Not Your Mama’s Feminism: From Budgets to Beliefs - How Money Shapes Feminist Anti-Trafficking Politics

Alex Andrews
10 hours ago
5 min read

January was about receipts.

We followed the money through human trafficking stings - police overtime, court costs, nonprofit contracts, press conferences, and political careers built on “rescue.” We watched how taxpayer dollars disappear into enforcement theater while survivors are left with court dates, ankle monitors, debt, and a pamphlet that expires faster than the trauma does.

February starts with a more complex question.

If the economics of anti-trafficking look like this - if the incentives reward arrests, visibility, and compliance - why does so much mainstream feminism still defend the policies that keep that system alive?

The answer isn’t a mystery. It’s money.

From Budgets to Beliefs

If you’ve ever found yourself listening to the exact phrases echo through feminist anti-trafficking spaces - conference panels, grant reports, press releases - and wondered why they never seem to change, even as evidence piles up that they cause harm, the answer isn’t complicated. It’s not ignorance. It’s not a lack of research. It’s funding.

Those talking points repeat because they are fundable.

“Demand reduction.”

“Buyer accountability.”

“Rescue and restore.”

“Exit services.”

They sound serious. Responsible. Compassionate.

And, crucially, they fit neatly into a grant narrative. Each one signals to funders that something is being done - that harm is being managed - without ever challenging the systems that produce that harm in the first place.

They promise action without disruption. Reform without risk.

What you don’t hear nearly as often are the approaches that actually change outcomes.

Decriminalization.

Housing without arrest.

Income stability without surveillance.

Peer-led safety networks.

Sex worker labor rights.

Not because these ideas are untested. Not because they’re radical or impractical.

But because they threaten existing revenue streams. They make it harder to justify particular budgets. They remove the need for handcuffs as a gateway to services.

You can’t defend million-dollar sting budgets if harm is prevented before police ever arrive. You can’t justify carceral nonprofit contracts if safety exists outside the court system. You can’t sustain a rescue economy if people aren’t first arrested.

So feminism - at least the version allowed to thrive inside this ecosystem - was slowly reshaped to fit the market. What survives isn’t what works best for people. It’s what works best for the funding structure.

When Ideology Follows Grant Requirements

Over time, something subtle - but deeply dangerous - took hold. The debate shifted. Policies were no longer justified by outcomes or evidence. They were defended based on identity.

Critiquing arrest-based anti-trafficking work was suddenly labeled “anti-feminist.” Questioning police partnerships became “pro-exploitation.” Listening to sex workers - especially those who challenged the narrative - was framed as controversial, suspect, even threatening. Not because the facts had changed, but because the funding structure demanded ideological certainty.

Once an organization’s survival depends on a specific framework, that framework hardens into moral truth.

Dissent becomes heresy. Evidence that complicates the story is waved away as biased, incomplete, or “dangerous.”

What matters is not whether the policy works, but whether it aligns with what the system is built to reward.

This is how you end up with a movement that claims to center survivors while systematically excluding the very people most harmed by its policies.

The Convenient Conflation

One of the most financially advantageous beliefs in anti-trafficking feminism is the deliberate conflation of sex work and trafficking. It turns a complex reality into a simple story. It justifies sweeping enforcement. It allows the category of “victim” to expand without any corresponding expansion of resources, care, or accountability.

Most importantly, it keeps the money moving.

When all sex work is treated as trafficking, every arrest can be framed as a rescue. Every raid becomes an intervention. And every survivor harmed by enforcement is written off as collateral damage - unfortunate, but acceptable in the service of the larger narrative.

This framing isn’t accidental. It’s operational.

Because the moment you separate consensual adult sex work from trafficking, the numbers shrink. The scale of the “crisis” becomes harder to inflate. Budgets become more challenging to justify. And the moral clarity that sustains carceral funding - clear villains, righteous saviors, unquestionable tactics - starts to fracture.

So the conflation persists, not because it reflects reality, but because it protects a system that depends on it.

Who Gets to Be Heard - and Who Gets Funded

Survivor voices are everywhere in feminist anti-trafficking spaces - on panels, in reports, in fundraising appeals. But they are not there at random. They are carefully selected, carefully framed, and carefully constrained.

Survivors who support criminalization are elevated and celebrated. Survivors who question policing or challenge arrest-based interventions are quietly sidelined. And sex workers who survive because of their work - who refuse the script of rescue and regret - are dismissed outright, their experiences treated as inconvenient or invalid.

This isn’t about truth. It’s about alignment.

Funding ecosystems rewards the survivors who reinforce existing frameworks, not those who expose their harm. Over time, this selective amplification teaches the public that these voices represent consensus - that this is what survivors think, what survivors want, what survivors need.

They don’t.

What we’re hearing isn’t consensus. It’s survivorship filtered through a budget.

The Question Feminism Keeps Avoiding

January laid the groundwork. We traced the money and watched how anti-trafficking operations quietly enrich institutions - police departments, courts, nonprofits, and political careers - while the people supposedly being “helped” are left navigating fallout that lasts far longer than a press cycle.

February has to ask the next, unavoidable question: who actually benefits from feminist anti-sex-work policy?

It isn’t survivors. Survivors are the ones arrested in the name of rescue, separated from their families, pushed into housing instability, and handed criminal records that follow them for life. It isn’t communities that watch resources siphoned away from prevention, housing, and care and redirected into policing and prosecution. And it certainly isn’t safety, which erodes under constant surveillance, displacement, and fear.

The beneficiaries are easier to see once you look past the rhetoric. Law enforcement agencies gain expanded budgets and broader mandates. Courts and probation systems secure steady caseloads that keep the machinery running. Nonprofits are positioned as service gatekeepers, controlling access to help that only appears after harm has already been done. Political actors collect moral capital - credit for being “tough on trafficking” - without ever being held accountable for outcomes.

And feminism - at least the version that is allowed to thrive inside these systems - has been shaped accordingly. Not to disrupt these interests, but to protect them.

What Comes Next

This post brings January’s economic analysis to a close - and opens something more complicated, and more necessary—a more profound reckoning.

Because if feminist anti-trafficking politics are shaped more by funding than by evidence, if ideology follows grant requirements instead of real-world outcomes, and if sex workers and many survivors are harmed in the name of “protection,” then the issue isn’t poor implementation or a few bad actors.

It’s the framework itself.

Next week, we turn directly to one of the most fiercely defended frameworks in feminist policy spaces: the Nordic Model. Not as a theory. Not as a talking point. But as a funded intervention with real, measurable consequences for the people living under it.

If feminism wants a future that actually protects people, it has to start by asking an uncomfortable question: who has it been protecting all along?

That conversation doesn’t end here. It continues at SWOP Behind Bars - on the blog, on the podcast, and across our social media - where sex workers and survivors lead the analysis, the storytelling, and the solutions.

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