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Since the late-19th century, academic researchers, nonprofits, and law enforcement have organized in coalition to combat the problem of human trafficking in the United States, while distorting the social consequences of their interventions. This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical examination of the anti-trafficking movement in Arizona. In addition to…
Since the late-19th century, academic researchers, nonprofits, and law enforcement have organized in coalition to combat the problem of human trafficking in the United States, while distorting the social consequences of their interventions. This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical examination of the anti-trafficking movement in Arizona. In addition to conducting archival research, data was collected through direct observations of academics, local nonprofit leaders, and law enforcement at anti-trafficking events that were open to the public. By examining vast, invisible anti-trafficking coalitions in Arizona from the 20th century to today, it becomes clear that coalitions garner power and profit by facilitating the criminalization of sex workers and offering support for other groups, most notably Mormon polygamists, whose religious practices can be tantamount to trafficking. Combining Charles Mills’ (2007) concept of white ignorance and the nonprofit industrial complex (INCITE!, 2009), this study draws on literature from critical race theory and feminist theory to interrogate how Christo-fascist discourses of the 19th century white slavery movement continue to guide anti-trafficking coalitions in the contemporary United States. As a social formation in which bourgeois white women have always held influence, this exploration of anti-trafficking activism pivots around political, economic, and cultural conceptions of white Christian women’s capacity to reproduce the white race in the United States which has been since its foundation a Christian nation. In turn, there is limited scope and depth of awareness about the complexity of race, gender, class, agency, in relation to the problems associated with trafficking in Short Creek, Arizona, as well as the interventions that were implemented in response to human trafficking following the reign of Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints’ Prophet, Warren Jeffs. In documenting and analyzing the organizing strategies of professional actors responding to human trafficking between 2016-2021, results generated from this research suggest that the anti-trafficking movement’s discourses are steeped in contradiction, to the effect of reproducing racial capitalism and necessitating the eradication of the trafficking framework. It reveals how the differential treatment of agency among trafficking victims in different communities, whether the women and children in polygamous families, or sex workers in Phoenix, has enabled their ongoing exploitation.
