The Persistent Erasure of Intersectional Racism in Our Understandings of Missing, Stolen, Exploited, and Trafficked Youth
To create effective education and prevention strategies to missing, stolen, exploited, and trafficked (MSET) youth in the United States, we need to disrupt the empirically false dominant racial narratives pervasive in society, driven by biased news media reporting, entertainment media portrayals, and skewed police-controlled data collection, reporting, and enforcement. We also need to adjust our assumptions of the ways in which the criminal justice system (selectively) protects these youth and build awareness of the capitalist interests that erase and/or hide the racialized realities of the place and frequency of our MSET youth.
While most research related to MSET youth education and prevention has come from a place of positive intention and impact, often calling for vital improvements to awareness, policy, law, praxis, and social change, significant outcomes on the state or national level have come far too slowly, if at all. While slow change is often blamed on notions of normality in legal systems and policy structures, we contend in this presentation (and forthcoming paper) that prior improvement efforts have suffered from a misunderstanding of who is impacted, when, and why, driven largely by persistent direct and indirect portrayals across a variety of media and by inaccurate, skewed, and incomplete government data (Polaris, 2020).
