ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that survivor participation in the contemporary anti-sex trafficking movement is heavily restricted by movement structure and ideology, survivors nonetheless make important activist contributions. Survivors co-opt the roles provided for them to assert their humanity beyond the role of victim, come out and build solidarity with other survivors, and use their experiences to demand legitimacy as qualified experts to challenge the dominant strategies and goals of the anti-sex trafficking movement. The contemporary anti-sex trafficking movement’s framing of all prostitution as commercial sexual exploitation emerges out of the latter feminist perspective. The chapter uses “commercial sex” as an umbrella term to refer to all forms of prostitution including that performed by victims of trafficking, chosen freely by sex workers, and all of the many experiences in between. The anti-sex trafficking movement’s framing of all women in commercial sex as victims makes relevant the rescue of women from, and abolition of, all forms of commercial sex.
