Judicial Maternalism, Tough Love, and Pastoralism in U.S. Human Trafficking Courts

Drawing on in-depth interviews with ten judges presiding over Human Trafficking Courts (HTCs) across the United States, this article develops the concept of judicial maternalism to explain how judges reconcile carceral authority with the therapeutic, victim-centered mission of the problem-solving court movement. HTCs classify defendants charged with prostitution and related offenses as trafficking victims and divert them into court-mandated treatment in place of traditional prosecution. Using Goffman's dramaturgical framework and Foucault's concept of pastoral power, I show that judges construct front-stage identities as mothers, mentors, and guardians that recast punitive measures, guilty pleas, mandated check-ins, arrest warrants, and extended supervision as benevolent “tough love.” Three interrelated mechanisms sustain this conflation of care and control: the illusion of choice and infantilization of defendants, the reframing of punitive sanctions as encouragement, and the rationalization of judicial overreach. Rather than empowering system-involved women, I argue that judicial maternalism functions as a self-serving identity project through which judges secure moral and professional legitimacy while extending carceral oversight over the very population HTCs claim to protect. This analysis contributes to carceral feminist scholarship by specifying the interpersonal and identity-level processes through which gender-responsive reform reproduces, rather than resolves, the punitive logics it professes to reject.

Menaka Raguparan is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and a feminist sociolegal scholar. Her research focuses on sex work, sex trafficking, and the conflation of the two. Her current research examines policing and state court operations in the United States to understand the anti-trafficking initiatives to rescue and rehabilitate women who engage in sex work. 

Dr. Raguparan is the founder and co-chair of "Sex, Work, Law and Society," a collaborative research network at the Law and Society Association (LSA).