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Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States

Online ISBN:
9780520957749
Print ISBN:
9780520281950
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States

Published online:
19 January 2017
Published in print:
5 July 2016
Online ISBN:
9780520957749
Print ISBN:
9780520281950
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

Control and Protect explores the meaning and significance of efforts designed to combat sex trafficking in the United States. A striking ethnographic case study of new ways in which law enforcement agents, social service providers, and nongovernmental advocates have joined forces to fight domestic sex trafficking, it reveals how these collaborations consolidate state power, resulting in carceral protectionism. This book examines how such partnerships have blurred the boundaries between punishment and protection, victim and offender, and state and nonstate authority. Girls and women deemed “at-risk” of domestic sex trafficking may nonetheless experience punishment such as arrest, detention, and networked surveillance, even as they receive protection including victim-centered identification and social service referrals. Technology also plays a critical role in expanding antitrafficking interventions and fostering state and nonstate collaborations. Such technology extends the powers of the state and creates new ways for state and nonstate actors to collaborate on law-enforcement issues. Tracing the implications of carceral protection strategies on people deemed “at risk” of sex trafficking, Control and Protect calls for better systems of protection not tied to punishment as a means of addressing the economic, gendered, and racial systems of domination contributing to the exploitation of sex-trafficked individuals.

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