Social service and moral panic

As liberal welfare state professionals, social workers have usually been understood as likely victims of moral panics (Cohen, Reference Cohen1971) who are vulnerable to redundancy in the face of populist austerity (Lloyd et al., Reference Lloyd, King and Chenowetb2002), making them natural enemies of most moral panics. However, there have been instances in which social workers have actively supported campaigns that proved to be moral panics. Most prominently, social workers were instrumental in generating child testimonies that led to wrongful convictions of childcare workers in the ‘satanic ritual abuse’ trials of the 1980s in the United States (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Reference Goode and Ben-Yehuda1994; de Young, Reference de Young2004; Grometstein, Reference Grometstein, Huff and Killias2008).

Sociologist Howard Becker (Reference Becker1963), who coined the term moral entrepreneur to describe the way social rules come into being, divides this social category into ‘rule creators’, who lead moral crusades to change social standards of deviance and normality, and ‘rule enforcers’, who carry out the new rules without regard to content, context or belief (Becker, Reference Becker1963). If accepted, this approach tends to force a choice between viewing policy implementers in a moral panic as stolid dupes (Conrad and Schneider, Reference Conrad and Schneider1980; Margolin, Reference Margolin1997; Lyon-Callo, Reference Lyon-Callo2000) or opportunists and moral bullies (Langan and Day, Reference Langan and Day1992; Goodyear-Smith, Reference Goodyear-Smith1993; Mathieu, Reference Mathieu1993).

Some authors writing critically about anti-trafficking have explicitly identified policy implementers, such as social workers, as active moral crusaders (Nadelman, Reference Nadelman1990; McDonald, Reference McDonald2004; Weitzer, Reference Weitzer2006; Zhang, Reference Zhang2009; Blanchette and da Silva, Reference Blanchette and Silva2012), while others have either ignored them entirely or viewed them as simply ‘rule enforcers’ (Curtis et al., Reference Curtis, Terry, Dank, Dombrowski, Khan, Muslim, Labriola and Rempel2008; Thrupkaew, Reference Thrupkaew2009; Day, Reference Day2010). To our knowledge, only Bernstein (Reference Bernstein2012) has attempted a study of the motives, desires, goals and contradictions of participating in the anti-trafficking movement as a subject in its own right. However, her focus has been on professional activists with huge latitude for choice and agency, rather than the social workers and other unevenly situated functionaries that we studied.

Research methods

In 2007, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded our research team, comprised of the Center for Court Innovation (CCI) and John Jay College, to study the nature and scope of the CSEC problem in New York City (Curtis et al., Reference Curtis, Terry, Dank, Dombrowski, Khan, Muslim, Labriola and Rempel2008). Over the course of four months, we interviewed 249 market-involved-adolescents, all of whom were under eighteen years of age, representing the largest in situ data set ever collected on this population in the United States. Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) was used to recruit a statistically representative sample by taking advantage of intra-group social connections to build a sample pool that mirrors the specified target population.Footnote ¹

Following the New York project, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention funded our research team to replicate the previous project in a six-city survey that would use RDS to recruit 1,800 young adults between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four. The goal was to create a broad survey of the nature and scope of CSEC in the United States, as well as an understanding of law enforcement and social service anti-trafficking institutions; the latter through interviews with providers.

Atlantic City, New Jersey, was chosen as the first site. A city of only 35,000 people on a tiny fifteen-kilometre long and several-hundred-metre wide island, roughly 200 kilometres from New York City, Atlantic City has eleven fully operative and licensed casinos, making it the United States’ second largest gaming market and a widely reported site of CSEC activity. Shortly after institutional review board approval was granted, in January 2010, we began a process of interviewing, regular engagement with and observation of a wide variety of Atlantic City youth policy implementers and also attended the monthly anti-trafficking taskforce meetings. Our fieldwork ended in January 2011, after interviewing 149 young sex workers who had started before their eighteenth birthday. As will become clear from the research narrative that follows, the smooth and rapid process of data collection that occurred in New York City was not repeated in Atlantic City. However, we believe that the process of failing at replication provides important insights that were not gleaned from the New York City study.Footnote ² Some of these insights involve the role of policy implementers who were not at the center of the sponsored research, but remain important to consider.

