Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Criminal Justice

Advisor

Samantha Majic

Committee Members

Rosemary Barberet

Valli Rajah

Crystal Jackson

Subject Categories

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Human trafficking, feminist criminology, sex work, specialty courts, victimology

Abstract

Human trafficking intervention courts (HTICs), specialty courts in the US designed to connect trafficking victims to services when they are arrested, require defendants to identify as victims of human trafficking in order to qualify for HTICs' services and other social supports. However, some defendants may be autonomously trading sex, thereby raising questions about the meaning of the term "victim" within HTICs. Therefore, my study asks the following: a) at the institutional level, how do HTICs’ rules, norms, procedures, and stakeholders implement and give meaning to the “victim” label, and why?; and b) at the individual level, how do people who go through these courts understand and give meaning to the label and its application to them? Which leads to my larger theoretical question: Why and how do legal systems, such as courts, shape victimhood for both the institution and the individual? To answer these questions, I draw from broader theories regarding interpretivism, victimology, labeling theory, social constructionism, feminist institutionalism and criminology, carceral feminism and protectionism and standpoint theory, and I employed multiple methods of qualitative data collection in New York, NY, Columbus, OH, and Nashville, TN. I argue that at the institutional level, HTICs’ rules, practices, and procedures formally understand and label sex worker defendants as victims without agency, but stakeholders within these institutions understand and apply this conception of victimhood with varying degrees of intensity. This variation is a function of their location within the criminal legal system, which positions them to adhere to human trafficking-related laws that are rooted in longstanding assumptions about sex workers’ lived experiences as victims and criminals. Conversely, at the individual level, defendants do not share a uniform understanding of victimhood, and this variation is a function of their positionality in broader systems of privilege and oppression, which help them determine whether and how they identify with, reject, or use victimhood strategically. Ultimately, this means that “victimhood” is not as static as the criminal legal system frames it to be, but is instead, victimhood within the HTIC context is a dynamic and contextual phenomenon.

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