Month: February 2026

The January 2026 release of additional files related to the Justice Department’s investigation of convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell has brought renewed attention to the late financier’s connections to the world’s rich and powerful.

However, the failure to redact identifying victim information and explicit photos has also brought unwanted attention to survivors. The lack of consideration for their welfare illustrates how legal proceedings can add to child sex trafficking victims’ existing trauma and burden instead of offering a stable path forward.

Some states have passed laws in recent years to protect child victims of sex trafficking. But at the same time, most states have passed laws that allow those same children to be arrested or prosecuted for prostitution. It’s a tug of war between advocates, law enforcement and policymakers to determine the best approach for keeping vulnerable children safe from pimps, predators and dangerous family members.

Often these intentions to “keep kids safe” end up harming the very children the laws are supposed to protect. This is done by identifying them as criminals and not victims.

As a sociologist and scholar who researches the commercial sexual exploitation of children, I believe Americans have to look at the many different ways states treat sexually exploited minors to fully understand this issue and the harm that is being done.

Retraumatizing victims

When approved in 2000, the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act established that children under 18 who experience commercial sexual exploitation are sex trafficking victims.

Criminally charging a child with prostitution, as most states allow, asserts they are willfully participating in the commercial sex trade, while identifying a minor as a sex trafficking victim recognizes they are not in this situation by choice.

Some states require minors to prove a third party forced, deceived or coerced them into prostitution to be considered a child sex trafficking victim. Their innocence, despite their age, is not automatically assumed. This approach risks retraumatizing victims by labeling and stigmatizing them as criminal, as voluntary participants in the commercial sex trade.

Examining these state statutes is important because these minors are more likely to interact with local law enforcement than federal agents. That’s because in the U.S. federalist system, states have more power than the national government to set rules regarding crime.

Arresting and prosecuting minors for prostitution

As of 2025, 15 states do not arrest and prosecute children for prostitution, while seven states allow a minor to be arrested but not prosecuted for this charge, according to my unpublished research. As a result, sexually exploited minors can be criminalized in 35 states for their maltreatment because they can be charged or prosecuted for prostitution.

These laws determine how courts identify commercially sexually exploited minors, as victims or criminals.

Safe harbor laws have been adopted by 31 states as a legal strategy to divert sex trafficked minors from the criminal legal system. These measures connect them to specialized services, including trauma-informed health care and safe housing. But safe harbor statutes do not guarantee that children will be protected from arrest or prosecution for prostitution.

For example, New York’s 2008 safe harbor law requires a child charged with prostitution to admit they participated in this crime. The child also has to explain why they shouldn’t be held liable for the charge.

Another common strategy adopted by some states, including Rhode Island, requires a minor to fulfill a specific “child sex trafficking victim” definition – such as proving force, fraud or coercion by a third party – to avoid being criminalized for prostitution. Yet mandating sexually exploited minors to meet such requirements places the burden of proof on the child.

Conversely, Massachusetts’ safe harbor law does not afford any protections to minors, allowing a child to be arrested and prosecuted for prostitution. State and local police collaborate with child protective services and are trained not to arrest sexually exploited minors. But some officials argue law enforcement needs the threat of criminal charges to pressure minors they see as “noncompliant” to accept services or leave trafficking situations.

This approach blurs the line between criminal legal mechanisms and social work. It positions police as “helpers” who expect trafficked youth to accept support or risk criminal punishment.

In sum, unlike federal law, which recognizes all sexually exploited minors as victims, some state authorities present minors with a choice: comply with law enforcement or prove their innocence.

The adultification of child victims

These demands that shift legal burdens to sexually exploited minors signal that law enforcement and legislators expect them to have the capacity to make mature and rational choices. Yet, neuroscience research indicates juveniles don’t have the same decision-making capacity as adults until their early to mid-20s.

Further, sexually exploited minors with trauma may appear as uncooperative in stressful situations. Those include being detained or arrested for prostitution.

By blaming sex trafficked minors for “making bad choices,” the criminal legal system treats commercial sexual exploitation victims as complicit. And this may lead to prostitution charges instead of support. Furthermore, focusing on a child’s “choices” does not address the financial, familial and traumatic adversities that make victims vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation in the first place.

Commercial sexual exploitation risk factors include complex post-traumatic stress disorder, low socioeconomic status, limited educational access and child sexual abuse prior to this exploitation. That includes exploitation from fraught family living situations where a parent, relative or caregiver sexually exploits a child.

Racial inequality in prostitution charges

Similarly, racial bias has deeply influenced trafficking legislation.

In 1910, Congress passed The Mann Act, also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act. This measure framed commercial sexual exploitation as a problem affecting only white women and girls, erasing the exploitation of people of color.

This pattern continues today. Black and brown children in the U.S. are more likely to be arrested and detained for prostitution than all other racial groups. Children who live in states with higher levels of structural economic inequality, which affects children of color at higher rates that white children, are at higher risk of being arrested and prosecuted for prostitution.

My research with Keith Bentele indicates that states with higher levels of structural economic inequality are less likely to adopt legislation protecting children from arrest and prosecution for prostitution.