Moral entrepreneurs or doubting ministers?

Neither of the two categories of moral entrepreneurs (rule creators and rule enforcers) adequately describes what we saw among social workers, law enforcement officials and youth services professionals in the anti-trafficking taskforce who were unable to find those they sought to help. Despite active and voluntary participation in the taskforce, most harboured too many doubts to be archetypical rule enforcers or creators. In contrast to Becker (Reference Becker1963), we prefer an approach closer to that of Mosse, who describes a gap between policy and practice in which ‘actors. . .devote their energies to maintaining coherent representations regardless of events’ (Mosse, Reference Mosse2005: 2), and Berlant (Reference Berlant1991), who identifies policy implementation as lying at the intersection of belonging and national fantasy. In this vein, we use the heuristic metaphor of the royal ministers in the classic Hans Christian Anderson tale The Emperor's New Clothes, which we believe captures some of the ambiguities and complexities of group behaviour and bureaucracy. In this tale, trusted royal bureaucrats go to view imaginary cloth that two conmen claim is invisible to anyone who is stupid or unfit for his position. The ministers cannot see the cloth and do not believe they are stupid, but wonder if they are unfit for their position. In doubt, they tell the emperor of a beautiful cloth. When the emperor finally wears the imaginary clothing in a public procession his subjects proclaim the beauty of the garments until a child blurts out that the emperor is naked. The child's father tries to silence him, but the spell is broken and everybody says the emperor has no clothes. The emperor also doubts the existence of the clothes, but ironically continues to lead the procession of ministers and nobles as if nothing unusual has happened.

This tale is typically viewed as carrying a moral that if one person with a vision tells the truth, lies and pretence can be defeated. Robbins (Reference Robbins2003) draws on Andersen's original version that does not include the child, but ends with the whole town, including the emperor happy with the imaginary suit of clothes and the fellowship brought by the shared lie/fantasy. For Robbins, the child who appears in the later and more widely known version is a disrupter of the social fabric who arrogantly assumes that emperors should be clothed, the townspeople are fools and that the social inequality that exists in town must be revealed to all who have ignored it, regardless of the social cost.

In the story, neither the emperor nor his ministers are completely cynical; even at the end of the story they all doubt the existence of the cloth and their own fitness for their positions, but choose irony over humiliation. It is this doubt and irony that we believe provides a more useful framework for understanding the experience of implementing policy in the type of situations we encountered in the anti-trafficking taskforce than do reductive terms like moral crusader and moral entrepreneur, which suggest certainty. We did encounter some individuals at the national policy level who seemed to fit the category of rule creator, and a few taskforce members who behaved like stolid enforcers. However, most of the policy implementers that we met were not sure exactly what they were seeing or what was at stake, and seemed to fear that there was somebody out there who was more fit for their job, because of the ability to see things that should be clear and manifest, but which were always just out of their sight.

We began our field research in February 2010 by engaging our social worker, law enforcement and anti-trafficking taskforce contacts, who all had described a ‘CSEC epidemic’ in Atlantic City and had assured us that we could find 300 ‘victims’ very quickly. An FBI agent connected to the taskforce asserted that, ‘the girls are all up and down Pacific Avenue every night’. As we were beginning the process of finding initial ‘seed’ interviews for the RDS, we had frequent contact with taskforce members and attended meetings that included all the programs serving youth in Atlantic City.

In group situations, particularly taskforce meetings, participants strongly affirmed the story of the CSEC epidemic and tried to help us see it in Atlantic City. For a long while, they insisted on referring us to Pacific Avenue after dark. However, it soon became clear that as researchers staying up all night on Pacific Avenue we knew it better than they did, since they all lived in the suburbs and rarely saw Pacific Avenue after 5p.m.

