Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States - Softcover

Musto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520281969 ISBN 13: 9780520281967

Publisher: University of California Press, 2013

Synopsis

Control and Protect explores the meaning and significance of efforts designed to combat sex trafficking in the United States. A striking case study of the new ways in which law enforcement agents, social service providers, and nongovernmental advocates have joined forces in this campaign, this book reveals how these collaborations consolidate state power and carceral control. This book examines how partnerships forged in the name of fighting domestic sex trafficking have blurred the boundaries between punishment and protection, victim and offender, and state and nonstate authority.
 

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Musto is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College.

From the Back Cover

"Jennifer Musto's work provides much needed on-the-ground critical perspective on the ideologies, methods, and effects of domestic U.S. anti-trafficking efforts. Her fascinating tour into the experiences of the criminalized victim-rescuees and the protective rescuer-incarcerators reveals the inherent inconsistencies and pitfalls of the coming together of U.S. criminalization methodologies and the complexities of sex trading and trafficking in the United States. A must-read for those seeking holistic understanding of the nature and impact of U.S. antitrafficking efforts."--Karen E. Bravo, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and International Affairs, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law

"Jennifer Musto provides critical insight into the wide-ranging social implications of the legal definition of human trafficking in the United States. Based on extensive qualitative research, Control and Protect explores the contradictions inherent in defining and dealing with domestic sex trafficking in the U.S. justice system. Examining anti-sex trafficking initiatives both on the streets and online, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of responses to combatting human trafficking in the United States."--Kerry Ward, Associate Professor, Rice University

"Musto has written an important and original book that carefully analyzes the practical consequences of policies, alliances, and technologies that are designed to protect victims of 'domestic minor sex trafficking.' Drawing upon an impressive body of primary research, she documents how and why recent efforts to protect vulnerable children and youth have too often translated into forms of incarceration, punishment, and surveillance. Essential reading for anyone interested in human trafficking, criminal justice, or critical humanitarianism."--Joel Quirk, Associate Professor and Head of Department, Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

From the Inside Flap

&;Jennifer Musto&;s work provides much needed on-the-ground critical perspective on the ideologies, methods, and effects of domestic U.S. anti-trafficking efforts.  Her fascinating tour into the experiences of the criminalized victim-rescuees and the protective rescuer-incarcerators reveals the inherent inconsistencies and pitfalls of the coming together of U.S. criminalization methodologies and the complexities of sex trading and trafficking in the United States.  A must-read for those seeking holistic understanding of the nature and impact of U.S. antitrafficking efforts.&;&;Karen E. Bravo, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and International Affairs, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law

"Jennifer Musto provides critical insight into the wide-ranging social implications of the legal definition of human trafficking in the United States. Based on extensive qualitative research, Control and Protect explores the contradictions inherent in defining and dealing with domestic sex trafficking in the U.S. justice system. Examining anti-sex trafficking initiatives both on the streets and online, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of responses to combatting human trafficking in the United States."&;Kerry Ward, Associate Professor, Rice University

"Musto has written an important and original book that carefully analyzes the practical consequences of policies, alliances, and technologies that are designed to protect victims of &;domestic minor sex trafficking.&; Drawing upon an impressive body of primary research, she documents how and why recent efforts to protect vulnerable children and youth have too often translated into forms of incarceration, punishment, and surveillance. Essential reading for anyone interested in human trafficking, criminal justice, or critical humanitarianism."&;Joel Quirk, Associate Professor and Head of Department, Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Control and Protect

Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States

By Jennifer Musto

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28196-7

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii, 
List of Tables, viii, 
Preface, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xvii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Collaboration Meets Carceral Protection, 27, 
2 Investigations, 48, 
3 Trafficking, Technology, and "Data-Driven" Justice, 68, 
4 The Switch Up, 86, 
5 Curative Harms and the "Revolving Door" of the Criminal Justice System, 116, 
Conclusion, 137, 
Appendix, 149, 
Notes, 159, 
Bibliography, 195, 
Index, 217, 

