The Anti-Trafficking Apparatus has a Racial Justice Problem

Anti-trafficking discourse regularly suggests that more policing and surveillance of women’s lives will protect them from the harms of sex trafficking. Prison abolition movements, on the other hand, argue that punishment and prisons do not end violence against women, they only intensify the violence women experience. This chapter analyzes an anti-trafficking news documentary that frames prison as a protective state service that, if reformed, can help women escape sex trafficking. The documentary was released during widespread grassroots activism to draw attention to the racialized and gendered injustices of the prison industrial complex, including high-profile campaigns to end money bail. The chapter argues that the anti-trafficking documentary works to discursively protect the state from allegations of racism and racial injustice amid public scrutiny of the antiblack structure of the criminal legal system. The chapter contextualizes the documentary’s narratives in an overview of the structural white supremacy of anti-trafficking’s philanthropic journalism and a discussion of common activist methods for supporting prisoners in order to show how the suggested reforms would harm the incarcerated women it aims to help. Ultimately, the case study reveals how the terms of the anti-trafficking discourse are mobilized in ways that undermine racial justice organizing and tactics.