USA TODAY International Edition
Florida charges tip of the iceberg: Sex trafficking rampant across US
While charges against New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for soliciting prostitution brought national attention to the issue of sex trafficking on Friday, data, expert opinion and cases from around the USA show how widespread the problem is.
Sex trafficking accounted for 6,081 of the more than 8,500 reported cases of human trafficking in the United States in 2017, according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
There is no official estimate of the total number of human trafficking victims in the nation. Polaris, a non-profit that operates the hotline on human trafficking, estimates that the total number of victims nationally reaches into the hundreds of thousands when estimates of both adults and minors and sex trafficking and labor trafficking are aggregated.
Illicit massage or spa businesses, similar to the ones in the Florida case, were the top location or industry where sex trafficking occurred in 2017, with 714 reported cases, according to the hotline’s data.
More than 9,000 illicit massage businesses operate in every state, bringing in $2.5 billion each year, Polaris estimated in 2018.
“It’s not accurate to understand these cases as local,” Bradley Myles, CEO of Polaris, told USA TODAY on Friday. “The places are being overlooked and underestimated.”
Ten spas were shut down in Orlando, Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast after a several months of investigation revealed women there were in “sexual servitude,” according to arrest records.
At Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida, where Kraft allegedly paid for sexual services, women – many of them from China – lived in the spa and were not permitted to leave, according to Martin County Sheriff Will Snyder.
Kraft, who has not been arrested, denied the allegation. He is one of hundreds facing charges in the Florida stings.
Myles said most massage businesses are tied to larger criminal networks that have links to the countries where many of the women at the spas are from. Many of them are coerced to work in the businesses and often earn no wages and have no autonomy, Myles said.
“These girls are there all day long, into the evening. They can’t leave and they are performing sex acts,” Vero Beach police Chief David Currey said of the investigation. “Some of them may tell us they’re OK, but they’re not.”
Each year the U.S. wins scores of convictions on charges of trafficking with respect to slavery and sex trafficking of children by force, fraud or coercion, according to an analysis of federal records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. In fiscal 2018, 189 cases resulted in convictions, according to TRAC’s data.
Here’s a look at how sex trafficking has affected areas across the country:
Last March, a report estimated 340 young adults and children have been victims of sex trafficking in Milwaukee in a four-year period.
“We’ve heard from different sources that we’re the mecca of sex trafficking, but we need to be able to measure that,” Mallory O’Brien, director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, which participated in the report, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time.
The CEO and co-founder of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty in April to charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering after the Justice Department seized the controversial online classifieds site.
Website’s co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin, as well as five other executives, faced 93 charges involving facilitating prostitution through the Backpage site and money laundering.
While some praised Backpage’s demise as a blow to an abusive industry, sex workers across the United States and Canada swarmed social media to air concerns rarely heard in political discourse: To them, Backpage’s demise meant the end of safeguards and a reliable revenue stream in a profession that’s not going anywhere.
Contributing: Cara Kelly and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY; Mary Helen Moore and Will Greenlee, Treasure Coast Newspapers; Ashley Luthern and Mary Spicuzza, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Megan Cassidy and Richard Ruelas, The Arizona Republic; Kristen Jordan Shamus, Detroit Free Press