Anti-trafficking, Policing, and State Violence
Jennifer Suchland, Associate Professor, Ohio State University, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., @mightykale
What is the relationship between policing, state violence and anti-trafficking? That is the question we should double-down on at this historical moment, as global outrage and protesting demand justice for the Black lives killed by racist police. There is a deep and serious connection between anti-trafficking strategies and systems of oppression and violence endemic to policing, border control, prisons, detention centers, and surveillance. These systems are sources of violence that remain at the center of the anti-trafficking apparatus because human trafficking is primarily understood and approached as a problem of criminal justice. While countless activists and scholars have exposed these connections, the most dominant approaches to anti-trafficking still actively align or are complicit with systems of injustice such over-policing, deportation, and mass incarceration.
At this moment, some anti-trafficking organizations and advocates have denounced racism but have not taken a hard look at how their work may implicitly support racist, anti-migrant, heteropatriarchal policing. Playing on the widespread public sympathy for “modern day slavery,” anti-trafficking advocates often validate and reinforce policing and criminal justice institutions. For example, in my local context of Columbus, Ohio, Mayor Andrew Ginther highlighted the Police and Community Together Team (PACT), a special force created to address human trafficking, as the main positive example of community policing in his first public response to the mass protesting against police violence here. PACT was created in 2018 when the previous vice squad was disbanded in the wake of the police killing of Donna Dalton, a 23-year-old white mother of two who was murdered by police. Vice Squad Officer Andrew Mitchell detained Dalton on the pretense of picking her up for solicitation. Instead, he forced her to have sex to gain her freedom. In self-defense, Dalton stabbed Mitchell in the hand for which Mitchell fatally shot her three times. Mitchell was already under FBI investigation for kidnapping and had at least eight complaints of misconduct since 2016.
With the creation of PACT there was a rhetorical shift to a “more humane approach to prostitution.” This approach is the result of anti-trafficking advocacy in which people (primarily white cis gendered women) who are involved in sex work are viewed as victims rather than criminals. The anti-prostitution approach to anti-trafficking dominates the Ohio advocacy agenda and this is evident in the “softer” approach to policing. Yet, this approach is not new because it avoids the fact that arresting, detaining, and criminally prosecuting sex workers and people involved in sexual economies are still the primary strategies of anti-trafficking. These strategies are part of a racist system of surveillance and over-policing of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) in the U.S., especially street-based, immigrant, queer, and trans folks in sex work. This so-called more humane approach does not de-escalate policing, surveillance, and detaining of sex workers. In fact, according to police records, PACT made 258 arrests between September 2018 and December 2019. It is reported that the rate of arrest of PACT is nearly the same as the old Vice Unit and the Acting Deputy Police Chief Jennifer Knight stated that “they expect to arrest even more women as their neighborhood efforts ramp up.”
Anti-trafficking advocates who support PACT give their implicit support to a state apparatus invested in arresting, detaining, and incarcerating -- strategies that perpetuate state-sanctioned murder, racist violence, sexual violence, and gender violence. The horrible story of Donna Dalton’s murder exposes not simply the evil behavior of one cop. It exposes the systematic ways that people engaged in sex work (especially street based economies), poor people, and people with addictions, are criminalized, surveilled and susceptible to police harassment and violence. It is widely reported that sex workers experience and fear police violence. A glaring reality that anti-trafficking groups often miss or ignore is that the police are in fact a significant source of the violence for the population they intend to serve. What that means is that the “softer” approach used by PACT does not in fact reduce police violence because rates of arrest are the same if not more than the previous vice squad. And, yet, anti-trafficking advocates too often are willing to accept this reality as they coordinate with police and diversion courts in the name of saving victims.
Promoting a criminal justice approach to anti-trafficking reinforces and intensifies the policing, surveillance, and arresting of populations who are already over-policed, surveilled and incarcerated - Black folks, Indigenous people, people of color, immigrants, and the poor. The policing problem at the center of the mainstream anti-trafficking agenda also includes the implicit support of the systems of oppression and violence endemic to policing, border control, prisons, and detention centers. The millions of people protesting in the U.S. and beyond is precisely about those systems of oppression. Yet, anti-trafficking organizations often do not see their work as intersecting with the work of combating racist policing and mass incarceration. Here in Columbus, the Police Department is known for its racial bias, excessive force and killing of Black residents, including Tyre King a 13-year old who was fatally shot in 2016 by a CPD officer. The problem of racist policing is here in Columbus because it is endemic to the institution. Thus, when local anti-trafficking groups unequivocally support the police as “partners” and not also as an institution that needs radical transformation, they in effect operate against those who are working to abolish state violence and to dismantle white supremacy. Advocates who are invested in anti-trafficking need to connect the dots and approach their work in alliance and solidarity with local organizations that are challenging the ongoing terror enacted on Black people as well as Indigenous and people of color through state-sanctioned murder, racist violence, sexual violence, and gender violence.
