APA handbook of the psychology of women: Perspectives on women's private and public lives, Vol. 2

http://dx.doi. org/10.1037/0000060-010 APA Handbook of the Psychology of Women: Vol. 2. Perspectives on Women’s Private and Public Lives, C. B. Travis and J. W. White (Editors-in-Chief ) Copyright © 2018 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. In this chapter I define the human trafficking of women and girls in the United States within a historical, psychological, and social context. To start, I present three cases to discuss two types of human trafficking scenarios, the iconic (Srikantiah, 2007) and the overlooked. Next, I connect human trafficking to slavery. I discuss vulnerabilities to human trafficking with attention to contextual, structural, and individual factors. In the recruitment methods section, I provide an overview of psychological coercion that complements existing legal constructs of human trafficking (Trafficking Victims Protection Act [TVPA], 2000). Thereafter, I propose the overlooked victim construct to represent cases in which the victim is made invisible by a combination of psychological and social factors. In closing, I offer an evolving psychosocial–historical definition of human trafficking. I do not provide a separate section with numbers of trafficked persons for two reasons. First, systems to accurately track human trafficking prevalence remain underdeveloped in the United States and globally. Human trafficking prevalence numbers currently published in various reports were generated using questionable methods (Jahic & Finckenauer, 2005; United Nations, 2014; Weitzer, 2015). My position related to the substantial attention and resources dedicated to count human trafficking is pertinent here. As a psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who practices within a human rights frame to work with survivors of trauma, I use the position of psychopolitical validity (Prilleltensky, 2003) to justify the need to respond to human trafficking. Psychopolitical validity runs opposite to mainstream psychology positions that, sometimes, support oppressive institutional views, even if inadvertently. For example, an absence of numbers on trafficking prevalence should not move psychology away from the issue of human trafficking. Despite the absence of numbers, human trafficking is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed, and psychology can respond to human trafficking by supporting research that helps understand the power dynamics and structural factors that fuel it. In my antitrafficking work, I consider issues of well-being, oppression, and liberation in relation to the individual, relational, and collective domains (Prilleltensky, 2008). Therefore, adopting a psychopolitical validity stance requires me to consider how a given research question, or a theory applied in practice, could benefit or affect the afflicted, in this case the formerly or currently trafficked persons I interact with as a clinician, researcher, and consultant. Prilleltensky (2008) explained that when psychopolitical validity is institutionalized instead of isolating important social issues, it merges discussions of wellness and justice and encourages a multidisciplinary approach, which is needed to respond to human trafficking (Contreras, Kallivayalil, & Herman, 2017).