What’s the Truth About the Super Bowl and Sex Trafficking?
Today, millions of Americans will gather to watch men slam into each other in the most-watched sports event of the year. It’s also time for the annual debate over whether the Super Bowl draws high numbers of sex traffickers and their slaves.
The argument is that the event brings tens of thousands of men to the area, with money and ready to party, and that raises the number of prostitutes, many of whom are victims of sex trafficking, and also increases the number who are ensnared by sex traffickers. There is some evidence for this, but hard data are difficult to find, given the nature of the crime.
Arrest rates, rescue numbers and other evidence aren’t available to prove a causal connection between the event and an increase in sex trafficking. As Just Facts’ James Agresti (Just Facts is a client of this reporter) noted, “Hard data on the prevalence of sex trafficking is scarce due to the covert nature of these crimes.”
All the same, human nature and the logic of supply and demand suggests that in San Francisco tonight many more women and girls than normal will be working as prostitutes, all too many of them victims of sex trafficking.
The Evidence
In 2014, exhaustive efforts from dozens of private groups, federal agencies and state agencies led to the arrests of 45 pimps in the New York area allegedly taking advantage of the Super Bowl. More than 50 women, including 16 minors, were released from bondage. Many close observers are convinced. Republican congressman Chris Smith, who co-chairs the House anti-human trafficking caucus, says, “We know from the past, any sports venue — especially the Super Bowl — acts as a sex-trafficking magnet.” The U.S. government agrees.
Not everyone agrees, though. J.D. Tucille argues otherwise at the libertarian Reason.com, claiming that the idea is promoted by “government officials and moral panic types.” In 2014, he wrote, Arizona State University’s Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research found “no evidence” that the Super Bowl “was a causal factor for sex trafficking.” The next year, wrote Tucille, the same group reported that “there is no empirical evidence that the Super Bowl causes an increase in sex trafficking compared to other days and events throughout the year.”
However, the report did note that “the sex selling and sex buying markets significantly increased” in both host cities the year they hosted the Super Bowl. It also noted that “the problem is … comprised of loosely affiliated networks of suspects and victims who travel to wherever large groups of people congregate, such as major sporting events.”
Tucille cited the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), which in 2011 reported, “There is no evidence that large sporting events cause an increase in trafficking for prostitution.” According to its report, GAATW examined two World Cups, two Olympics and three Super Bowls from 2004 to 2011 and found just a handful of sex trafficking arrests. GAATW concluded that those publicizing the possibility of greater sex trafficking could be using the issue to promote themselves, raise money or use “a more socially acceptable guise for prostitution abolitionist agendas and anti-immigration agendas.”
The Link
Tucille, GAATW and others insist that voluntary prostitution — often called “sex work” or “commercial sex” — is very different from sex trafficking. Dawn E. Hawkins, executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, say they are inextricably linked. “Research shows that where there is increased prostitution, there is increased sex trafficking,” she explained. “Any society or group that condones the sale of sex is promoting a culture of sexual exploitation.”
“The vast majority of individuals in prostitution don’t want to be there,” Hawkins said. “One study found that 89 percent of women in prostitution want to escape, but believe that they have no other options for survival.”
Former prostitute Annie Lobert agrees that the link between prostitution and sex trafficking is real, though often hidden. The line between them is “often blurred,” she says. “If you start out working in the industry as a ‘free choice,’ you are considered a prostitute. This would mean you have no one controlling you or earning money off what you are making … no fees, debt bondage or pimps involved.”
However, “This is a rarity that will eventually lead to a road when you will meet someone who is a trafficker, and many times in the guise of a romantic interest. This life is lonely without a partner, and many ladies I know succumb to meeting someone, so that they will be comforted when they are not working.”
Lobert explained that uncoerced prostitution can transition to sex trafficking “as soon as someone is forced and coerced to sell themselves, because they have been threatened they will be framed, blackmailed, hurt or killed.”