Black and White and Read All Over: Considerations of Race in the Identification, and Prosecution of Sex Trafficking in the United States

• In Event: Difficult-to-Detect-Violence: An Empirical and Political Discussion

Abstract

Human trafficking is a crime that is built around force, mobility, and organization, connecting nouns like cargo container, trans-shipment points, slaves, and US ports with verbs and adjectives like drugged, resold, beaten, and smuggled, as well as locales like Albania, the Philippines, China, Cambodia, Moldova, and West Africa. However, a third of all trafficking cases in the US involve domestic minors (U.S. Department of Justice 2011) and over half of all officially confirmed trafficking suspects in the US are African American males (Banks and Kyckelhahn 2011). Much of this contemporary use of sex-trafficking laws involves the combination of easily identifiable racial and sexual tropes and difficult to identify violence, raising questions about fairness of application, commensurability of punishment, and a relationship between identity and culpability that is often difficult to separate in crimes involving difficult-to-detect violence. This paper draws on empirical research in street sex markets in New York City and Atlantic City, and a federal anti-trafficking task force, as well as considerations drawn from federal trafficking trial proceedings to question the current use of sex trafficking laws against pimps, love-companions and other third parties to sexual commerce.

Author

• Anthony Marcus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice