*Trigger Warning: Sexual Abuse, Abuse of Minors
While scrolling through various social media accounts in the last few months, I’ve noticed many posts circulating by and about Black women explaining their experiences with attempted kidnapping and trafficking. This is likely due to the increase in trafficking in states such as Georgia, Florida and New York, as well as the de facto normalization of sexual violence under the current neo-fascist administration. But this upsurge of Black women circulating these stories on social media also speaks to the widespread acknowledgment that Black people—and especially Black women and girls—are dismissed, demonized, and violated by both racist and heterosexist media and law enforcement/legal entities who claim to be the arbiters of justice.
The current use of independent and unofficial media networks to bring both attention to and action around abductions and trafficking illustrates that Black liberation and the protection of Black women and girls, as history has proven, is continuously up to us.
The first post that really caught my attention was a no longer available video of a Black woman in the back of a car, comforting a young baby and speaking frankly—yet calmly—about being kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and eventually narrowly escaping her confinement and being sold into human sexual slavery. Her calmness was both chilling and alarming. It was the matter-of-factness with which she spoke, I think, that really got me.
Of course, there is no correct or universal way to retell such a violation, but I couldn’t help but think about all the ways that Black women are expected to and often embody the stereotype of the “strong Black woman.” This historically constructed trope buttresses many things, from established practices of medical racism (i.e. she doesn’t “seem” like she’s in pain) to the physical, emotional, and intellectual labour Black women are consistently expected to do without recompense (think Mammy stereotypes here).
Coupled with past and contemporary histories of state-sanctioned physical and sexual violence against Black women and girls—and constructions of hypersexuality based on the latter—this particular testimony stood out as an example of a spreading cultural recognition that the state has never protected us.
Many of the videos and posts mentioned the noticeable lack of media attention paid to missing Black children, and the police indifference in following up with missing persons cases. Black youth are often considered to be “runaways” by law enforcement when they go missing. The recent and prominent case of Karol Sanchez, a Black teenager from the Bronx, New York, whose kidnapping was caught on a security camera, was a clear exception to that rule. In Sanchez’s case an Amber Alert—albeit delayed and incomplete—was sent out. While Sanchez allegedly later admitted to framing the incident, the support shown on social media to find her, and the public shaming that followed, all hinged upon the rare occurrence of a Black child being tracked through the Amber Alert system.
State institutions such as the police, and child welfare services are often complicit in sexual violence enacted upon Black women and girls. The Oakland Police Department recently underwent an investigation into the participation and cover-up of officers engaging in child trafficking. Likewise, the Chicago Police Department has come under fire—which in one case resulted in a conviction—for officers engaging in child trafficking as well. As social scientific research illustrates, most trafficked girls have been involved in the child “welfare” system, and criminalized through the juvenile “justice” system. Foster parents are regularly involved in trafficking children in a nation that has made sport of breaking up Black kinship networks before its inception.
The juvenile (in)justice system uses legislation about child and juvenile “prostitution” to arrest and incarcerate children for being victim to predatory traffickers and pedophilic purchasers. Since age of consent laws indicate that sexual relations with children under a specific age is considered statutory assault, the legalized arrest and incarceration of Black children for participating in sex work is all the more grotesque and speaks to the hypersexualization and adultification of Black girls.
In Georgia, House Bill 234–a, which stops anyone under 18 from being charged with prostitution—was only signed off in March 2019. This very recent induction of policy reform indicates that the onus has and continues to be is placed on Black girls, and other women and children of colour, to not be trafficked (and how that law will be applied remains to be seen). It is rarely the white suburban men soliciting and engaging in this violence that are targeted and criminalized by the system. The cases of Cyntoia Brown and Chrystal Kizer easily exemplify this. Black women have always had to defend themselves, even when such defenses end in incarceration.
On November 14th, realtor and media personality Egypt Sherrod posted a video about the continuing epidemic of trafficked Black women and girls on her FaceBook page. Unironically, commenters have noticed the inability to re-share her video on the notably suppressive social media platform. This is completely in line with how corporate and state entities have always treated Black liberation.
In Sherrod’s video post, she calls for Black women’s environmental awareness when in public, amongst other things. Many men’s circulation of testimonies have stated similar advice. However, simply watching one’s surroundings, like dressing moderately, has never been a deterrent to gendered sexual violence. These blame-the-victim discourses maintain patriarchal power structures that situate violence as a woman’s problem and erases both the prevalence and frequency with which patriarchal sexual violence occurs.
It is the solicitors, traffickers, and ultimately the demand for child and adult trafficking that are the crux of the issue. It is Black girls, and children more broadly, that are paying the unfortunate price.
As the testimonies of attempted abductions and suspicious activity in high trafficking areas like Atlanta, southern Florida, Chicago, DC, New York City and elsewhere continue to circulate, Black women are participating in a long history of resistance to normalized anti-Black gendered violence. Police, prisons, and the state are clearly ineffectual if not explicitly complicit in creating and perpetuating this violence.
As such, abolitionist thought and actions such as creating independent networks of safety by and for Black women and girls is evidently the only feasible solution. As the more than 64,000 missing Black women and girls belies, the state was never intended to and will never protect us.
Recommended Readings:
Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement“, 1974
Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6):1241-99, 1991
Andrea Ritchie, “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color“, 2017
Boke Saisi is a PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She previously graduated with an MA in Ethnic Studies from UCSD, an MA in Communication and Culture from York University in Toronto, Canada and a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Her research and writing interests include Black feminist thought, Indigenous and decolonial feminisms, critical gender studies, mad and disability studies, carceral studies, media, and political economy. Her Twitter and social media handle is: @bsaisi
