There are many forms of human trafficking and for the past two years, Human Trafficking Search has been writing a weekly blog on the topics of sex trafficking, child trafficking, organ trafficking and forced labor yet sex trafficking remains the most common form of human trafficking in the world. The HTS blog has covered both international and domestic trafficking on all continents, but whether local or abroad, the underlying cause of all types of human trafficking stems from demand. Much like any other product or service in the free market, human trafficking follows the standard economic principal of supply and demand. When buyers demand young women and girls for sexual services, the market eagerly complies and traffickers sell their “supply” for a large profit. The men and women responsible for the perpetuation of commercial sexual exploitation must face consequences for their actions in this not so free market. This is why Human Trafficking Search encourages and supports the creation of the Shared Hope Demanding Justice website. Only when the men and women who perpetuate the commercial sexual exploitation of human beings are held accountable and feel consequences for their actions will the demand for sex trafficking stop.

Accountability

For demand to decrease, the buyers of sex must be held accountable. Many buyers lead doubles lives as respectable family and businessmen and women—some are even considered pillars of their community. With the Shared Hope Demanding Justice website, these buyers will be exposed and held accountable for their actions. The shame and embarrassment the victims of commercial sexual exploitation feel needs to be transferred to the real problem—the buyer. As current legislations stands today there are very few legal repercussions for buyers of sex, but that doesn’t mean the buyer should escape all consequences. The Shared Hope website will hold buyers accountable for their actions and use social repercussions as a form of deterrence.

Social Consequences

The Demanding Justice website will expose buyers to the pain, social disconnect and humiliation that victims of commercial sexual exploitation feel each time they are sold. By showing the convicted buyer’s mug shots on the Internet, the buyers will be forced to face their peers both professionally and personally and accept what they have done. The buyers face will be on the Internet just like the faces of the women and girls who are sold online everyday. If the anti-trafficking community is serious about ending demand and the legal community won’t step up and evoke stricter laws against buyers then the best way to end demand is through social consequences to the buyers. Negatively affecting the buyers lives through public exposure will help end demand, as potential new buyers will be deterred by the threat of their mug shot posted online.

Even though sex trafficking is fueled by demand, it is one of the least researched, funded or publicized topics in the anti-trafficking community. There will always be a demand for sex trafficking unless there is public dialogue and agreement that purchasing another human being for sex is wrong and never consensual. The Shared Hope Demanding Justice website is just the catalyst the anti-trafficking community needs to change conversation from the supply side of sex trafficking to the demand side.

Researchers tend to be both curious and risk-averse. Curious because we’re always looking for unanswered questions, and risk-averse because we don’t want to make mistakes as we try to answer those questions. These are generalizations, of course…but we researchers tend to be fond of generalizations, too. I believe it is the push and pull of curiosity and risk-aversion that gives many researchers heartburn about digging into the subject of sex trafficking.

On the one hand, there are many unanswered questions about sex trafficking in the United States and beyond. On the other hand, empirical studies on sex trafficking are difficult to design and carry out at the level of rigor with which most researchers are comfortable. As an applied sociologist (that means I conduct social research to help clients answer real-world questions), this kind of heartburn is par for the course. The way I think of it is this: is it better to sit back as a researcher and point out why a study cannot be done perfectly, or is it better to work around limitations and try to answer the question? When lives are at stake, I believe there is greater net risk in avoiding research just because the methodological limitations might preclude you from publishing the results in an academic journal.

I’ve been involved in quite a few studies over the years to better understand child sex trafficking, but things changed for me the first time I studied demand. Back when online classifieds sites were mostly unknown to the public, traffickers were some of the first to figure out that you could post an ad for pretty much anything you wanted to sell — including a person. You still can today, by the way. Once every couple of months I would review and sort thousands of crudely pornographic images collected from online sites. The images were far more grotesque back then compared to what they are today. It was nauseating to see four or five naked young females, each in different ads but obviously photographed in the same person’s garage. I went through this routine for several years and watched as more and more females were being offered for sale online.

