Intercourse Trafficking Legal guidelines,” Purpose, October 14, 2024.
Right here’s a key excerpt:
Burns: So, I assumed that there have been most likely folks on the market who have 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 injury and one thing good is definitely occurring for some individuals who actually need it.” What I discovered after I did my data request to seek out out the entire instances that had been charged beneath the brand new trafficking regulation: 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 have been charged with intercourse trafficking.
After I was designing the survey, I had put in there some questions to seek 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 have been two or thrice as prone to be sexually assaulted by police. And simply each different dangerous factor on the survey—being turned away from providers at shelters or by counselors or being turned away from making an attempt to report against the law—all of it was occurring to them two or thrice extra typically than to different intercourse employees.
So I had thought that there have been victims who have been being helped, however really it was these victims who have been being essentially the most harmed by the legal guidelines and the rhetoric. I believe the identical sorts of marginalizations that make folks susceptible to abuse inside the intercourse trade may also make folks susceptible to abuse by law enforcement officials and discrimination by shelters and stuff like that.
Observe the disgusting irony. We’re informed to look out for intercourse traffickers as a result of that may scale back the variety of folks pressured into prostitution. But when we cooperate, we’d nicely be serving to the police use drive in opposition to harmless non-coercive folks.
The entire thing is price studying.
