Racialization within Antitrafficking Interventions Targeting Migrant Sex Workers: Findings from the SEXHUM Research Project in France

This article draws on the findings of the research project Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work, and Trafficking (SEXHUM), a study investigating migration, sex work, and human trafficking in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. In this article, we focus on how racialized categories are mobilized in antitrafficking practices in France. Since April 2016, the French government has enforced a prohibitionist and neo-abolitionist law criminalizing the demand for sexual services. This coincided with the targeting of Chinese and Nigerian cis-women and with the neglect of Latina trans women working in the sex industry according to racialized and sex-gendered understandings of victimhood. Whereas Chinese women tend to be presented by humanitarian rhetoric as silent victims of Chinese male-dominated mafias, Nigerian women have come to embody the ultimate figure of the victim of trafficking by an overpowering Black male criminality. Meanwhile, (sexual) humanitarian actors have neglected Latina trans women’s ongoing experiences of extreme violence and marginalization.


Introduction
In recent years, gender and sexuality became a prism through which certain migrant groups are identified as 'vulnerable' to exploitation and violence. The project Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work, and Trafficking (SEXHUM) defines the focus on the sexual dimension of humanitarian-inflected interventions targeting migrants as 'sexual humanitarianism'. Within sexual humanitarianism, migrants' vulnerability is understood through cultural constructions emerging at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality at both national and global scales. The article analyzes how racialized presumptions of vulnerability impact the lives and rights of migrant sex workers in France, one of the four national settings of the SEXHUM project.
Between October 2016 and September 2020, SEXHUM studied the relation between migration, sex work, and trafficking in the global sex industry by examining migrants' own understandings and experiences of agency and exploitation. The project draws on the concept of 'sexual humanitarianism' to address how the humanitarian fight against trafficking in the sex industry often becomes involved in the enforcement of increasingly restrictive migration laws and control by constructing categories of victimhood in relation to sexual identity and behavior that often exacerbate sex workers' vulnerability to being exploited and trafficked (Mai, 2018). SEXHUM studied the impact of sexual humanitarianism across eight strategic urban settings in France (Marseille and Paris), the US (New York and Los Angeles), Australia (Melbourne and Sydney), and New Zealand (Auckland and Wellington) that are characterized by different policies on migration, sex work (criminalization, regulation, and decriminalization), and trafficking. The focus of this qualitative research has been on migrant sex workers' own understanding of exploitation and trafficking and sexual humanitarian interventions. SEXHUM adopts an intersectional and self-reflexive approach to account for the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality frame the positionalities of researchers and participants according to existing hierarchies. Addressing these fundamental ethical and methodological concerns has been particularly important for the project because of the Whiteness of the research team, which could discourage and undermine the participation of racialized research respondents. Researchers have actively addressed this issue and the limits of their positionalities by being aware of how racialized inequalities translate into power disparities during the research process (particularly in interviews). We have also collaborated with racialized research participants and community members as coauthors of the publications drawing on project data and as active contributors to its dissemination activities, as well as having relied on postcolonial and decolonial scholars and theories. By undertaking long-term ethnographic fieldwork before undertaking interviews, researchers sought to establish a relationship of trust with respondents.
The SEXHUM project and this article will focus on the concepts and experiences of trafficking and antitrafficking as constitutive frameworks within the operationalization of carceral sexual humanitarian processes of both control and protection (Musto, 2016). The definition of trafficking to which we refer is the one framed by the 2000 UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, signed in Palermo in 2000. This document states that trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.
We will engage with this concept of trafficking critically, in the light of the fact that the definition of trafficking contained in the 2000 UN Palermo is informed by a neo-abolitionist sensibility (Ditmore and Wijers, 2003) and lacks a clear definition of exploitation. 1 This allows a considerable degree of arbitrary discretion that often translates into repressive antimigrant and antisex work interventions and policies in the fight against trafficking (O'Connell Davidson, 2005: 73). The convergence between prohibitionist feminist ideologies and conservative agendas to control and detain marginalized social groups frames what Elisabeth Bernstein (2010) defines as 'carceral feminism' referring to how incarceration and the judiciary system are mobilized to construct, rescue, and control all sex workers as victims of gender-based violence and trafficking within a humanitarian framework.
