I was online dragged by Harris County Crime Stoppers-stans for mocking a program that purports to teach school-age teenagers about sex trafficking. My attention was drawn by the “Safety Tips for Students” card, which I suppose was intended for distribution to young people. Most of the information consists of vague statements that are, by now, standards tropes of the Sex Trafficking Panic Industry, whose funders includes many major oil corporations in the Houston area.
Aside: It’s funny that investing in “sex trafficking education” is a viable cause for a major extractive industry (e.g oil) that is killing many more people than sex trafficking. Under the best estimates, 83 million people will be killed by 2100 from global warming alone. That’s around 830,000 people PER YEAR worldwide. This is not even including other corporate crimes such as, say, wage theft committed by Phillips 66.
There’s no available data on the efficacy of said cards nor whether teenagers are calling in viable tips. Let’s get down to an even more fundamental question: is sex trafficking prevalent enough to warrant such resources, resources which could be used to other projects that might benefit young people?
The Harris County District Attorney’s office files over 300,000 criminal cases per year. A 2021 Crime Stoppers report looked at 549 cases and 217 defendants for both “human trafficking” and “compelling prostitution” as well as “related charges” from 2018 through 2020. These were, they said, all of the “sex trafficking” cases filed over the 2-year time period. (There was more than one “case” per defendant. It’s not clear to me whether “cases” means individual victims or multiple charges. I suspect the latter because the report conveniently elides all victims, including whether victims were charged.) That means “sex trafficking” cases are less than .1% of all cases filed in Harris County, using Crime Stoppers’ largest number.
The report is very unclear with respect to who is being charged for what, and it seems to confuse “charged” with “convicted.” (It also does not indicate where people were convicted of lesser crimes. It looks like of these 217 defendants, 30 had their cases resolved during the two-year period. 10 defendants had a conviction related to any minors. 13 cases were dismissed. (The point of the report is that most of these 217 defendants are out on bond. It’s hard to make any assessment of this because, against, it’s not clear what the charges or facts of the cases are.)
What is clear is that “child sex trafficking” charges are incredibly rare. There were 10 confirmed in the 2-year period. That means “child sex trafficking” cases are .0017% of all charges filed in Harris County per year on average.
It’s hard to blame Crime Stoppers for ALL of the misinformation because progressive Texas leaders also quote inaccurate statistics. I’m far from the first person to point out that the data is wildly inaccurate; so much so, that it is difficult to root out how the sausage is made. But, I confess I was surprised that the numbers were totally invented.
In fact, there are no actual numbers for the prevalence of sex trafficking in Texas nor anywhere else in the nation— no federal data or state-level data. Sex trafficking nonprofits argue that sex trafficking is “under-reported” so that we can “never know” the true extent of it. But I’ve never seen a social phenomenon so completely lacking in data and so overblown (except for child abductions. see Paul Renfro’s amazing book Stranger Danger).
Houston is widely touted as hub for sex trafficking, a claim that has sparked a million initiatives. I cannot find any data that suggests Houston’s claim to being a sex trafficking hub is true. A report from the University of Texas McGovern Medical School cites the Department of Justice for this – but the actual page has only “Action Plans” – which are initiatives to “fight” sex trafficking, not actual case counts of data – and the toll-free number for a hotline NOT EVEN OPERATED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE.
The other data in support comes from the Polaris Project – one of the biggest sex trafficking non-profits that have contributed to the Qanon explosion – which consists of data culled from their hotline, not data from victims, cases, prosecutions, arrests, or any other quantifiable data. (Hotline calls are overinclusive both because they double-count and because anyone can call a tip about anything. See Cindy McCain.)
The University of Texas – a credible institution – is largely responsible for the inaccurate data on Texas sex trafficking. A December 2016 report is the source of the numbers used by Crime Stoppers and Democratic leaders in Houston alike (see tweet above). This UT report – which was funded by the Office of the Governor – was done in partnership with Allies Against Slavery – which promotes the strange narrative that sex trafficking is akin to “modern-day slavery” – and credit Polaris (again). (Allies Against Slavery isn’t an organization I have researched in-depth, but it does perpetuate this “white slavery” claim which has been a mainstay of sex panic since the 1800s.)
The UT report is over 100 pages long, but the methodology is quite simple. Basically, to come up with the “79,000 minor and youth victims of sex trafficking in Texas,” the report does two things: 1) adds together homeless, abused, and foster care youth to create a number they call “at-risk youth;” and 2) multiply that number by 25%. (See below)
The basis of the 25% stems from interviews with 230 “professionals” who made assessments about how many of their clients/ contacts are sex trafficking victims. (No changes were made for double-counting.) They all estimated around 25%. Now, to be fair, the report further justifies the 25% by citing other studies which also use the 25% number. But…none of those studies are based on anything aside from interviews or guesses either. And the report argues, based on no facts, that this is an underestimate if anything. Why? Because of the “hidden nature of the crime.”