Then one day a client asked how many people were buying these females. It seemed an important question because “supply” was clearly increasing online, so demand obviously was to blame in one way or another. But measuring demand was even more challenging than measuring supply, because as a U.S. society we seem to be more tolerant of seeing females sold for sex than males buying them. Instead of reviewing thousands of images of exploited females at a time, I was now listening to men as they were calling in and attempting to buy a female advertised online.

Suddenly I struggled to get to sleep at night. I was cold and distant with my wife. I was yelling at my kids. I got fed up with little things at the office that normally wouldn’t bother me. This lasted for weeks before I even noticed it was happening, at which point I blamed it on stress and vowed to be less of a jerk. That didn’t work, though.

It wasn’t until several weeks after we finished our first demand study that these symptoms started to go away and I realized what was really going on: I was experiencing secondary trauma as a result of having studied the direct traumatization of so many other people. Today I understand that trauma affects everyone differently, and that it can be insidious. While I could somehow withstand viewing thousands of dehumanizing photos of abuse victims, I responded quite viscerally to the sound of a man ordering up a child, like she was a box of pizza.

Today there seems to be much wider interest from the social research community in studying all forms of human trafficking than there was several years ago. Yet studies on demand are still few and far between—particularly empirical studies. I believe there are a few reasons why this is still the case.

First, it is important to realize that most research on social issues comes from either academic or governmental institutions. I suspect one day our federal government will invest in large-scale ongoing data collection on sex trafficking, just as it does today with gun trafficking, drug trafficking, and many other criminal activities. Today it does not, though we seem to be headed in the right direction.

If an academic researcher gets funding to research demand for sex trafficking, he or she then must face the realities of human subjects review boards. These boards are well-intentioned, but they can also stifle research innovation. I have seen boards require jargon-filled informed consent passages longer than this very article to be placed at the beginning of completely innocuous surveys. Now imagine what a board would want to see from a researcher who seeks to ask questions of a male engaged in trafficking. More often than not, my academic friends and colleagues say that their review boards would not allow such research to happen.

The other reason why I believe we don’t see more empirical studies on demand is that we aren’t yet comfortable as a society with who the perpetrators are. We often talk about child sex trafficking perpetrators as if torches and pitchforks are in our hands, right up until the perpetrator is Lawrence Taylor. The day she turns 18, and often earlier, we openly ponder whether or not she chose to prostitute herself. We essentially ignore the situation where a homeless adolescent male or female “stays with” a newfound acquaintance because the streets are just too damn cold to sleep on that night.

Here’s the thing: in order for there to be thousands of victims on the “supply” side, there must be many, many more perpetrators on the “demand” side. That means we know these perpetrators because they live in our neighborhood, go to our church, are friends with us on social media, and work in the same office as us. We’ve gone to dinner with them, celebrated holidays with them, and helped them when they needed it.  We give them identities outside of their actions as perpetrators, yet we often fail to extend the same courtesy to those on the supply side whom we know by their labels as “prostitutes,” “whores,” and worse. The truth is, “we” as a society give perpetrators of sex trafficking the protection of anonymity, and that is the very reason why demand-side research is both challenging to conduct and terribly needed.

In this, the 21^st Century, tens of millions of women and children are slaves in their homelands throughout the globe to be used solely for sex.

And every year hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked to foreign lands and throughout the United States as fodder for the sex trade.

As I investigated the causes behind this global sex slave calamity, I quickly discovered the main reason for this – MEN – men who feel that because they have cash, they have the right to rent and invade a woman’s body.

Through all my research, I witnessed the very worst of men who rent the bodies of women and children.  I witnessed their complete indifference toward another human being; their profound disregard and disrespect for the prostituted ; and their grand sense of entitlement and the kingdom of delusion in which they hold court.

And I quickly learned that the Johns don’t want to hear a peep about the incredible human suffering they are causing worldwide.

What I found was they only want, and need, to believe in the myths; the lies and the propaganda that help them get through the night.

Today men who step out into the night seeking purchased sex defiantly cling to the myth that all prostituted persons are in the sex trade by CHOICE and are making money the easy way – on their backs.

Johns don’t want to hear the tragic stories of how the vast majority of women and children were forced into the world of prostitution.

