Over the past several years, anti-sex work activists have pushed for Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act (TVPA) reauthorizations to radically change the meaning of “human trafficking” by removing force, fraud, coercion, or exploitation of minors from the definition. This change would render the definition meaningless, and entirely disregard the role of consent by disregarding people’s bodily autonomy.
When the TVPA originally passed, it included a non-operational definition of “sex trafficking” in section 12, which is not unusual. Bills often include non-operational definitions that do not define or create crimes but rather serve as a type of glossary for the rest of the bill. The non-operational definition of “sex trafficking” in the TVPA is broad and includes all commercial sex, and was added as a compromise with anti-prostitution activists, who had initially wanted all sex work classified as trafficking. The non-operational definition of “sex trafficking” in section 12 has never been used to prosecute human trafficking or determine eligibility for victim services, and does not mean that all commercial sex falls under the criminal definition of human trafficking.
The criminal definition in section 11a has been used for funding, victim services, and criminal prosecution, human trafficking, and it defines the crime as “severe forms of trafficking in persons.” Severe forms of trafficking in persons doesn’t mean that this form of trafficking is worse than others (a common misunderstanding), but is the language agreed upon to define the crime of “sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age.” The inclusion of force, fraud, coercion, or exploitation of a minor in the criminal definition of human trafficking uniquely defines the extreme experiences of confinement, fear, and violence that trafficking survivors face.
When activists push to define labor trafficking using section 11a and sex trafficking using section 12, these are attempting codify the conflation of consensual and trafficked engagement in commercial sex. While the surface reason often given is to increase sex workers’ eligibility for services through redefining them as victims, the reality is that anti-pornography and anti-sex work activists have been attempting to codify the conflation of consensual and trafficked commercial sex since the early drafts of what became the TVPA.
To use “sex trafficking” to refer to all commercial sex will cause harm to all people in the sex trades, whether they are there consensually or by trafficking. These harms will include:
- Increasing confusion among the public about what trafficking actually is.
- Promoting harmful and coercive (and often ineffective or discriminatory) interventions directed not just at trafficking victims but also at sex workers.
- Diverting much-needed trafficking funds, investigative hours, and media focus away from actually abusive cases of trafficking and into expanding harassment and criminalization of consensual adult sexual behavior.
- Artificially inflating statistics about the prevalence and incidence of sex trafficking.
- Misleading the public about appropriate responses to and needs of sex workers, many of whom may have experienced trafficking in their pasts and be using consensual sex trading as a way to maintain independence from their abusers, care for their children, and pay their bills when struggling with disability or CPTSD that does not allow them to engage in full-time work.
- Further alienating the many human trafficking survivors who have experienced force, fraud, or coercion in the sex trades or exploitation as a minor who already feel excluded, marginalized, and invalidated by the modern mainstream anti-trafficking movement for their beliefs that sex workers deserve safety.
This push to redefine human trafficking relies on the ignorance of the political actors and the general public about non-operational vs. criminal definitions in the TVPA.
While the definition anti-prostitution activists propose when they use section 12 as their definition may appear simpler to someone without intimate knowledge of the dynamics of trafficking or history of the movement, the reality is that the section 12 definition of sex trafficking was a highly politicized and divisive compromise developed to appease anti-prostitution activists at the expense of shaming survivors and disregarding their agency. To suggest to someone who has consensually traded sex and who has at other times been beaten, raped, and forced into trading sex that those two experiences were the same, are both equally exploitative, or are both trafficking is to absolutely deny their bodily autonomy, self-determination, and self-description. This definition is perceived by many survivors (many of whom have been pushed out of the movement or avoid the anti-trafficking movement due to perceiving it as inherently harmful due to conflation of consensual and trafficked sex trading) as a flaw in the original TVPA. Twenty years of normalizing it has not changed that and has in fact made meaningful collaborations between anti-trafficking organizations and human rights, LGBTQ+, and anti-racism organizations more challenging, and recent years have shown an increase in survivor organizing to repair this flaw.
Codifying this kind of harmful language in the law while there is such a tremendous shift in survivors’ willingness to speak out and organize against conflation would cause tremendous harm to our movement’s ability to repair trust with the very people we say we are advocating for. We agree that expanding services to more people is a good thing, including sex workers who need economic, emotional, housing, and legal advocacy. Doing this by rendering the actual meaning of being trafficked or exploited in the sex trades meaningless is not the way.
So what is the truth about this attempt to codify exploitation?