Note: The lead author, Professor Noël Busch-Armendariz, is on leave and did not respond to an email. The Institute of Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault, housed in the school of social work, said they would look for someone to answer my questions on the 2016 report, but did not get back to me.
It’s not a surprise that fears of sex trafficking are a hot topic right now: they distill the essence of panics over a changing society (the internet/ online school), violence against women and children, and nativist and racist concerns. But the reported data doesn’t support any of the panic, even the best data from what would appear to be the best resources.
The greatest violence against women, children, and LGBTQ people (who don’t seem to exist in the sex trafficking nonprofit complex?) is committed by the state, by orders of magnitude. The number of women in prison has grown exponentially in the past few years. 17 million kids went hungry in 2020. Trans teens are at unfathomable risk of violence – mostly from the police. Adults and young people are much more likely to be sexually abused in prison than be victims of sex trafficking. More men have been sexually assaulted in the military than women have been sex trafficked in the country.
Here’s my biggest issue: Sex trafficking makes a number of presumptions about women and children that are extremely convenient for both the religious right and law enforcement as well as conservative lawmakers and carceral feminists. These presumptions are harmful to women and young people, contributing to a narrative of victimization without giving power to those who need it.
The panic assumes, for example, physical frailty – presumably, fat women and Black male teenagers who look like adults are excluded from sex trafficking; sexual innocence – there is no space for desire or natural sexual attraction or curiosity even though many young people who engage in sex with adults are LGBTQ youth whose desires are wholly unexplored and unacknowledged (or these youth have been kicked out of the house by their parents and are engaging in sexual relationships to survive); and, most pernicious of all, a presumption of “pricelessness “that is all the more corrupted by rapacious capitalism that wants to buy and sell women and children (illustrated by hair-raising commentary about women and children being “bought and sold”) – it assumes women do priceless work that can’t be accounted for with mere dollars (raising children is the “hardest job” albeit one for which women are not paid; their sexuality is not for sale even though you are supposed to have sex in marriage as a currency for a good relationship). Children are expected to be athletes, good citizens, hard workers, and obedient but not for money. Teenage girls who are pregnant are expected to donate their fetuses to wealthier families who will adopt them without, of course, compensation for the girls’ literal labor.
Like the framing of domestic violence by law enforcement and feminists that de facto largely punishes men of color – abusers can be anyone, they can look like good guys, they are irrevocably broken inside, domestic abuse is not a function of circumstance but of fundamental moral character etc etc – sex trafficking has ballooned to be anyone, anytime, anywhere. This is seen as a largely feminist move, or so men tell me. Law enforcement and the right pounce on “undocumented immigrants” crossing the border as likely sex traffickers without much evidence (the young men pretending to be children are also demonized because they are, in a sense, trafficking themselves by pretending to be children). A less-overtly racist narrative argues anyone can be trafficked, even though the people actually arrested and charged with trafficking are almost all men of color.
The grooming narrative also has huge and problematic holes, but not, I think, the ones typically considered. A high school girl gets gifts and nice clothes, the story goes, her boyfriend becomes coercive and then viola, she’s a trafficking victim. In other words, all men acting as men are largely taught to do in society and as women are largely taught to expect – gifts, praise, being put on a pedestal – becomes an unspeakable crime at a certain undetermined moment. Is the issue “sex trafficking” or the way sexual relationships are commodified every day to the detriment of everyone? Are women on magazine covers not “selling” and women buying the magazine not “buying?” “Sex trafficking” conceals the actual interaction between capitalism and desirable bodies, which is that it infiltrates and perhaps even sculpts sexual desire and relationships everywhere. Is this not the real problem, and one that the criminal system cannot address?
Finally, everything described on those cards for teens addresses nothing about the real problems young people face — climate change, a lack of health care, food insecurity, houseless, the failing power grid, etc. All of these concerns kill or injure many more young people than sex trafficking, by orders of magnitude using even the best numbers. More people died in the Texas winter freeze than were sex trafficked that year. More people died from generators that they used because their power failed than were sex trafficked in a year. We have failed the young people and replaced care and concern with a panic that allows more money to flow to the police without questioning how the infantilization of teenagers deprives them of rights and ends with more youth in prison. 2,000 people are serving life-without-parole sentences for crimes they committed as children. 600 children were placed in foster homes where the families were known to be abusive. The answer for young people who run away is to return them to the place where they ran from; that’s considered a success. No one asks the youth where they want to go or where they feel safe.
Domestic violence and sex trafficking have become convenient ways for law enforcement to prove their feminist street cred in a way that both naturalizes their presence in the affairs of women and children (as protectors) and permits racial profiling under a race-neutral guise. Using unspeakable crime as a story chills criticism and asks people to look away from other problems, other solutions.
Next week, I will talk about how “sex trafficking” as a category of “crime” harms those it most pretends to protect and shields law enforcement from accountability.