In a 2014 Washington Post op-ed, human rights lawyer Malika Saada Saar described how Sandra, a 12-year old girl, ran away from an abusive foster home in Florida. A man then found her at a bus stop and forced her to sell sex on a nightly basis. Although Sandra was well below the state’s age of consent, when she encountered the police they arrested her for prostitution. In response, Saar’s op-ed is titled “There Is No Such Thing as a Child Prostitute,” and it speaks for a social movement that has worked to change how youth who trade sex are viewed and treated in public discourse and under the law. At first glance, this movement may seem unnecessary: after all, no one favors sexually exploiting youth, commercially or otherwise. Yet in the United States, changing social attitudes and achieving related legal reforms has been a fitful, uneven, and highly contested process.

Carrie Baker’s Fighting the US Youth Sex Trade offers a thoughtful and comprehensive examination of this movement. Drawing on Black feminist and social movement theories, existing scholarly research, media sources, campaign materials, and interviews with advocates and elected officials, Baker argues that activism against the US youth sex trade has surged when social changes related to gender, sexuality, race, economics, and immigration have fueled concerns about youth safety. By using narratives that resonate with and reflect long-standing beliefs about race and sexual victimization, she shows how this movement has often exaggerated and sensationalized youth’s engagement in the sex trades; ignored the heterogeneity of their experiences; reinforced racial, gender, and sexual ideologies; and promoted neoliberal economic and carceral policies. Although many activists in this movement have challenged these tendencies, its more influential segments have not, and as a result it “has not done enough to address the underlying conditions that make youth vulnerable to entry into the sex trade in the first place” (p. 239), such as underemployment, racism, and homophobia.

The book’s first three chapters provide the historical context for contemporary activism against the US youth sex trade. Chapter 1 documents how late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century campaigns to control and protect young women’s sexuality, along with mid-twentieth-century social and political shifts, provided the grounds for this movement. Chapter 2 turns to campaigns against juvenile prostitution that emerged in the late 1970s and inspired the passage of laws and policies emphasizing criminal justice solutions over social service provision. Chapter 3 discusses the emergence of “survivor activists” in the 1990s, whose efforts encouraged Congress to pass the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000.

Chapters 4–6 consider how the movement reframed youth involvement in the sex trades as domestic minor sex trafficking. Chapter 4 illustrates how activists used political opportunities created by the TVPA to push for new laws to assist youth at the federal, state, and local levels. Chapter 5 considers the ideological diversification of the movement as it expanded to include evangelical Christians, sex worker rights advocates, and youth empowerment organizations, which often worked across differences (or at arm’s length) to achieve common goals. Chapter 6 then documents how the movement expanded its efforts in the 2010s to reform the child welfare and criminal justice systems, target men who purchase sex, and draw attention to a wider range of youth in the sex trades, including girls of color, LGBT youth, and boys. Chapter 7 raises criticisms from journalists, academics, and activists on the Left, who claim that this movement has deployed framings that deny human agency and rights to youth while expanding the carceral state and social welfare bureaucracies. The concluding chapter reflects on how recurrent narratives about the commercial sexual exploitation of youth have largely promoted criminal justice responses, which have not mitigated youth’s vulnerabilities at the systemic level.

Many scholars have written about specific efforts to combat the US youth sex trade, and a major strength of Baker’s book is that it gathers this existing research, together with new research of her own, in one place. Although it would have been interesting to hear more about this movement’s efforts through the post–World War II economic boom and the quietistic 1950s, Baker’s work provides a coherent picture of the political mobilization around this issue over time. Namely, readers will see that even as youth enter the sex trade in response to a range of complex socioeconomic factors, dominant segments of the movement have consistently deployed a simplistic gendered and racialized narrative that involves “innocent children, evil pimps, and heroic rescues” (p. 201). Whether it was the nineteenth-century campaigns against “white slavery,” news stories about “predatory African American men cajoling and coercing white girls into prostitution” (p. 42) in the 1970s, or stories in the 2000s of “pimps” kidnapping young middle-class suburban girls that were replete with the “racially coded language of the ‘inner city’ and ‘ghetto’” (p. 103), there is ample evidence in Baker’s book that this movement has long mobilized racist stereotypes in service of its goals.

But in emphasizing the movement’s racist tendencies, Baker is also careful and clear to highlight its diversity. Here she draws attention to groups like the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP; chap. 4) in Chicago that, in contrast to dominant discourses, focused on youth of color in the sex trade and worked through a peer leadership model to emphasize their rights and empowerment, “rather than victimization rescue” (p. 94). However, in offering these examples to show variation in the movement, the book tends to describe individual activists and groups as either committed to advancing sex worker rights or to abolishing sex work altogether, when in fact these ideological boundaries were blurred at times. For example, Baker writes about the late Norma Hotaling, a notable survivor activist who sought to abolish prostitution for youth and adults. Although this was indeed her position for much of her life, my research (Sex Work Politics, 2014) indicates that Hotaling was initially a sex worker rights activist until a combination of therapeutic encounters, interpersonal experiences, and funding opportunities shifted her allegiances to the anti-sex work camp. Given this, more engagement with existing research about sex worker rights activism would have enhanced the book’s argument about the “collaborative adversarial” (p. 8) character of the movement against the US youth sex trade by showing the conflicts, interactions, and shifting positions of many of its leaders and organizations.

Of course, illustrating the complex politics of this vast and long-standing movement in a single book is a challenging task, and Baker’s work definitely pushes scholars to take on further research about this movement’s efforts and successes. To name just some examples, Baker indicates how the movement has targeted men to end their “demand” for commercial sexual services, forced websites such as Craigslist to close their “adult services” section, and won “safe harbor laws” in some jurisdictions to divert youth from prosecution to social services (see chap. 5). However, she indicates that these and many of the movement’s efforts have simultaneously expanded the prison industrial complex and the bureaucratic surveillance of various populations. As this movement proceeds, Baker’s work calls on political science and policy studies scholars to examine whether its recent victories will continue reinforcing racial and gender hierarchies and, consequently, fail to address why young people like Sandra are vulnerable to trading sex in the first place.