Abstract
Over the last 20 years, advocates concerned about youth involved in the sex trade have had tremendous success in calling attention to this issue, reframing it as “domestic minor sex trafficking,” passing laws at the state and federal level to address the issue, and creating new programs and services to help these youth (Baker, 2018). In Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States, Jennifer Musto offers a well-researched and much-needed assessment of the policies resulting from this activism. Musto conducted 40 interviews with law-enforcement agents, advocates, social workers, other anti-trafficking professionals, and people identified as victims of sex trafficking, and she observed anti-trafficking meetings, conferences, trainings and related events from 2011 to 2014. Based on this research, Musto assesses how anti-trafficking reforms have played out on the ground. Musto argues that despite lip service to rescuing and protecting youth, anti-trafficking interventions are often punitive and harmful to people identified as victims of trafficking.
In the first chapter, Musto examines the proliferation of public/private anti-trafficking collaborations among law enforcement and advocates, private social service organizations, and faith-based groups. These collaborations, she argues, have facilitated punitive treatment, surveillance and social control of youth seen as vulnerable to trafficking. Furthermore, she argues that these interventions often blur the boundaries between protection and punishment and are in fact both protectionist and punitive, which she calls carceral protectionism. This “arrest to assist” approach, where law enforcement uses arrest or detention to purportedly keep youth safe, is in fact harmful to them, argues Musto. Despite the language of victim-centeredness, these anti-trafficking efforts are led by law enforcement, which prioritizes criminal justice goals over the well-being of survivors. She argues that these public/private collaborations “retool carceral processes” through “soft lockdowns” (detaining youth with an advocate/counselor present), housing and other social services, victim management strategies, and collaborative courts (pp. 39–41).
In chapter 2, Musto describes how law enforcement and non-state social service organizations engage collaboratively in technologically mediated surveillance of youth through online sting operations, searches incident to arrest (particularly of cell phones), and fake Facebook accounts, potentially violating people’s right to privacy and skirting the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unlawful search and seizure. Musto delves more deeply into technology and “data-driven justice” in chapter 3, including how law enforcement has used Backpage.com, algorithmic and machine-learning technologies, and Memex to investigate sex trafficking.
In chapter 4, Musto argues that law enforcement often engages in a “switch-up”—treating girls as offenders, then victims, or some a combination of both—to achieve their priority goal, which is to criminally prosecute adults who facilitate youth involvement in the sex trade. In the process, argues Musto, police coerce and manipulate girls, subordinating their interests to the criminal justice goal of prosecuting traffickers. The highlight of the book for me was Musto’s presentation of the perspectives and voices of the girls that she interviewed about their experiences with law enforcement and anti-trafficking service organizations. Youth perspectives are extremely valuable to understanding this issue and are too often missing from anti-trafficking scholarship.
Finally, in chapter 5, Musto argues that criminal records created during police interactions with youth involved in the sex trade can have long-term negative effects on survivors of trafficking because expungement of these records is difficult, costly and time-consuming, and it is increasingly difficult to ever completely erase or seal a juvenile criminal record because of “third-party data brokers and myriad ‘proprietary’ databases [that] keep digitized track of justice encounters” (p. 132). In her conclusion, Musto suggests several solutions to domestic sex trafficking, including decriminalizing prostitution, creating more social services that are not connected to the criminal-justice system, and developing a mechanism for erasing digital traces of people’s history.
Musto makes an excellent, well-supported argument that, despite anti-trafficking reforms that reframe youth in the sex trade as victims rather than offenders, law enforcement continues to treat youth in punitive and harmful ways, despite their frequent claim to offer protective, victim-centered treatment. Musto’s book is part of the developing field of “critical anti-trafficking studies,” which condemns anti-trafficking activists and government policies for contributing to the neo-liberal build-up of the prison industrial complex in the United States. Drawing on Elizabeth Bernstein’s (2010) criticisms of the neoliberal carceral agenda of the anti-trafficking movement, Musto persuasively argues that state/private collaborations are a “technology of neoliberal governance […] a way to patch up, in piecemeal form, a state in decline” by “reviving [the state] through carceral projects” (p. 36). Particularly interesting are Musto’s discussions of technology and trafficking throughout the book, including how police and anti-trafficking organizations are using technology as well as how technology can cause continuing abuse of trafficking survivors.
In her title and throughout her book, Musto uses the phrase “domestic sex trafficking,” but focuses her study primarily on cisgender girls under the age of 18, not on adults, males, or transgender people. Considering this focus, the lack of a discussion of the gendered dynamics of the treatment of sex trade-involved girls, and the country’s long history of policing sexually active girls, is surprising. More attention to how gender ideologies as well as race and class ideologies impact the treatment of youth would have been helpful. Furthermore, a more thorough discussion of the significance of the distinction between minors and adults, and even between younger and older youth—e.g. a 12-year-old versus a 17-year-old—would have been helpful. Developmentally, youth vary significantly among themselves and from adults (see, e.g., Drobac, 2016). Should this influence the state’s relationship to them? It certainly has historically in many areas (e.g. medical treatment, education, employment, etc.). The legal doctrine of parens patriae has historically placed an obligation on governments to protect citizens unable to protect themselves, including children. And, in fact, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act treats adults and minors differently, defining sex trafficking as requiring force, fraud or coercion for adults but not for minors involved in the sex trade. Some exploration of these issues in Musto's assessment of anti-trafficking interventions would have been helpful. Finally, some historical context about the evolving and politicized ways that the state has treated sex-trade involved youth would have been helpful.
This readable and engaging book would be an effective text in a wide range of classes at the graduate and undergraduate levels, including political science, criminal justice, and gender studies.