They don’t want to hear about five- and six-year-old girls and boys being sold by their desperately poor parents to brothel owners in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam to be used and abused by men on international sex tours.

They don’t want to hear that most prostituted women and children are recruited into the flesh trade throughout the Western World at ages as young as 12, 13 and 14 – teenage girls who have been made vulnerable by the violence of their surroundings; teenage girls who are victims of shattered and abusive families where they had been sexually abused and raped by their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and trusted family friends and where their innocence and self esteem has been destroyed.

Johns don’t want to hear that the vast majority of prostituted women and children are controlled by violent pimps and crime gangs; that most are addicted to drugs, oftentimes forcibly addicted by their drug-dealing pimps as a form of control, and that most prostituted women and children suffer from serious mental health issues.

Johns don’t want to hear how traffickers are hunting down and ensnaring more and more unsuspecting young women and girls for the seemingly insatiable global sex market.

They don’t want to hear how these young women and girls are taken to “breaking grounds” where they are “seasoned” for the flesh trade.  Places – out of sight – in cities like Moscow, Belgrade, Milan, Berlin, Miami and New York – where they are beaten, gang raped and forced to comply with every demand made by their new owners, where they are depersonalized until they are no longer capable of acting or thinking for themselves.

The only avenue of survival for these destitute women and girls is prostitution.  In essence, what they are forced into is an act of desperation and there is never a choice in desperation.

This is the cold, hard reality for the vast majority of women and girls in prostitution, and the Johns don’t want to hear any of this.

What Johns want to believe is the lie that somehow, magically, a woman is suddenly struck with the idea that prostitution would be a rewarding and wonderful career path!

That these young women and girls enjoy servicing a half dozen or more strange, doughy, smelly, sweaty, middle-aged, bozos on Viagra because it’s a good paying job!

And it’s because of all the lies, the propaganda and absurd myths perpetuated by the prostitution legalization lobby that the situation for tens of millions of impoverished and vulnerable women and children worldwide is getting worse.

The fact is that over the past decade, the demand by men for purchased sex has gone off the charts.

There is no complicated or complex explanation for what is going on. It’s very simple.

In economic parlance, women and girls are the commodity; the supply side of the coin. And imbedded on the supply side are the push factors—extreme poverty, lack of education, and the eternal yearning of desperate human beings to improve their lot in life.

Flip the coin and you get the demand side of the equation with the emphasis on three key letters: “m…a…n.”

Without the demand, there would be no supply.

It would not be profitable for the criminals and pimps to stay in this business if endless platoons of men weren’t prowling the side streets for purchased sex.

The clandestine activities of men on the prowl for sex with prostituted women and girls are forever dismissed with glib comments like: “Boys will be boys … they’re just sowing their wild oats.” It is precisely this bizarre entrenched attitude that has led to the global explosion of men buying sex.

All these crazy and widely-accepted myths about men “needing sex to release tension” “the natural drive of men for sex” “prostitution protecting nice women and girls from rape” and “the rite of passage by initiating boys into manhood.”

No matter which way you examine the issue of buying sex, you cannot escape this one conclusion: this entire global human rights debacle is totally man-made!

The cold, hard reality is little will be done to stop this worldwide sexual carnage until men start taking responsibility for their behavior.

Men hold the key to putting the breaks on this sexual insanity because unlike the tens of millions of women and girls ensnared in the flesh trade, men have a choice.

Men can make different choices and those with a moral compass do.

 

South Dakota is not the place one expects to find fourteen-year-old girls being sold for sex on the internet. The grim reality, however, is that sex trafficking is a growth industry and it has taken root even here in rural America. I became the United States Attorney for South Dakota in 2009, and at that time there had never been a case of sex trafficking prosecuted in the history of our state. Over the past four years in South Dakota, three men have received life sentences for sex trafficking in federal court, two more were sentenced to thirty years or more in prison, and more than a dozen men were prosecuted federally for attempting to purchase sex from a trafficking victim.

