RT Article
T1 Anti-trafficking saviors: celebrity, slavery, and branded activism
JF Crime, media, culture
VO 18
IS 2
SP 301
OP 323
A1 Heynen, Robert 1969-
A2 Van der Meulen, Emily 1977-
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1836529953
AB This article traces the development of popular forms of anti-trafficking activism in the United States through a social network and discourse analysis that focuses on NGO websites, celebrity advocacy, merchandising, social media campaigns, and policy interventions. This "branded activism," as we describe it, plays an important role in legitimizing an emerging anti-trafficking consensus that increasingly shapes both US foreign policy and domestic policing, and is frequently driven by an anti-sex work politics. Popular anti-trafficking discourses, we find, build on melodramatic narratives of victims and (white) saviors, depoliticize the complex labor and migration issues at stake, reinforce capitalist logics, and enable policy interventions that produce harm for migrants, sex workers, and others ostensibly being "rescued." Celebrity and marketing-driven branded activism relies especially strongly on parallels drawn between histories of chattel slavery and what anti-trafficking campaigns call "modern-day slavery." We challenge these parallels, particularly as they encourage participants to see themselves as abolitionist saviors in ways that reinforce neo-liberal notions of empowerment rooted in communicative capitalist networks.
K1 Abolitionism
K1 United States
K1 branded activism
K1 celebrity humanitarianism
K1 modern-day slavery
K1 Neo-liberalism
K1 Racism
K1 Sex Work
K1 Trafficking
K1 Whiteness
DO 10.1177/17416590211007896