When most people think about migrant sex workers, they think of them as objects of grave moral concern. Not as powerful and capable community members, but as social problems. We have been trained by politicians, the police, media, churches, nonprofits, and a host of rich white academics and feminists to view sex workers from the Global South as silent, helpless “sex slaves,” women sold off by their heartless families, kidnapped from their homes by human trafficking gangs and sold into torturous circumstances for the pleasure of depraved men in wealthy countries. They paint a portrait of a young woman who is too ignorant, naive, confused, or brainwashed to fight back, and quietly prays for a hero to rescue her from her traffickers. Former New York Times columnist Pamela Paul’s 2023 op-ed “What It Means to Call Prostitution ‘Sex Work’” exemplifies this: “I first heard the term [sex work] in the early ’90s while living in Thailand, where I offered to volunteer for an organization aimed at helping local women caught up in prostitution. . . . We all knew many of these girls had been sold into sex slavery by their own desperately poor parents.” Paul succinctly captures the main tropes of the “modern slavery” panic: helpless women, racialized abusers, and the liberated Westerner coming to her rescue.
Across the political spectrum, from radical left to white-nationalist right, the specter of migrant sex workers from the Global South—and their association with human trafficking or modern slavery—looms large. For nearly three decades, the United States and Canada have been awash in stories about migrant women and white girls kidnapped by cabals of sex traffickers, who, in popular imagination, are assumed to be men of color—“bad hombres,” “pimps,” “illegal immigrants,” “organized crime rings,” and “gangs.” Such stories form the moral foundation for international campaigns to “fight modern slavery.” Vast sums of money have been funneled into various lobby and advocacy groups that claim their mission is to rescue women and crack down on traffickers. In practice, that has not meant addressing any of the causes of violence against women or abuse in the sex industry.
But this agenda, which claims to protect and save women by combating sex trafficking, has actually worsened the situation for poor, racialized sex workers. First, anti-trafficking measures—promoted as “public safety”—have reduced migrant sex workers freedoms, rights, and control over their lives while increasing vulnerability to all forms of discrimination, abuse, and violence, including by cops, border agents, partners, clients, bosses, and smugglers. Second, anti-trafficking measures are the justification for state and civilian surveillance, police and immigration control raids, arrests, job loss, seizure/theft of wages, and deportations of migrant sex workers. Third, narratives that claim to “raise awareness” about sex trafficking have instead spread racist depictions of white-dominated institutions (such as police forces and Christian churches) as “crusading” human rights heroes, bravely liberating oppressed women of color from racialized sex traffickers.
A huge gap stands between people’s perceptions of migrant sex workers and their actual reality. The “modern slavery” narrative is a moral panic that creates misinformation about migrant sex workers’ varied experiences in the sex industry while framing migrant women as passive, sexually exploited victims of bad men who are implicitly or explicitly racialized. This is a racist, xenophobic distortion of the actual sources of exploitation and violence in their lives—the injustice meted out by the state, the police, immigration control agents, and the unjust society in which migrant sex workers live and work. These false beliefs are so powerful that they dominate how we see migrant sex workers, what we see, and what we think can and should be done. Migrant sex workers’ agency, labor, and resistance—and also their entire lives, families, and communities—are obscured and distorted. Their involvement in sex work is seen as sex trafficking; when they cross borders, this is seen as forced movement; when they live where they work, they are believed to be held in captivity; when they have an employer or colleagues, they are considered exploited; and when they are arrested by cops, they are seen as being “rescued.”
Even when the state employs brutal violence against migrant sex workers, it can still appear to many people as being protective or a helpful “rescue” from worse circumstances. For example, when, the police seize migrant sex workers’ wages during a raid and place the workers inside a jail cell at gunpoint, reporters describe the police as having “freed women.” And if migrant sex workers who have been arrested do not identify as trafficking victims, the state’s narrative flips and they are constructed as illegal immigrants, participating in organized crime.
How have the public’s ideas about racialized migrant sex workers become so twisted that their being held in a cage by people with guns could be described as freedom? Why are brutality and terror seen as promoting public safety, so long as the abuser is the state? Why is there so little solidarity with migrant sex workers when they face state violence?
State violence against migrant sex workers is severe. Migrant sex workers lack most political, economic, social, civil, and human rights and freedoms. They cannot legally hold office, open a bank account, get a credit card, or rent an apartment without the risk of arrest. They have no right to privacy, labor protections (including their own wages), association with each other, freedom of movement, bodily autonomy, or citizenship. The state is authorized to secretly surveil them; seize their children, wages, bank accounts, and passports; lock them into a detention facility or prison; and charge their friends and family with criminal and immigration offenses, simply for being in their presence or assisting them.
