Fixing Broken Women: Examining the New York Anti-Trafficking Courts’ Mission to Reform Prostitution

• In Event: Quitting the Sex Trade: Pimps and Sex Workers and their Various Forms of Exiting

Abstract

Since September 2013 individuals arrested for prostitution and related offenses have been diverted from standard prosecution through the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts. A rather novel addition to the New York State Courts System’s expanding problem solving courts initiative, the trafficking courts have a stated mission to rescue victims of human trafficking from a life of violence, in addition to preventing them from falling prey to pimps and traffickers. In exchange for the paternalistic protection of the state, sex workers are thus compelled into pleading guilty, and subsequently forced into exiting sex work. This paper examines the ways sex workers triaged through New York’s HTIC make meaning of the intermittent social death imposed on them by the courts decisions, and how they adjust to life under the sex trafficking victim label.

Author

• Claudia Horning Cojocaru, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY