Cartographies of Consent: Sex Trafficking, Space, and the Politics of Victim Recognition in the United States

This critical literature review examines how scholarship in sociology, criminology, law, and geography conceptualizes consent within U.S. sex trafficking, survival sex, and sex work. We identify four recurring socio-legal debates: the choice/coercion binary; hierarchies of victim recognition; the victim/criminal nexus; and surveillance, rescue, and punishment. Drawing on critical geographic understandings of cartography, we examine how socially produced meanings of places and bodies shape sexual agency and interpretations of consent, victimhood, and criminality. Across these studies, similar acts acquire different meanings depending on who is involved, where they occur, and how bodies, relationships, and spaces are socially coded. We introduce cartographies of consent, a framework explaining how social, relational, spatial, and institutional power shapes both the conditions under which consent is negotiated and the processes through which it is recognized. The framework examines how unequal access to resources and protection, and unequal opportunities to refuse or exit, interact with meanings attached to bodies, relationships, and places. Rather than equating consent with its social or legal recognition, cartographies of consent examines how the social conditions shaping sexual agency become visible, obscured, or reinterpreted, with consequences for recognition, protection, and criminalization.