Increasing compassion for victims

Without addressing these structural inequalities and the lack of a social safety net, sex trafficked children, particularly children of color and LGBTQ+ youth, are at risk of facing further marginalization and criminalization for prostitution.

One state has risen above the rest in recognizing and addressing these systemic barriers. Minnesota’s “No Wrong Door” framework utilizes a public health approach and is regarded as the gold standard of state-level commercial sexual exploitation legislation.

Protecting youth up to age 24 from prostitution charges, Minnesota offers housing and medical services to victims instead of criminal punishment. It also coordinates trauma-informed training for professionals, such as police and social workers.

An evaluation of this model indicates that it has successfully increased compassion for youth victims in the community, particularly among law enforcement.

Mallika Sunder, a student at Wellesley College and intern in its Wellesley Centers for Women, co-authored this article.

Kate Price does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In the first weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a strange pattern emerged in Western media coverage. Headlines oscillated between confidence and confusion. Kyiv would fall within days, one story would claim, then another would argue that Ukraine was winning. Russian forces were described as incompetent, then as a terrifying existential threat to NATO.

Analysts spoke with certainty about strategy, morale and endgames, but often reversed themselves within weeks. To many news consumers, this felt like bias – either pro-Ukraine framing or anti-Russia narratives. Some commentators accused Western media outlets of cheerleading or propaganda.

But I’d argue that something more subtle was happening. The problem was not that journalists were biased. It was that journalism could not keep pace with the war’s informational structure. What looked like ideological bias was, more often, temporal lag.

I serve in the Navy as a war gamer. The most critical part of my job is identifying institutional failures. Trust is one of the most critical and, in this sense, the media is losing ground.

The gap between what people experience in real time and what journalism can responsibly publish has widened. This gap is partly where trust erodes. Social media collapses the distance between event, exposure and interpretation. Claims circulate before journalists can evaluate them.

This matters in my world because the modern battlefield is not just physical. Drone footage circulates instantly. Social media channels release claims in real time. Intelligence leaks surface before diplomats can respond.

These dynamics also matter for the public at large, which encounters fragments of reality, often through social media, long before any institution can responsibly absorb and respond to them.

Journalism, by contrast, is built for a slower world.

Slow journalism

At the core of their work, journalists observe events, filter signal from noise, and translate complexity into narrative. Their professional norms – editorial gatekeeping, standards for sourcing, verification of facts – are not bureaucratic relics. They are the mechanisms that produce coherence rather than chaos.

But these mechanisms evolved when information arrived more slowly and events unfolded sequentially. Verification could reasonably precede publication. Under those conditions, journalism excelled as a trusted intermediary between raw events and public understanding.

These conditions no longer exist.

Information now arrives continuously, often without clear provenance. Social media platforms amplify fragments of reality in real time, while verification remains necessarily slow. The key constraint is no longer access; it is tempo.

Granted, reporters often present accounts as events are occurring, whether on live broadcasts or through their own social media posts. Still, in this environment, journalism’s traditional strengths become sources of lag.

Caution delays response. Narrative coherence hardens fast. Corrections then feel like reversals rather than refinements.

Covering real-time events

The war in Ukraine has made this failure mode unusually visible. Modern warfare generates data faster than any institution can metabolize. Battlefield video and real-time casualty claims flood the system continuously.

For their part, journalists are forced to operate from an impossible position: expected to interpret events at the same speed they are livestreamed. And so journalists are forced sometimes to improvise.

Early coverage of the war leaned on simplified frames, including Russian incompetence, imminent victory and decisive turning points. They provided provisional stories generated to satisfy intense public demand for clarity.

As the war evolved, however, those stories collapsed.

This did not mean the original reporting was malicious. It meant the narrative update cycle lagged behind the underlying reality. What analysts experienced as iterative learning, audiences experienced as contradiction.

The acceleration trap

This forces journalism into a reactive posture. Verification trails amplification, meaning accurate reports often arrive after the audience has already formed a first impression.

This inverts journalism’s historical role. Audiences encounter raw claims first and journalism second. When the two diverge, journalism appears disconnected from reality as people experienced it.

Over time, this produces a structural shift in trust. Journalism is no longer perceived as the primary interpreter of events, but as one voice among many, arriving late. Speed becomes a proxy for relevance. Interpretation without immediacy is discounted.

Although partisan bias certainly exists, it is insufficient to explain the systemic incoherence Americans are witnessing.

Can journalism adapt?

Institutions optimized for one tempo rarely adapt cleanly to another. Journalism is now confronting the risk that its interpretive cycle no longer matches the speed of the world it is trying to explain.

Its future credibility will depend less on accusations of bias or even error than the question of whether it can reconcile rigor with speed, perhaps by trading the illusion of early certainty for the transparency of real-time doubt.

If it cannot, trust will continue to drain. An institution that evolved to help society see is falling behind what society is already watching.

The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

Charles Edward Gehrke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When the early 2000s hit series “The West Wing” returned on Netflix in December 2025, it spurred conversation about how the idealistic political drama would play in Donald Trump’s second term.