Wishing to continue helping, they directed us to new areas where they were sure CSEC was rampant. A law enforcement official (from the district attorney's office) at a taskforce meeting suggested that ‘CSEC activity has been moving away from Pacific Avenue for a long time. There are too many police patrolling. The teenagers have moved to the Marina.’ We had recently spent several nights at the Trump Marina hotel investigating the area, but had seen nothing and heard nothing from the many street hustlers and ‘spot pimps’ (street hustlers who direct potential customers to sex workers, typically for a $10 tip, but have no exclusive management) who were being paid to introduce us to sex worker respondents. It was again clear that this official did not know the Marina after dark. We politely took notes on what he said and informed the group that we would put more effort into the Marina.

It soon became apparent that there was not only no CSEC at the Marina, but little commercial street sexual activity of any kind there, and we were directed out of town. In a focus group setting, we were told by a mid-level state social worker from the taskforce that ‘all the real trafficking activity happens in the motels on the Blackhorse Pike – in the suburbs’. We had recently spent nights at varied motels that line the Blackhorse Pike, early mornings and days in their parking lots and the nearby public spaces such as convenience stores and petrol stations, but found nothing. As a street hustler we worked with observed, ‘if a couple of middle age white guys like you [the principal investigators] and a team of young girls [our interview staff] can't find the action, how is a john from Kansas at the convention center going to?’. In fact, we found that these motels were indeed sites for the consummation of paid sex acts, but there were no public spaces to sustain the market, which remained in the city.

It was April and we had engaged Atlantic City street sex markets, but still did not have our first interview with a CSEC victim. We suggested our doubts about a CSEC epidemic on the streets of Atlantic City. Taskforce members became angry and started to suggest that we were unfit for our positions. The primary street outreach worker for a prominent religiously based youth shelter informed us at a taskforce meeting that we would never find respondents, since ‘they all hide under the boardwalk and researchers like you will never gain their trust. None of the girls will be brave enough to talk to you. If they do, their pimps will cut their faces and it will be your fault.’ In a more gentle tone, but with similar content, an official from the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) told us, ‘don't feel bad, the police in this town aren't finding them either. They are hidden and you have to be able to convince these girls that you can protect them, which you, obviously can't.’

Such explanations for our inability to find minors in local sex markets seemed highly questionable. We were now familiar with local street sex markets and knew that pimps generally steered clear of the late teenagers that sometimes slept rough under the boardwalk. They claimed that there was not any money to be made from ‘scrawny drug addicted white girls’. However, we politely absorbed this criticism.

Finally, we began to get suggestions that our inability to see CSEC victims made us not only unfit for our jobs, but also stupid. At a taskforce meeting where we presented a new version of our interview instrument, an FBI agent blamed our lack of interviews on incompetence, saying, ‘you guys are too academic to do this study. How can you ask these girls when was the first time they exchanged sex for money? You need to put it in language they know, like when was the first time your daddy turned you out.’ We had enough familiarity with the target population, from the New York City study, to know that this FBI agent's insistence on police television slang that few young people would ever willingly use suggested that his knowledge of the problem was weak and second hand, but nonetheless, it stung.

Perhaps in response to the FBI agent's combination of harshness and ignorance at the meeting, several social workers sought us out to reassure us that our inability to see CSEC victims did not make us stupid. The DYFS official told us, ‘don't worry, you can iron out the interview and when the summer comes you will get your 300 [interviews] easily’. Later that same day, after the meeting, the director of a small state funded youth homeless shelter, who we had developed good relations with, quietly exposed his own doubt. In sotto voce he said, ‘she's right you know [the DYFS official], you'll get interviews when summer comes, but I've been working in AC for twenty-eight years and there are never more than about fourteen underage girls working in this town at one time. So don't get your hopes too high.’

In June, young people finally did start to come to Atlantic City for the summer and we got interviews through the street hustlers and spot pimps to whom we paid $10 for each successful interview introduction. Within a few days, they informed us that we had interviewed all the underage sex workers that any of them could find in Atlantic City. They told us that new ones would come and go during the summer and that they would keep an eye out for us. Fearing that we would become ethnographic cold product, we raised the age limit from nineteen to twenty-two (later twenty-four) in order to keep the research connections strong and instantly obtain information on new arrivals.

