Non Profit Industrial Complex and how it serves Neoliberalism

Below is long quote that details the central issues with the rescue industry, the non profit industrial complex as it concerns the sex industry. It’s from Mobile Orientations by Nicola Mai. I’m posting it here, because when I have the time I’ll be adding links to what she’s saying.

Sexual humanitarianism’s moral imperative to “rescue” victims of sex trafficking often becomes entangled with the enforcement of restrictive labor-migration policies and controls, exacerbating migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation in line with racial, ethnic, and class-based hierarchies (Chapkis 2003). My work draws on critical studies of the category of the trafficked “victim,” which strongly indicate the need to transcend the dichotomy between “free” and “forced” in studies of the nexus between migration and the sex industry, in order to make visible women’s migratory agency (Doezema 1998; Andrijasevic 2010; Ham 2017).

This book problematizes sexual humanitarianism as a strategic vector of neoliberalism in five main ways. First, sexual humanitarianism normalizes the everyday exploitability and precarization of labor engendered by neoliberal policies because it grants humanitarian protection only to exceptional and extreme forms of gender- and sex-related exploitation. Second, sexual humanitarianism’s prevailing neo-abolitionist ideology represents sexual transactions according to the economic fundamentalist mantra of supply and demand, neglecting the complexity of the libidinal, socioeconomic, and intersubjective dynamics involved. Third, sexual humanitarianism’s sexual and gender politics play a strategic role in framing antitrafficking as a legitimate object of investment for multinationals, which increasingly use campaigns against sex trafficking as part of their branding, effectively laundering their own involvement in similar exploitative practices in other employment sectors (Bernstein 2016). Fourth, by legitimizing the surveillance and control of migrant sex workers on the basis of their supposedly inherent vulnerability, sexual humanitarianism operationalizes neoliberal governance through the punitive containment of their marginality, which ignores and exacerbates the underlying socioeconomic insecurities and inequalities it enforces (Wacquant 2009). Fifth, sexual-humanitarian, “end-demand” antitrafficking campaigns, by blaming individual customers and criminal networks for trafficking, cast governments as “heroes offering compassion and support” while deflecting from their direct responsibilities for instituting restrictive labor migration regimes that create the conditions for forced labor and “perpetuate a market for people smugglers and traffickers” (O’Brien 2016, 220).

Mobile Orientations analyzes the complicity between sexual humanitarianism and neoliberalism