Collaboration Meets Carcerai Protection

I met fourteen-year-old Che, a brilliantly witty, fast-talking Latina teenager, in June 2013, at a private shelter for youth who have been involved in domestic sex trafficking situations. In 2012, one year before I met her, Che had been identified by federal agents in a sting operation. On the day of the raid, the agents banged on the door and swiftly entered the hotel room where Che was staying with the adults she referred to as "her people." The man accused of pimping Che was also in the room, as were two other women, one African American woman and one white woman, both of whom were also involved in prostitution and later charged. When the agents found her, they handcuffed and questioned her. Later she told me she was placed in juvenile detention.

A year after the raid, Che's anger and frustration were still palpable, but not for the reasons I anticipated. She was not upset about being briefly detained, which she matter-of-factly compared to being put in a daycare facility, albeit one where the girls were separated from the boys. Instead, she was mad that the agents had tricked her into giving them information about the man accused of being her pimp, and she harbored feelings of guilt about the unwitting role she had played in sending him to prison, a sentence that would make it difficult for him to see his daughter and require him to register as a sex offender upon release.

Che's story is notable, not only because or her critical take on the raid that led to her recovery, which is to say the law-enforcement effort that led to her removal from a situation in which sex trafficking was alleged and later legally confirmed to be taking place. What is additionally important about her story is what she experienced after she was identified in the raid and after she was placed at and then subsequently ran away from a placement designed to assist her. When Che ran away — from what in antitrafficking terms may be referred to as the protection phase of her recovery — a local police unit that works on domestic sex trafficking cases was called. Members of the unit exchanged text messages with Che and set up a date with her to catch her in the act of soliciting sex. It worked. Che was arrested and then taken back to the shelter.

Che's post-federal-raid trajectory reads like a zigzagging maze punctuated by moments of protection interspersed with instances of punishment. To recap: following her identification in the raid, she was handcuffed and detained. Later she was offered assistance in the form of shelter placement. Then, after running away from the shelter, she was arrested and returned to it. What Che's story signals is that when the carceral state is situated as one of the main systems of first response to intervene on at-risk victims' behalves, law enforcement and some non-state partners sometimes play a role in exposing them to various types of control and punishment, even if their main intention is squarely focused on securing victims' protection and keeping them safe.

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Notable changes are afoot with respect to individuals, particularly sex trade-involved girls in the United States. Where once they might have been profiled by police as juvenile offenders, they are now, thanks to widespread national public attention to human trafficking and the passage of federal and state anti-trafficking and safe harbor legislation, provisionally viewed by local law-enforcement agents and their nonstate partners as victims of domestic sex trafficking, not offenders, replete with traumatic pasts, turbulent family histories, and violent pimps controlling them, factors that authorize state intervention. Not only have "at-risk" domestic victims received heightened state and nonstate attention aimed at securing their protection, they have also been the targets of law-enforcement coordinated, social-service assisted interventions that may include arrest, detention, or technological surveillance — all under the auspices of helping them.

The idea that sex-trade involved individuals, especially girls may be classified as victims of domestic sex trafficking yet encounter interventions that can include punishment grates against mainstream expectations about what ought to happen to a group of people legally defined as victims of crimes, both in international protocols such as the Palermo Protocol and to domestic statutes like state and federal antitrafficking laws. That some youth meet the federal definition of sex trafficking but may nonetheless be arrested, detained, or diverted to specialized courts or programs also clashes with campaigns instructing the public that services are available to victims once identified, and that members of the American public need to "look beneath the surface" to facilitate their protection.

My suggestion is not that efforts to identify and protect at-risk victims universally translate into punitive results. There aren't sufficient data on punitive or protective interventions targeting domestic sex trafficking victims to make this claim, and neither are some forms of punishment ever counted as such, issues discussed in greater depth in chapter 4. Yet what I want to complicate is the premise that finding at-risk victims "hiding in plain sight" will automatically lead to efforts that are protective, narrowly defined here as activities not reliant on punishment, criminalization, or control in the form of handcuffs, arrest, detention, probation, or court-monitored supervision. A more nuanced assessment is needed, because coordinated state and nonstate efforts to assist vulnerable groups — for the purposes of this chapter, youth trafficked for sex — are sometimes assumed to have broken with the more punitive methods of the past. Yet interventions in the name of domestic sex trafficking victims' protection at times merge with broader efforts to control, discipline, and punish them.

This chapter explores how efforts to identify and protect "at-risk" victims of domestic sex trafficking have given rise to interventions that blur carceral control with protection. In it, I examine how and why arresting girls in order to help them or detaining them for their safety are not always viewed by frontline antitrafficking actors as diametrically opposed goals. On the contrary, some of the law-enforcement orchestrated, nonstate-assisted antitrafficking efforts I have learned about subject people deemed "at risk" of domestic sex trafficking to different situations where assistance is secured through encounters and the use of carceral methods that bear a closer likeness to punishment. That punitive techniques may be leveraged in the service of protection is itself worthy of attention. Yet equally significant is that collaboration — a much-vaunted...