Not Your Mama's Feminism: The Policy in Practice - When “Rescue” Means Arrest

In practice, most trafficking stings follow a familiar feminist-approved script: Police First, Services Later

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People are arrested on prostitution-related charges, booked into jail, processed through court, and handed conditions they never agreed to.

Only after the damage is done does help appear, often contingent on compliance with the very system that caused the harm.

Feminism, in this moment, does not interrupt the pipeline - it legitimizes it.

The Cost of Compliance

Survivors leave these operations carrying far more than trauma.

• They leave with court fines and fees.

• Probation requirements that interfere with work, housing, and childcare.

• Criminal records that follow them for life.

• Families disrupted by incarceration or child welfare involvement.

Yet the feminist rescue narrative rarely accounts for this cost. The harm is treated as incidental - an unfortunate but acceptable tradeoff in the name of protection.

Nonprofits as Proof of Compassion

Nonprofits, many operating under feminist banners, step in after the fact, attempting to mitigate damage they did not create but are structurally tied to. They deliver services inside an arrest-dependent pipeline, bound by referrals, reporting requirements, and funding contracts that limit what they are allowed to challenge. Their presence becomes proof that the system is compassionate, even as feminism continues to endorse a model that arrests first and helps later.

What Gets Counted - and What Doesn’t

When outcomes are evaluated, feminist accountability evaporates.

• Arrest numbers are celebrated.

• Program enrollments are tracked.

• Media coverage is logged.

  
  

What isn’t counted is how many people lost housing, lost custody, accrued debt, or were pushed deeper into precarity because a “rescue” began with handcuffs.

A Reckoning for Feminism

There is no meaningful reckoning with harm - only a recycled narrative of protection that feminism helps sustain. In this version of feminism, rescue is something done to people, not with them.

Arrest is treated not as a failure, but as an acceptable cost of doing business in the name of care.

Feminism cannot claim the language of liberation while endorsing punishment, surveillance, and state control.

Especially when those policies so clearly harm the people they claim to protect.

If feminism is serious about justice, it must stand with sex workers, listen to survivors in all their complexity, and reject Nordic Model interventions that dress coercion up as care.

Support for sex worker rights is not a fringe position; it is a litmus test.

A feminism that requires arrests to prove its values has lost its way.

A feminism that centers autonomy, safety without punishment, and the leadership of those most impacted has not.

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