Despite only a trickle of minors in our sample, we regained credibility and legitimacy with taskforce members and, as the CCI institutional interviews began, many service providers started to reveal doubt about the extent of CSEC. A census of the DYFS caseload for Atlantic County in May of 2010 revealed nearly 1,000 adolescents in crisis, of which there was institutional evidence of only six having regularly traded sex for money. Parallel youth services provided by not-for-profits yielded similar percentages. We were not the only ones having trouble finding this population that had been described to us as ‘an epidemic’.

The DYFS official finally confided to us that she and most of her staff had not actually met any young girls who could be authoritatively categorised as CSEC victims:

Then, almost as if she was in the Hans Christian Anderson story she said, ‘I'm an old timer. I can't even tell which of these girls is being exploited. You should talk to SherryFootnote ³ . . . She sees things on the streets that none of the rest of us do.’ Thus began a chain of individuals who pointed us towards other individuals who were more fit for their position because they were better at seeing CSEC victims.

Sherry was a white woman in her mid-twenties. We interviewed her in the same room with an official. She told us that she knew of CSEC girls, but that confidentiality restrictions prevented her from introducing us. Instead, she told us stories about a girl named Kerry who had started as an underage client of hers and eventually grown out of prostitution, became an assistant pimp and then a pimp in her own right: ‘going undercover into the local high school to recruit new victims’. She told us about her friendship with Kerry and how their rhyming names made them honorary sisters. She gave us Kerry's number, but when we contacted her, she was living in Philadelphia, about to have her first child and had little interest in or seeming ability to help.

We contacted Sherry again, this time in private, by telephone. Coming as close to saying the emperor has no clothes as anybody on the taskforce, she told us, ‘what can you do, they would rather make $100 for a trick than working at Subway for $7.25 an hour. It's their choice. I can't really blame them.’ When asked about the power of the pimps that the taskforce was pursuing, she told us that ‘pimps are not always what we think they are’. She went on to imply that CSEC might not be as pressing as we imagine by saying that, ‘I don't see that many of these girls. Mostly I deal with emergencies, like when a girl is being molested by her stepfather.’ Then invoking the metaphor of visibility as it is connected to merit and fitness for a professional position, she told us that we should talk to Andy at the previously mentioned religiously based youth shelter, ‘He's out there once a week under the boardwalk actually rescuing girls from their pimps. He's the one who really knows the scene and sees what is happening firsthand.’ This was the one organisation that had taken an early and principled stance against offering us any help, arguing that we were just another set of exploiters. Andy did not return our calls.

By late July, we had done over 100 interviews (ten with minors) and had developed a local reputation for being able to find and interview CSEC victims, but this seemed to disturb some at this above-mentioned organisation. We no longer had an office and had to do interviews in public. In one instance, a priest connected to the same organisation Andy worked for, who was on the taskforce, disrupted an interview with a young woman who had entered the organisation just at her eighteenth birthday, had met her pimp there, and had begun trading sex for money while a resident. She was now living under the boardwalk with the pimp, who was eighteen and also indigent. During the interview, the priest hovered just behind the interviewer, repeatedly putting his finger to his lips and making the shush sign to the young woman. When asked to leave, he sat down and made the interview impossible. However, such open hostility and sabotage was unusual.

As the summer started to come to an end, some taskforce members actually came to us for help. In early August, a middle-aged woman from the DYFS office who was doing a graduate degree in social work called us for help locating CSEC victims for her thesis on relationships between CSEC victims and pimps. She had been directed to us by several taskforce members, all youth workers, who, early in our research, had led us to believe that they had many connections with CSEC victims. They had told her that we had gained the trust of the girls and their pimps and that we were the only people in town who could make contact with and talk to CSEC victims. We informed her that we had found ten minors in the sex trade, only one had a pimp, and none of them regarded themselves as victims. We offered to help her with a thesis that our data could speak to, but she never contacted us again.

Later that month, we shared a Sunday brunch with the DYFS official at an Atlantic City bar frequented by local police. Over beer and burgers, she asked us if we could provide the taskforce with a report on our research that would help them argue for more CSEC program support to find and prosecute pimps. We explained that our data might not be helpful since so few of the minors we met actually had pimps, and those few did not want to be identified as children or exploited victims. ‘Look’, she said suddenly becoming almost intimate, ‘we know that you have only found a few CSEC victims, but you know them better than anybody else in this town. They trust you and you can help them by getting us more resources to start the investigations that will find and prosecute the pimps.’

