Creating Responsibilized Victims: Judicio-therapeutic approaches to the social control of prostitution

• In Event: 3245 - Pathways to Social Justice

Abstract

I draw from theories of neoliberal governmentality in criminology and gendered theories of victimhood to examine the nature and outcome of rehabilitation-based approaches to prostitution. The project is an ethnographically grounded mixed-methods research study of a criminal diversion program for women charged with prostitution-related offenses. I use quantitative analysis of survey data of all approximately 250 clients who have enrolled in the program to establish outcome measures of program efficacy. I also conducted 18 months of ethnographic field work and qualitative interviews with over 50 program clients, staff, and related experts to understand the underlying social processes through which these outcomes are produced.
My analysis reveals that the program operates at the fault line between two conflicting penal orientations: (1) victimization, as manifest in the anti-trafficking movement’s successful framing of women in prostitution as victims in need of rescue, and (2) responsibilization, which is in line with the drug court addiction treatment model on which the program is based. I demonstrate the diversion program produces responsibilized victims, making women solely culpable for their circumstances and aiming its remedies at their ostensibly helpless status as victims while also failing to recognize, much less address, structural realities. Although designed to diminish a punitive approach to the policing of prostitution, these contrasting carceral logics reinforce one another in order to ultimately create a gendered version of responsibilization through which the state can justify the increased criminalization of women through conferring their status as victims. I find that by virtue of a range of factors, including patterns of arrest, program policies, and differential access to additional resources, the program has disparate impacts on women of color, poor women, and transgender women.

Author

• Lillian Taylor Jungleib, University of California, Irvine