MISSING THE MARK
Sex trafficking stings sometimes fail to find right target by hitting consenting adults
LAS VEGAS — Sunday afternoon, when the San Francisco 49ers tried to win their first Super Bowl title in 29 years, Maxine Doogan was no different than many other longtime 49ers fans. She cheered her favorite team at a watch party in downtown San Francisco.
But at some point during the 49ers’ 25-22 overtime loss, Doogan knew she would reflect on all her fellow sex workers who were recently arrested in Las Vegas as part of law enforcement’s latest sting operation around the Super Bowl. Sex workers’ rights groups believe that these annual crackdowns, purported to be about curbing sex trafficking in the event’s host city, too often land prostitutes in jail who weren’t being trafficked.
“It just leaves a bad taste in your mouth,” said Doogan, who has been a Bay Area sex worker for 35 years and helped organize an anti-raid gathering Feb. 5 outside Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. “Our business is part of the larger economy, and it’s just really a discriminatory act to single us out at these large sporting events.”
Less than a decade ago, most news stories on the topic perpetuated a narrative that the Super Bowl was the world’s largest sex-trafficking venue. Now, in the wake of several studies that found no causal relationship between big sports events and a spike in sex trafficking, more and more sex workers’ rights groups are trying to dispel what many of them call the “Super Bowl myth.”
Research does suggest that online ads for sexual services in the host city increase during Super Bowl week, which makes sense: More people and more disposable income in a place tend to result in more sex being traded for money. Where things become murky is the differentiation between prostitution and sex trafficking.
Almost half of Americans believe that prostitution, the exchange of sex for payment and a misdemeanor in many states, should be decriminalized. However, few doubt that sex trafficking — defined under federal law as commercial sex involving minors, force, fraud or coercion — is an act of evil.
The problem is that police often struggle to distinguish adult sex-trafficking victims from consenting sex workers (minors in these situations are always victims because they can’t legally consent). Desperate to show the public that they took the issue seriously, host cities’ law-enforcement agencies often have spun their Super Bowl sting operations as sextrafficking raids. Odds are high that at least some of the people arrested were consenting adults.
“There’s a stark difference between independent sex workers and sex-trafficking victims,” said Kara Smith, a sex-trafficking expert who works as a consultant with families and law enforcement. “But unfortunately, there are so many commonalities that sometimes the only way to know if someone is being trafficked is if that person is willing to talk about it. Obviously, a lot of people going through this don’t want to talk because they’re afraid of what could happen to them.
“So, can experts say with 100% certainty that there’s more trafficking taking place during the Super Bowl? It’s hard to say that because there’s a lack of built-in accountability in these statistics. But for five years, I either attended the location of the Super Bowl or I worked it digitally, and there was an absolute increase in online ads for sex.”
Police posted some of those ads in hopes of luring buyers into a sting operation. In the leadup to Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the FBI and Bay Area law enforcement launched a six-month crackdown. About 360 sex buyers and 68 traffickers were arrested. Thirty juvenile victims were recovered.
Last February, eight days after the Chiefs beat the Eagles in Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Ariz., Phoenix police released a report that law-enforcement agencies in the area had made 48 felony and 300 misdemeanor arrests during a crackdown on sex trafficking. About 120 of the misdemeanor arrests were for sex buyers, with at least 35 of those being for prostitution.
Such numbers anger Doogan, who has spent decades working to decriminalize prostitution in California. At UNLV this month, she helped lead a two-day webinar educating people on how to get community buy-in for decriminalizing prostitution. On Feb. 5, Doogan was standing outside Super Bowl Media Day at Allegiant Stadium with a sign calling to “Decriminalize sex work now!”
As 49ers and Chiefs fans filtered past them in the rain, about 20 protesters chanted: “My body! My business!”
Las Vegas police already had begun a large-scale sex-trafficking sting operation, which was expected to last until the morning after the Super Bowl. A similar crackdown around November’s Formula 1 race led to the arrest of 67 people and police contact with 215 potential victims.
Though data from the latest sting operation likely won’t be released for at least another week, experts anticipate hundreds of arrests. About 450,000 people have traveled to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl. And given that a lot of visitors here embrace the “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” mindset, many might not care — or even know — that prostitution is illegal.
It’s against the law in Nevada counties with more than 700,000 people, which includes Clark County, where Las Vegas is. The state’s 10 rural counties that allow prostitution permit it only inside licensed brothels.
Certain establishments with legal prostitution haven’t kept Nevada from having the country’s third-highest rate of trafficked people, with 6.3 cases per 100,000 residents, behind just Mississippi and Washington, D.C. It’s no surprise, then, that some sex-trafficking experts were concerned when news broke in 2020 that a place known as “Sin City” would host the Super Bowl.
“The U.S. is the No. 1 consumer of child-sex material in the world,” said Toby Braun, a human-trafficking investigator with the American Special Investigative Group. “These traffickers know that, and they’re going to go where the demand is the highest. The Super Bowl creates the demand.”
Las Vegas officials also recognize as much, which is why they went to great lengths to prepare for Super Bowl week. TSA officers, Lyft drivers and hotel and casino employees throughout the city have been trained to spot human trafficking. Signs with the Human Trafficking Hotline (888-3737888) paper public places. On many flights to Las Vegas last week, passengers saw a video message condemning human trafficking.
Then there’s that expansive raid, which was being orchestrated with the help of Signs of Hope, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting survivors of sexual violence and human trafficking. It has a team of trafficking experts available at all hours to offer victims necessary resources.
“We’ve definitely beefed up our staffing to accommodate the need,” Signs of Hope CEO Kimberly Small said. “Still, it’s important to remember that this issue never goes away. Even if the Super Bowl weren’t here, trafficking would still be a major problem.”
Doogan just wants police to focus on the sex-trafficking victims, not the consenting sex workers. On Sunday, as she watched the franchise she has loved since the Joe Montana-led teams of the 1980s, she likely thought about the fellow sex workers who aren’t so fortunate.
“You can’t help but feel bad for the prostitutes that get caught up in these sting operations,” Doogan said. “The Super Bowl is such a unifying event, and they won’t get the chance to take part in it.”