We tried to be honest about what our report might look like and that the few full-time exclusive management pimps that we had found had no interest in teenage runaways, but we promised to try to do our best to help her. It seemed to have worked because she hugged us and thanked us warmly as we said goodbye on the Atlantic Avenue street corner in front of the bar. She emailed us several more times with the same request, but we were neither ready to release our findings so soon, nor sure what we could give her. We kept politely putting her off, trying to figure out how to help.

Doubt, irony, and hope: the contradictions of implementing policy for invisible populations

Within the world of youth services and law enforcement in the United States, there are clearly individuals who regularly see, identify and directly address the needs of child sex-trafficking victims. However, we would speculate that there are far more social service providers and law enforcement officials who never identify the minors they meet as sex workers because those minors do not want to be labelled as children or victims. For most of the several hundred sex worker-minors we met across our two studies, many of whom have their own children, the CSEC narrative that identifies their biggest problems as being too young to consent to sex and living under the shadow of pimp coercion appeared absurd, insulting and too far from reality to make them want to engage such social services. In certain respects, this point was made by Sherry, the social worker mentioned above.

Just as we are left by Hans Christian Andersen with an emperor who only ‘suspects’ that he is naked and uncertain about whether his ministers agree with the crowd or still fear they are not fit for office, we cannot know what was in the heads of taskforce members when they spoke passionately about CSEC. They all seemed sincere and were giving their time voluntarily. Even the shelter director who suggested that there were never more than fourteen underage prostitutes in Atlantic City, seemed to move between doubt and enthusiasm in a way that defies terms like rule creator or rule enforcer. As probably the only person on the taskforce who regularly saw individuals who could be authoritatively categorised as CSEC victims, due to an agreement with local police that brought minors arrested for prostitution to his shelter, we suspect that his package of enthusiasm and doubt were held together by ironic positioning for CSEC funding that he hoped might help the few who did trickle into his, ‘never full shelter’, as he described it.

Other outliers, such as the two taskforce members connected to the religiously based youth shelter, and the FBI agent who revealed his lack of direct contact with CSEC victims by insisting on clumsy television dialogue, appeared to have the fanaticism typically associated with moral crusaders. However, we suspect that this was as much driven by doubt and concern to cover up weakness and feared inadequacies as it was enthusiasm.

This fear of professional unfitness can be contagious in face of powerful discursive formations, such as anti-trafficking. In our own case, as researchers who are highly experienced in finding and interviewing hidden and stigmatised populations, and had recently produced the first successful empirically based CSEC census, we faced the same doubt and irony as we analysed our data and struggled with results that left us feeling professionally unfit. We had spent more than a year in Atlantic City, supposedly a national hub for CSEC.

Our team of some twenty researchers had scoured Atlantic City at all hours of the day and night, using the RDS which had been successful in New York City, developed a remarkable ethnographic rapport with very well-placed participants in street sex markets, collected one of the largest extant in situ data sets on street sex markets and finally received affirmation from taskforce members that nobody else knew of more than the thirteen minors we had found (two with pimps).

However, nothing looked as it should have: nobody was using television police dialogue, none of our respondents dressed like people in the sex industry do in movies and television, and the only pimps who were supporting themselves on sex commerce were the few working high-end hotels, where young people would never have been allowed to work. The two pimps we met who did work with minors, like similar ones in the New York study, were not depending on sex commerce to support themselves (minors generally bring in less overall income), and most of the young sex workers we met seemed to have surprising agency in their personal relations, often choosing their pimps and sacking them when they were not effective (see Curtis et al., Reference Curtis, Terry, Dank, Dombrowski, Khan, Muslim, Labriola and Rempel2008; Marcus, Reference Marcus, Riggs, Horning, Rivera, Curtis and Thompson2012). The biggest dangers that our informants faced seemed to be customers, homelessness and drug addiction, rather than pimp-traffickers. We struggled to figure out what to send the DYFS official, and, more worryingly, feared publishing our own work, since it disagreed with everything we had heard, read, seen and thought before doing fieldwork.

