The “Trafficked Narrative”: Modern Slavery’s Troubling History in the United States and Mexico

This chapter presents a comprehensive critique of the erroneous “trafficked narrative,” a framework that mistakenly compares the experiences of commercial sex workers and trafficking victims to historical Black slavery and Emancipation. This study meticulously dissects a century’s worth of anti-trafficking legislation, unearthing the fundamental paradoxes in our legal and historical interpretations of contemporary slavery in the United States and Mexico. The research unveils a troubling historical pattern of laws intended to combat trafficking and protect victims that improperly apply the narrative of Black slavery as a protective blueprint. The analysis notably critiques the Williams v. Sisolak case, that drew a controversial parallel between Nevada’s regulated sex industry and America’s historical racial chattel system. Consequently, it labeled sex workers as slaves and advocated for the abolition of prostitution under the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended antebellum slavery in 1865. The research emphasizes that entrenched gender and racial biases are embedded in the anti-trafficking policies of the United States and Mexico. This chapter dissects the vast influence of these biases, particularly when mislabeling sex workers and trafficked persons as slaves in an ill-conceived attempt to guard them against sexual exploitation. It also reveals how these biases pervasively shaped Mexico’s policies, resulting in prostitution being redefined as modern slavery ten years prior. By highlighting the similarities in narratives and policies across the United States and Mexico, this study provides a complete understanding of how these embedded biases shape attitudes and actions toward sex work and trafficking. Conclusively, this analysis insists on reexamining historical narratives and ongoing discussions about sex work, sex trafficking, and human trafficking in both countries. It exposes the racialized rhetoric that diminishes the severity of Black slavery and connects discourses around autonomy and the delegitimization of sex work after the American Civil War to broader discourses about Black freedom.