Rationale for Study
Out from the Shadows: Re-Framing the Rescue Narrative
The rescue narrative that dominates trafficking discourses begins with an evil trafficker or pimp who abducts, deceives, or lures a young, innocent, helpless, and often naive girl into a prison-like brothel and controls her with brutal violence until a heroic rescuer comes to save the day. The trafficker is often a man of color or from a foreign country, and the rescuer is often a white, Western man.
In this narrative frame, the solution to sex trafficking is capturing and criminally prosecuting the trafficker. Popular images portray vulnerable women in need of help and frame the state, as well as health-care and social-service professionals, as women’s rescuers (Baker, 2013).
Rather than using a rescue narrative to frame the problem, which focuses almost exclusively on criminal justice solutions to sex trafficking, we offer an interactive, user-driven narrative that emphasizes the role of women's agency and the power of individual choices.
Baker, C. N. (2013). Moving Beyond ‘Slaves, Sinners, and Saviors’: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis of US Sex-Trafficking Discourses, Law and Policy. Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 4, 1-23.