The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today by Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter

Social construction and the diffusion of anti‐trafficking laws in the U.S.

“…In either case, the expectation is a combination of rhetorical support and underfunded services, with public statements of support for the dependent group enabling policymakers “to show great concern through widespread public announcements, but relieve them of the need to allocate resources” (Schneider & Ingram, 1997, p. 123). These dynamics were readily apparent at the federal level—while initial laws contained victim assistance provisions, “only minimal provisions were made in their model statute for victim services” (Bales & Soodalter, 2010, p. 198). The federal government finally created a Domestic Trafficking Victims’ Fund in 2015.…”

“…These so‐called “3Ps” (later joined by “partnership”) served as the basis for a fair standard set of guidelines for evaluating the comprehensiveness of trafficking laws, both internationally as well as within the U.S. (U.S. Department of State, 2019b). Model statutes were developed by the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of State and NGOs like the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Freedom Network, and the Polaris Project (Bales & Soodalter, 2010, pp. 201–202).…”

Editorial: Slavery and Popular Culture Studies

“…There, he promoted these books as essential reading in the field and abandoned the academic's usual cool objective distance: “It is the duty of every American to … burn with anger over man's inhumanity to man” (Rev. of Slave Next Door 287). In the early years of The Journal of Popular Culture , the new cultural historians found a home for discussing the promotional union of sentimental fiction and the antislavery novel, racism and proslavery attitudes in nineteenth‐century school readers, abolitionist ideas in Beadle and Adams's dime novels, racist stereotypes and literary formulas, sympathetic antebellum portrayals of African‐American characters in children's books, minstrelsy and blackface, and the invention of the romanticized Old South.…”