On 11 April 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law in the United States. FOSTA introduced new provisions to amend the Communications Act of 1934 so that websites can be prosecuted if they engage ‘in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution’ or ‘facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.’ While supporters of the law claim that its aim is to target human traffickers, its text makes no effort to differentiate between trafficking and consensual sex work and it functionally includes websites where workers advertise services or share information, including safety tips.[3] Following the law’s passage—and even before its full implementation—sex workers felt its impact as websites began to eliminate platforms previously used to advertise services. Backpage, an adult advertising website, was pre-emptively seized by the FBI. Other platforms began to censor or remove content related to sex work, including Google, Craigslist, and many online advertising networks. Sex workers in the United States have denounced the passage of FOSTA for reducing workers’ ability to screen clients and ensure safety practices. This paper provides an overview of the findings of a recent survey with sex workers in the United States, details the advent of similar initiatives in other countries, and explores how the legislation conflates trafficking with consensual sex work.

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In 2008, the San Francisco-based antitrafficking nonprofit organization Not for Sale launched a campaign advocating "backyard abolitionism," training American citizens to seek out and identify victims of human trafficking as part of their everyday activities. Based on two years of ethnographic participant observation with two evangelical Christian human trafficking outreach projects in Southern California, this article examines the processes of what I term vigilante rescue in human trafficking. The enthusiasm around this brand of civilian vigilantism mirrors contemporary trends in urban governance, including community policing and civilian neighborhood patrol as modes of law enforcement engagement that operate outside the formal dictates of "state control." The nonstate actors discussed in this paper are empowered not through professional skills or legal authority, but rather through merging American concern with human trafficking with moral panics concerning race, class, and migration as markers of sex trafficking. Situating new trends in human trafficking vigilante rescue within the extant literatures on neoliberal governance globally, this article argues that vigilante rescue enforces state goals of surveillance and policing of working-class immigrant women in Los Angeles. These activities further racial, gender, and class divides that extend sexual state politics and privilege criminal justice rather than social welfare solutions to human trafficking.

Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and “caring” interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these references also expose two conflicting modes of care work that are implicated in contemporary anti-trafficking activism. Building on an extensive scholarship on care work, which has rarely been read alongside critical human trafficking scholarship, this article asks how human trafficking rescue programs expose disparate types of care work deeply connected to sexual commerce. Extending Rhacel Parreñas’ typology of moral and material care work of Filipina migrant domestic workers, this article argues that the shifting contexts of gendered care work under conditions of global migration, development, and humanitarianism, require an acknowledgment of how the moral care work involved in global “anti-trafficking” rescue performed mainly by first world women operates in opposition to the material care work of supporting families and households performed by migrant sex workers who are being rescued. As an additional articulation of material care work, global sex worker activists have also expressed how care work is a vital component of the labor relations of sex work itself—as a way to call for its recognition as a form of labor.