Abortion Trafficking is the New Satanic Panic
The first time I heard the term “commercial sexual exploitation” I was a 24 year old domestic violence advocate working to support LGBTQ youth experience violence. The young people I supported had always been involved in the sex trades. Each person talked about their experiences in different ways. Some folks called it hustling, some folks called it a hook-up, some folks called it sex work and some folks just said they were doing what they needed to do to survive.
When supporting LGBTQ youth I heard over and over again about the ways that criminalization was crushing their lives. I think about the incest survivor forced to testify in court, receiving no meaningful support to address the layers of trauma they were experiencing, only later to be criminalized when a male police officer was ordering them to the ground and they had a panic attack and “didn’t comply.”
Dancing the Carceral Creep
Coined by Mimi Kim, carceral creep is the concept that no matter how much resource, time, energy and reform we attempt, the criminal legal system is going to take up all the air in the room. It will eat up every dollar, every hour of your time, every reform attempt. The criminal legal system is a black hole that sucks every bit of time and energy from us and keeps on keeping on. It’s one of many reasons why trying to reform the criminal legal system will never work. Rather than meaningfully helping people who have experienced violence, the carceral creep becomes a collaboration between social services and the criminal legal system and serves to feed the ever expanding beast that is criminalization.
“I use the term carceral creep to suggest the incremental and often imperceptible advance of carceral forces that led to the eventual domination of crime control within a feminist social movement field that was once almost devoid of its presence.”- Mimi Kim, The Carceral Creep: Gender-Based Violence, Race, and the Expansion of the Punitive State, 1973–1983
On April 5, 2023 the state of Idaho passed a new “abortion trafficking’ law which criminalizes abortion access in almost all cases, including in instances of rape and incest. This ban is horrifying for all the reasons we already know including that it makes abortion functionally inaccessible in Idaho for anyone under the age of 18. More than just simply banning abortion, this law criminalizes people who seek an abortion AND those who are supporting them. It makes it illegal to obtain abortion pills for a minor or to help them leave the state for an abortion. Anyone convicted will face two to five years in prison and could also be sued in civil court by the minor’s parent or guardian.
To understand the context of Idaho’s Abortion Trafficking Law it’s helpful to understand the history of laws related to trafficking minors. In 2018, Idaho passed a series of laws aimed at combating “domestic minor trafficking.” The term “domestic minor trafficking” was coined in the early 2000’s when the United States Trafficking Victims Protection Act ( TVPA) was passed. The TVPA does two things of note:
It defines sex trafficking as “a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion”; and
It says that a person under the age of 18 engaged in a commercial sex act is a victim of trafficking whether or not they experience force, fraud or coercion .
Overnight the Trafficking Victims Protection Act collapsed a range of complex experiences. Now any young person engaged in survival sex or trading sex for money is considered a trafficking victim. Where in previous definitions of sex trafficking you had to be moved across borders and there had to be a person controlling your involvement in the sex trades, now merely being under 18 and in the sex trades made you a victim of trafficking.
Sexual exploitation is not new. For as long as sex, power and violence have been interwoven, sexual exploitation has existed. What is new is the meaning we are making from these experiences and the role of the government in creating a new non-profit industry built not from the experiences of survivors themselves but instead run by white, anti-sex-work Christians. Organizations like Operation Underground Railroad, Into the Light and Project Rescue started bringing in millions of dollars of funding. They used this funding to demonize sex work and redefine survival sex as sex-trafficking.
“Into the Light began as God broke the hearts of followers of Jesus over the issue of child sex trafficking and then brought them together to a small town in Arkansas. None of us were survivors of sex trafficking or had previous experience working with trafficking victims. However, we were willing to learn how we could be effective in identifying victims and providing them with the support they needed to overcome this evil atrocity.” -Gretchen Smeltzer, founder of Into the Light
The anti-violence movement is built on survivors of domestic and sexual violence building for ourselves and each other what we didn’t have. Early domestic violence advocacy groups were unfunded community groups working to create support for people, largely women and children, to escape violence, heal and re-establish their lives. The tenants of the early anti-violence movement include deep value for the safety, confidentiality and the self-determination of people experiencing violence. We were a “by and for” movement, working without our own communities to keep each other safe.
Anti-Trafficking and Criminalization
The sex trafficking rhetoric pushed by white anti-sex-work Christians is a moral panic. Like all moral panics it uses the fear mongering of “what about the children!?” to bolster social conservatism. This fear is used to pass draconian laws that claim to keep children safe but instead increase criminalization.
Much has been said about the function of moral panics in the United States. The satanic panic of the 1980’s and 90’s was horrifying for so many reasons. It’s fun to laugh in retrospect about the susceptibility of “folks back then.” How could they believe such ridiculous lies!? Real harm was done to real people. The satanic panic was used by law enforcement to criminalize innocent people. In the course of the satanic panic over 200 people were charged and dozens convicted. Like with the majority of moral panics, moral outrage was used to justify police as the only ones that could keep us safe from unthinkable harms. Law enforcement training included false information on fabricated satanic rituals well into the 1990s. Over 30 years later and research shows that there are functionally no substantiated cases of the ritualistic satanic abuse popularized during the satanic panic.
As with the satanic panic, the fabricated moral panic created by anti-sex-work Christians is being used to pass increasingly more conservative laws. In 2003, Washington State was the first state in the country to pass laws criminalizing sex trafficking. In 2011 Washington passed House Bill 1874 amending the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 9.73.210 and 9.73.230 which authorized law enforcement to “conduct surveillance operations” and changed the laws on two-party consent in order to record a conversation. This law allows one-party consent if police have “reasonable suspicion that the safety of the consenting party is in danger.” Where previously everyone had to know and give consent to being recorded in order for the recording to be used for prosecution, now the cops are able to record people they suspect of trafficking with only the consent of “the victim of a serious violent offense.” While on the surface these laws appear to be protecting people experiencing violence, over time these same laws are being used to criminalize people experiencing exploitation. Valuable privacy protections are eroded and the criminal legal system expands its reach.
In April of 2024 Alabama State Legislature passed the Sound of Freedom Act otherwise known as House Bill 42. House Bill 42 sets a minimum sentence of life in prison for people convicted of trafficking minors. State Representative Donna Givens, who introduced the bill, directly cited watching the highly inaccurate, religious propaganda film, the Sound of Freedom. She says, “I went and saw the movie and sitting there in the movie I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do something.’ I felt like God was speaking to me and I just felt like this is something that I needed to do and be very strong about it. I know this sounds like, ‘Wow, that’s a harsh penalty.’ Well, it’s a harsh crime.” For more on the Sound of Freedom check out the Popaganda Podcasts episode with myself and co-host Tashmica Torok breaking down the scam that is Sound of Freedom, Tim Ballard and the impacts of this harmful rhetoric on survivors of violence.
This law is just the beginning. Sex trafficking moral panics bring with them a cascade of bills that have doubled and tripled down on increased criminalization as the primary strategy for addressing human trafficking. Rather than keeping people experiencing sexual violence and exploitation safe, these bills set a foundation that continues to degrade important protections against the harms of the criminal legal system and adds to the cooptation of our community responses to violence.
Criminalization will never keep survivors of violence and exploitation safe. The role of criminalization is enforcing laws. To support survivors of gender-based violence is to support their self-determination and safety. As Mimi Kim has taught us, the carceral creep that is criminalization will just keep creeping. Today’s criminalizing anti-trafficking laws will be tomorrow’s total abortion ban.