Within these social processes, and following our research findings, we will analyze the pivotal role played by racialized and sex-gendered criteria of victimhood and vulnerability in the unfolding of sexual humanitarian rhetoric, policies, and interventions. We will strategically deploy the concept of racialization, referring to the deployment of racial categories to define and understand social issues (Murji and Solomos, 2005), to understand which racialized assumptions of victimhood and vulnerability are at play. The term sex-gendered will also be used strategically in order to acknowledge how these two interlinked categories are implicated in the unfolding of sexual humanitarian concerns and interventions (Mai, 2018: 4). Both concepts are crucial for our analysis of how sexual humanitarianism operates by intersectionally racializing and sex-gendering its shifting target populations according to emerging and historical cultural constructions of vulnerabilities and victimhood at local, national, and global levels. In this respect, sexual humanitarian discourses amplify the ways in which vulnerability narratives participate in the constructions of certain groups as representing a social problem. In doing so, they displace the responsibility for risks and harm away from social factors such as poverty, exclusion, and gendered violence onto individual sex workers reframed as both victims and offenders (Brown, 2017).

Study methodology
The project gathered 240 semistructured interviews across all of its four national settings, including the experiences of a variety of people working in the sex industry, in terms of their ethnicity, area of work, migration, sex-gender identity, class, and racialization. Through the support of local sex workers-led organizations, the project purposely oversampled racialized participants across its settings reflecting the ways in which they are disproportionately targeted by antitrafficking and migration and law enforcement authorities. In interview and participant observation settings, migrant sex workers were guaranteed anonymity as they were asked about their own understandings and experiences of work, migration, trafficking, and exploitation, while key informants were asked about their work experience in the field of sex work and antitrafficking policy, legal assistance and service provision, and the major challenges they encountered. Having access to such variety of participants enabled the project to analyze strategically different experiences of agency and exploitation in relation to sex work and to the impact of antitrafficking and other social interventions on (migrant) sex workers' lives and rights.
This article draws specifically on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in France from March 2017 to September 2019 in Paris and Marseille in the context of the SEXHUM project. Data were collected through qualitative in-depth, semistructured interviewing with sex workers and trafficked persons lasting 60-90 minutes, and ethnographic observations with community members of all genders. The qualitative interviews with migrant sex workers focused on the experiences of Latina trans women (25), Asian (15), and Nigerian cis women (12) because these were the groups most frequently at the center of public debates about their supposed vulnerability to violence, exploitation and trafficking (in the case of Asian and Nigerian cis women) or marginalized by such debates (trans Latina women). In addition, interviews were conducted with key informants from legal, health, and social service organizations and law enforcement institutions. We used English, Spanish, and Chinese with trained and community-based interpreters. Interview transcripts were coded, sorted, and analyzed using a combination of thematic analysis guided by the theory of sexual humanitarianism and the constant comparative method for the development of grounded theory.
In this article, we will focus on the comparison between the ways in which Asian cis women, Latina trans women, and Nigerian cis women are constructed as specifically vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation, which will allow us to better understand the hierarchies of racialized victimhood at play within the implementation of the neo-abolitionist law passed in April 2016 in France. This comparative approach is strategic to explore how racialization emerges within sexual humanitarian processes, as evidenced by existing research underlining how Asian cis women and trans Latina sex workers are stereotypically racialized and represented respectively as passive victims and offenders while being also both constructed as noncitizens/outsiders, and as such targeted by law enforcement and immigration controls (Bolivar, 2017;Dalton and Jung, 2019;Ham, 2017;Lam and Lepp, 2019).
To understand how SEXHUM researchers in France negotiated their positionality, it is important to contextualize the cultural construction of Whiteness within the different colonial and racial histories of Europe by following a critical Whiteness studies perspective (Nayak, 2007). The historical construction of Whiteness in Europe draws on 'discourses surrounding not only diaspora, slavery and segregation (. . .), but also religion, ethnicity, migrations (. . .) national identities and territorial disputes', meaning that 'critical Whiteness studies in a European context raises issues of exclusion and inclusion, geographical and ethnic borders, migration and integration and assimilation' (Ponzanesi and Blaagaard, 2011: 6). These considerations are crucial in understanding how the two first authors (who undertook fieldwork in France) negotiated their positionality in the field as their openly non-French-White (Italian) and queer male identities were recognized as distinct from hegemonic (i.e. French-White and heterosexual) definitions of masculinity and national identity in France.
These considerations refer to the ways in which the racialization of marginalized social groups in Europe emerges from the convergence between colonial racialization and the unfolding of European and international migration processes (Erel et al., 2016). Within these racialized hierarchies, the first two co-authors can be seen as occupying a position of nonhegemonic Whiteness as they are both migrants from Southern Europe into Northern European countries (France and the UK, respectively) and queer. These considerations do not aim to relativize the privilege, power, and salience of actual and perceived Whiteness in their negotiation of power dynamics that framed research with groups marginalized by and through process of racialization. Rather, they seek to highlight the nuanced and contextual ways in which race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and migration are involved in the reproduction of racialized hierarchies in relation to hegemonic and exclusionary constructions of Whiteness (and masculinity). They also aim to underline that the subjective and intersubjective positionings produced by these complex hierarchies and forms of racialization can create a productive platform, grounded in intersectional theoretical insights for undertaking ethical, collaborative, and self-reflexive research.

Who is the victim? From 'White slavery' panic to antitrafficking discourses
With the introduction of the 2016 Law against the 'prostitutional system', France renewed its anti-trafficking efforts both by criminalizing the demand for sexual services and expanding humanitarian 'rescue' operations directed at sex workers. These efforts were also informed by nationalist sentiments reliant on the universalistic logics of color-blindness and egalitarianism. The race is central to the Law in France (Chapman and Frader, 2004).
As such, we argue that even where race is rendered invisible, the law's implementation racializes migrants, particularly (cis and trans) women, subject to state attention in the name of addressing trafficking in France.
Under colonialism, and in postcoloniality, gender and sexuality have been intimately linked to the vast array of social processes aspiring to maintain racial hierarchies. Historically, the triad race-gender-sexuality has taken the center stage in the unfolding of the past colonial order and also in today's postcolonial global reconfiguration (McClintock, 1995). Analyzing the varied forms of control of prostitution in different geo-political locations thus requires attentiveness to the entanglements of sexual and racial politics vis-à-vis the international mobility of people, including those that are embedded in humanitarian policies and interventions.
Contemporary sexual humanitarian understandings of, and interventions on, people's vulnerability to being exploited and trafficked into the sex industry express the ontologically racist coloniality of human rights and their fundamental, historical role in framing civilized geographies, bodies, and subjectivities (Maldonado and Torres, 2017;Wynter, 2003). In this respect, tracing the continuity between contemporary sexual humanitarian concerns and interventions and the historical myths surrounding 'White slavery' is crucial. Emerging in the late-19th-century Europe, these myths were grounded in the perceived need to regulate female sexuality under the auspices of protecting women. More specifically, 'White slavery' expressed deeper anxieties concerning national identity, Whiteness, women's increasing desire for autonomy, foreigners, immigrants and colonial peoples' (Doezema, 2000: 24).
Contemporary antitrafficking campaigns and moral panics echo some of the racialized, colonial, and sex-gendered hierarchies described above. For instance, sociologist Lilian Mathieu finds 'the myth of White slavery recycled by those who perceive foreign prostitutes only as naive women, abused by their pimps' is reactivated today to implement liberticidal laws against migrant women' (Mathieu, 2009). Women's independence continues to be seen as a threat to family stability and, by extension, the nation. In contemporary trafficking discourses, victims are no longer White Anglo-Saxon or Northern European; they are women from the global south and Eastern Europe. However, as Kempadoo (2001) argues, what fueled the emergence of 21st-century antitrafficking discourses and policies was the plight of Eastern European (i.e. 'White') women. This demonstrates the durability of the White slavery myth and the symbolic linkages it has authorized that tie state protection to historical understandings of Whiteness. The continuity between earlier and contemporary articulations of sexual humanitarianism reveals the ontological role of human rights discourses and practices in enforcing colonial and racialized understandings of victimhood including Eastern European women framed as incomplete subaltern others by 'Balkanist' discourses (Teodorova, 1997: 17) alongside fully orientalized others such as Nigerian and Asian women.
The universalist and prohibitionist understanding of prostitution as violence or women's 'sexual slavery' (Barry, 1984) does not account for the variety of sex-gendered identities (cis, trans, and gender-nonconforming people) involved in the sex industry -or for the intersecting ways in which class and race shape sex workers' experiences of labor and exploitation. Moreover, while most representations of sex workers focus on racialized and migrant (cis) women, they are often positioned as passive victims rather than subjects who actively resist (neo)colonial oppressions and structural racism embedded within the sex industry and antitrafficking field (Kempadoo, 2001: 40). The exclusion of gender and sexual minorities is noteworthy. Trans people rarely fit hetero-and cis-centric understandings of victimhood, and racialized transwomen's particular vulnerability to structural violence is rarely recognized within antitrafficking interventions (Boukli and Renz, 2018;Hoefinger et al., 2019).
