“I Can Be Big Sister, Even If You Can’t Be Big Brother:” Spectatorship and Punishment in Anti-trafficking Efforts

Abstract

Anti-human trafficking efforts by both state and non-state actors are proliferating across the United States (US). While there is ostensibly some merit in widespread awareness to generate social change, the reality is that the majority of these efforts rely on and support the violence of the carceral state. Using interviews with anti-trafficking stakeholders in the Midwestern US, I argue that anti-trafficking efforts depend on the policing of particular notions of criminality, femininity, sexuality, and victimhood that foster an environment where carceral measures are the only solutions to the exploitation of trafficking. Weaving together key theories from critical trafficking studies (Hill 2016; Kempadoo 2015; Musto 2016; Shih 2016; Srikantiah 2007) and penal spectatorship (Brown 2009), I argue that justice cannot exist in current punishment-centered approaches to ending human trafficking. A more expansive, structurally founded concept of accountability and recourse, not imprisonment (Davis 2003), is necessary to truly stop human trafficking and to meet the needs of trafficked persons in ethical ways.