Constructing Vulnerability: The Effect of State Migration Policy and Policing on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children

ABSTRACT

This article examines the effects of the criminalization of immigration control systems on the prevalence of the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in the United States. This research delineates the relationship between increased carcerality and marginalization. The results confirm existing theory that more intense criminalization is associated with greater marginalization and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of the polity. Controlling for demographic and socio-economic variables prove relevant to CSEC, and models exhibit positive correlations between the variables of interest. I argue that the increase in CSEC rates associated with criminalized immigration policy is a manifestation of changes in exploitation due to an increasingly carceral state. In attempting to exercise control over migrant bodies through state violence, policies that increase criminalization lead to more commodification in precarious communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration policy
• criminalization
• CSEC
• United States

Notes

¹ I considered utilizing arrests for juvenile prostitution as a starting point for estimating the number of juvenile prostitutes. These data were largely available within the Uniform Crime Report dataset. Florida metro areas and Washington, DC were exceptions, as they do not report arrests to the FBI. These arrest data, however, appear to suffer from the problems outlined in the literature on Human Trafficking measurement (Tyldum & Brunovskis, 2005). Simply put, the arrest data have no discernable pattern or relation to other theorized variables, and “correcting” for measures of police efficacy does not appear to change this. This implies that the data that would, perhaps, be considered to be the most obvious measure of juvenile prostitution is of no clear value as a predictive variable of the commercial exploitation of children as understood in this research. The existing literature (Tyldum & Brunovskis, 2005) argues that arrest numbers are more of a reflection of police policy toward sex trafficking victimization than of the prevalence of the phenomenon. Upon examination, this appears to be the case.

² This formula is a development of a basic premise, as follows: not all homeless runaways are sexually exploited, and not all sexually exploited minors are homeless runaways. Multiplying the number of homeless runaways (as proxied by the number of missing minors) by their rate of exploitation in the commercial sex market yields a measure of homeless, exploited minors. This sum must then be divided by the percentage of exploited minors that are homeless to discern the complete population of exploited minors.

³ Goodness of Fit statistics for Economic Marginalization factor variable were marginally acceptable with a KMO of 0.496 and BTS significant to p <.05, while Family Instability was acceptable at KMO of 0.698 and BTS significant to p <.001.