Meanwhile, categories of 'youth', 'womanhood', and 'violence' framing the construction of trafficking victimhood in the 19th century remain consistent over time. The victim's innocence is proven by her supposed ignorance of her destiny, her age, her sexual unawareness, and the poverty from which she emerges (Doezema, 2001). Yet, racialized migrant women who are subject to violence and exploitation in the sex work sector and who refuse to be categorized as innocent victims cannot leverage human rights protections only reserved for 'real [White] victims'. Slippages between victimization and accusation further shape discourses of sex work where structural racial and gendered violence is masked by presumptions of guilt. As one respondent, Paris, a 40-year-old racialized trans woman doing street-based sex work explained: 'alongside victimization there is always the prejudice of thinking the person is also guilty . . . of doing something wrong'. Paris's observation underscores the ways in which notions of individual culpability are tied to constructions of racialized sex-gendered victimization in France, topics we explore in the next section.

'Race' in France
Examining the Dutch context in her book White Innocence, Gloria Wekker remarks that since World War II, race is rarely used in the Netherlands. Instead, race is replaced by 'softer' words like 'ethnicity, culture, and culturization'. These terms purport to privilege cultural rather than biological difference. However, in discussions about ethnic and cultural difference, biology and culture intertwine and ascribe to 'other' cultures (Wekker, 2016: 22). The obliteration of race is reflected in the politics of research on race and ethnic relations in the Netherlands. These dynamics are not unique to the Netherlands, however. Rather, they reflect parallel 'culturalist' dynamics based on the erasure of race that reproduces racialized hierarchies through the epistemological category of culture in the global north since World War II (Balibar, 2008). The problem with culturalist racism is that the 'antiracialist' fight against the concept of race has not translated into the 'antiracist' fight against the discriminatory 'conditions of being and living' (Goldberg, 2008: 10).
Recent political debates in France reflect these dynamics. In the summer of 2018 in Paris, the National Assembly unanimously suppressed the word 'race' from Article 1 of the French Constitution while inserting 'discrimination based on gender' into the text. Article 1 was rewritten so the Republic now 'ensures equality before the law of all citizens without discrimination of sex, origin or religion', instead of 'without discrimination of origin, race or religion'. MPs proudly proclaimed the logic behind the erasure of the term race is 'antiracist'. The term 'race' was introduced into the preamble of the 1946 Constitution and again in 1958. MPs wanted to assert their rejection of racist theories reinforced during Nazism and France's colonial history. Antiracist activists and scholars across the country highlighted the shortsightedness of this argument, and its inherent colonial heritage.
Notably, 'gender-based' discrimination enters the text of the French Constitution, substituting and erasing race-based discrimination. Whereas sex-gender becomes a privileged category of discrimination, race is made invisible under the presumed color-blindness of the French republic. This means that to celebrate the universalist notion of the citizen constitutive of the French republican and nationalist ideology, racial differences are ignored (Vermeren, 2015). Yet as the history of culturalist racism reveals, racial categories do not disappear. Rather, the absence of race is absorbed into culturalist forms. This in turn fuels the reproduction of race and racialized groups in insidious yet invisible ways (Mazouz, 2017). The parallel conflation and inscription of sex-as-gender into the Constitution also deserves to be questioned for its potential to implicitly reproduce essentialist and discriminatory categories and hierarchies of vulnerability. Here, we will use the term 'sex-gendered', acknowledging that the two categories of sex and gender are both specific and inextricably interlinked, to indicate how some migrant sex workers are understood and represented as vulnerable by social actors in relation to sex and gender (Mai, 2018: 4).
The constitutional erasure and substitution of race with the French universalist sex-asgender is a manifestation of the historical conjuncture where sexual politics have been framed as incompatible with racial politics in France (Farris, 2017). Consequently, efforts to fight sexism have contributed to openly racist policies while authorizing positions that reproduce racial inequalities even as race is absented from official policy. These dynamics echo the ways in which gender and sexuality have become new categories through which racialized and class-based hierarchies of belonging are reinscribed into nationalist policies in contemporary neoliberal societies (Hancock 2011). Although these dynamics are taking place in many societies, particularly in the global North, they have a specific resonance and amplitude in France, where a public focus on gender and sexuality frames them as emblematic features of the French Republican values of liberté and egalité (Fassin, 2010).
To counter the ways racialized dynamics are reproduced through their denial, in the next sections of the essay, we examine the role of racism within antitrafficking discourses and practices in a national context where the idea of institutional racism is continuously and actively dismissed. In contemporary France, the sex work sector has been recently criminalized by the implementation on 13 April 2016 of the Swedish model, a prohibitionist policy framing sex work (prostitution) as violence against women and migrant sex work as trafficking, it is based on the parallel decriminalization of sex workers 2 by repealing laws against soliciting, the criminalization of clients to 'end the demand' for sexual services through fining clients 1500 euro when caught buying sexual services (3750 euro in the case of reoffense), and offering sex workers the possibility to avail themselves of a program supporting them toward leaving the sex industry. The third objective was conceived as the social policy aspect (volet social) of the law, while the first two form its repressive aspect (volet repressif).
