Abstract
Sex trafficking thrives on intersectional inequality and reinforcing
layers of vulnerability. Sex trafficking exists on a continuum of
sexualized violence, from microaggressive sexual harassment to
macroaggressive gang rapes, all of which create vulnerability in the
victim and perfect sovereignty in the perpetrator. Sexualized violence
performs power, as it is raced, classed, and gendered. Power not only
requires performance, but it necessitates repetitive reenactments of
domination in order to normalize its compulsive and pathological nature.
Lynchings, police shootings, gang rapes, and sex trafficking are all
performances of power on vulnerable bodies through which power
perfects itself. The same inequality that creates the necessary
preconditions for vulnerability to violence in the first instance, also
obfuscates or masks power's pathology and compulsivity in the
investigative and adjudicative processes. By way of illustration, victim
blaming renders the pathology of the perpetrator invisible because it
removes accountability from the perpetrator and shifts blame onto the
victim. Shifting blame onto the victim obfuscates or hides power's
omnipresence, compulsiveness, and pathology. The victim blaming
process is pervasive, systemic, and entrenched.
Without proper interventions, sex trafficking cases can become
ritualized spectacle, where sexualized violence as well as its
accompanying investigation and adjudication convince the factfinder of
the pathology of the victim and the sovereignty of the perpetrator. The
pathology that surrounds victims of sexualized violence adversely
impacts their credibility and extends narratives about male entitlement to
vulnerable bodies. The recent cases involving R. Kelly and Cyntoia
Brown illustrate these points. In the case of singer, song writer Kelly, his
videotaping sex with an underaged black female resulted in an acquittal.
Similarly, Brown was 16 when she shot her 43-year-old white pedophile
purchaser of sex. Brown's race (black), however, rendered her childlike
qualities, claims of innocence, and arguments involving self-defense
invisible. Before receiving clemency, Brown received a life sentence. In
both cases, the victims' race, class, and gender rendered them
hypersexualized and their victimization invisible. In both cases, the
victims were readily detectible for purposes of pathology, but not
humanity. In both cases, the victims were raced as black and gendered as
female. In both cases, neither victim was entitled to innocence or
childhood. Both cases reflect an ongoing historical tendency to
hypersexualize black females as a justification for their sexual
exploitation.
Both cases illustrate that problematic, often half-hearted,
prosecutions and bias saturated jurors can result in an absence of charges
and acquittals. This absence of accountability can license sexualized
violence with impunity and repeat rituals of spectacle. Like failed
adjudications involving police shootings of the societally vulnerable,
lackluster sex trafficking adjudication can perform the same task as the
violence itself- the exploitation and vilification of the victim, the
overvalorization or hypervalorization of the assailants, and the
reassurance of patriarchal order, entitlement, preeminence, vindication,
safety, and security.
Without proper interventions, sex trafficking investigations and
prosecutions can become a stage for the performance of state sanctioned
violence, further extending institutional racism, sexism, and classism.
Traditional liberal approaches to sex trafficking prosecutions- namely
intersectional indifference or the absence of race, class, and gender
salience- become breeding grounds for implicit bias because they allow
what goes unregulated in the "subconscious" to run rampant. As a
corrective, intersectionality and feminist discourses can be strategically
deployed to reconceptualize sex trafficking in order to maximize litigation
strategies, particularly the use of sex trafficking expert (STE) witnesses.
Comprehensive use of STEs can mitigate the adjudicative process'
complicity in and ratification of sexualized violence through operations
of law.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
1-23-2023
Repository Citation
Cook, Blanche, "Stop Traffic: Using Expert Witnesses to Disrupt Intersectional Vulnerability In Sex Trafficking Prosecutions" (2019). Law Faculty Scholarly Articles. 746.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/746
Notes/Citation Information
Blanche Bong Cook, Stop Traffic: Using Expert Witnesses to Disrupt Intersectional Vulnerability in Sex Trafficking Prosecutions, 24 Berkeley J. Crim. L. 147 (2019).