7 Alb. Govt. L. Rev. 144 (2014)
Samuel Vincent Jones
Virtually no academic or media attention has been dedicated to
female traffickers, or female delinquency, in general. Human
trafficking, like other crimes, has been myopically constructed,
marketed, and viewed through news reports, cinema, literature,
and criminal statutes as a heinous male-perpetrated offense
against women and girls, rendering the female trafficker
practically invisible. This essay questions the soundness and
viability of continued reliance on the female victim-male culprit
paradigm, used by many countries to prevent human trafficking.
It confronts contemporary assumptions about femininity,
violence, and aggression, calling particular attention to American
cultural suppositions about femaleness that have detrimentally
influenced our capacity to properly identify and quantify female
human traffickers. In so doing, this essay attempts to take a first
step in reducing the knowledge gap relative to female traffickers
that remains so extant in human trafficking discourse.