The series features a Democratic presidential administration led by President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, and his loyal White House staff negotiating political challenges with character, competence and a fair bit of humor.

It sparked cultural commentary long after it ceased its original run in 2005.

In 2016, The Guardian’s Brian Moylan asserted that the “The West Wing” was appealing because it portrayed “a world where the political system works. It reminds us of a time, not too long ago, when people in political office took their jobs very seriously and wanted to actually govern this country rather than settle scores and appeal to their respective bases.”

In 2025, Vanity Fair’s Savannah Walsh mused that “The West Wing” might be dismissed by younger audiences as a “form of science fiction” or lauded by the demographic currently watching “Jed Bartlet fancams scored to Taylor Swift’s ‘Father Figure’” on TikTok.

Audiences have been comfort-streaming the “The West Wing” since Trump’s first term. Interest in the series spiked after Trump’s election in 2016, and it served as an escape from the contentious 2020 campaign.

When the cast reunited at the 2024 Emmy awards, the Daily Beast’s Catherine L. Hensley remarked that the series’ “sense of optimism about how American government actually functions … rang hollow, almost like watching a show from another planet.”

Nonetheless, Collider’s Rachel LaBonte hailed its Netflix return in late 2025 as a “balm for these confusing times.”

“The West Wing’s” transition from broadcast television behemoth to “bittersweet comfort watch” in today’s streaming era reveals a lot about how much our media and political landscapes have changed in the past 25 years.

As professors of media studies and political communication, we study the fracturing of our media and political environments.

The shifting appeal of “The West Wing” during the past quarter century raises a sobering question: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms losing popularity in 2026? Or does the new political reality demand engagement with the seamier side of politics?

‘The West Wing’s’ optimistic big tent

“The West Wing” premiered on NBC in the fall of 1999, blending political intrigue with workplace drama in a formula audiences found irresistible. The show surged in viewership in its second and third seasons, as it imagined responses from a Democratic administration to the values and ideology of the newly installed Republican President George W. Bush.

But the series was undergirded by an ethic of political cooperation, reinforcing the idea that, according to Walsh, “we’re all a lot more aligned than we realize.” In 2020, Sheen observed in an interview that writer “Aaron Sorkin never trashed the opposition,” choosing instead to depict “people with differences of opinion trying to serve.”

In 2019, The New York Times observed that the “The West Wing” presented “opposition Republicans, for the most part, as equally honorable,” and noted that the show earned fan mail from viewers across the political spectrum.

At its height of popularity, episodes of “The West Wing” garnered 25 million viewers. Such numbers are reserved today only for live, mass culture events like Sunday night football.

Of course, “The West Wing” aired in a radically different television environment from today.

Despite competition from cable, that era’s free, over-the-airwaves broadcasters like NBC accounted for roughly half of all television viewing in the 2001-02 season. Currently, they account for only about 20%.

Gone are the days of television’s ability to create the “big tents” of diverse audiences. Instead, since “The West Wing’s” original airing, television gathers smaller segments of viewers based on political ideology and ultraspecific demographic markers.

Darker, more polarized media environment

The fracturing of the television audience parallels the schisms in America’s political culture, with viewers and voters increasingly sheltering in partisan echo chambers. Taylor Sheridan has replaced Sorkin as this decade’s showrunner, pumping out conservatively aligned hits such as “Yellowstone” and “Landman.”

Liberals, conversely, now see “West Wing” alumni recast in dystopian critiques of contemporary conservatism. Bradley Whitford morphed from President Bartlet’s political strategist to a calculating racist in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” and a commander in “The Handmaid’s Tale’s” misogynist army.

Allison Janney, who played “The West Wing’s” earnest and scrupulous press secretary, is now a duplicitous and potentially treasonous U.S. president in “The Diplomat,” whose creator in fact got her start on “The West Wing.”

Even Sheen has been demoted from serving as America’s favorite fictional president to playing J. Edgar Hoover in the film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” whom Sheen described as “a wretched man” and “one of the worst villains imaginable.”

Television as equipment for living

Philosopher Kenneth Burke argued that stories function as “equipment for living.” Novels, films, songs, video games and television series are important because they not only reveal our cultural predilections, they shape them, providing us with strategies for navigating the world around us.

Films and series like “Get Out,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Diplomat” and “Judas and the Black Messiah” urge audiences to confront the racism and sexism ever-present in media and politics. That includes, as some scholars and viewers have noted, the often casual misogyny and second-string roles for some women and Black men in “The West Wing.”

As U.S. citizens protest authoritarianism in the streets from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, a comfort binge of a series in which the White House press secretary, as Vanity Fair said, “dorkily performs ‘The Jackal’ and doesn’t dream of restricting West Wing access – even on the administration’s worst press days” is appealing.

But indulging an appetite for what one critic has called “junk-food nostalgia for a time that maybe never even existed” may leave audience members less equipped to build the healthy democracy for which the characters on “The West Wing” always strived. Or it may invigorate them.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation