The Sexual Politics of the New Abolitionism

Elizabeth Bernstein’s article is a key entry point for understanding carceral feminism. It traces how U.S. anti-trafficking politics brought together feminist concern, evangelical moral politics, and state punishment, turning anti-exploitation language toward policing, border control, and criminalization.

The article matters because it does not simply deny violence in sexual labor. Instead, it asks why certain anti-violence solutions treat state punishment as the primary answer. Bernstein shows how the “new abolitionism” draws on nineteenth-century abolition, contemporary human rights discourse, and conservative sexual morality while intensifying regulation over sex workers, migrants, and trafficked people.

The article’s contribution is both conceptual and ethnographic. Bernstein draws on participant observation at conferences, prayer gatherings and church-based anti-trafficking events, interviews with organizational staff, and policy documents and media coverage. That combination lets her examine not only public arguments but also the alliances and moral vocabularies through which campaigns become politically persuasive. Her focus is specifically the U.S. “new abolitionist” formation, including prominent evangelical organizations; it should not be treated as a survey of every anti-trafficking group or feminist position.

Bernstein situates this coalition in neoliberal sexual politics. In her account, social harms are increasingly narrated as the result of deviant individuals, while remedies are routed through policing and criminal law rather than robust welfare, labor protections or redistribution. Humanitarian rescue can then elevate the rescuer’s benevolence while limiting the political agency of the people being “saved.” Her critique also asks how racialized and colonial images of an endangered woman from the Global South make intervention appear self-evidently moral. This is an analysis of political framing and institutional effects—not a denial that trafficking, coercion or violence occur, and not proof that every intervention has the same outcome.

Read today, the paper offers a way to test anti-violence policy: who defines the harm, whose account is treated as knowledge, what power does the proposed remedy expand, and what material supports become less visible when punishment is centered? Its 2007 U.S. case is historically situated, so readers should pair it with current local evidence and work by sex workers and anti-trafficking survivors rather than use it as a universal template. For a productive FemRes path, read it alongside resources on sex-worker organizing, migration and prison abolition: the comparison makes clear that disagreement about law is also disagreement about whose safety, labor and political agency count. Read the full article PDF alongside the Duke University Press record.