Alongside Nigerian women, the migrant group is more closely associated with trafficking in France and more racialized in association with colonial tropes according to which 'the West is conceived as the moral leader in the fight against the exploitation of non-Western women migrants' (Aanu Oloruntoba et al., 2018), the targeting of Asian women has been embedded in antimigration and antisex work policies, reinforced by the prohibitionist criminalization of clients. On the other hand, migrant trans women, a stigmatized social group experiencing extremely high levels of violence and abuse, have been invisible to sexual humanitarian interventions, which tend not to support them, as they do not fit with their cis-and hetero-centric understanding of victimhood.

Chinese migrant women in the sex work sector
Since the 1990s, Chinese women have become an important migrant group in the sex industry in France, particularly in Paris (Levy, 2012). Most come from the North-East of China, are between 40 and 60 years old, and have no networks in France prior to their arrival. For many, there is no model of migration and little if any support during their migratory journeys. During fieldwork, we learned that many Chinese women gradually started sex work. Many women discussed sex work as a means to live in France and as a way to achieve their goals. Yet, although many women's description of their migration to France was punctuated by descriptions of sacrifice toward family members -whether a husband or children left at home -most did not hide their own personal motivations, including a search for personal autonomy, the possibility of self-discovery and a way to defy social expectations.
Many women did street-based work in different areas of Paris, yet the majority of respondents were based in the neighborhood, Belleville, a fairly central part of the city (Roses d'Acier, 2016). Women work along its spacious boulevards, hence the common term used to refer to them: les marcheuses (the walkers). The Belleville marcheuses have gained heightened attention in the French media, and local NGOs. Simultaneously, they have been subject to heightened police interventions and repression, fueled in part by neighborhood gentrification (Le Bail and Lieber forthcoming).
Although the street-based sex workers to whom they talked had hoped the repeal of the soliciting charges would have meant fewer police controls, they actually experienced an increase of identity checks in the Belleville streets targeting Chinese sex workers, and also an increase of police operations directed at landlords who rent to sex workers (Le Bail and Lieber forthcoming). Knowingly renting an apartment to a sex worker is illegal because it is viewed as procuring (proxenetisme), a crime in France construed by prohibitionists as intrinsic to the 'prostitutional system' that the 2016 law sought to eradicate (Mathieu, 2018).
The challenges Chinese women experienced are the result of laws passed in the last two decades aimed at controlling sex work. However, the passage and enforcement of the 2016 law further exacerbated extant vulnerabilities. Despite the law's goal to move away from criminalizing sex workers, numerous Chinese women experienced racial profiling and expansive forms of policing, exacerbating their fears. As interview participant Fei Hung 3 explains: The police . . . when I'm back in Paris and I go to Belleville next to supermarkets or hotels, then I meet the police, and it's stressful . . . I go to Belleville to do my shopping and I see their cars, it's scary because they don't care if you are trading sex, what matters is that you are a Chinese woman. Immediately, they come to you and ask for your papers, so now I really don't want to work in Belleville anymore, I don't dare. When I go I do my shopping very fast. I don't even dare to talk with my friends in the street. If I want to see friends, I go to a coffee shop. I just try not to stay outside for too long. A Ling's narrative reveals how criminalization by proxy, introduced by the 2016 Law, reinforces the marginalization of racialized women. This insight is all the more striking given that non-migrant White sex workers we encountered seemed less concerned by the physical presence of police compared to racialized women in this study. Indeed, many nonmigrant White sex workers said they observed police targeting racialized street-based workers and that officers racially profiled migrant sex workers.
