Abstract
Erin C. Heil and Andrea J. Nichols’ Human Trafficking in the Midwest explores the role St. Louis, Missouri, plays in both domestic human trafficking and anti-trafficking advocacy efforts. Human trafficking—the fraud, force, and coercion of people in sexual or labor exploitation—is present in our cultural imaginary as trauma and violence centered in urban hubs or overseas. Challenging this “not in my backyard” mentality, Heil and Nichols explore the St. Louis bi-state region, highlighting the importance of the Midwest in national anti-human trafficking advocacy and policy efforts. The authors use semi-structured interviews with service providers and trafficking survivors in Missouri and Illinois to illustrate the different ways sex and labor trafficking can manifest, the populations affected by trafficking, and the legal and social services survivors can access as they escape cycles of trauma and seek justice.
Through 31 interviews with service providers and trafficking survivors, Heil and Nicholas provide a persuasive, rich account of how human trafficking emerges in the bi-state area and what practices anti-trafficking advocates and service providers use to assist trafficked persons in the face of stigma and fear. With their focus on service delivery, much of the interview data examines the protection of trafficked persons who leave exploitative situations or relationships and discusses the prosecution of identified traffickers. Additionally, all interviewees are invested in anti-trafficking work: they attend trainings in the bi-state area and are somewhat familiar with state and federal trafficking codes. Since this sample is primed to identify and assist trafficked persons, the book primarily focuses on an important subset of highly trained service providers in the St. Louis bi-state area.
Given the paucity of rigorous empirical work in the field of human trafficking, Heil and Nichols provide readers with a rare look at all aspects of trafficking in this deliberative and thorough case study. Indeed, their book is a much-needed answer to the call for thoughtful, in-depth studies of trafficking in regional settings. Readers who are new to the trafficking scholarship will also find this book particularly useful, as the authors meticulously describe how trafficking occurs—the recruitment, entrapment, and exploitation of different types of persons—as well as how service providers identify, assist, and respond to trafficking situations. Their writing is clear, accessible, and void of the frenzied, salacious accounts of trafficking we often see in popular culture. The wealth of qualitative interviews enlivens their description of trafficking patterns, and the interviews expose in very raw terms the layers and forms of exploitation that trafficked persons face. Readers will be moved by these narratives and inspired by the work that service providers tirelessly provide.
Heil and Nichols deliberately include sex and labor trafficking in their research, a conscious choice in the face of policy efforts and media narratives that can conflate human trafficking exclusively with sexual exploitation. The project itself reveals how this system-wide focus on sex trafficking is reproduced in the bi-state advocacy efforts. The unequal distribution is evident in both the quantity of interviewees focused on sex trafficking advocacy efforts and the lack of resources for labor trafficking survivors, especially those who are also undocumented persons within isolated rural communities. However, the authors draw attention to the nuances between labor trafficking in rural and urban communities in the bi-state area, illuminating the complexity of human trafficking across sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, construction) and geographic spaces.
While much of their chapter on sex trafficking focuses on certain aspects of commercial sexual activities that can be legally labeled as trafficking—the role of “boyfriends” or pimps who push their partners into sexual exploitation and the commercial sexual exploitation of minors—the authors’ strongest contribution is their emphasis on the relationship between marginalized identities and trafficking push factors. In their analysis of sex trafficking, Heil and Nichols notably draw attention to the particular vulnerability of LGBTQ youth, who are more at risk for certain trafficking push factors. LGBTQ youth might turn to survival sex or unhealthy relationships in the face of unsupportive families and limited social networks.
Police officers play a unique role in identifying and assisting trafficked persons, as they can be the first point of contact for a trafficked person. However, officers must be properly trained in order to help trafficked persons without re-traumatizing them or seeing their exploitation first as a criminal act. This is especially true for trafficked persons engaged in commercial sexual activity and undocumented trafficked persons, who might be first read through a criminal lens and arrested for selling sex or lacking appropriate citizenship documentation. Heil and Nichols show the multiple difficulties of introducing anti-trafficking advocacy efforts into an established police protocol, including inadequate training programs, trafficked persons who might not want to cooperate per standard legal norms, and officers’ own ideas about the existence of human trafficking in the St. Louis bi-state area. Trafficked persons frequently face multiple issues beyond their exploitation through sex or labor trafficking, and these issues can easily cloud officers’ perceptions and even trump their identification as trafficked persons.
Per the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, human trafficking efforts should focus on protection, prosecution, and prevention. Heil and Nichols explore how service providers can offer more competent, survivor-defined services and police officers can better investigate trafficking cases through increased training and trafficking-specific practices. Prevention still remains elusive, but Heil and Nichols provide solutions that could resist some human trafficking push factors: increased safe spaces and services to decrease the stigma that marginalizes members of the LGBTQ community, school and social-service interventions for truant youth, and anti-trafficking educational programming for at-risk students. These are critical steps in order to holistically implement a model of anti-trafficking intervention in the St. Louis bi-state area and could serve as a model for other regions’ advocacy and policy efforts.
It is rare to find a full-length account of trafficking within a particular region. Most popular accounts of trafficking in the media, and surprisingly also within some scholarly writing, are based on thin empirical research, make unsubstantiated cross-national projections, and play into a moral panic around trafficking. Heil and Nichols challenge the notions of an “ideal victim” and demonstrate that the reality of human trafficking crosses all nationalities, races, and classes. They show us how trafficking can be both hidden from view and, shockingly, right next door. They demonstrate that trafficking and exploitation are present within our communities and that recognizing them is key to finding ways to address them. This is an important step forward in trafficking research, and the book is a must-read for scholars and activists in the fields of violence prevention and anti-trafficking advocacy.