Racialization within Antitrafficking Interventions Targeting Migrant Sex Workers: Findings from the SEXHUM Research Project in France

This article draws on the findings of the research project Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work, and Trafficking (SEXHUM), a study investigating migration, sex work, and human trafficking in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. In this article, we focus on how racialized categories are mobilized in antitrafficking practices in France. Since April 2016, the French government has enforced a prohibitionist and neo-abolitionist law criminalizing the demand for sexual services. This coincided with the targeting of Chinese and Nigerian cis-women and with the neglect of Latina trans women working in the sex industry according to racialized and sex-gendered understandings of victimhood. Whereas Chinese women tend to be presented by humanitarian rhetoric as silent victims of Chinese male-dominated mafias, Nigerian women have come to embody the ultimate figure of the victim of trafficking by an overpowering Black male criminality. Meanwhile, (sexual) humanitarian actors have neglected Latina trans women’s ongoing experiences of extreme violence and marginalization.