CHAPTER 1

Collaboration Meets Carcerai Protection

I met fourteen-year-old Che, a brilliantly witty, fast-talking Latina teenager, in June 2013, at a private shelter for youth who have been involved in domestic sex trafficking situations. In 2012, one year before I met her, Che had been identified by federal agents in a sting operation. On the day of the raid, the agents banged on the door and swiftly entered the hotel room where Che was staying with the adults she referred to as "her people." The man accused of pimping Che was also in the room, as were two other women, one African American woman and one white woman, both of whom were also involved in prostitution and later charged. When the agents found her, they handcuffed and questioned her. Later she told me she was placed in juvenile detention.

A year after the raid, Che's anger and frustration were still palpable, but not for the reasons I anticipated. She was not upset about being briefly detained, which she matter-of-factly compared to being put in a daycare facility, albeit one where the girls were separated from the boys. Instead, she was mad that the agents had tricked her into giving them information about the man accused of being her pimp, and she harbored feelings of guilt about the unwitting role she had played in sending him to prison, a sentence that would make it difficult for him to see his daughter and require him to register as a sex offender upon release.

Che's story is notable, not only because or her critical take on the raid that led to her recovery, which is to say the law-enforcement effort that led to her removal from a situation in which sex trafficking was alleged and later legally confirmed to be taking place. What is additionally important about her story is what she experienced after she was identified in the raid and after she was placed at and then subsequently ran away from a placement designed to assist her. When Che ran away — from what in antitrafficking terms may be referred to as the protection phase of her recovery — a local police unit that works on domestic sex trafficking cases was called. Members of the unit exchanged text messages with Che and set up a date with her to catch her in the act of soliciting sex. It worked. Che was arrested and then taken back to the shelter.

Che's post-federal-raid trajectory reads like a zigzagging maze punctuated by moments of protection interspersed with instances of punishment. To recap: following her identification in the raid, she was handcuffed and detained. Later she was offered assistance in the form of shelter placement. Then, after running away from the shelter, she was arrested and returned to it. What Che's story signals is that when the carceral state is situated as one of the main systems of first response to intervene on at-risk victims' behalves, law enforcement and some non-state partners sometimes play a role in exposing them to various types of control and punishment, even if their main intention is squarely focused on securing victims' protection and keeping them safe.

* * *

Notable changes are afoot with respect to individuals, particularly sex trade-involved girls in the United States. Where once they might have been profiled by police as juvenile offenders, they are now, thanks to widespread national public attention to human trafficking and the passage of federal and state anti-trafficking and safe harbor legislation, provisionally viewed by local law-enforcement agents and their nonstate partners as victims of domestic sex trafficking, not offenders, replete with traumatic pasts, turbulent family histories, and violent pimps controlling them, factors that authorize state intervention. Not only have "at-risk" domestic victims received heightened state and nonstate attention aimed at securing their protection, they have also been the targets of law-enforcement coordinated, social-service assisted interventions that may include arrest, detention, or technological surveillance — all under the auspices of helping them.

The idea that sex-trade involved individuals, especially girls may be classified as victims of domestic sex trafficking yet encounter interventions that can include punishment grates against mainstream expectations about what ought to happen to a group of people legally defined as victims of crimes, both in international protocols such as the Palermo Protocol and to domestic statutes like state and federal antitrafficking laws. That some youth meet the federal definition of sex trafficking but may nonetheless be arrested, detained, or diverted to specialized courts or programs also clashes with campaigns instructing the public that services are available to victims once identified, and that members of the American public need to "look beneath the surface" to facilitate their protection.

