The Trafficking-Technology Nexus

• In Event: Critical Carceral Studies in Action: Geographies, Discourses, and Technologies

Abstract

This paper examines how and why technology has become part a part of anti-trafficking discussions in the United States, particularly those focused on domestic minor sex trafficking [DMST]. Drawing on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with anti-trafficking stakeholders, I suggest that widespread anxieties and overzealous optimism about technology’s role in facilitating and disrupting trafficking belie other pressing trends underway, developments I refer to as the 4As of sociotechnical anti-trafficking innovation (Musto and Boyd 2014)– and which refer to heightened awareness of particular online sites assumed to promote sex trafficking, the cultivation of automated, machine learning techniques for identifying “high risk” victims, the amassment of digital and geolocation data from mobile phones and third-party networks to pursue anti-trafficking investigations and the augmentation of governmental anti-trafficking efforts with third-party collaborators. This paper and the larger book project in which it is excerpted suggests that an examination of technology has purchase for students of gender, critical carceral studies, and collaborative governmentality by tracing how widespread attention and sociotechnical innovation in the trafficking space has underwritten new methods of surveillance, exclusion, and social control, both for individuals seen as “at risk” for sex trafficking and the people suspected of exploiting them.

Author

• Jennifer Musto, Wellesley College