Defining and Predicting Pimps' Coerciveness Toward Sex Workers: Socialization Processes

The Reconsecration of the Self: A Qualitative Analysis of Sex Trafficking Survivors' Experience of the Body

The understudied bodily harm women experience after commercial sex (CS) may be partially explained by the prominence of Cartesian mind-body dualism in psychological science. Accordingly, we qualitatively explored the mind-body relationship among 79 female sex trafficking survivors. Survivors reported long-term negative alterations in feelings about the body, sex, and physical touch posttrafficking and these negative outcomes did not differ across women who self-perceived as consenting and women who self-perceived as forced. Implications for future research are presented, particularly on measuring dehumanization in CS which contributes to extensive harm even in the absence of physical aggression.

"He Loves Me Hard and Then He Abuses Me Hard": How Service Providers Define and Explain Trauma Bonds Among Sex Trafficking Survivors

There is a dearth of research on trauma bonding among victims of sex trafficking. This study aims to fill this gap by seeking to understand how service providers working with survivors of sex trafficking conceptualize and observe trauma bonding in their clients. This qualitative study involved interviews with 10 participants. Purposeful sampling was employed among licensed social workers or counselors. Two themes emerged: defining trauma bonding (with four subthemes: embracing intensity, power imbalance, distortion of love, and inescapability) and the development of trauma bonds (with three subthemes: universality, gendered, and grooming). These findings provide much-needed insight into the complexities of trauma bonding.

Trauma Bonding Perspectives From Service Providers and Survivors of Sex Trafficking: A Scoping Review

A trauma bond is an emotional attachment between an abuser and victim. Trauma bonds in sex trafficking compel victims to submit to continued exploitation and protect the trafficker. This scoping review examines trauma bonds in sex trafficking situations, its conceptualizations, and key characteristics. Ten databases were searched using sex trafficking AND trauma bonding-related terms; sex trafficking AND Stockholm syndrome, attachment, coercion, and manipulation. Articles were included if they featured trauma bonding, were published in English after 2013, or featured sex trafficking victims or traffickers in a Western country. Fifteen articles were included. The features of trauma bonding identified in these articles were (1) imbalance of power that favors trafficker, (2) traffickers' deliberate use of positive and negative interactions, (3) victim's gratitude for positive interactions and self-blame for the negative, and (4) victim's internalization of perpetrator's view. We also identified four aspects related to trauma bonding: (1) prior trauma made victims vulnerable, (2) victim's feelings of love remained even after exiting trafficking, (3) love is why victims do not prosecute traffickers, and (4) traffickers' intentional cultivation of the trauma bond. No article indicated how trauma bonds could be severed and replaced with healthy attachments. These findings reveal the need for practitioners and law enforcement and criminal justice professionals to address trauma bonding in both trafficking and posttrafficking situations. The findings also represent potential targets for urgently needed interventions that promote the replacement of trauma bonds with healthy attachments.

Violent and Nonviolent Crimes Against Sex Workers: The Influence of the Sex Market on Reporting Practices in the United Kingdom

Previous research has shown that sex workers experience extremely high rates of victimization but are often reluctant to report their experiences to the police. This article explores how the markets in which sex workers operate in the United Kingdom impact upon the violent and nonviolent crimes they report to a national support organization and their willingness to report victimization to the police. We use a secondary quantitative data analysis of 2,056 crime reports submitted to the U.K. National Ugly Mugs (NUM) scheme between 2012 and 2016. The findings indicate that although violence is the most common crime type reported to NUM, sex workers operating in different markets report varying relative proportions of different types of victimization. We also argue that there is some variation in the level of willingness to share reports with the police across the different sex markets, even when the types of crime, presence of violence, and other variables are taken into account. Our finding that street sex workers are most likely to report victimization directly to the police challenges previously held assumptions that criminalization is the key factor preventing sex workers from engaging with the police.

Functional Isolation: Understanding Isolation in Trafficking Survivors

The study of sexual exploitation of trafficked victims cannot be done without understanding their enforced isolation. To better understand the dynamics of isolation, this study examined how traffickers used different elements of isolation and how such tactics may have contributed to the traffickers' success in maintaining control over the victim(s). We examined in-depth narratives from 14 women between the ages of 20 to 53, primarily immigrants, who were recruited from an agency serving victims of sex trafficking in a large metropolitan city. The tactics used by traffickers varied and included not only the commonly defined structural isolation in which victims are restricted physically and socially, but also included a shrinking of safe social space and an elimination of privacy and social support. The latter, which we label as functional isolation, refers to instances when survivors are surrounded by peers who are either unreliable or aligned with the trafficker and thus are unable to give true social support. Survivors reported a combination of isolation tactics (i.e., both structural isolation and functional isolation). The different interwoven types and patterns of isolation reported by former victims of trafficking help address a dearth in the coercive control and abuse literature, providing a richer understanding of isolation in trafficking survivors.