Language is an important part of how the state justifies its violence. The terms “modern slavery,” sex trafficking, and human trafficking carry hidden racist and anti–sex work biases that support an agenda to conceal and justify state violence against racialized sex workers. This is why we think it is important to reject these terms and we encourage others to do the same. These are political terms used to define certain activities and certain people as the legitimate targets for state control and punishment. These terms represent a distorted view of the world, where sex work is purposefully differentiated from other work and conflated with violence and exploitation. And where the police, corporations, governments, and the ruling class are the saviors of poor, sexually victimized women of color.
We argue that racialized migrant sex workers are not sex-trafficking victims or “modern slaves,” even when they are suffering coercion, exploitation, and abuse in the sex industry. This is not because we think that migrant sex workers are free and empowered workers. It is precisely because we understand how migrant sex workers are socially, legally, economically, and politically oppressed, as well as the discrimination and violence they face, that we reject the concepts of sex trafficking and “modern slavery” as ways of understanding those problems.
The terms sex trafficking and “modern slavery” do similar ideological work as the concept of “crime.” Social harms like sexual and physical assault exist, but the term “crime” is not an objective descriptor of those harms. “Crime” conflates harm (like assault) with the survival strategies of the poor (like shoplifting) and defines them both as individual problems committed by bad people who deserve punishment. The idea of “crime” hides social problems like poverty (and those who are responsible for it) while criminalizing the people surviving the problem. The concept of “crime” invents problems, too—by labeling undesirable people and behaviors as “criminal.” Consider laws that once criminalized Indigenous cultural practices or homosexuality. The concept of “crime” distorts our understanding of real problems to make some people the legitimate targets of state violence.
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The same is true for the terms sex trafficking and “modern slavery”. Real harms against migrant sex workers exist—problems like exploitation, abuse, and violence. But the terms sex trafficking and “modern slavery” don’t neutrally describe those problems; they obscure the problem by conflating harms like violence with sex work and migration. Sex work (and migration for sex work) are not themselves harms, or violence, or social problems. People sell sex and migrate because it is useful to them in some way, often because it solves a problem. For example, people use sex work to resist other, more punitive and lower-paying work on farms or in factories. They sell sex because it is paid work that they can keep secret from immigration control so it lets them get across borders undetected, or they sell sex to avoid having to marry a man to escape poverty. In other words, they use migration and sex work to cope with problems like border security, the impoverishment of women (and resulting coercion into heterosexual marriage), and the problem of migrant labor exploitation. When governments frame migrant sex work as “modern slavery,” it allows them to deflect responsibility off the real problems—like violence and exploitation—and pretend that controlling and punishing racialized migrant sex workers is for their own good.
We also reject the terms sex trafficking and “modern slavery” because of how these terms harm other kinds of workers by normalizing the exploitation, coercion, and abuse that happens outside of the sex industry. The state gets to decide what counts as “modern slavery” and it has decided that it does not include corporate wage theft, even when millions of workers are cheated out of money for their labor. Legal definitions of modern slavery do not include the extreme economic coercion that forces poor migrants to take abusive, exploitative jobs for massive corporations that cheat them, bust unions, and lead to serious illnesses and injury. When corporations destroy the climate, pushing people out of their homelands and into unwanted, forced migration, this is not viewed as trafficking. When governments allow widespread sexual violence in jails, prisons, and youth detention centers, they deny that this constitutes sex trafficking. These conditions of exploitation and sexual and physical abuse are not treated as “modern slavery” or sex trafficking, because they are perpetuated against other marginalized workers, at the hand of the capitalist class and protected by the state. The terms sex trafficking and “modern slavery” can imply that the exploitation and abuse of workers outside of the sex industry is normal, fair, or insignificant.
The concept of human trafficking isn’t much better. The legal definitions in the United States and Canada are broad and vague, and anti-trafficking nonprofits use the term human trafficking to refer to a laundry list of highly varying activities that once again conflate sex work with a range of social problems—including migrant workers in sweatshops, intimate partner violence against sex workers, rape, child sexual abuse, the transatlantic slave trade, and the purchase and sale of babies for adoption.