The economics of sex trafficking provide a clear illustration of the law of supply and demand. The traffickers profit from selling their victims to an eager market. Law enforcement has aggressively prosecuted the supply side of this equation, the traffickers, and in some areas this effort has produced significant results. But it is also important to address the demand side of the sex trafficking equation. In my experience, those who seek to purchase sex from trafficking victims often have a great deal to lose if they are caught by law enforcement, and thus we can significantly reduce the demand for trafficking victims in a community by also aggressively prosecuting these individuals. This article is a brief overview of our efforts to prosecute those seeking to purchase sex from trafficking victims in South Dakota.

The First Sting:

In 2011, South Dakota law enforcement set up an internet sting operation targeting men purchasing sex from children on the internet. Fictitious twin fourteen-year-old girls and an eleven-year-old girl were advertised on the internet as being available to perform sex acts for money. Three men responded to the advertisements and exchanged numerous emails and phone calls with an undercover agent, describing in great detail the sex acts they wanted to perform on the young girls. When they arrived at a local house with money in hand expecting to meet the trafficked children, the men were instead greeted by law enforcement.

Two of the defendants went to trial and were convicted by separate juries. The defendants subsequently filed motions with the trial court, asking that the convictions be dismissed. They argued that the federal sex trafficking statute they were charged with violating, 18 U.S.C. Section 1591, did not apply to “customers”. The district court was persuaded by the defendants’ arguments that the federal statute did not apply because the legislative history showed that Congress had failed to discuss the importance of prosecuting the demand side of a human trafficking enterprise. In fact, the legislative history revealed that Congress paid little attention not only to the demand side of human trafficking, but even to domestic sex trafficking generally when they passed the law in 2000. My office appealed the judgments of acquittal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. We argued that the plain language of the statute included those who seek to obtain sex from a trafficking victim, and that criminal trafficking enterprises cannot exist without both supply and demand. In a landmark decision released in January 2013, the appellate court reversed the district court and reinstated the convictions. This decision was a victory for law enforcement, as it is now clear under federal law that if you attempt to purchase sex with a trafficking victim that you are also a human trafficker.

Prosecuting Demand at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally:

The South Dakota decision from the Eighth Circuit provided my office with an additional weapon to attack sex trafficking. Armed with this new tool, South Dakota law enforcement turned their focus to the 2013 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. A coordinated team of state and federal authorities once again set up a sting operation targeting individuals interested in purchasing sex with children. Many men responded to the ads, nine men of whom we charged in federal court for responding to internet advertisements offering sex with girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. One of the men even asked for a ten-year-old girl but settled for a twelve-year-old on the condition that he could take photos and did not have to use a condom. When this individual arrived at a gas station parking lot on his 2012 Harley Davidson expecting to pick up a child for sex, he was instead met by agents from the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation and arrested. He now faces a federal mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years.

We conducted a similar law enforcement operation last month during the 2014 Sturgis Rally. The number of individuals who responded to the ads were down significantly, a good result, but we are still prosecuting five individuals in federal court who responded to the advertisements. It should also be noted that South Dakota law enforcement conducts these operations not only during the Rally, but throughout the year. Our federal prosecutions have included prominent members of the community, such as a physician and an air traffic controller. Our citizens are now well aware of the dramatic ramifications for trying to purchase sex from a trafficked child.

Conclusion:

There are good people deeply committed to ending sex trafficking who disagree with our approach in South Dakota. I want to be clear that we do not seek 10-year mandatory minimum sentences in all of our cases. In every case, we look at the criminal history of the defendant and the nature of his conduct during the commission of the crime to determine whether a mandatory minimum sentence is appropriate. I also recognize that other prosecutors, in areas much larger than mine, are devoting all of their resources to rescuing children from actual sex trafficking operations. I appreciate their budget constraints and commend the important work they are doing with limited resources.

I do not, however, accept the criticism that I often hear about South Dakota federal prosecutors acting like “vice cops”. Let me be clear, we prosecute individuals who are on the internet looking to pay money to a stranger in order to have sex with a young child in their care. I offer no apology for prosecuting that type of trafficker to the fullest extent of the law. This strategy works in South Dakota and it can work elsewhere.