Lights, Camera, Policy? Examining Celebrity-driven Anti-sex Trafficking Campaigns (abstract)

Celebrities—persons who attract large audiences and are well known in the realm of popular culture (sports, entertainment, and fashion)—are increasingly vocal about sex trafficking. Although they often lack knowledge about or experience with the issue, they commonly testify before Congress, serve as Goodwill Ambassadors for the UN, and act in public service announcements (PSA), to name just some examples. As a result, celebrities arguably play a role in shaping related policy developments, namely by fostering particular discourses about the issue. To explore celebrities’ engagement with sex trafficking, my paper considers a very prominent case: Demi Moore’s and Ashton Kutcher’s “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” video campaign, and their subsequent partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to create a human trafficking PSA. The former was meant to deter men from soliciting sex, while the latter was meant to educate the US public about sexual and labor slavery more broadly. Supporters of these efforts claimed that they represent an innovative and effective way to promote gender equality by educating the public to “end demand” for prostitution and sex trafficking. This paper takes a more critical view of these celebrity-government efforts. Using interpretive methods, and drawing from a growing body of research about celebrities in politics, my goal is to analyze Kutcher’s and Moore’s case to understand whether their discourse promotes or inhibits gender-equal understandings of prostitution, sex trafficking, and related policy responses. I argue that instead of emphasizing the complexity of sex trafficking, their efforts promote a unitary narrative about the issue that reifies stereotypical notions of gender, agency, and (in)equality. The remainder of this paper discusses the broader lessons we may learn from this case about celebrities, prostitution policy discourse, and social change

Good Girls, Bad Men? Rethinking Sex, Vulnerability, and Consent

Reviewing: Jennifer Ann Drobac, Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers: Adolescent Development, Discrimination, and Consent Law (University of Chicago Press 2016); Joseph J. Fischel, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent (University of Minnesota Press 2016)

Sending a Dear John Letter: Public Information Campaigns and the Movement to “End Demand” for Prostitution in Atlanta, GA

This paper examines “Dear John”, a public information campaign that ran from 2006–2008 in Atlanta, GA, to ask what narrative it conveys about commercial sex and those who engage in it, in order to understand the gendered (and other) discursive constructions it produces, reflects, and complicates about these activities and subjects. Drawing from both policy and sex work/trafficking scholarship, this paper argues that Dear John used symbolic images and direct and consequential text to convey a “male demand” narrative, which holds that men’s demand for sexual services harms girls and young women and will not be tolerated. Yet, in so doing, Dear John also reinforced particularly gendered characterizations of individuals who trade sex, while de-emphasizing other factors that increase young peoples’ vulnerabilities to and within sex work. The paper concludes by discussing Dear John’s outcomes and significance for scholars concerned with sex work, policy, and social change

Same Same but Different? Gender, sex work, and respectability politics in the MyRedBook and Rentboy closures

Among the many policies implemented to eradicate trafficking in the sex industry, US government agencies have targeted online platforms that market and facilitate sex work. In this paper, I consider two instances of this activity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2014 raid and subsequent closing of MyRedbook.com, and the Department of Homeland Security’s 2015 raid and closing of Rentboy.com. Drawing from a qualitative-interpretive analysis of the media coverage of these raids, I show that the responses to them emphasised how the sites’ closures increased both men’s and women’s economic vulnerability, but the similarities largely ended there. Instead, I argue broadly that public responses to these events reflected and reinforced gendered notions of women’s vulnerability and men’s agency in the sex industry. While these responses may seem unsurprising, they are also potentially productive, calling into question the limits of respectability politics and signalling new solidarities in the struggle for sex worker rights

Protest By Other Means? Sex Workers, Social Movement Evolution And The Political Possibilities Of Nonprofit Service Provision

Is it possible for service organizations formed from protest movements to maintain their radical commitments, even when they partner with state agencies? Engaging with the social movements, civic engagement, and nonprofit sector literatures, I focus on the American prostitutes’ rights movement and the emergence from it of the California Prevention and Education Project (CAL-PEP) and the St James Infirmary (SJI) in the San Francisco Bay Area. As flagship nonprofit health service organizations, the SJI and CAL-PEP illustrate how a social movement’s radical impulses and claims-making capacities are both maintained and restricted when they are institutionalized into service provision organizations that seek to work with state agencies in an era of neoliberal politics. Based on participant-observational, interview-based and archival research, I contend that CAL-PEP and the SJI express their radical impulses within their organizations by maintaining prostitution as a legitimate occupational choice and involving sex workers in service provision and management. Granting agreements encouraging local, community-based health service provision and an emphasis on professional, credentialed service provision permit this expression of their radical impulses, even as charitable nonprofit tax status and granting agency requirements for data collection constrain their capacities to advocate for sex workers' rights beyond their organizations

Sending a Dear John Letter: Public Information Campaigns and the Movement to “End Demand” for Prostitution in Atlanta, GA

This paper examines “Dear John”, a public information campaign that ran from 2006–2008 in Atlanta, GA, to ask what narrative it conveys about commercial sex and those who engage in it, in order to understand the gendered (and other) discursive constructions it produces, reflects, and complicates about these activities and subjects. Drawing from both policy and sex work/trafficking scholarship, this paper argues that Dear John used symbolic images and direct and consequential text to convey a “male demand” narrative, which holds that men’s demand for sexual services harms girls and young women and will not be tolerated. Yet, in so doing, Dear John also reinforced particularly gendered characterizations of individuals who trade sex, while de-emphasizing other factors that increase young peoples’ vulnerabilities to and within sex work. The paper concludes by discussing Dear John’s outcomes and significance for scholars concerned with sex work, policy, and social change