ADDICTS TO SEX TRADE
tremendous services. It also makes our cases and investigations even more complicated, even more difficult.”
A Herald investigation also found:
• The sex buyers’ demands are becoming sicker and an increasing number want unprotected sex. Doctors, lawyers, academics and businessmen are among those buying sex. They want anything from the “girlfriend” experience to fetish fantasies.
• Gang members are infiltrating the lucrative sex trafficking business because a girl’s body can be sold for sex over and over again.
• Girls engaged in sex trafficking other girls is on the uptick.
• Online review boards for sex buyers are cropping up — easy internet access to sex markets for johns. There are online sex-buyer chat boards, including one in Boston, where buyers boast of sex acts, where to get the best “massages” and alert men to law enforcement crackdowns.
• Even though the online classified ad site Backpage. com shut down its “adult” section in January, traffickers are still advertising sex with girls in the “dating” section. Online sex trafficking ads use code words, like “party favors,” which means the girl has drugs. Some even run “specials” for two girls at once.
• Many pimps are techsavvy, running sophisticated operations with their own websites and phone apps. Some online sex trafficking sites are now vetting sex buyers, making them fill out applications, trying to weed out cops.
• Some Boston hotel rooms, booked online, are available for cheap after 11 p.m.
Over the past decade, the sex trafficking industry on the internet has boomed, taking the illegal racket from the streets to behind closed doors.
“The reason it’s able to happen so pervasively is because the internet and online activity makes this possible,” Healey said.
The girls targeted for sex trafficking have often been sexually abused and have been involved with the Department of Children and Families. Others come from affluent families and communities. Healey has met with many survivors. “Your heart aches,” she said. “This is something that could happen to anyone’s daughter.”
Lisa Goldblatt Grace, director of My Life, My Choice, a survivor-led Boston organization fighting sex trafficking, has seen victims as young as 11.
“They usually come in without an addiction and over time they learn it’s one of the ways that they can survive what they’ve been through,” Goldblatt Grace said. “By 18 to 24, we do see a fair amount of addiction that goes quickly from using any number of substances to using heroin.”
Gang-based sex trafficking, she said, is also on the rise. “About one in four of our kids has some tie to a gang in that way,” Goldblatt Grace said.
And the men buying sex, she’s been told by survivors, are mostly upper-middle class white family men from the suburbs.
“It is a multibillion-dollar industry,” Goldblatt Grace said. “People are making a lot of money.”
Boston police Lt. Donna Gavin has long been on the front lines, heading the department’s anti-human trafficking unit.
“There’s a huge demand for sex trafficking,” Gavin said.
The sex buyers caught up in hotel stings, Gavin said, are mostly married men from the suburbs with graduate degrees and professional careers who are “able to drop $200 a few times a week at lunchtime or after work before they go home.”
“What does surprise me about sex buyers is how many of them want unprotected sex at this day and age,” Gavin said.
While most sex trafficking victims are girls, Gavin said, they’re getting more referrals for boys and transgender youth. Boston police have been involved in the arrests and prosecutions of 50 sex traffickers, including cases prosecuted out of state, since the law passed.
“And these are cases that are long and complicated,” Gavin said. “I’m happy that we’re able to get some people out of the life and well and refer them to victim services.”
The cases are horrific. There was the father who sold his 9-year-old daughter for sex. The victim was beaten so badly her swollen face was unrecognizable. Gavin has seen pimps force young women to commit robberies when business is slow.
“Never mind all the sex buyers that they have to see, sometimes it’s 10 guys in a day, and some of them want some twisted stuff,” Gavin said. “It’s just constant trauma.”