The Feminization of Victimhood: Rethinking Gender, Power, and Visibility in Human Trafficking Narrative

Abstract

The dominant victimhood narrative in human trafficking primarily focuses on the Ideal victim of a passive, helpless, and naïve young woman from the Global South who is forced into sex slavery. This feminization of victimhood obscures the rising demographic of trafficked men and boys, particularly in forced labor and other forms of exploitation. Utilizing a qualitative conceptual analysis, this study applies three prominent feminist frameworks, Judith Butler’s post-structuralist performativity, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s postcolonial critiques of homogenization, and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s critical race intersectionality, to deconstruct the gendered, racialized, and structural dimensions of trafficking discourses. It argues that the dominant victimhood narrative discursively produces gendered subjects, reinforces patriarchal binaries, and structurally marginalizes the help-seeking behaviors of trafficked men. The findings reveal that the dominant narrative performatively reinforces patriarchal binaries that equate femininity with vulnerability and masculinity with invulnerability. This discursive construction severely damages male victims’ self-perception, forcing them to internalize trauma and “perform” hegemonic masculinity to avoid social stigma. Consequently, male survivors face deep-rooted institutional blindness, severe under-resourcing, and structural barriers to support-seeking behavior.