Let’s start with a cold, hard truth: the so-called “anti-trafficking” initiatives that claim to “rescue” sex workers often function more like a conveyor belt straight to jail. And spoiler alert—if your “rescue” ends with a mugshot, trauma, and court-mandated shame therapy, it wasn’t a rescue. It was a raid with a PR team.
Despite all the glossy PSAs, billboards, and tearful press conferences, most “anti-trafficking” operations disproportionately arrest adult consensual sex workers—not traffickers, not clients, and certainly not the multimillion-dollar industries that profit off criminalization. These operations rarely even identify trafficking victims. What they do reliably produce are court dockets full of Black, brown, poor, queer, trans, and undocumented folks booked on charges like prostitution, loitering, failure to identify, or possession of condoms—yes, condoms.