Masters Thesis

The discursive power of anti-trafficking laws: restructuring social justice outside of neoliberalism

Passed in November 2012, the Californians Against Slavery and Exploitation (CASE) Act increased prison terms, financial penalties, and law enforcement. The research’s objective is an analysis of the CASE Act to critically examine child sex trafficking in California, specifically in the San Francisco Bay Area, through the intersections of race, gender, and class. I explore the societal investment on child sex trafficking to argue that there is a societal anxiety over reproductive futurity, childhood happiness, and family structure in neoliberal society, economy, and politics. Using affect theory to uncover our investment in protecting children, I analyze three political advertisement for supporting the CASE Act and two participant observations of anti-human trafficking training sessions. I contend that the rhetoric of child exploitation exacerbates other forms of violence towards black/brown bodies through the affective response of wanting to save children from potential abuse and trauma vis-a-vis incarceration. Therefore, the carceral framework of social justice justifies systematic and racialized violence in the sake of protecting children, without considering the socio-economic and political systems that perpetuate exploitation, institutional racism, and marginalization.

Relationships

In Collection:

Items in ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.