Tag Archives: LGBTQ

Why Jane Doe doesn’t get to be a sex trafficking victim

In detailing the story of “Jane Doe,” a 16-year-old transgender youth stuck in an adult prison in Connecticut for over six weeks without even being charged, Shane Bauer at Mother Jones steps back to describe the context in which Jane grew up. In reading this horrific (but not that uncommon) account of abuse, neglect, poverty, and dreadful state interventions, I came across this sentence:

“While in group homes, she says she was sexually assaulted by staffers, and at 15, she became a sex worker and was once locked up for weeks and forced to have sex with “customers” until she escaped.” — Mother Jones

What makes this sentence so startling is the choice of the term “sex work.” Whether the author realizes it or not, this term is extraordinarily political, especially when applied to an abused and entrapped teenager. I couldn’t help but wonder why the author didn’t identify Jane as a victim of human trafficking.

Commercial sexual exploitation of minors

Over the last few years, I’ve been working with an amazing collection of researchers in an effort to better understand technology’s relationship to human trafficking and, more specifically, the commercial sexual exploitation of children. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the politics of sex work and the political framing of sex trafficking. What’s been infuriating is to watch the way in which journalists and the public reify a Hollywood narrative of what trafficking is supposed to look like — innocent young girl abducted from happy, healthy, not impoverished home with loving parents and then forced into sexual acts by a cruel older man. For a lot of journalists, this is the only narrative that “counts.” These are the portraits that are held up and valorized, so much so that an advocate reportedly fabricated her personal story to get attention for the cause.

The stark reality of how youth end up being commercially sexually exploited is much darker and implicates many more people in power. All too often, we’re talking about a child growing up in poverty, surrounded by drug/alcohol addiction. More often than not, the parents are part of the problem. If the child wasn’t directly pimped out by the parents, there’s a high likelihood that s/he was abused or severely neglected. The portrait of a sex trafficking victim is usually a white or Asian girl, but darker skinned youth are more likely to be commercially sexually exploited and boys (and especially queer youth) are victimized far more than people acknowledge.

Many youth who are commercially exploited are not pimped out in the sense of having a controlling adult who negotiates their sexual acts. All too often, youth begin trading sex for basic services — food, shelter, protection. This is part of what makes the conversation about sex work vs. human trafficking so difficult. The former presumes agency, even though that’s not always the case while the latter assumes that no agency is possible. When it comes to sex work, there’s a spectrum. Sex work by choice, sex work by circumstance, and sex work by coercion. The third category is clearly recognizable as human trafficking, but when it comes to minors, most anti-trafficking advocates and government actors argue that it’s all trafficking. Except when that label’s not convenient for other political efforts. And this is where I find myself scratching my head at how Jane Doe’s abuse is framed.

How should we label Jane Doe’s abuse?

By the sounds of the piece in Mother Jones, Jane Doe most likely started trading sex for services. Perhaps she was also looking for love and validation. This is not that uncommon, especially for queer and transgender youth. For this reason, perhaps it is valuable to imply that she has agency in her life, to give her a label of sex work to suggest that these choices are her choices.

Yet, her story shows that things are far more complicated than that. It looks as though those who were supposed to protect her — staff at group homes — took advantage of her. This would also not be that uncommon for youth who end up commercially sexually exploited. Too many sexually exploited youth that I’ve met have had far worse relationships with parents and state actors than any client. But the clincher for me is her account of having been locked up and forced to have sex until she escaped. This is coercion through-and-through. Regardless of why Doe entered into the sex trade or how we want to read her agency in this process, there is no way to interpret this kind of circumscribed existence and abuse as anything other than trafficking.

So why isn’t she identified as a trafficking victim? Why aren’t human trafficking advocacy organizations raising a stink about her case? Why aren’t anti-trafficking journalists telling her story?