The little child can say the emperor has no clothes, but we could only say what the ministers thought: we have tried to see the cloth, but cannot. When we had taken this halfway step towards the child's scepticism at taskforce meetings, we had been met with the hostility of the father in the Andersen tale, rather than the affirmation of the crowd. We started publishing because academics are supposed to see what the crowd does not. However, we continue to fear that there are others out there who are more fit for their jobs because they will be able to find innocent fourteen year olds and their wealthy and violent pimp-traffickers in the numbers we could not. We were experiencing the angst of the emperor and his ministers who have enough at stake in the problem at hand to fear getting their assessment of the emperor's new clothes wrong.

How does a researcher argue, in good conscience, against resources to save innocent children? We do think it is likely that CSEC is greatly exaggerated, but this is not sustained by rule creators and rule enforcers, who may be a small minority of the participants in this drama. It is more likely sustained by the doubt, irony, hope and, ultimately, fantasy that Berlant (Reference Berlant1991) describes. In the last paragraphs of this article, we speculate on how and why the anti-trafficking taskforce members that we met were able to willingly and enthusiastically sustain such contradictions.

In general, they all shared a commitment to help those in trouble. Mostly pink collar workers who had some type of feminist consciousness, their connection to anti-trafficking was built around what Bernstein (Reference Bernstein2010) has described as the carceral turn in feminism, attempting to create gender justice and salve anxieties about the weakening of the family in face of neo-liberalism through use of the criminal justice system (Bernstein, Reference Bernstein2012). For taskforce members in the helping professions, the carceral feminism of the anti-trafficking narrative was the only paradigm they had for righting the terrible wrongs they knew were out there: more investigation, more policing, more punishment. Even small proactive possibilities for empowerment of the individual to claim his or her own rights, such as a higher minimum wage, the creation of sex worker collectives or childcare cooperatives for the sex worker-minors who had their own children were ideologically absent from view.

Instead, taskforce members struggled daily with little agency in the face of bureaucratic rules, penurious funding, heavy caseloads and a set of policies that they knew and readily admitted were hated by many of their clients. For these individuals, the narrative of anti-trafficking represented a mission, the possibility for group fellowship that comes from such a mission and new sources of funding that did not seem to have the usual tools of accountability and assessment that are intentionally designed as part of implementing austerity.

While the CSEC narrative clearly involved much doubt and irony, it also involved expansiveness and hope; the hope of a world in which the innocent are safe and secure and everybody is working together: good versus evil, rather than the everyday social work slog of bad versus less bad. The contradictions of ministering to an invisible population may be huge, but they are less than the contradictions of ministering to a manifest population that is wounded, but never heals. CSEC is exactly the type of ceremonial fiction that would appeal to well-intentioned beleaguered social workers. The very invisibility and uncertainty of CSEC is what provides protection from the depredations of the institutionalisation of care, providing charismatic and magical qualities that instantiate the original ending of the Andersen tale, in which

It is not so much that any of these taskforce members was on a crusade or engaging in entrepreneurial behaviour. Instead, they were looking for the enchantment of valuable work that matters, and were not willing to relinquish the shared fantasy in public to enfant terrible social scientists trying to figure out whether the emperor is or is not dressed. Though all of them could cite at least one case of CSEC which had crossed their path personally (for many it was the same case that had appeared in April of 2010), it is difficult for us to imagine that most of them did not have the same scepticism we did about whether the CSEC funding and institutions are out of proportion to the scope of the problem. As social workers, they were far more familiar with the suffering of children than we, as researchers, are.

Some of them believed in the CSEC narrative and others clearly followed the imperial procession out of an ironic sense that there were other good things that they could do with the CSEC support. In private, nearly all of them were ready to admit that they could not see the beautiful fabric, but, like the second minister, they knew that they were not stupid. In the less harsh and more generous world of social work, it was not so much that they were unfit for their position as that somebody else was more fit for the truly valuable job that they were able to share, professionally and emotionally, despite, or perhaps because the targets of this policy were always just out of sight.