Most young people become ‘sex trafficking victims’ due to poverty, racism, transphobia, and homophobia. Arresting ‘pimps’, and young people, won’t solve these problems.
The perfect mother is a ubiquitous, if impossible, part of American life. We see her in spandex at the gym, working out—self-care!—a week after delivering twins. She’s at center-stage when internet experts opine about how mothers can prevent teenagers’ opioid addictions. In the shadow of this unattainable, idealized vision of a mother as a virtual guarantor of their children’s health and happiness, actual mothers berate themselves for falling short of perfection, feeling ashamed and inadequate. In the American legal system, the pervasive stereotype of the perfect mother can lead to serious consequences, dramatically distorting the judgments of police, prosecutors, judges, and jurors.
The problem of police brutality in the U.S. has largely and rightfully highlighted police killings of unarmed Black men. Still, when police violence against women can be connected to women’s personal experiences with intimate partner violence and sexual violence, researchers helping craft policy must work toward a comprehensive understanding of both men’s and women’s experiences with law enforcement. Police brutality is not a new phenomenon. Researchers, scholars, and activists such as Andrea Ritchie, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Hillary Potter and grassroots movements like #SayHerName and INCITE! have long described and documented the problem of police brutality – specifically, police brutality against women and trans women of color. The #SayHerName brief documents cases in which women call police to report intimate partner or sexual violence, only to be met with inadequate, harmful, and abusive law enforcement responses. INCITE! has explained how police violence and intimate partner violence intersect in the lives of women of color, including women of color who are trans, bisexual or lesbian, immigrant, undocumented, living on tribal land, have prior criminal convictions, or are involved in sex work.
As Minnesota prepared to host the Super Bowl, increased attention was given to the issue of sex trafficking. In a Civios podcast, Lauren Martin, director of research at the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC) and affiliate faculty member of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, addressed the way that Minnesota state policy and research impacts federal policy related to sex trafficking and commercial sex.
It is easy to overlook the presence of women in our prison system. After all, in Minnesota, women account for just over 7% of the prison population, a mere 737 individuals. And the same is true across the country, with women comprising just 7% of the estimated 1.53 million people held in state and federal correctional facilities. Given these small numbers, the path to reducing mass incarceration is generally framed through its impacts on men. Fewer researchers work on questions such as whether the reasons women are imprisoned are unique, whether their rehabilitative needs are different, or whether the experience of prison impacts their outcomes differently than it does men.
Social Media