The reality is that she’s not a good example for those who want clean narratives. Her case shows the messiness of human trafficking. The way in which commercial exploitation of minors is entwined with other dynamics of poverty and abuse. The ways in which law enforcement isn’t always helpful. (Ah, yes, our lovely history of putting victims into jail because “it’s safer there.”) Jane Doe isn’t white and her gender identity confounds heteronormative anti-trafficking conversations. She doesn’t fit people’s image of a victim of commercial sexual exploitation. So it’s safer to avoid terms like trafficking so as to not muddy the waters even though the water was muddy in the first place.

(This entry was first posted on June 19, 2014 at Medium under the title “Why Jane Doe doesn’t get to be a sex trafficking victim” as part of The Message.)

The Politics of Queering Anything

Sitting at an academic conference years ago, I was struck by the marginalization of various voices under the guise of inclusion. There were queer panels and race panels and gender panels. In sampling those panels and various other panels, I started to see a trend in the audiences. In short, the audiences attracted to those panels identified as a member of that particular identity group or were allies. And I realized that panels that were not identity-marked tended to not have theories of gender/race/sexuality woven into them. When panels are marked through identity issues, people choose whether or not they should attend based on their identity politics, failing to recognize how critical analyses of race/gender/sexuality are broadly relevant. Thus, in marking panels through identity, this conference fundamentally marginalized the population it was theoretically including.

A few weeks ago, I helped organize a conference; I was one of the program committee members and coordinated three invited sessions. In the wind, I heard that a few folks were disappointed that there were no LGBT-specific panels. The assumption was that queer issues were forgotten. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only did all of the panels that I coordinated have queer-identified panelists on them but they all integrated queer theory into their arguments, whether explicitly or implicitly. I purposely left these issues unmarked in my description of the panels because my goal was to make sure that these issues were integrated seamlessly into a conversation without making identity politics the organizing theme of any of the panels.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m a huge fan of creating safe space to have serious conversations about identity politics, but I’m also determined to bring the lessons from queer theory (and race studies and feminism) into broader conversations. Sure – I’d love to call out these frameworks explicitly and have everyone who should hear the concepts come to the room. But, at the end of the day, I prioritize strategy. So I’ve gone out of my way to integrate these frameworks into my own work without ever calling them out explicitly, specifically so that those who are constitutionally incapable of listening to any argument that involves identity politics will accidentally listen to the underlying theories without realizing it, will incorporate the tenets of queer theory into their understanding of the world without realizing that this is where the roots of those frameworks come from.

At the root of queer theory is a very simple practice: questioning what is “normal” or normative, complicating any simple framework by asking critical questions about who is excluded and what is assumed. Anyone who has studied queer theory immediately gets how this framework is useful beyond analyses of sexuality, yet those who haven’t been trained as such see two scary words: queer and theory. Depending on the audience, either word can prompt a serious phobia. But that framework does more than answer questions about sexuality; it allows us to interrogate any supposedly stable system.

My favorite book in the world is Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. It’s a work of fiction – a novel – that lays out all of the core tenets of queer theory without ever telling the reader that that’s what’s going on. It’s a distinctly queer book, but it’s meant to help those who have theory phobia understand theory without realizing that they’re reading theory. Candy-coated vitamins if you will. One of the lessons I took from reading that book is that, if you want to get a message across, it’s important to recognize people’s anxieties and discomforts at face value and try to present information to them in a way that’s palatable and embraceable. Let them understand through a set of language that they can recognize instead of alienating them with language that terrifies them.

This form of “selling out” is bound to piss off anyone who believes that failing to mark queerness is a sign of weakness, a form of re-closeting, a way of undermining queer experiences, etc. I can totally hear and respect that. But I’m a pragmatist. And I’m more than willing to “sell out” if it means that I can get more people to understand why the core tenets of queer theory can help them understand structural inequality and systematic marginalization. I’m willing to let that go unmarked if doing so helps.

I integrate all sorts of queer theory into my arguments without signaling explicitly that that’s what I’m doing. And I often include queer theory references as “in-jokes” in ways that don’t make them visible to the untrained eye. I recognize that my path has strengths and weaknesses, but I’m also curious how others balance these issues. How do you integrate complex or potentially alienating frameworks into your work so that people can consume them? Or do you refuse to make things palatable? And if so, why? Are you horribly offended by the choices I’ve made?