Trafficking Trajectories: Vulnerabilities, Failed Systems, and the Case for Prevention

Highlights the role structural vulnerability plays in the lived realities of domestic sex trafficking survivors before, during, and after trafficking

Drawing on survivor narratives and ethnographically rich accounts from frontline workers in New England, specifically Maine and New Hampshire, Trafficking Trajectories contextualizes the ways in which structural vulnerability is embodied by domestic sex trafficking survivors in complex ways over time. The book also makes legible where and when upstream responses are most needed to prevent trafficking from occurring.

Trafficking Trajectories counters the dominant trafficking narrative of victims and villains and how this narrative decontextualizes and isolates the period of victimization and rescue from broader experiences of vulnerability. Instead, Alicia Peters centers survivor experience to highlight the role of structural violence and vulnerability before, during, and after trafficking. Focusing on the lived realities of survivors, she argues that prioritizing an interventionist criminal legal response to trafficking does little to address the issues that make individuals vulnerable to trafficking in the first place and fails to end trafficking.

Peters combines nuanced accounts of survivors with the observations and quandaries faced by frontline workers to reveal opportunities for rethinking and broadening the response to trafficking to make it more focused on prevention, and thus more effective. The book reframes trafficking--not as sporadic instances of interpersonal violence requiring criminal legal intervention-- but as structural violence that requires systematic and preventive intervention. Trafficking Trajectories concludes with a series of policy recommendations intended to address human trafficking at its root.

Alicia W. Peters is Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliated faculty in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of New England.