ABSTRACT
Historically, the domestic sex trafficking (DST) of women and children has been overlooked by policy-makers, scholars, and the public, or overshadowed by concerns about international sex trafficking (Rand 2009). In the last decade, developments in scholarship and advocacy related to DST have culminated in legislation addressing this human rights issue (Polaris Project 2013; Rand 2009; TVPA 2000). According to federal law, sex trafficking occurs when a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion (TVPA 2000). Despite evidence that many prostituted women and girls in the USA have been forced into the sex trade by traffickers or ‘pimps,’ these women continue to be criminalized under solicitation or prostitution statutes, and the disciplines of criminal justice and criminology have yet to fully explore DST as it intersects with other forms of gendered violence. The invisibility of this problem repeats an historical evolution of limiting women’s equal protection under the law (Franklin 2008). Specifically, battered women and sexual assault victims were similarly invisible until the second wave of the feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s (Brownmiller 1975; Martin 1976).
