The Cop vs. the Predator: Harris, Trump, and the Politics of Sexual Menace

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Former District Attorney, Attorney General, and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is performing a balancing act this election season. Mass incarceration has emerged as a significant concern amongst the Left, and even amongst the Right as well. At the same time, anxiety over crime has not dissipated, nor is this fear exclusive to the isolated strata of the white middle class. In this ambiguous and ambivalent political climate, Harris is hoping that voters will forget her aggressive prosecutorial past, yet still retain the image of her as a no-nonsense enemy of injustice.

In order to appeal to voters’ growing distaste for mass incarceration while legitimizing her own history as a prosecutor, she imagines an America with two criminal justice systems. One of these criminal justice systems is the one that targets poor people of color for low-level drug offenses, and is rooted in white supremacy. The other criminal justice system, the one that targets “sex offenders,” is wholly righteous, objective, and needs no adjustment in priority, save only, perhaps, in its too obtrusive concern for defendants’ rights.

These two criminal justice systems are evident in Harris’s memoir, wherein she asks herself “how I, as a black woman, could countenance being part of ‘the machine’ putting more young men of color behind bars,” yet at the same time she argues, “there must be serious consequences for people who commit serious crimes.” Thus, she notes with pride her work in increasing sentences for “johns who paid to have sex with underage girls” —treating it as an act of “child sexual assault”—while ignoring “less serious crimes” for which Black, brown, and poor men were disproportionately imprisoned, writing “They represented a living monument to lost potential, and I wanted to tear it down.”

Of course, as scholars have pointed out, these “less serious crimes” (by which she certainly means drug violations) have not been a primary cause in the rise of mass incarceration since the early 70s, and directing attention towards combating the War on Drugs would not significantly reduce the number of Americans spending time in prison. However, by keeping the focus on drugs and racism alone, Harris can check off the box that says she’s “doing something” about mass incarceration [1]. At the same time, she can use the bipartisan construction of the dangerous sex fiend in order to reach out to tough-on-crime voters without ruffling any feathers amongst her base. For instance, as District Attorney of San Francisco, she supported the preexisting collaborative courts program which offered pretrial diversion to defendants, but she acted to exclude people charged with certain sex offenses from eligibility. This is the general pattern Harris has followed in presenting herself as America’s “warrior-mom”: sweet and gentle towards the good, unremitting towards the bad, and always able to tell the difference.

The War on Sex Offenders has been an obsession of Harris since early in her career, when she was a Deputy DA in Alameda County, in charge of sex crime prosecutions. Her televised speech accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination highlights her career choice as motivated by her high school friend Wanda, who was being sexually abused by her step-father and found refuge by coming to live with Kamala’s family.

Although now trying to frame herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” Harris never hesitated to deploy against sex offenders whatever machinations she could get away with to put the defendant in jail for as long as possible. For example, in the trial against George Gage, a man charged with sexually abusing his stepdaughter, a case that surely reminded Harris of Wanda, Harris’s team continued to uphold his conviction even after the judge found the prosecution to have “unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence.” On another occasion she defended district attorney Robert Murray, who falsified two lines of a child sex offender’s confession, making it appear that he confessed to a much more serious crime. After these extra charges against the defendant were dropped on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, Harris appealed the decision, claiming “only abject physical brutality would warrant a finding of prosecutorial misconduct and the dismissal of an indictment.” In other words, according to Harris, prosecutors are justified in doing whatever they please, so long as they do not physically hit anybody.

Recognizing political cannon fodder when she sees it, Harris has also taken steps to restrict the liberties of people on the sex offender registry, specifically online, stating “yesterday’s playground has turned into today’s social networking site.” Thus, in 2010, she pushed California Assembly Bill 2208 which would make it illegal for registered sex offenders to go on social media sites including Facebook and Twitter. Harris explained (apparently forgetting what the “carrot” in this metaphor is supposed to signify), “The carrot is don’t get on these sites, and the stick is we will prosecute you.” Using deeply stigmatizing and inflammatory rhetoric, she says, “In my experience, these types of predators are a slimy group and they don’t want to go to jail, and what we’re telling them is that if you go online and start chatting with my 12-year-old niece, you’re going to jail.” This bill did not pass, though she did help pass the The Californians Against Sexual Exploitation (“CASE”) Act, a broad piece of legislation which required, among other things, that all registered sex offenders disclose all of their online identities—a provision that was deemed a violation of the First Amendment by the United States Court of Appeals. This is fortunate, as laws such as these discourage people on the registry from speaking out about the injustice they experience and work to keep them isolated and invisible. Banning social media use also complicates their ability to find appropriate adult partners; forming healthy legal relationships correlates with lower risk of recidivism.

