Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking by Alexandra Lutnick

Author:Alexandra Lutnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC054000, Social Science/Slavery, SOC059000, Social Science/Prostitution & Sex Trade
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF STATE RESPONSE

Despite the TVPA’s classification of all domestic youth who trade sex as victims of sex trafficking, in New York and California young people are still being arrested for prostitution-related offenses. UCR data for 2013 reveals that 205 prostitution arrests of minors occurred in California, and 22 in New York (U.S. FBI 2014b). In the case of Illinois, where juvenile prostitution has been decriminalized, young people, surprisingly, are still being arrested. In 2013, UCR data shows that 8 prostitution of arrests of minors were reported by Illinois (U.S. FBI 2014b). What is more common is for young people in Illinois to be charged with other offenses instead. In some cases, police officers are initially charging them with prostitution-related offenses because they are unaware of the change in the law. Even though young people can still be arrested in California for prostitution-related offenses, in some counties, such as San Francisco, the unofficial policy is not to charge them with prostitution offenses. In one situation, a young cisgender woman was arrested in California for prostitution and during the arrest lied and said she was eighteen. Once it came to the authorities’ attention that she was a minor, she no longer faced a prostitution charge; rather, she was charged with lying to a police officer. Her case manager in San Francisco explained the situation: “The probation officer’s response was that, ‘Well, in our eyes she’s not a victim; in our eyes she’s a criminal because she lied to the police.’ And that’s her charge. The charge that stuck was lying to a police officer about her name, about her identity when she was rescued, which is how the pimps, you know, that’s exactly what they’re coached to do, it’s exactly what she was told to do…. There she was held in custody for over two months, over two and a half months…supposedly for her own safety” (P. Bagheri, personal communication, May 4, 2012).

Similar to the gendered prostitution arrest rates for young people, this idea of holding young people, in particular young cisgender women, “for their own good” is another example of the gender bias inherent in the juvenile justice system (Sherman 2012) and the “detention-to-protection pipeline” (Musto 2013). Minh Dang highlights how framing “trafficking as a crime versus a human rights violation” makes it “a criminal justice response” wherein “people justify arresting people for the sake of services” (personal communication, January 16, 2014). Furthermore, with an emphasis on prosecution, people are “rarely seen as the holders of rights. They are instead seen as ‘instruments’ in investigations or prosecution” (Craggs and Martens 2010, 49). Detective John Sydow of the Sacramento County Sherriff’s Office indicated that even when attempts are made to link people to appropriate services, for the criminal justice system the benefit of doing so is that a more stable victim “makes a better witness” (qtd. in Bullard and Wygal 2014). Criminalization unfortunately exacerbates rather than alleviates the problems these young people experience.

Neither the TVPA nor its subsequent reauthorizations in

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