Trafficking and the Porn Wars in New York City: Consensus and Contestation in the Making of a Moral Crisis

In a crowded church basement in Brooklyn, Jake looked out at a rapt audience and declared, “there are more illicit brothels in New York City than Starbucks.” “Just picture that – picture how often you see a Starbucks walking down the street…and this is where human trafficking is happening. It is ubiquitous and it is in our own backyard.” Jake was speaking at a community information session hosted by Restore NYC, an evangelical, anti-trafficking, social services non-profit organization that exemplifies the abolitionist approach to “ending modern slavery” in the anti-trafficking movement in New York City. While Jake does not have any direct institutional connections to the anti-pornography activists of the 1980s and 1990s who used to declare “there are more adult bookstores in NYC than McDonalds,” his humanitarian project and the moral panic which frames it have been profoundly shaped by the so-called “sex wars” and the contingent alliances between feminist and evangelical activists that these conflicts produced.

This historical-ethnographic paper considers the afterlives of the “pornography wars” of the 1980s and 1990s in the sensibilities, tactics, rhetoric, and priorities of contemporary anti-sex trafficking “abolitionists.” I contend that my interlocutors draw on this history not only in their framing of “sex trafficking” as a humanitarian problem, but in the way that they imagine and map the urban landscape as the center of a moral crisis. In doing this, I push back against the characterization of conservative evangelicals and anti-porn feminists as “strange bedfellows” and explicate the ideological commitments and institutional connections that continue to make them natural collaborators.