Introduction

Welcome to the Oregon and Multnomah County Sex Trafficking Timeline Project. This project is led by claire barrera (Sex Trafficking Senior Strategist, Multnomah County) and Kat Salas (Director, New Avenues for Youth New Day Program) with support from our colleagues.  Our goal for this timeline is to build a picture of the unique history of trafficking and anti-trafficking efforts in our area.  

No timeline or history is complete and curators are always making choices about what to include and exclude.  We recognize that our choices are informed by our expertise, biases, limited knowledge and intentions.  Our hope is to present factual information that allows viewers to build awareness and draw conclusions.  So many issues- housing policy, racism, environmental events etc- connect to trafficking.  We chose to focus primarily on laws, funding and new initiatives that explicitly addressed trafficking.  Secondarily, we included some other moments in history that we felt significantly impacted trafficking and anti-trafficking work.  In particular, we have included laws and efforts targeting the sex trades.  Our intention is not to conflate consensual sex work with sex trafficking, but to acknowledge that these two things have been conflated in the past and that events related to sex trades inherently also impact trafficking and trafficking survivors.

This project is ongoing and we plan to create a place for it on the Multnomah County Sex Trafficking Collaborative website.  If you have history you’d like us to include in the future, please email us at claire.barrera@multco.us and ksalas@newavenues.org.

Questions for reflection and discussion 

1. How did mainstream pornography and the invention of the camera influence anti-trafficking work?

2. How might have national/ federal level legislation impact local attitudes towards sex trading?

3. At any point in time, who was leading the movement? Were survivors involved? Who was represented?

4. How were survivors of color and those from marginalized communities represented differently than white cis counter parts? How might have legislation impacted groups differently?

Content warning:

This timeline includes descriptions of sex work, sex trafficking, racism, sexism and other incidents of violence and oppression.  Also, some historical documents contain outdated and harmful language.  Please take care when engaging with this document.