How Antitrafficking Social Movement Organizations Frame Sex Trafficking

• In Event: Understanding Human and Sex Trafficking

Abstract

Service providers who are part of the National Human Trafficking Hotline’s Referral Network offer social and legal services to survivors. Antitrafficking legislation and services have expanded rapidly. Antitrafficking organizations (ASMOs) play an active role in defining sex trafficking, ensuring trafficking is criminalized, and garnering support. There are three types of core framing tasks that ASMOs engage in: diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, and motivational framing. ASMOs utilize stereotypical frames of trafficking to gain support and attention. The problem of sex trafficking is the exploitation and abuse of survivors of sex trafficking. The frequency, severity and cruelty is emphasized. Activists connect sex trafficking to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Hope activists believe that sex trafficking is part of a cycle of abuse, often starting in childhood. Hope and Church Ladies activists believe sex trafficking stems from the legality of pornography. Activists believe that trafficking will never be completely eradicated, but the goal is to reduce it. Activists motivate others to action by emphasizing the severity of sex trafficking, that it occurs “in our own backyards,” that the problem is urgent, life threatening, and victims need to be “rescued.” In doing so, I argue that activists create a moral panic.

Author

• Jenn Cheek, Metropolitan State University of Denver