❌ Myth: Using the secton 12 definition for prevention or services expands human trafficking services to more people who need them.
✅ Fact: What many people in the sex trades by circumstance, who would leave if they had better options, say is that the kinds of services offered by anti-trafficking organizations are not relevant for their lived experiences, are harmful, or rely on instilling shame about consensual adult sexual choices. They often do not want access to “anti-trafficking services,” which rely on a framework enmeshed with a criminal legal system that replicates the coercive patterns of traffickers and puts them at increased risk of sexual violence by police. Framing all commercial sex as trafficking produces exit from the sex trades as the only measure of success, which doesn’t respect survivors’ agency or self-defined needs.
In an interview, a survivor said: Even now, looking back, I see a lot of my peers who left their trafficking situation and went straight into agency care or straight into a square life. And a lot of them really struggled. For me, I believe that the time that I stayed in the industry really was the time that I was able to reclaim my body & my boundaries, financially stabilize myself to [do] things that I needed, [learn] life skills I needed to learn, pay for the healing modalities & education. All of which most entry-level jobs would not have given me access to. I don’t know that I would be here if I had been pushed to exit too quickly or on someone else’s terms.
❌ Myth: Most of the people in the sex trades say they’d leave if they had better options, so we must prevent or reduce commercial sex to keep them safe.
✅ Fact: In the United States’ current system of capitalism, all work falls under a spectrum of agency from trafficked to freely chosen, and most labor in all industries is performed by “circumstance.” Work by circumstance is when someone does work they do not want to be doing because they do not have better options. This is reflected by the sentiment, “I would leave this work if I had better options,” and this is the situation in which many people in the United States find themselves.
Another survivor said: The end-demand stuff has been really harmful, especially because it’s not focusing on supply chains or labor trafficking. It’s literally just focusing on sex trafficking. But let’s talk about the demand for cheap labor. Let’s talk about how capitalism creates the need for exploited bodies and labor. It’s a much broader conversation, but when people say end-demand, they don’t understand that that’s not a comprehensive solution. You can’t try to help one population by harming another.
❌ Myth: This is a minor change.
✅ Fact: Using the definition of “sex trafficking” found in section 12 radically transforms the entire meaning of “human trafficking,” and will lead to less effective prevention strategies, ineffective or inappropriate services, and a complete disregard for bodily autonomy. The fundamental violence of human trafficking is restriction or denial of a person’s ability to make their own choices about their bodies — expecting them to do and say things they do not want, or that don’t resonate with their lived experience — in order to get things they want. We cannot prevent or repair the harm of human trafficking by replicating the coercive patterns of traffickers in our framing, prevention, or services.
Another survivor said: There’s a lot of nuance to situations. And I think that that nuance is where their messaging is the most harmful… Seeing the messaging about sex work, like if you started being trafficked but then you ended up continuing to engage in sex work, which again is what I did…seeing that makes it seem like your experiences are completely invalid and that you don’t count. And that your experiences of trafficking don’t matter.
❌ Myth: People can’t consent to trade sex.
✅ Fact: Trafficking in the sex trades is a form of sexual violence, and complete respect for the bodily autonomy of consenting adults is fundamental to ending sexual violence. We do not restrict the sexual freedom of consenting adults because we do not like the sexual choices they are making. To codify section 12’s disregard for the bodily autonomy of consenting adults to make their own sexual decisions would set a dangerous precedent.
Another survivor interviewed said: A lot of these anti-sex work people love to use the word “empowering” and then say that we say that all the time. I’ve never once said, “oh, this industry is empowering for me.” And like, even if I had, that’s valid if that’s my experience. But also making money is inherently empowering. It empowers me to pay my bills. But they’re like, “oh, you know, these white privileged sex workers are telling everyone it’s empowering.” I haven’t really heard anyone in the industry say that. I’ve heard people say that it’s not about empowerment. It’s about rights.
When these extremist, anti-sex work and anti-pornography attempts to conflate consensual and trafficked participation in commercial sex (up to and including naming this approach the “Equality Model” or even the “Survivor Model” – thus excluding all survivors who support sex worker safety), stand strong against efforts that rely on your ignorance about legislative processes and the history of the TVPA. Anti-trafficking work should not be rooted primarily in ending sex work and forcing consenting sex workers into services they don’t need. It should focus on ending violence and exploitation while fostering opportunities and safe options.
*This post was initially written in 2022 for an organization but was not posted at that time.