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This article looks at debates over human trafficking by considering the linkages between federal funding, media myths, and non-governmental organization (NGO) activities

Community safety has complex connotations for sex workers. This complexity is, in part, a function of the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the positioning of sex workers as both at-risk and risky, victims and criminals. ‘Community’ is simultaneously inclusive of everyone, including sex workers, and that which needs to be defended against the perceived dangers posed by sex work and sex workers. Denied in these contexts is any sense that harm may indeed flow from community to sex workers, not just the reverse. Drawing on data from a study with a diversity of sex working women in Toronto, Canada, this article argues that these contradictions are not the product of confusion, but in fact are constitutive of the ways in which communities are rhetorically and materially formed. They have structured legislative responses to sex work, reflect normative conceptions of community, bodies, and public space, and have actively produced unsafe and insecure conditions for sex workers. Indeed, sex workers themselves consistently identify the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the harm that flows from them. This is strongly evident in one of the key ways in which projects for ‘community safety’ are currently implemented, namely the installation of Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV).

This article traces the development of popular forms of anti-trafficking activism in the United States through a social network and discourse analysis that focuses on NGO websites, celebrity advocacy, merchandising, social media campaigns, and policy interventions. This “branded activism,” as we describe it, plays an important role in legitimizing an emerging anti-trafficking consensus that increasingly shapes both US foreign policy and domestic policing, and is frequently driven by an anti-sex work politics. Popular anti-trafficking discourses, we find, build on melodramatic narratives of victims and (white) saviors, depoliticize the complex labor and migration issues at stake, reinforce capitalist logics, and enable policy interventions that produce harm for migrants, sex workers, and others ostensibly being “rescued.” Celebrity and marketing-driven branded activism relies especially strongly on parallels drawn between histories of chattel slavery and what anti-trafficking campaigns call “modern-day slavery.” We challenge these parallels, particularly as they encourage participants to see themselves as abolitionist saviors in ways that reinforce neo-liberal notions of empowerment rooted in communicative capitalist networks.

This article looks at debates over human trafficking by considering the linkages between federal funding, media myths, and non-governmental organization (NGO) activities and by examining the textual and visual content of NGO websites. By highlighting the ways in which NGOs echo government communication strategies, we argue that these debates are constrained not only by the current political terrain, but also by an ingrained and problematic anti-trafficking discourse. Further, we interrogate the language and emotive appeals of NGOs that receive federal funding for anti-trafficking programming through the exploration of counter-discourses developed by both scholars and independent organizations that are critical of dominant narratives and policies. We conclude by suggesting that alternative narratives and media strategies are needed for the development of more nuanced and authentic conceptions of labour, migration, and sex work