A Ling reported that police asked her questions about work and if she knew another Chinese woman under investigation. After answering their questions, she learned her landlord is a policeman and was instructed to leave the flat immediately. As she describes, What really annoyed me was the collusion between my landlord and the police, as the police ordered me to give my key for an apartment which I was legally renting, I had signed a contract for it, I had given a deposit, I had paid already a month rent, and that's why I feel very annoyed. I lost everything! This was my apartment, but I think that as my landlord turned out to be a policeman, I think that it was a set-up. (A Ling, 44 years old, interview August 2017) According to the 2016 Law, when women are viewed as 'victims' they can access the state-funded protection mechanisms to fight prostitution and human trafficking. However, many women we interviewed experienced the limits of these purportedly protective mechanisms said felt patronized by the Law's narrow understanding of victimization. Rose, a Chinese respondent, shared that doing sex work guaranteed her autonomy, both in terms of personal finances and control over her time. Sex work also helped her end the exploitative labor conditions she endured while working as a nanny for a Chinese family from Wenzhou upon arriving in Paris. Yet for her and other migrants we interviewed, the Law has limited available labor options, and imposed restrictions that make it difficult to earn money. Moreover, protections in the form of shelter also thwarted her ability to make a decent living: Rose did not see herself as a victim. At the time of the interview, Rose was staying at a women's shelter after filing her application to be recognized as a victim of human trafficking. Yet, notably it wasn't exploitation within the sex industry making Rose anxious. Rather, she feared deportation following a police raid on the apartment where she worked, the fear that many migrant sex workers experience worldwide (Ahmed and Seshu, 2012). This prompted her to apply so she could avoid deportation. Yet despite entering a system of supposed protection, she was skeptical and had reservations about its efficacy.

Racialized migrant trans women in sex work
The Chinese and the trans Latina migrants we interviewed endured the double stigma of being ambivalently framed as both victims and offenders (Brown and Sanders, 2017), which compounded their shared experiences of heightened police control and widespread violence based on how they were stigmatized, racialized, and sex-gendered in the context of sex work. Yet, our research findings showed that antitrafficking discourses and practices tended to exclude migrant and racialized trans women, as they did not seem to fit the ideal type of the trafficking victim defined by a cis-and hetero-centric understanding of vulnerability. Tragically, the convergence between these processes of racialized and sexgendered stigmatization constructed (and made) trans Latina women as 'disposable' (Lowman, 2000) to the forms of violence and abuse that can be associated to sex work in repressive law enforcement and criminalized situations (Armstrong, 2019;Kinnell, 2009). The killing of a trans woman in August 2018 in the bois de Boulogne, a historical location of sex work in Paris, triggered an international outcry against the violence to which trans women, particularly migrant sex workers, are exposed on a daily basis, and also against the laws prohibiting sex work, which have pushed trans women to work in more hidden and therefore dangerous locations. Her name was Vanesa Campos, a Peruvian migrant who lived and worked as a sex worker in Paris for the last 2 years of her life. Vanesa Campos was murdered in the bois while trying to help out a client being mugged by a group of men. Her story shows that criminalizing the demand for sexual services puts sex workers more at risk, as they work in further isolated locations in order to escape police control, which was the case for Campos on that summer night. It also makes them more vulnerable to the abuse of exploiters and assaulters, who know neither the sex worker nor the client would easily press charges against them (Le Bail and Giametta, 2018).
Through the work of organizations in Paris, 4 news of Vanesa Campo's murder featured prominently in mainstream media outlets, and her murder galvanized the fight against sex work prohibitionism in France. The famous French weekly magazine Paris Match published an article, Les Nuits Fauves du Bois de Boulogne (The Savage Nights of the Bois de Boulogne) that featured Campos' corpse. The article emphasized the otherness, radical alterity and 'savagery' of Campos and other trans women of color, and relied on problematic yet common tropes and images used to depict trans sex workers in France and elsewhere (Paris Match, 6 September 2018).
Trans women sex workers we interviewed in France have experienced multiple forms of discrimination and marginalization, due to their gender identity, racialized identities, migration statuses, (at times) HIV status, and language-related obstacles. Our data also confirm existing research on the socioeconomic, class-based vulnerability of trans Latina migrant sex workers, most of whom come from underprivileged backgrounds and cannot find alternatives to sex work in the countries of both origin and destination of their migratory journeys (Gonzalez, 2018). At a time when both sex work and migration have become important political issues and main subjects for the deployment of police and bordering control, transwomen, and particularly racialized migrants, working in the sex work sector has been paying the consequences with their lives.
