Speaker Series: Rashmee Singh
Since 2010, specialized dockets self-identifying as ‘human trafficking courts’ (HTC) have proliferated throughout the United States. These recent iterations of the problem-solving court movement surfaced in response to twenty-first-century anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution panics, which conflate sex work and sex trafficking. Despite their name, HTCs are not courts dedicated to prosecuting individuals charged with trafficking offences. Rather, these dockets draw on the logic of therapeutic jurisprudence to prosecute those the legal system has deemed ‘trafficking victims’—cisgender women criminalized for a range of offences that typically include drug-related charges, property crimes, and prostitution. In lieu of pursuing traffickers, HTCs require women to change themselves via court mandated substance abuse recovery programs, trauma-based counselling, and life skills counselling to ‘prevent their victimization.’
Drawing on her twelve-year, multi-sited study encompassing six U.S. cities, court observations, and over 100 interviews, this talk examines how anti-trafficking panics are impacting criminal legal responses to system-involved women. Dr. Singh argues that once the ‘sex worker as victim’ narrative drives the formation of problem-solving courts, the concept of human trafficking victimization materializes as a proxy for a range of experiences that the law identifies as problematic and aims to correct. Dr. Singh’s findings suggest that while these imaginaries result in net-widening, court actors are also mobilizing them in unexpected ways to mitigate punishment. This project contributes to socio-legal scholarship on the fractured and contradictory impacts of carceral institutions by illustrating how criminal legal actors differentially use legal fictions of ‘trafficking victimization’ to administer state power.
To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.
Dr. Rashmee Singh (she/her) was a 2025-26 Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include feminist legal theory, feminist criminology, specialized courts, gender-based violence, and the governance of sex work.
Her primary research project is a five-year comparative study examining the impact of criminal legal reforms on adult sex workers in the wake of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution panics in the United States and Canada. The project, which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) examines specialized prostitution and human trafficking courts in multiple American cities and anti-trafficking movements in Southern Ontario.