Trafficked Children and Youth in the United States: Reimagining Survivors, by Elżbieta M. Goździak

Book review: Trafficked Children and Youth in the United States: Reimagining Survivors by Elżbieta M. Goździak New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016, 141 pp

Editorial: Between Hope and Hype: Critical evaluations of technology’s role in anti-trafficking

Over the past decade, scholars, activists, and policymakers have repeatedly called for an examination of the role of technology as a contributing force to human trafficking and exploitation. Attention has focused on a range of issues from adult services websites and the use of social media to recruit victims and facilitate trafficking to the utilisation of data analytics software to understand trafficking and identify ‘hotspots of risk’. This article introduces the Special Issue of Anti-Trafficking Review devoted to the role of technology in (anti-)trafficking. It outlines the main assumptions and critiques some of the proposed ‘solutions’ in the field and presents briefly the articles included in the issue. It concludes that the factors that enable and sustain human trafficking are varied and complex and require political will – not tech solutionist fixes

Networked trafficking: Reflections on technology and the anti-trafficking movement.

Abstract In this essay, we offer field notes from our ongoing ethnographic research on sex trafficking in the United States. Recent efforts to regulate websites such as Craigslist and Backpage have illuminated activist concerns regarding the role of networked technologies in the trafficking of persons and images for the purposes of sexual exploitation. We frame our understanding of trafficking and technology through a network studies approach, by describing anti-trafficking as a counter-network to the sex trafficking it seeks to address. Drawing from the work of Annelise Riles and other scholars of feminist science and technology studies, we read the anti-trafficking network through the production of expert knowledge and the crafting of anti-trafficking techniques. By exploring anti-trafficking activists' understandings of technology, we situate the activities of anti-trafficking experts and law enforcement as efforts toward network stabilization

Digital Apprehensions: Policing, Child Pornography, and the Algorithmic Management of Innocence

In this paper, I discuss the embodied labor of policing child pornography through the ways in which algorithms and human reviewers like Linda see abuse images. I employ the concept of “apprehension” to suggest that the ways that reviewers “see” child pornography is always already oriented toward the capture and arrest of suspected offenders. As I have argued elsewhere (Author 2017; Forthcoming), the use of new digital techniques to find child pornography has fundamentally transformed and expanded policing into a distributed network of labor increasingly done by computer scientists and technology companies. Rather than suggest new software is the cause of these transformations, I draw attention to the constitutive and mutually defining relation between computing and corporeality, or how image detection algorithms need the work of human perception to put their detective skills to work.            I argue further still that the case study of child pornography detection offers an entry point into examining the algorithmic management of race. I suggest that childhood innocence is coded as whiteness, and whiteness as innocence, in the algorithmic detection of victims and abusers. By taking ‘detection’ as a dynamic practice between human and machine, I make an intervention into critical algorithm studies that have tended to focus solely on the programming of racial bias into software. The algorithmic detection of child pornography hinges, crucially, upon practice and the tacit observation of human reviewers, whose instinctual feelings about child protection and offender apprehension become embedded within the reviewing and reporting process as cases escalate for law enforcement

Algorithmic detectives against child trafficking : data, entrapment, and the new global policing network

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2016.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 244-268).My dissertation explores how "anti-trafficking" has emerged as a global network of humanitarian professionals, law enforcement, and software companies collaborating to address the issue of child exploitation and trafficking online. I argue that the anti-trafficking network consolidates expertise through a shared moralizing politics of bureaucracy and carceral sensibility of securitization. This network mobilizes the issue of child protection to expand the reach of technologies of search and prediction, and to afford legitimation to a newly normalized level of digital surveillance. My findings are based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with the United Nations and anti-trafficking organizations in Thailand, with a child protection NGO and police in the Netherlands, and with software companies and law enforcement in the United States. I use two case studies to support my argument that the child protection movement has motivated the expansion of digital policing and surveillance: 1) image detection software developed in collaboration between social media and software companies and international law enforcement organizations; and 2) the design and deployment of a 3D moving avatar of a photorealistic girl used in a child sex exploitation sting operation by an NGO working with an advertising firm. I draw from queer feminist phenomenology to introduce 'proximity' as a governing concept for understanding expert sociality and digital surveillance. Child protection operates in a global affective economy of fear, in which the risk of violence is always anticipated and close. The new global policing network keeps exploitation proximate through the humanitarian ideology of emancipation that motivates child protection, and through publicity of technological campaigns, in order to produce public acquiescence to the spectacles of digital surveillance, shaming, and punishment.by Mitali Nitish Thakor.Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Genealogies and Futures of Queer STS: Issues in Theory, Method, and Institutionalization

What is Queer STS, and what is new about it? In this “News in Focus” piece we situate recent efforts by various STS scholars to tinker and play with the intersections of queer studies and social studies of science and technology within a longer history of sexuality studies. We also narrate several critical new developments in academic collaborations in this growing subfield, from workshops to conference roundtables, and attempt to further develop Queer STS theory and praxis while negotiating the role of this nascent sphere of academic practice

Networked trafficking: reflections on technology and the anti-trafficking movement

In this essay, we offer field notes from our ongoing ethnographic research on sex trafficking in the United States. Recent efforts to regulate websites such as Craigslist and Backpage have illuminated activist concerns regarding the role of networked technologies in the trafficking of persons and images for the purposes of sexual exploitation. We frame our understanding of trafficking and technology through a network studies approach, by describing anti-trafficking as a counter-network to the sex trafficking it seeks to address. Drawing from the work of Annelise Riles and other scholars of feminist science and technology studies, we read the anti-trafficking network through the production of expert knowledge and the crafting of anti-trafficking techniques. By exploring anti-trafficking activists’ understandings of technology, we situate the activities of anti-trafficking experts and law enforcement as efforts toward network stabilization.Microsoft Researc

A conversation: Queer digital media resources and research

The following is a panel discussion from QIS2 that in which five experts shared their research on queer media and technology. The panellists discuss a wide range of topics including trans people and surveillance online; trans identity and social media; online communities and feminist politics; the LGBT games archive; and digital vigilantism and sex trafficking. Uniting these diverse themes were a shared attention to the politics of queer visibility online that two of the editors of this special issue explore further in their opening comments