Addressing questions of race was not always straightforward with research participants, as the racial hierarchies they mobilized were often shaped by legacies of colonization. Some migrants felt more 'at home' than others in France. Some Latina sex workers, for instance, were under the impression transwomen from the Maghreb, particularly Algerians, had more of an attachment to France and thus felt at home in Paris (elles se sentent chez elles) due to language and culture (read colonial relations and legacies). We noted this complexity on a number of instances throughout the fieldwork, but more precisely when interviewing Naomi, an Algerian trans sex worker, for whom national identity was a particularly contentious matter. When asked about her nationality, Naomi said: 'I'm Algerian, but I'd rather you put down French'. When asked why she had this preference, she replied that if we stated we interviewed an Algerian, once we publish the research data readers would 'undoubtedly' think: 'There you go, still another foreign prostitute!' I tell you, you do what you want, but I promise you that this will discredit my whole argument. Because at the [National] Assembly, it was specifically said that France should not be a country of destination for prostitutes. If you could put French I will be very grateful to you. This is not racism, it's just how it is here. I do not want to lie to you, that's why I told you my nationality. But honestly, I should have just said French. (Naomi, 28 years old, interview July 2018) Naomi's interview shows postcolonial, racialized hierarchies at work as she expresses her fear her argument against the repression of sex work in France would be jeopardized by the simple fact she is Algerian. Naomi views the fact of being a 'foreigner' as a troubling and delegitimizing position to take, precisely because she thinks politicians tell themselves: 'we are becoming a country of prostitution and we do not want that'. The fact that, as Naomi reminded us, it was Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the then French Minister for Women's Affairs and a woman from Moroccan origins, who proclaimed this at the National Assembly is emblematic of the ways in which the erasure/substitution of race with sex-as-gender in the French Constitution legitimized and normalized carceral forms of state feminism (feminisme d'état) granting extremely precarious rights to sex workers in the context of prohibitionism. This is especially relevant to the vast majority of Nigerian women, whose rejection from the exit program -introduced by the 2016 Law -further highlights the racialized politics of victimhood of French neo-abolitionist sexual humanitarianism.

Nigerian women and the prostitution exit program (le parcours de sortie)
Challenging widespread assumptions that migrant Nigerian sex workers are illiterate villagers at the mercy of traffickers, the sociologist Francoise Guillemaut (2008) instead finds that many Nigerian women migrants are literate, hold high school and university degrees, and hail from urban centers. Upon reaching Europe, Nigerian sex workers in France are often responsible for paying off debt related to their journey and responsible for supporting the upward mobility to families back home. Malsan (2012) notes that many Nigerian women accept conditions that turn out to be worse than what they had imagined. For instance, they agree to pay back sums of money of which they do not clearly know the value (Simoni, 2010); work very long hours; do street-based work in the cold; send money to families; and pay arbitrary fees on top of the debt upon arrival in the country or later on. Malsan suggests it is important to consider the symbolic meaning of the debt -beyond its monetary value. For instance, migrants may feel grateful to those who brought them to Europe; this may make them accept exploitative relationships, a trend we also observed among trans Latinas we interviewed According to the French prostitution Law 2016-44 the parcours de sortie (exit program) would provide sex workers with: • • A financial aid for social and professional reintegration of 360 euro per month • • A temporary residence permit of 6 months could be renewed for a maximum of three times • • The support of an accredited organization to access housing opportunities, health care, and professional reintegration The application of the parcours de sortie is processed through certified community health organizations and is reviewed and decided upon at a regional committee presided by the police prefect, the regional Police chief. In theory, this law is supposed to create an administrative 'clean slate' for those who want to leave prostitution. However, this part of the law appears to be applied differently and arbitrarily in different local jurisdictions. This is because some regional committees (i.e. Nice) expressed the fear this would create a regularization pathway for undocumented migrants that could be politically dangerous in the current political climate in France, characterized by a hardening of migration controls and repatriations.
During our fieldwork, we noted Nigerian women in particular found themselves in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they had been portrayed by political discourse and the media as the main recipients, for being ideally naïve and innocent victims, of the exit-from-prostitution mechanism as a way of combating the human trafficking of which they were supposedly victims. On the other, when the applications of 14 Nigerian women were processed, they were rejected by the prefect and the committee as they were not considered genuinely willing to stop sex work. This corroborates the fact that historically, the authenticity of racialized subjects and their 'stories' has been denied, as lying was considered structural to the 'nature' of the colonized (Giuliani et al. 2019). In this respect, the rejection of Nigerian women from the parcours de sortie and their perceived nongenuineness is the expression of hierarchies of nonbelievability that both reflect and exacerbate their racialized and marginalized social positions, as many of them 'lived just beyond the confines of the fluctuating and unequal rules of dominant society' (Angel-Ajani, 2004: 134). The following quote from the interview with Precious, a 27-year-old woman working and living in Nice, shows the disillusionment of Nigerian women with the real perspectives of regularization and support offered by the parcours de sortie.
In 2016 the social projects (social workers) told us that they want to stop the girls in the street and give them documents. They said that want to share paper to the girls in the street; that the government wants to give paper if you want to leave the street. So I was happy about it because I wanted to leave, to get out of this . . . they did not tell us anything. They just took us, the four girls. I feared they were going to deport me, but nobody told me what was happening. They even took me to Nigerian embassy in Paris by flight, two policemen. When we get there the two policemen stepped aside and the Nigerian consul or the ambassador asked me: 'why can't you just marry or do hair in Africa'.
