Anti-trafficking awareness campaigns have gone rogue in their efforts to save and rescue trafficking victims. With the United States leading the heavily funded crusade against sex trafficking and globally dictating the penalties of such crimes, there is minimal or no accountability for factual trafficking data. The hyper-sensationalism perpetuated by media outlets, government propaganda, and anti-trafficking organizations, have largely framed all sex work as human trafficking and all sex workers as needing to be saved and rescued from a life of degradation and exploitation. Over-saturated anti-sex trafficking awareness campaigns ranging from television commercials to welfare office posters are geared to incite public fear that our world is a seedy underground mass of sex-trafficking hubs. Sex workers face the brunt of the rescue industry’s hyperbole through state sanctioned violence, hyper-criminalization, over-policing, targeting, and stigma. As the US War on Drugs wanes down, it has been replaced by a War on Sex Work heavily undertaken by anti-trafficking awareness organizations that promote save and rescue rhetoric.
Results of anti-trafficking awareness campaigns that focus exclusively on sex trafficking and child sex trafficking have shuttled other forms of trafficking such as labor and human trafficking onto the back burner. This is problematic for several key reasons.
While recent campaigns aim to bring awareness of child sex trafficking, recent research has suggested that the public’s understanding of sex trafficking is misinformed. A research report, Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade: A National Study by John Jay College and the Center for Court Innovation, contested the myth that youth engaging in the sex trade(s) were all victims of sex trafficking. This two-year long research project showed only 10% of approximately 300 interviewed minors in the NYC sex trade used “market facilitators” (e.g., pimps), and 70% stated they had sought services specifically for youths at least once and could not adhere to the regimented guidelines of the service agencies (one-half of the 1,000 minors interviewed nationally did not access services). A whopping 95% of NYC youth stated they exchanged sex for money purely for financial support.
