Racialized Rescue Narratives in Public Discourses on Youth Prostitution and Sex Trafficking in the United States

Carrie N Baker

doi:10.1017/s1743923x18000661

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of how activists, politicians, and the media framed youth involvement in the sex trade during the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2000s in the United States. Across these periods of public concern about the issue, similar framing has recurred that has drawn upon gendered and racialized notions of victimization and perpetration. This frame has successfully brought attention to this issue by exploiting public anxieties at historical moments when social change was threatening white male dominance. Using intersectional feminist theory, I argue that mainstream rhetoric opposing the youth sex trade worked largely within neoliberal logics, ignoring histories of dispossession and structural violence and reinforcing individualistic notions of personhood and normative ideas about subjectivity and agency. As part of the ongoing project of racial and gender formation in US society, this discourse has shored up neoliberal governance, particularly the build-up of the prison industrial complex, and it has obscured the state's failure to address the myriad social problems that make youth vulnerable to the sex trade.

Highlights

Activism against youth involvement in the US sex trade has spanned the modern industrial era
In the early twenty-first century, campaigns against “domestic minor sex trafficking” attempted to reshape societal responses to youth involved in the sex trade, with the goal of reframing young people as victims of exploitation rather than delinquents
These contemporary campaigns have resulted in new laws and public policies as well as new programs to assist youth exiting the sex trade

Summary

Introduction

Activism against youth involvement in the US sex trade has spanned the modern industrial era. In the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2000s, activists, politicians, and the media framed youth involvement in the sex trade as an “urban” problem invading suburban and rural communities, suggesting a racial subtext, and portrayals of the issue often focused on rescuing white girls victimized by black men.

Results

Conclusion