This is why, instead of the terms “modern slavery,” sex trafficking, or human trafficking, we use language that accurately describes the problems facing migrant sex workers and holds the right people and institutions accountable—terms like police abuse, poor working conditions, workplace discrimination, intimate partner violence, and client violence. Many of the problems sex workers face fall into three types—state violence, intimate partner violence, and poor working conditions. If a sex worker is being forced to work or forced to hand over all their money, it is usually by a partner and thus is a case of intimate partner violence. If a sex worker is being cheated out of their money, it may be at the hand of a bad boss and thus a problem of abusive working conditions, one that is faced by a lot of migrant and undocumented workers. When the police rape sex workers, we call it police violence. If the problem is forced labor, we call it forced labor. When we’re honest about the problem, we can identify the institutions and people responsible for the problem and what needs to be done to fix it, and we stop perpetuating the idea that migrant sex work is the problem.
We also recognize and respect that some survivors use the language of sex trafficking, which they have many reasons for adopting. For sex workers, their complex experiences of violence and harm are often not listened to or understood. Using the language of sex trafficking can be the only way for survivors of violence to get people to take them seriously, gain access to services and support, or be protected against serious criminal charges. We have known many migrant sex workers who were released from police custody without charges (or a deportation order) only because they were willing to identify as human trafficking victims. We have known others who would have had to wait six months to access emergency rape crisis counseling but, by identifying as human trafficking victims, could get it immediately. And we have known migrant sex workers who were facing homelessness but could get immediate shelter if they identified as human trafficking victims. Sex workers and survivors didn’t build this system. They are not the ones perpetuating or dismissing violence against sex workers or gatekeeping social services. Our fight is not with them. It is with those who have made the sex-trafficking paradigm the only way to think about harm against sex workers because it serves their interests.
Understanding migrant sex workers means seeing that they are more than their oppression. When most people imagine migrant sex workers, they rarely think of resourceful immigrant moms in their thirties, forties, and fifties. But this is the norm. Migrant sex workers are parents, grandmothers, aunties, entrepreneurs, small business owners, independent travelers, struggling workers, providers, artists, storytellers, friends, and lovers with full lives and big dreams. And they are powerful. They skillfully resist criminalization, labor exploitation, abuse, racist exclusion, and hostility through community building, self-defense, mutual aid, organizing, art, and culture. They fight for justice, insist on their dignity, protect their safety, claim their freedom, and carve out their own spaces of joy, pleasure, laughter, and connection. They share their stories of strength and resistance—and, increasingly, they organize for labor and migration rights and against state violence. Migrant sex workers are freedom fighters, and their resistance is among the longest standing (yet least recognized) resistance struggles in the United States and Canada. Migrant sex workers are the heroes in their own stories. They are no one’s rescue project.
Migrant sex workers do not need rescue, but they do need what every oppressed group needs—more power to challenge and change their circumstances. We have witnessed firsthand the power of bringing transformative social justice approaches to migrant sex workers’ lives and struggles. But they are too small a community, without enough power and resources to transform their unjust conditions. On their own, migrant sex workers cannot win against the seemingly bottomless resources of governments, the police, border security, anti–sex work nonprofits, and conservative Christian organizations set on controlling and punishing them. Migrant sex workers need to be part of strong, strategic, and united movements for racial, economic, migrant, gender, disability, and climate justice that can eradicate the root causes of inequality and violence. In other words, what they need are not saviors but comrades, joined in struggle for collective liberation.
We have seen increasing support for migrant sex workers from leftists, progressives, and feminists. This is encouraging. But many often fail to understand the root causes of migrant sex workers’ problems. The politics of leftists, progressives, and feminists can hugely differ between each other. But many of them share a belief that the systems that harm migrant sex workers, like policing, are necessary, unintentionally harmful, and can be reformed. They believe in reducing the harm of policing by, for example, replacing police officers with social workers during human trafficking investigations. Or they oppose police violence but not policing itself, and believe that better trained police officers could result in less violence against migrant sex workers. But there is no safe version of policing for racialized migrant sex workers. These politics uphold a harmful carceral logic. Campaigns for more, different, or better surveillance and policing to “combat sex trafficking” only make things worse.
Through our organizing in the migrant sex worker movement, we have observed that it is the abolitionists who most quickly understand migrant sex worker issues and become strong allies to migrant sex workers. Abolitionists are the first ones to truly believe migrant sex workers regarding their experiences of state violence through surveillance, policing, and immigration systems. They understand that these systems were built to uphold colonialism and capitalism and can never be the source of safety or justice. They don’t have hope that reforms to policing and prisons can help rescue the migrant sex workers; instead, they work with migrant sex workers to build strength against these systems. Support and allyship with migrant sex workers is not possible without abolitionist politics.
Excerpted from Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice by Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam. © 2024 by Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam. Reprinted with permission from Haymarket Books.
Image: Hongwei FAN / Unsplash