One of Harris’s proudest accomplishments is her long campaign against Backpage, which she has touted as a heroic, holy crusade against the sex trafficking boogeymen who lurk among us. Backpage was an escort site where sex workers could advertise their services, and was painted by anti-prostitution activists as a global hub for child sex slavers, primarily because the website did not have the capacity to weed out every instance a minor entered the site posing as an adult. Harris leveled legal charges against Backpage twice, though both times her efforts were hindered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which made platform service providers not legally liable for third party speech on their sites. It’s no wonder that Harris supported the overreaching and invasive 2018 “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (SESTA-FOSTA), initiated during the Trump administration. Harris specifically praised SESTA-FOSTA’s amendments to Section 230, claiming it stopped those who “cowardly sit behind a computer committing their crime and then suppose that the Communications Decency Act (CDA) would shield them.” One co-founder of Backpage, Michael Lacey, is facing up to 20 years in prison for the dubious charge of money laundering, while his friend and business partner, Jim Larkin, shot himself.

For all this sound and fury, what does “sex trafficking” actually mean? While the term “sex trafficking” conjures up sensational images of abducted women and girls chained by their ankles in filthy dungeons, who can only beg for mercy as sick old men defile them, it is a loose term that can be applied indiscriminately to the sex industry as a whole, and, unsurprisingly, gives law enforcement a great deal of discretionary power. Some of the things people have done that have resulted in arrest on sex trafficking charges include living with a sex worker who pays or helps pay the rent, allowing sex work to occur on one’s property, or driving a sex worker to a meeting with a client. In other words, being anywhere near the business of sex work, even in the capacity of a supportive friend or family member, is dangerous, and only serves to keep many sex workers socially isolated.

Harris has a long history of “protecting” sex workers without talking to them about the liberties and resources they need to protect themselves. Unsurprisingly, sex workers and sex worker advocates are not happy with her track record, citing her endorsement of SESTA-FOSTA as contributing to the endangerment and stigmatization of sex workers by taking away their easiest means of meeting and vetting clients: the internet. Without it, they must take their chances on the streets and in bars despite the increased risk of assault and exploitation. (Click here for our book review on this subject).

In recent years, Harris has begun to read the room and altered her position on decriminalization since 2008, when she claimed that decriminalization would welcome “pimps and prostitutes” into the city, to a more moderate: “When we are talking about consenting adults, I think that, yes, we should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed. But at the point that anyone’s being harmed or exploited, we have to understand that that’s a different matter.” At first glance, this seems like a more reasonable response. However, it leaves several questions unanswered, such as “what does it mean to be harmed or exploited?” Sex cannot be so neatly separated into binary categories of agency and powerlessness. In reality, sex workers, like all people, have a wide range of capabilities and vulnerabilities that they navigate in diverse ways [2]. Opposing the structural conditions that limit people’s ability to find profitable and safe employment—sexual or otherwise—is a basic political priority. However, expanding the definition of sex trafficking to encompass all sex work that falls short of 100% counterfactual consent, has given the federal government overwhelming power over individuals’ sex lives, causing great harm to “victims” and “offenders” alike.

