Irrational fears of being sex trafficked among financially stable white women are created by misogynistic and whorephobic myths around the circumstances in which most sex trafficking happens. Those ideas date all the way back to the idea of “white slavery” being popularized in the 1800s and early 1900s as a way to view prostitution among white women. Whilst people of any racial or ethnic group can have a disproportionate level of anxiety about being sex trafficked, it is consistently white women who use this fear performatively the most often.
People who are forced or coerced into selling sex are typically not kidnapped and sold between pimps like objects. Far more often, sex trafficking victims are women in desperate situations who initially agree to work for a trafficker as a means of survival and/or escape from where they currently live. The job can be misrepresented, with traffickers not being open about the sexual nature of the work or the conditions they’ll do it under, but sex trafficking victims are often very aware that they will be selling sex once their trafficker helps them cross a border or covers their short-term emergency financial needs. On other occasions, poor women are threatened into selling sex by their partners so that they can profit. Women in poverty are always the primary targets.
Despite these issues being more common in the global south and for people of colour outside of it, it is white women who are by no means struggling financially who make a performance of their fears of being sex trafficked. I call this a performance because that’s exactly what it is, regardless of the sincerity of their fear. They act out the part of someone who would never even consider sex work, both as a way to pre-emptively avoid blame if they are sexually abused or kidnapped and to show their own virtuousness. How could you call these wealthy white women whores, when they’re so terrified of the prospect they might be forced into the role of one?
These performances of a fear of being sex trafficked take many forms. I have seen TikToks where women rip out hair and press finger prints on the windows of the Uber, on the basis that they want to leave their DNA behind in case they are kidnapped. I have seen Facebook posts where women show pictures of sunglasses or zipties on their cars and claim traffickers use these methods to slow down women who are about to drive away, to grab and traffic them. The women who make these claims are white the vast majority of the time, and if they’re claiming a near miss in being sex trafficked they’ll talk about their fear and the physical effects of it. I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen these affluent women recount the physical symptoms of their terror from a flyer left on their car or a taxi taking a left turn where they think it should have taken a right.
A sex trafficker is not going to snatch these women in a parking lot, regardless of how deserted it is, or pick them up for an Uber ride and make them disappear. Someone who has the funds to own a car is likely to have people who would report them missing and the location of the car would provide authorities with information about where the victim was taken. A car that is registered with Uber would be extremely easy to track down if a customer never made it to their location. These scenarios don’t even require research to debunk, merely a few moments spent thinking critically.
When videos and posts about the ways to protect oneself from trafficking go viral, they have the effect of spreading this stress to others and encouraging them to share their fears and the rituals they engage in for self-protection. To avoid acknowledging the true reasons people are targeted for trafficking, these white influencers act as though this supposed risk they will be abducted and sold as sex slaves is due to their attractiveness. Viewers absorb the idea from this that if they act out similar levels of fear, they too will be considered attractive.
In the same way that many radical feminists argue that the existence of prostitution is a threat to all women, claiming the trauma that countless sex workers have experienced as their own by proxy, people who publicize their fear of being sex trafficked are doing the same thing. Whether they intend to or not, they are trading society to becoming more hostile to sex workers for a little extra attention. It’s a lot easier to get people on board with criminalizing the purchase of sex when they believe that clients are almost exclusively unknowingly buying it from women snatched up off the street who are under threat to act as willing participants. This is what misinformation about sex trafficking makes people think.
It is actually a lack of money which drives people into sex work when they do not have a passion for providing sexual pleasure. As a result of overlapping racism and misogyny, women of colour specifically are disproportionately likely to end up being poor and to find that selling sex is their best option. Wealthy women of colour do still exist, though, which begs the question: why is it that wealthy women of colour aren’t engaging in sex trafficking fear mongering to the same extent that white women are? It’s because they don’t benefit the same way from performing these anxieties; the people white women are performing for do not care about Black women or indigenous women or Asian women or any women of colour.
Demonstrating a fear of being sex trafficked, as someone who is not at risk, is a call for protection from white men and the white supremacist structures they run. It is a promise that white women would never consider trading sex for money, so they remain untainted in the eyes of the white men who might later consider them for wives. These same men were never interested in women of colour because of their racism, and few people besides self-hating conservatives who think they can be “one of the good ones” will waste time on appealing to them.
Trafficking is a real problem. It is one that is best solved by tackling poverty and resource scarcity, not by believing in false narratives and kidnappers seeking out victims among the middle and upper class.
We must open our borders and put an end to deportations. We must make sure that everyone has what they need to survive and eradicate poverty. We must decriminalize sex work and wipe sex workers’ criminal records clean of all offenses related to it. We must tear down the racist structures which control our society and stop all forms of racial discrimination. That is how we end sex trafficking – not by listening to the anxieties of wealthy white women and following where those emotions take you.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 