Target demand for sex trade, advocates say

Some say law used against pimps should go after ‘buyers’ next

In 2015, detectives investigating prostitution at Allentown motels encountered two women being forced by Isaac Pearson to have sex for money.

One woman testified in Pearson’s trial that he had arranged for her to leave a heroin recovery house and set her up in a motel room where she had sex for money with customers Pearson arranged through online ads. Pearson paid for the room, provided heroin and kept all of the money the woman earned. The other woman also told detectives Pearson drove her to motel rooms to meet customers and kept all the money she earned in the encounters.

Pearson in 2016 was the first person convicted of human trafficking offenses under a Pennsylvania law enacted to give police and prosecutors more powerful tools to fight commercial sexual exploitation. Since then, the law has been used in the state’s big cities and suburban and rural counties to combat the sex trade as well as unpaid labor.

“The thing that’s critically important for people to understand is that trafficking is happening here and the victims are born here,” said Shea Rhodes, director of the Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation at Villanova University’s law school.

While the human trafficking law has allowed law enforcement to begin comprehensively tackling the criminal enterprises that exploit victims for profit, more needs to be done to eliminate the demand that makes the sex trade a lucrative business, Rhodes said.

That means prosecuting the people who seek out sex for money under the same law as traffickers. While the human trafficking law doesn’t cover people who patronize prostitutes, Pennsylvania’s old law does but it isn’t always used, she said.

Since the human trafficking law took effect in 2014, prosecutors have used the human trafficking law nearly 800 times, in most cases filing multiple charges against a single defendant. Prosecutors won convictions more than 15% of the time, according to data released by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.

The largest numbers of charges were filed in Lancaster County, with 33%; Montgomery, with 15%; Philadelphia with 12%; Monroe with 7%; and Dauphin, with 5%, according to the AOPC.

Lehigh County, with just over 1% of the charges filed, has had two convictions, including Pearson, who was sentenced to 14 to 34 years in prison, and Cedric Boswell, who received a 13- to 26-year sentence in a similar case. Northampton County prosecuted serial rapist Seth Mull under the human trafficking law. He received a 10-year prison sentence.

Lancaster County’s cases include Kenneth J. Crowell and Barry Charles Schiff, who trafficked six women in a prostitution ring between York, Lancaster, Montgomery, Philadelphia and southern New Jersey from 2014 to 2017. Prosecuted by the state attorney general’s office, Crowell was sentenced to 39 to 78 years and Schiff received a 55- to 141-year sentence.

The Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation estimates 59 people have been convicted under the law, while charges are still pending against another 29. Charges were either dismissed or moved into federal court in another 75 cases, according to the institute’s 2020 annual report.

Lehigh County Senior Deputy District Attorney Robert Schopf said the human trafficking law reflects a shift in how law enforcement and society in general view prostitution. Two decades ago, prostitution was a street crime that was treated as a quality-of-life issue, and charges resulted in minimal penalties and small fines.

With the rise in popularity of the internet, prostitution moved from the streets to websites such as Craigslist and Backpage.com. That broadened the audience of people exposed to prosecution and took away some of the stigma by keeping the process behind closed doors, Schopf said.

As law enforcement worked with the websites to investigate people posting ads for sex, investigators began to better understand how the criminal enterprise worked.

“You were starting to see this is an unbelievably lucrative business,” Schopf said. “You started to see the dynamic between the pimps and the victims.”

The traffickers were driven and entrepreneurial while capable of dehumanizing their victims. The people they exploited were often highly vulnerable, suffering from addiction, mental illness and family circumstances that left them with nowhere else to turn.

Northampton County District Attorney Terry Houck said he’s seen the paradigm shift since his days as a Philadelphia police officer, and said prostitutes who were once seen solely as defendants are now also treated as victims.

Police are now trained to look deeper for indications of a criminal organization and signs that a person engaged in sex for money is being subjected to force or coercion, Houck said.

The human trafficking law criminalizes recruiting, enticing, advertising, soliciting, harboring, transporting, providing, obtaining or maintaining an individual for involuntary labor or sex through force, fraud, or coercion. That can include threats of harm, physical restraints, kidnapping, withholding personal property, or controlling access to addictive drugs. In cases where the victim is a minor, prosecutors don’t need to prove there was force fraud or coercion.

The law gives Pennsylvania authorities the same ability to charge perpetrators with human trafficking as their federal counterparts except for one important aspect: Pennsylvania’s law doesn’t include patronizing a victim among the acts that constitute human trafficking.

Legislation is pending to amend the trafficking law to include patronizing, among other changes Rhodes said would make the law more equitable to victims. House Bill 2170 would eliminate increased penalties for victims of sex trafficking who are charged with prostitution while also adding the offenses of “promoting prostitution,” “living off sexually exploited people” that exist under Pennsylvania’s old prostitution law.

While adding patronizing prostitution to the sex trafficking law would give law enforcement another tool to reduce the demand for prostitution, prosecutors don’t always use the one they have had for decades under Pennsylvania’s old prostitution law, Rhodes said.

In many counties, arrests for selling sex outnumber arrests for buying sex by significant margins, and even within the same part of the state, there can be large disparities.

The Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation noted in its report last year that while Northampton County charged 56 with selling and 67 with buying between 2016 and 2020, Lehigh County charged 210 with selling and 10 with buying.

“Every single dollar that goes into the pocket of a trafficker comes from the wallet of a buyer,” Rhodes said. “You can’t have the conversation about sex trafficking without talking about the fact that the buyers drive the demand.”