Ironically, Harris’s zeal for punishing sexual misconduct is much more timid when the issue is closer to home. For instance, whilst in the middle of campaigning against Backpage, police officers in her jurisdiction in California were allegedly having sex with an underaged sex worker named Celeste Guap. After Guap fell under the radar of law enforcement, police officers called her a “whore” and treated her like a criminal. Soon, several officers began having sex with her over a period of years, and telling her she would not be believed if she testified against them. Civil rights lawyers and local residents begged Harris to open up an independent investigation into the matter. Harris, however, was presumably too busy hunting bigger game and did not respond. She also refused to comply with the California Public Records Act by withholding 80 years of documents on the Catholic sex abuse scandals, keeping them locked tight for five years. Her rationale was protecting the identity of victims, although these records were primarily requested for use in civil lawsuits, and irrelevant information could be redacted without complication. Why a firebrand like Harris would pass up on such a perfect opportunity to get into her Wonder Woman tights and expose the “forces of evil” within the Catholic Church is unclear, but California’s significant Catholic voter base might have had something to do with it. 

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Clearly, Harris is well-versed in the art of a good sex panic, that is, using the simplified images of innocence and perversion to cultivate a state of emergency and push for broad regulatory controls over people’s lives. However, she is up against an opponent who may be even better at it. The Right certainly has more practice in linking sex to the moral health of the nation, and while the Left must make an effort to at least appear tolerant and sensible (basing their claims on “power imbalances” and stringent definitions of consent) the Right has no such inhibitions. More recent manifestations of Right-wing sex panics do not even have the veneer of sanity, such as the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The QAnon conspiracy theory is a series of assertions made on the website 4chan by a poster known only as “Q.” Q claims to be a high-level government official with top-secret intel about a network of organized Satanists engaged in child sex trafficking and ritual abuse. This network is also accused of trying to orchestrate the downfall of Trump, who is fighting to expose this cabal and end their reign. Trump himself feigns ignorance. When asked about QAnon supporters, he said, “I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it,” praising it and distancing himself from it at the same time. His ignorance of QAnon is dubious, as he has liked and reposted QAnon-linked content on his social media site, Truth Social, including an image of himself wearing the Q lapel pin overlaid with the phrase “the storm is coming”—the “storm” referring, in QAnon literature, to the day when Trump would orchestrate the mass arrest of these conspirators and either send them to Guantanamo Bay or execute them on live TV. While Trump has never “officially” supported QAnon, it forms a key part of his base, making it a fire he is not incentivized to put out. His explicit endorsement of other conspiracy theories about the “Deep State” and rigged elections gives license to this paranoid strain in the American body politic.

As commonly noted,​​ Trump has also played a deliberate part in generating panic over the “hordes of foreigners” at our borders, always making sure to include the word “rape” when describing the sort of people whom Mexico is “forcing on us.” Trump and his administration also blame the media and the Democratic Party for downplaying rates of violent crime committed by the immigrant population. Again, as with QAnon, Trump is not an idiot and he directs his attention largely toward the sexual assault of migrant women and girls in caravans during the journey to the border. Trump knows he cannot only sell the image of native-born (implicitly white) women being raped by “illegals” (although it’s an image he does nothing to dispel), so he reframes the problem as concern for migrants, even as he pushes his anti-immigration agenda.

Trump has stoked the flames of sexual anxiety amongst his supporters through his support of Tim Ballard, even hosting a screening of the propagandist film Sound of Freedom. Sound of Freedom is an action-thriller film depicting Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard, former CEO of the anti-sex trafficking organization “Operation Underground Railroad” (O.U.R.), going undercover in Latin America to rescue children from child predators. O.U.R. has minimal supporting evidence for any of the “thousands of children” they have rescued, despite the organization’s considerable funding. Many have described it as a heavily stylized club of Christian cosplayers indulging in a collective “James Bond fantasy,” an aesthetic which Sound of Freedom deftly captures. Unsurprisingly, Ballard and Trump are a match made in heaven, and the two of them have joined forces to connect the sex trafficking narrative to that of the “dangerous immigrant.”   

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How much sleep does Trump actually lose at the thought of women experiencing sexual aggression and the loss of their bodily autonomy? Considering his own conduct, the answer is likely very little. The number of women who have accused Trump of kissing/groping them without permission is staggering, and on at least two occasions he has openly admitted to this sort of behavior, saying infamously on a hot mic in 2005, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He also claimed in an interview on the Howard Stern Show that he walks in on beauty pageant participants while they’re changing, saying, as the owner “I sort of get away with things like that.”

