From Social Experience to Cultural Expertise: The Role of Nonprofit Organizations in Identifying Sex Trafficking Victims in France

Résumé En

The links between nonprofit organizations and public authorities play a unique role in public policies for combatting trafficking in human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation in France. Based on observations and interviews with actors in the social and penal sectors (police, justice) involved in the fight against trafficking, this article analyzes the way in which nonprofit organizations have constituted and claimed expertise in the field of detecting and identifying victims of trafficking. In this respect, the "cultural" expertise claimed by some non-governmental actors, linking the supposed origin of the victims and perpetrators with the particular methods of committing the offense and exercising constraint, seems to be particularly significant in their recognition as partners of public actors. In fact, this cultural expertise appears to be a key component in the circulation, exchange and mutual consolidation both of interpretations of trafficking and professional legitimacy between social and penal actors. However, cultural expertise being claimed by nonprofit organizations and used by law enforcement actors seems both to contribute to freezing the incommensurability of difference-by establishing the supposed opacity of certain practices or rationalities-and to allow a rapprochement between social and penal logics.