Sex Trafficking and the Super Bowl

by Christine Heckman

The author, middle, with other volunteers at an anti-sex trafficking command center / Courtesy of Christine Heckman

Our meeting in Arlington, Texas, began with the reading of a heart-wrenching letter. Its author was a mother who last year, as well as the year before that, had been standing among the group of people that currently surrounded us. However, as we listened to her words being read aloud, this woman wasn’t with us. She had stayed home to mourn the loss of her 16-year-old daughter Michelle (a pseudonym), whose body had been found brutally murdered and dumped in a field a few weeks before. Our group took a moment of silence, then finalized our strategy, broke into teams and set out to look for others like Michelle, young girls who had run away or gone missing and were being bought and sold in the commercial sex industry.

This was not your typical Super Bowl experience. However, it was an all-too-typical night for the hundreds of thousands of American teenagers who are victimized through sex trafficking each year. This horrendous abuse of human rights is why, three days before the Super Bowl, two fellow Columbia students and I found ourselves—along with NGOs and volunteers from around the country—at the meeting mentioned above. That strategy session kicked off a week of awareness raising activities and overnight street outreach to potential sex trafficking victims. As part of Columbia’s new Initiative Against Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery, the three of us had travelled to Texas to join the effort.

When I tell people I work on human trafficking issues, most have at least a vague notion of what I’m talking about. They’ve heard something about the issue and usually in the context of South or Southeast Asia or perhaps Eastern Europe. However, few realize that trafficking exists here in the United States as well. Sometimes victims are foreigners but more often they are American children and teenagers, exploited through domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST). These are society’s most vulnerable people—children, the vast majority of whom come from a history of abuse, neglect and broken homes. Most have previously suffered sexual abuse as well. They escape a life of misery only to find themselves trapped in something even worse: under the control of a pimp, often performing 10 or more sex acts every night, suffering horrendous physical and psychological abuse, enduring scorn and ridicule from the general public, law enforcement and medical professionals and not keeping a single cent of the money they “charge” for their “services.”

Hard data on DMST is hard to come by, but the most reliable estimates are that at least 100,000 American minors are victimized each year. Between 1.6 and 2.8 million children go missing each year, and of those that are gone longer than 48 hours, a third have to engage in some sort of transactional sex in order to survive. The average age of entry into prostitution in this country is 13 years old. (Most statistics in this article were taken from “The National Report on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking,” published by Shared Hope in 2009.)

Then why were we at the Super Bowl? First of all, I should note that the link between sporting events and spikes in sex trafficking has been heavily debated. On a conceptual level, it makes sense that a situation where large numbers of males—travelling without their romantic partners or families and looking for a party atmosphere—would likely increase the demand for commercial sex. Anecdotal accounts by DMST survivors and professionals in the field support this connection. However, others point to the lack hard data to “prove” that sporting events spark an increase in trafficking. Unfortunately, due to the clandestine nature of the crime and general lack of knowledge on the issue, this lack of evidence, and the resulting underestimation of the true scale of the problem, is present in all areas of trafficking. It does not, however, mean that the problem does not exist.

Part of our Super Bowl outreach effort involved trying to fill some of those holes in available data. Through monitoring internet sites that advertise commercial sex, we saw the number of online ads nearly triple in the days directly preceding the Super Bowl, with many of the postings making explicit references to the game and its influx of visitors. Furthermore, news stories that came out weeks before Super Bowl weekend indicated the Dallas-Fort Worth area was short on dancers to fill the temporarily increased demand at strip clubs — another indication that excess demand would likely be filled by traffickers. It is certainly true that some women were voluntarily working as dancers and prostitutes. However, from what we saw and heard, it is undeniable that many others were there against their will.

Volunteers on the outreach teams witnessed a pre-adolescent girl dancing topless at a strip club, as well as teenagers held inside a motel room with men guarding the door. Victims we spoke to on the street also confirmed that their pimps had brought them to Texas specifically for the Super Bowl. Perhaps the hard data are missing, but the link between the game and trafficking activity was clear to us.

One might ask why the girls don’t just run away. While most victims of DMST are not physically restrained, the pimping strategy is a sophisticated, calculated and carefully studied process of psychological control. One expert has noted the commonalities between the grooming process of trafficking and the brainwashing techniques employed by cult leaders.

Official how-to guides for pimps, complete with detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to fully establish control over a young girl, can be purchased on Amazon. One such guide offers the following summary: “You’ll start to dress her, think for her, own her. ... After you have broken her spirit, she has no sense of self value. Now, pimp, put a price tag on the item you have manufactured.”

Furthermore, in the eyes of law enforcement, this exchange of money instantly transforms a child rape victim into a criminal. Rather than receiving medical treatment, counseling and other social services, these children are often locked up in a jail cell or an institution and eventually lost in the juvenile justice system. Traffickers exploit these cultural attitudes, which view prostituted children not as victims but as delinquents, in order to solidify their control. This strategy further isolates the victim, who becomes convinced that seeking help is a waste of time since she is “just a prostitute.” According to Ernie Allen, President and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: “What we have learned is overwhelmingly, while these kids may leave home voluntarily, while they may be runaways or any one of a variety or variations on that theme; they are seduced, they are tricked, they are lured into this practice and then they lose the ability to walk away. These kids literally become 21st-century slaves.”

In a country that eradicated slavery nearly 150 years ago, the fact that so many American children continue to be enslaved is staggering. Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking is beginning to gain more attention through awareness-raising and legislative efforts, but there is still a long way to go if we hope to adequately address this human rights tragedy.

For more information on DMST, please visit sharedhope.org and the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, nhtrc.polarisproject.org.

Published in RightsNews Volume 29, no. 3, May, 2011.
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