My suggestion is not that efforts to identify and protect at-risk victims universally translate into punitive results. There aren't sufficient data on punitive or protective interventions targeting domestic sex trafficking victims to make this claim, and neither are some forms of punishment ever counted as such, issues discussed in greater depth in chapter 4. Yet what I want to complicate is the premise that finding at-risk victims "hiding in plain sight" will automatically lead to efforts that are protective, narrowly defined here as activities not reliant on punishment, criminalization, or control in the form of handcuffs, arrest, detention, probation, or court-monitored supervision. A more nuanced assessment is needed, because coordinated state and nonstate efforts to assist vulnerable groups — for the purposes of this chapter, youth trafficked for sex — are sometimes assumed to have broken with the more punitive methods of the past. Yet interventions in the name of domestic sex trafficking victims' protection at times merge with broader efforts to control, discipline, and punish them.

This chapter explores how efforts to identify and protect "at-risk" victims of domestic sex trafficking have given rise to interventions that blur carceral control with protection. In it, I examine how and why arresting girls in order to help them or detaining them for their safety are not always viewed by frontline antitrafficking actors as diametrically opposed goals. On the contrary, some of the law-enforcement orchestrated, nonstate-assisted antitrafficking efforts I have learned about subject people deemed "at risk" of domestic sex trafficking to different situations where assistance is secured through encounters and the use of carceral methods that bear a closer likeness to punishment. That punitive techniques may be leveraged in the service of protection is itself worthy of attention. Yet equally significant is that collaboration — a much-vaunted ideal in formal antitrafficking circles — allows overlapping forms of control and protection to occur. Indeed, though cooperation between state and nonstate actors is commonly framed as a way to achieve more responsive, victim-centered anti-sex-trafficking efforts, my suggestion is that collaboration holds the potential to outsource the protection and control of at-risk victims to state and nonstate actors alike.

COLLABORATION WITHIN ANTITRAFFICKING NETWORKS

Researchers Mitali Thakor and danah boyd have likened antitrafficking activities in the United States to a networked enterprise, a model where different actors are situated at "various nodes of the network relative to one another" Whether one describes interactions between different antitrafficking actors as collaborative or networked, what both of these frameworks suggest is that on-the-ground activities to respond to sex trafficking can include bringing different actors from disparate backgrounds together to respond.

The specific sliver of the antitrafficking universe I observed most closely centered on localized law-enforcement activities in general and interviews and observations of a few officers and police units whose work includes investigating domestic sex trafficking in particular. Yet equally instructive to learning about a select few local police efforts to respond to domestic sex trafficking was having the chance to learn about some of the other actors they partner with — social-service providers, nongovernmental advocates, faith-based actors, and technology experts among them — whose own antitrafficking work loosely constellates around local and federal law-enforcement activities. What research on a few highly localized collaborative networks impressed upon me is that it is misleading to view anti-sex-trafficking efforts focused on domestic victims as something solely undertaken by sworn local police officers or federal agents. In reality, social-service providers, victim advocates, representatives of for-profit companies, technology experts, and enterprising researchers together with police, prosecutors, federal agents, probation officers, judges, public defenders, and members of the public play a hand, even if limited, in supporting, supplementing, and in some instances supplanting activities typically associated frontline police activity. Sometimes those pushing for carceral interventions are nonstate actors, rather than individual law-enforcement agents or their agencies.

The idea that nonstate actors may work in support of rather than in opposition to law-enforcement efforts complicates earlier research pointing to the tensions between law-enforcement and social-service responses to trafficking. Amy Farrell and Stephanie Fahy have observed, for instance, that service providers are often "unwilling to alert law enforcement about human trafficking victims they are assisting out of fear that the victims will be harmed by the criminal-justice system." Table 1 presents a breakdown of NGO and state-based approaches to human trafficking and their corresponding aims. This list is not exhaustive. Rather, it is aimed at showing these two approaches and the different goals they are assumed to produce.

The premise that the criminal-justice system's de facto agenda of "identifying and punishing offenders" is at odds with service providers' goal of assisting trafficked persons and providing them with restorative services needs updating, or least ought to be tempered. That is because it does not account for the collaborative partnerships that have been formed between state and nonstate actors since the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in the United States and as attention to trafficking has expanded to include victims of domestic sex trafficking who are U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

In a U.S. context, state and nonstate activities sometimes converge, some of which can be traced to the U.S. government's efforts since the early 2000s to facilitate cooperative arrangements between different actors to deal with trafficking through federally funded task forces. For instance, Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) task forces have been formed to address human trafficking involving migrants and domestic trafficking situations involving children. In addition to creating a formal structure for bringing different actors together, task forces have also aimed to strengthen coordination and information sharing between local and federal law-enforcement agents and selected nongovernmental task force members.

A few people I interviewed participated in the OVC, BJA, and the Department of Justice's Innocence Lost task force. Zack, a federal prosecutor and member of one of the collaborative Bureau of Justice human trafficking task forces explained the twofold mission of the work of his task force this way: "to rescue victims of human trafficking and restore them and prosecute the traffickers. ... We worked [at] those two things hand-in-hand with our NGO community. ... We have coordination on every case." Zack was direct about the initial tensions that surrounded his task force's activities. "We certainly did start off somewhat misaligned ... law enforcement has a mission, and that's to get the bad guy. Social-service organizations have a mission, and that's to help the poor victim." It took a big case and a sizeable federal grant, equally divided between the law-enforcement and social-service sides, to bridge some of the cultural divide in the task force.

Though it is difficult to quantify the scale and impact of collaborative interventions in the United States, Zack's note about the grant money attached to human-trafficking task forces offers cursory insight into the federal government's commitment to collaboration in monetary terms. Fiscal spending aside, formal human trafficking task forces (e.g., those funded by the federal or state governments) are important to my discussion of less well-known collaborations in the domestic anti-sex-trafficking field for two main reasons. First, task forces have advanced a model of governance predicated on state and non-state cooperation. Second, task forces are geared toward bringing different constituencies together to find victims and prosecute traffickers, yet also aim to raise public awareness of "the menace of trafficking and the plight of victims." In this way, task forces are significant in more widely promoting the message that trafficking is taking place in the United States and that coordination between different actors and groups is an important way to eradicate it.

The local collaborations I learned about typically weren't the public-facing versions. However, one collaboration did emerge from a federally funded task force where the impetus for one police detective to go off the task force script was the result of feeling like it wasn't sufficiently focused on activities he thought were most important. Grady, a detective in a unit that handles runaway and domestic minor sex trafficking cases offered insight into his own transition from participating on a formal task force to a local arrangement. Though he once sat on an Office for Victim of Crimes Human Trafficking task force, he felt isolated on it and found the politics overwhelming. He attributed some of the tensions to what he thought were some NGO members' myopic focus on victim rescues, with less attention paid to criminal prosecutions. Despite his misgivings, the task force was useful to him in one way; it gave him the opportunity to connect with Tina, an advocate who also sat on the task force. Together, they came up with their own local collaboration based on separate but mutually supportive goals. As he explained: "Her and I kinda felt like we were all alone. We were trying to do some things that the task force wasn't necessarily doing. ... She wanted to get much more intimate with the victims, and I wanted to get much more intimate with the crooks, with the perpetrators. So that's why her and I fit together in the beginning. We fit together like a perfect puzzle."

Grady's narrative offers insight as to how different professionals with seemingly different goals can find common ground cooperating in antitrafficking activities. For instance, the relationship Grady developed with Tina's nonprofit organization helped his unit figure out what to do with potential victims from the moment they are picked up to the time they are placed either in juvenile hall or some other placement. Grady said Tina is instrumental in helping manage victims so that he can focus his work and attention on investigating pimps, who he describes as the bad guys and "true criminals."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Control and Protect by Jennifer Musto. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520281969
• ISBN 13: 9780520281967
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250