Precious's observations reveal how gendered stereotypes relegating women outside international and social mobility into heteronormative and patriarchal roles and places are readily mobilized and put into practice when migrant sex workers deal with institutions and humanitarian organizations targeting them as potential or actual victims of trafficking (Shih, 2018). Her story also underscores that when sociopolitical anxieties over migration control meet public concerns about the presence of sex workers in the streets and other public spaces, the racist, and discriminatory colonial sex-gender repertoire is readily mobilized. In the process, Nigerian women are gendered, racialized, and understood as being out of place in a European city. The patronizing request, why can't you just marry or do hair in Africa, sought to put Precious in her 'proper place' according to racialized hierarchies fixing the place women can and should occupy in public. Precious' story also illustrates the detrimental effects of the French neo-abolitionist sexual humanitarian policies and interventions. A few weeks after her exit program application was rejected, Precious was stopped by police officers in the street where she worked. She was taken to the police station and ended up in a detention center where she remained for 45 days. Not only do her experiences illustrate the perverse effects of 'carceral feminism' (Bernstein, 2018), they further highlight the ethos of sexual humanitarian projects that leverage antitrafficking discourses and seemingly protective calls to 'support' those wanting to stop sex work as a means to curtail irregular immigration and punish racialized migrants.

Conclusion
The data, observations, and analyses informing this article clearly show the substitution of race with sex-as-gender in the French Constitution in 2018 is paradigmatic of a rearticulation, rather than a crisis (Schor, 2001) of French universalism. The ethnographic material analyzed here highlights the ways in which the 'State Feminist' inflection of sexual humanitarianism is complicit with the securitizing and bordering logic of the French State. More specifically, it highlights the ways in which the implementation of the 2016 Law can be seen as complying with and expanding a bordering politics and repertoire of repressive interventions dating back to the early 2000s during the Sarkozy, Hollande, and Macron governments that prioritize heightened securitization.
The law penalizing sex workers' clients has shown that neoliberal policies put in place to fight the sex trade have prioritized criminal justice approaches. In this respect, both the social and repressive aspects of the 2016 Law are embedded in the deployment of racialized categories of victimhood that reproduce neoliberal and neocolonial hierarchies of mobility legitimizing control in the name of protection. They also participate in the broader sexual humanitarian separation of trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation from the exacerbation of inequalities and the parallel erosion of labor rights engendered by the globalization of neoliberal ideologies and policies (Mai, 2018). These critical considerations highlight the pivotal need to reframe policies addressing sex work and trafficking around the interconnected structural issue of labor and migration rights, in order to address the forms of exploitation and the needs and priorities of the people who are directly concerned (Bravo, 2009;Thiemann, 2019).
The article presents the detrimental effects of the 2016 Law, which were anticipated by previous research conducted in France between 2014 and2015, showing 98% of migrants were against the criminalization of clients and predicting the majority of sex workers would be more vulnerable to violence and abuse as the industry would be pushed underground (Le Bail and Giametta, 2018;Mai, 2018). Although the fact that sex workers were against criminalization of clients should have been enough to prompt politicians and policymakers to reject the new law proposal, it was approved with a strong bipartisan majority in April 2016. In this respect, the universalist neo-abolitionism of the 2016 Law expresses how human rights discourses and practices can be a strategic vector for the expansion of racist coloniality on the mobilities, bodies, and subjectivities of migrant sex workers.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This research was funded by the European Research Council.

ORCID iD
Calum Bennachie https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9250-676X Notes has also collaborated on several global health studies with migrant sex workers in the United States, Cambodia, France, Australia, and New Zealand.
Heidi Hoefinger's academic research involves urban ethnography and gender and sexuality, with a focus on sex work, trafficking, migration, race, LGBTQ communities, nighttime economies, intimacy, subcultures, activism, and substance use in Southeast Asia, the UK, and NYC. In addition to conducting research in NYC for SEXHUM through Kingston University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, she is a full-time faculty in Social Sciences at Berkeley College.
PG Macioti is a qualitative social researcher at La Trobe University whose work focuses on social change, peer education, sex work, migration, and LGBTIQ + health and well-being. She has lived and researched in the UK, Germany, the US, and Australia. She is currently the manager of a pilot research on the health and well-being of Victorian sex workers that is informing the introduction of sex work decriminalization in the Australian state of Victoria.

Date submitted 4 December 2020
Date accepted 28 February 2022