In their analytically rousing and comprehensive book, Youth Who Trade Sex in the United States, Carisa Showden and Samantha Majic provide a clear-eyed account of the dominant narratives that surround these social practices. The book deftly unpacks the glaring disconnect between the misconceptions reflected in well-intended policy characterizations of sex trafficking and the complex realities facing young people who trade sex, explaining how we got here, what ideas and assumptions inform public understanding, and the steps researchers and policy makers can take to change course. By excavating policy makers’, advocates’, media commentators,’ and some researchers’ indefatigable attachment to “innocent girl–predatory man” (p. 19) narratives, Showden and Majic explain why public policy efforts and attendant frontline anti-trafficking interventions are not only inadequate but also ill equipped to address the structural inequalities that render youth vulnerable to exploitation in the first place.

All too often, policy discussions avoid meaningful conversations about the complexities surrounding young people who trade sex (p. 10). For instance, by singularly focusing on sex as exploitation, discussions about sex trafficking often eclipse more expansive conversations about structural vulnerabilities that contribute to the phenomenon. Similarly, despite extensive media coverage and teeming public interest in stories about young people in the sex trades, most narratives of sex trafficking rely on individualized stories and depict youth’s lives simplistically. By exploring the overlapping gendered, racial, economic, and sexual vulnerabilities that shape young people’s lived experience of agency and vulnerability, Showden and Majic provide a much-needed intersectional feminist analytical intervention rarely considered in either policy discussions or even some research on sex trafficking.

For students of law, policy, and American politics at the intersection of race and gender, it may seem incomprehensible that intersectional scholarship on young people in the sex trades in the United States is in such short supply. Unfortunately, this is still the case. Showden and Majic explain why, despite the existence of some well-designed empirical studies on the topic featuring “a range of genders, ages, races, and sexualities,” a “dominant gendered narrative” nonetheless endures, one that is “radically insufficiently intersectional” (p. 107). Typically, young, cisgender white girls are centered in anti-sex trafficking discussions, and Black and Brown men are presumed to be traffickers/exploiters (p. 85). Not only do such stereotypes tie notions of innocence and criminality to race and gender but also racially coded and gendered assumptions shape narratives that contribute to policy decisions and systems interventions. The fact that Black girls are more frequently arrested on prostitution charges than white girls and more commonly treated by law enforcement authorities as criminals offers an illustrative case in point, among other rich examples featured in the book regarding how dominant narratives reproduce “hierarchies of victimization” (pp. 4, 50–51; see also Alexandra Lutnick, Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: Beyond Victims and Villains, 2016; Jennifer Musto, Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States, 2016).

A key intervention of the book shows how dominant narratives have intersectional and material effects. The first half of the book introduces readers to the common misconceptions and simplistic narratives that shape dominant thought about the sex trade. In the second part, Showden and Majic describe and apply an original model they developed inspired by intersectional frameworks and Patricia Hill-Collins’s influential “matrix of domination.” Their “Matrix of Agency and Vulnerability” analyzes empirical scholarship with an eye toward complicating the “unitary, individualizing account(s) that dominates public policy debates and media coverage of young people who trade sex” (p. 11). In the conclusion, they discuss how this more complex framework can be applied in crafting future research and policy.

As the title of the book implicitly suggests, the language used by policy makers and advocates to describe situations where young people trade sex is contested. Showden and Majic deliberately foreground the agency of young people in the book and as such use “people first language” (p. 14). Debates about language are not “just an issue of semantics” nor the narrow concerns of social scientists and area experts, they argue (p. 5). Language and the narratives that emerge from it shape public awareness, and the introduction succinctly scaffolds these issues and maps the guiding questions explored throughout the book.

Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the enduring tensions and ideological debates that inform “innocent girl–predatory man” (p. 19) narratives. By examining the historical antecedents shaping contemporary anti-trafficking politics, this chapter surfaces “an epistemological history of ‘innocence’” that recursively shapes trafficking and prostitution policy and also explains why dominant narratives, like most policy responses, are misaligned with young people’s actual experiences (p. 12).

Furthermore, a host of theoretical and methodological challenges surround empirical studies on young people in the sex trades. Not only do these challenges require researchers to confront and push back against a slew of empirically contested claims (p. 58) but they also necessitate navigating an anti-trafficking landscape steeped in an “oppression framework” that tacitly presumes that “trading sex for some type of payment” (p. 14) is the singular and privileged ontological site of youth victimization and vulnerability (p. 59). In chapter 2, Showden and Majic discuss how researchers can challenge simplistic narratives and move beyond oft-rehearsed critiques. They do so by presenting a novel framework, what they refer to as a “comprehensive narrative analysis” (CNA; p. 79). A narrative analysis that blends “the tools of methodological, systematic, narrative, and theoretical contribution reviews” (p. 79), their CNA offers “a more complex narrative about the lives and experiences of young people who trade sex” (p. 79). By synthesizing a wide range of empirical scholarship often siloed by disciplinary, subfield, and ideological orientation, a CNA also importantly contributes to critical trafficking studies research.

Showden and Majic present their Matrix of Agency and Vulnerability in chapter 3. A dynamic framework that decenters sex and draws on intersectional feminist approaches, their innovative model inspires new ways of “thinking about and researching young people in the sex industry (pp. 108–10). Discussions about sex trafficking commonly disregard the ways that structural inequalities like poverty, racism, misogyny, and transphobia shape young people’s vulnerability to exploitation and heightened risk of experiencing harmful system interventions (pp. 86, 108). Their matrix underscores the range of individual, social, and structural factors that shape how young people “navigate coercion and ‘choice’ simultaneously” (p. 116). The authors also explain the salience of locational factors as they converge with social, structural, and individual factors, because where and with whom youth trade sex are integral to theorizing youth experiences in the sex trades from an intersectional perspective (pp. 81, 132–33).

Chapter 4 applies the Matrix of Agency and Vulnerability and advances more complex renderings of young people’s lives that move beyond “innocent girl–predatory man” narratives (p. 141). By operationalizing intersectional feminist insights and putting youth who trade sex at the center of the analysis, this chapter dually reframes and reimagines future research and policy development, chiefly by reorienting attention toward “the structural, locational and social dimensions”—factors that shape youth’s involvement in the sex trade—and moving away from a discussion about “bad individuals” (p. 162).

Youth Who Trade Sex in the United States is essential reading for scholars in political science, gender studies, sociology, and social work whose work investigates intersectionality, American politics, policy narratives, and law reforms. This book is also impressively accessible, and nonacademic area experts’ understanding of young people’s lives will be enriched and deepened by reading it. Finally, for policy makers accustomed to discussing young people in the sex trades through dominant narrative frames, a book as empirically rigorous and analytically nuanced as Youth Who Trade Sex in the United States may not be the volume they want, because it unsettles the empirical foundation on which so many of their anti-trafficking claims hang. But it is undoubtedly the book they need and would be wise to read in order to develop policy that meaningfully addresses young people’s comprehensive needs.