Whereas many jurisdictions have stopped criminalizing prostitution, New Orleans continues to do so, and in doing so it continues to arrest and charge sex trafficking victims (a practice that can disproportionately punish women and girls of color). As part of the Catalyst Grant Program, Polaris, a nonprofit antitrafficking organization, conducted research to improve outcomes for survivors of human trafficking in New Orleans.
Sex trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to compel another person to engage in a commercial sex act or causing a child to engage in a commercial sex act. While a person may engage in sex work of their own volition, law enforcement is often unable to identify who has been victimized and consequently fails to provide trafficking victims with the resources and connection to services they need. Polaris’s analysis of data on prostitution and connected offenses led it to discover that rather than being arrested, potential sex trafficking survivors were increasingly receiving less-visible citations and fines that still caused them harm. This discovery would not have been made had Polaris not also engaged with stakeholders and learned about survivors’ lived experience. Polaris’s research practices and findings both raise lessons for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand how local governments respond to sex trafficking.
Polaris began its project by accessing and analyzing arrest data on prostitution in New Orleans, finding an unexpected decline in arrests and prosecution of sex trafficking survivors. This contradicted what it had heard in conversations with survivors, who reported still being penalized by police. To understand the dissonance, Polaris engaged with various staff members from the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office and court system about practices related to sex offenses and human trafficking. From those conversations, it learned that the City of New Orleans houses certain data in court information systems that are separate from the government’s repository of prosecution data. Those court data revealed that survivors were being issued citations directly by law enforcement and being led into the court system, but that those citations were not reflected in the government’s prosecution data. These citations were logged on survivors’ records, could include fines, and could lead to jail time if the fines were not paid. Thus, relying only on the arrest data would have resulted in significant underreporting of the criminalization of sex trafficking survivors in New Orleans.
Polaris’s experience is an important story for reform advocates of how the criminal legal system responds to sex-related offenses. The shift from arrests to citations for prostitution offenses was not an explicit or documented policy, and examining just the arrest records would have masked the extent of consequences for survivors. Polaris averted this through practices that mitigated data-quality issues endemic to the criminal legal system. First, it invested the time to engage and listen to survivors of human trafficking, so it knew to dig deeper after the initial analysis. Second, it connected with the data providers to explore the disconnect between the initial analysis and survivors’ experiences and uncover other sources of information.
With this complete picture of the range of consequences for survivors, Polaris could better tailor its policy recommendations for responding to both wrongful citations and arrests of sex trafficking victims for prostitution and related offenses. Considering the well-documented racial disparities in the criminal legal system, particularly concerning prostitution offenses, Polaris’s policy recommendations are an important step toward reducing criminal legal system contact for women and girls of color. Polaris hopes its analysis will persuade New Orleans law enforcement to adopt new policies focusing on diversion to services rather than sanctions. A diversion-based intervention would enable law enforcement to connect the people they interact with to support such as housing, food, and employment assistance, substance use services, and mental health care. The project not only shows the need to change policy to better support survivors, but also serves as an example for how organizations can combine exploration of data from a variety of sources and the perspectives of people with lived experience to inform agendas for change.
The Catalyst Grant Program is a collaboration between the Urban Institute and the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative to help nonprofit organizations use data and technology to advance racial equity and reform in the criminal legal system. Visit the Catalyst Grant Program Insights page for more resources and stories about the grantees.