Sociologist of religion Samuel L. Perry has a theory why Trump’s openly lewd behavior with women has seemingly failed to register among his disproportionately Evangelical base, arguing that “sexual temptation” in contemporary male Christian circles is conceptualized as a struggle, yet a struggle that reaffirms their strength and virility, so that men are almost compelled to fall prey to lust. Based on this view, it may be supposed, sexual temptation, when directed towards females who are (mostly) “age-appropriate,” is a “pro-social sin” that binds and unifies men. On the other hand, sexuality that expresses a deformed masculinity such as homosexuality or a preferential attraction to minors are “anti-social sins” that cannot be integrated into the common, masculinized battle of the spirit, but must be expelled from the social body. This helps explain why Trump is so easily able to rile up his followers into fits of rage at all the “pedophiles and perverts” that the Democrats are supposedly protecting, even as his own misconduct is visible in broad daylight.

This is not to say that his opponents have given up on the matter; they are still actively trying to keep attention focused on Trump’s many offenses. In an ironic turn of fate, many on the Left have taken to the rhetoric of law and order, moral propriety, and social respectability. One article, for instance, refers to Trump with the phrase “moral degeneracy” and Pete Buttigieg mocks Trump’s failure to conform to “family values”. And, as Harris posted, in no uncertain terms, during her 2020 election campaign, “I prosecuted sex predators. Trump is one.” While language such as this has historically been used to dehumanize and control sex and gender minorities, the Left seems very confident that with them, at least, it is in good hands and will be used responsibly.

The truth is, the “sex offender” label is too dangerous for any politician to exploit. While calling Trump a sex criminal may score points at fundraisers, the impact on him will be minimal. However, continuing to naturalize the category of the “sex offender” in social discourse will have a significantly negative impact on the hundreds of thousands of people who live under the weight of this label. This includes people who have consensual sex with teenagers, viewers of child pornography, sexually active HIV-positive people, low-income johns, homeless people who have sex in public spaces, trans people charged with “gender identity fraud,” kids who sext or “play doctor” with peers scarcely a few years younger, etc, [3]. Of course, there are many behaviors that should be deeply condemned, from sexual assault to non-consensual condom removal (“stealthing”). Even in these cases, however, the brutally harsh punishments and sensationalized news coverage that accompany them serve little purpose besides satisfying the popular urge to punish. Sexual misconduct is better addressed through more restorative models that emphasize offender accountability and victim affirmation/closure within a whole person context [4].

While both sides wrestle over the discourse of sex crime, trying to portray the other side as the party that is the “friend of the pedophile and the pervert,” it is the innumerable Americans disenfranchised by this label, and their families, who feel the force of these blows. This election cycle, things seem unlikely to change.

Notes

[1] It’s important to note that even Harris’s record on drug prosecution and racial justice still leaves much to be desired. For instance, in San Francisco she oversaw the prosecution of nearly 2,000 cannabis-related charges—an increase from her predecessor. She has also refused to allow the use of DNA testing which might have led to the exculpation of a Black inmate on death row, and also declined to support a bill that would have made her office responsible for investigate shootings by police officers.

[2] For more on the trouble with categorizing consent along dichotomous lines such as pleasure/disgust, desire/resistance, agency/passivity, etc., see, inter alia, Fischel, J. J. (2016). Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent; Butler, J. (2011). Sexual consent: Some thoughts on psychoanalysis and law; and Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, traumatophilia.

[3] For the increased support of the use of criminal law—including both harsher sentences and post-release controls such as residency restrictions and civil commitment—in sexual offenses that cause little to no harm, see generally Halperin, D. M., & Hoppe, T. (Eds.). (2017). The War on Sex.; De Orio, S. (2017). Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights.; and Wypijewski, J. (2020). What We Don’t Talk about when We Talk about# MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority & the Mess of Life.

[4] For evidence of the benefits of restorative justice, even in cases of sexual harm, see Gavin, P., Kite, C., Porter, C., McCartan, K., & Cawley, P. (2023). Restorative justice in cases of sexual violence: Current and future directions in the UK.; Burns, C. J., & Sinko, L. (2023). Restorative justice for survivors of sexual violence experienced in adulthood: A scoping review.; and Wager, N. (2013). The experience and insight of survivors who have engaged in a restorative justice meeting with their assailant.