We are at an important flashpoint right now and it is time to directly address the policing and state violence at the center of anti-trafficking and redesign the dominant carceral approach to human trafficking. While there is a vast literature in critical trafficking studies and many mobilizations at the forefront of anti-carceral and transformative justice, I highlight three important examples that all anti-trafficking advocates, especially in the U.S., should be aware of and use to radically rethink how to approach anti-violence work.
Point One: women and girls of color are punished for defending themselves from domestic and sexual violence
Most attention in anti-trafficking interventions is towards the gender and sexual violence of forced sex work, or sex trafficking. Yet, there is little attention to those who are incarcerated because they defended themselves from gender and sexual violence. Anti-trafficking efforts should center the experiences of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other women and girls of color, especially queer and trans folks whose experiences are often erased in mainstream social justice efforts. Given the history of racist violence and sexual terror exacted on BIPOC, anti-trafficking should focus less on saving and on more on anti-racist alliances with liberation movements. For example, anti-trafficking strategies need to be in alignment with the principles and work of mobilizations in the name of women and girls incarcerated for self-defense. We can learn from and support Survived & Punished, a national coalition of survivors, organizers, victim advocates and experts and formerly incarcerated people. Growing out of the work of the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, “S&P organizes to de-criminalize efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations.” Women, girls, femmes, trans men and gender non-binary folks of color are targets of over-policing and incarceration because their bodies are criminalized. If that problem is not at the center of what anti-trafficking advocates aim to abolish, then their work will perpetuate rather than upend gender and sexual violence.
Point Two: carceral approaches to human rights perpetuate state violence
The argument against carceral feminism has long been made by numerous scholars and activists. Yet, mainstream anti-trafficking projects (state organized and in the non-profit sector) continue to primarily focus attention on finding victims and prosecuting criminals. This approach assumes that arrest and prosecution of the crime of trafficking will not only punish criminals and bring victims justice but also reduce trafficking. That logic is flawed in many ways, including that it reinforces the use of police and prisons which are sources of systematic and systemic violence. The logic of carceral human rights also assumes that justice for the victim hinges primarily on the harm of trafficking and not also or primarily on systemic racism, poverty, heteropatriarchy, transphobia and white supremacy. This is glaringly evident in the case of trafficking and sexual and gender violence against Indigenous women and girls. Indigenous lawyers, advocates and others have fought a long battle with the U.S. government over the sovereign right of Native tribes to prosecute sexual and gender violence that occur on tribal lands. The remedy of prosecution in a federal court in the case of trafficking does not address the root of gender and sexual violence against Indigenous women and girls – settler colonialism. According to legal scholar and advocate Sarah Deer, colonialism introduced rape as a tool to destroy Indigenous peoples. For example, the Sioux Uprising in 1862 was in fact related to the failure of the encroaching white settler state to investigate the sexual mistreatment of Indian women by white men. That history finds a contemporary manifestation in the fact that tribal courts do not have full jurisdiction to prosecute or enact tribal-centric resolutions to gender and sexual violence on tribal lands when non-Natives are the perpetrators. This means that non-Native perpetrators act with impunity. Thus, sexual and gender violence is just as much about the individual act as it is about the settler logic that allows for that impunity to exist. There are many problems and harms tied to a carceral response to gender violence, and the ongoing unaddressed violence of the settler state is just one.
Point Three: human trafficking is inseparable from precarious and exploitative labor
The harm, violence, and exploitation of human trafficking is not an aberration of neoliberal capitalism, rather it is endemic to it. Anti-trafficking advocacy pays little acknowledgement to (and even less criticism of) the structural violence of neoliberal capitalism that requires and perpetuates exploitative labor, especially the gendered and racialized labor of migrants. The work of combating human trafficking must center the decriminalization of migrants and mobility, to demilitarize the border, and abolish immigration detention centers. The respectability politics that surrounds anti-trafficking advocacy in the United States not only constructs a narrow and problematic “perfect victim” narrative, but it restrains the ways that anti-trafficking can align and conspire with migrant rights organizations. The Coalition for Immokolee Workers is one organization that has gained wider recognition for their work linking migrant rights, labor exploitation and human trafficking. However, there is much more to be done to re-focus anti-trafficking advocacy towards addressing the violence that is rooted in, rather than an anomaly to, our economic systems.
As thousands of us take to the streets and intensify our efforts to end racist police violence and dismantle white supremacy, those invested in the cause of anti-trafficking need to take a long hard look at the rhetoric, institutions, and experiences in which it is invested. The hard truth is that those same systems of racism and violence that many are now denouncing in the name of #BlackLivesMatter are in fact the same that are protected and perpetuated from the inside of anti-trafficking agendas.