The Campaign Against Child Sex Trafficking: Reasons for Caution
Truth is often a casualty of moral crusades
The vigilantes who tortured and killed 30-year-old Bradley Lyons in 2018 thought they were bringing a pedophile to justice. Calling themselves the Australian Freedom Fighters, the friends had declared it their mission to protect their community from child abusers. When Jana Hooper told them she was convinced her husband Bradley (father and step-father to her children) had raped two of her daughters (an accusation never backed up with evidence), the men planned to extract a confession from him before dumping him at a police station.
One night in December, they arranged with Jana to kidnap the victim from his home. Ambushing him while he slept, they beat and tortured him, tied him up in the trunk of a car, and drove him to another location where they continued to beat and torture him; finally, the group leader, Albert Thorn, executed him with a gunshot to the back of his head. It isn’t clear whether the group intended to kill Lyons from the beginning or simply got carried away with their “questioning.”
It was a horrible but far from unimaginable killing given widespread public perception of pedophilia as the worst possible offence and one that is becoming more prevalent. Even before the much-publicized arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, we have all heard in sensationalistic detail about child sex-trafficking and pedophile rings, which are alleged to operate in our communities’ shadowy corners. Websites tell us that sex traffickers, those who entice and then trap victims in the sex trade, are part of a vast “slavery” network; they hang around schools, seek out vulnerable adolescents, and sometimes even snatch kids off the street to meet the ever-growing demand. In our ignorance and passivity, we are allowing them to sell our children.
Advocacy organizations feed the fears of parents and others. Shared Hope International laments that “Much of America is in the dark about how traffickers work, leaving vulnerable children even more vulnerable and our communities disempowered and unequipped.” It pledges to initiate campaigns “that raise alarm in communities.” But will “alarmed” communities be safer ones? The anti-trafficking Polaris Project likewise encourages anxiety, telling readers that “In complex and frightening times, it’s natural that the world seems like a more dangerous place for children than ever before.” The imprecise sentence draws back from declaring the world actually more dangerous while still leaving the impression that it is.
Disturbing personal accounts and stomach-churning statistics reinforce the sense of imminent peril. Shared Hope International alleges that sex trafficking is “a booming industry,” in which the average age of children is 14-16 years. Another organization called Disrupt Human Trafficking tells us that “There are more humans being sold today in the world than at any other point in human history” and estimates that “every 30 seconds, another child becomes a victim of human trafficking across the globe.” On their Statistics page, we learn that “The Human Trafficking Institute estimates in their 2019 Federal report that 51.6% of the human trafficking active cases in the US were sex trafficking cases involving children. The youngest was one year old.”
What is to be done? Anti-trafficking organizations solicit money, of course, but often encourage a personal commitment as well. Shared Hope calls on readers to become “Weekend Warriors” who “help us prevent child sex trafficking and protect the children in your life.” It doesn’t specify exactly what that means, but the imperative to do something is clearly communicated. Similarly, Disrupt Human Trafficking reminds visitors to its site that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Doing something is a theme sounded by the sleeper movie Sound of Freedom. Articles with titles like “5 Reasons You Must See ‘Sound of Freedom,’” allege that “Each of us is called to combat the sex industry,” and many of the movie’s customer reviews echo the sentiment. One reviewer recommends the movie because “It will help us all to be more vigilant.” Another, describing how Tim Ballard was “called by God (shouldn’t we all) to rescue children,” wants fellow movie-goers to ask “how can we make a difference?”
None of these voices are calling for vigilantism, but it is difficult not to suspect that sex trafficking is becoming a moral panic of the sort that inevitably creates collateral damage in the form of irrational fear and suspicion, wasted public funds, busybody policing, and, especially, innocent accused, many of them men. Vigilance about victims can too easily become retribution against assumed perpetrators, and advocacy groups pressuring law enforcement can lead to many unnecessary or over-punitive arrests and prosecutions.
Law enforcement leaders are often quick to echo popular anti-trafficking rhetoric. Earlier this year, the Daily Caller announced in a headline “46 Arrested in North Texas Sex Trafficking Bust.” It was a large operation involving nearly a dozen agencies, including Homeland Security. Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, quoted in the article, provided a word-perfect soundbite to frame his team’s heroism: “The victims of these heinous crimes are treated like commodities, used to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. Those who traffic victims are the scourge of the earth, and we will continue to target those responsible for the trafficking and those who solicit sex from them.”
It sounded stirring, and one had to read the story carefully, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown did for Reason magazine, to verify that the sheriff’s words were empty bombast. In this particular bust, there were no actual traffickers and no actual trafficking victims; there were only men who thought they were paying adult sex workers for services, now publicly disgraced as sexual predators and facing up to two years in prison.
The much-touted “sting operation” worked as many similar ones do: “Undercover cops posted ads online pretending to be adult sex workers and then arrested the people who agreed to pay the undercover officers for sex.” While officials took pains to mention the types of people arrested--“A youth pastor, an operations director of a large hospital network, a teacher and football coach”—as if to warn how many abusers are present in every community, in reality these were men who thought they were paying adult prostitutes for a consensual interaction, not depraved ghouls harming innocents against their will.
Underneath all the hype, Brown alleges, there is good reason to fear that the war on sex-trafficking is not too much different from the war on drugs: over-heated and ineffective, catching many non-criminals and petty criminals in its over-capacious net and failing to save many real victims. In a 2015 article for Reason magazine, Brown provided a compelling analysis of the deceptive wording, exaggerated statistics, and hyper-punitive legislation surrounding the trafficking panic, noting that “The activity now targeted under anti-trafficking efforts includes everything from offering or soliciting paid sex, to living with a sex worker, to running a classified advertising website.”
Trafficking is an intentionally vague term that carries an emotional wallop. Legally, it involves coercion or threat, or the sale of youth under age 18. In practice, as the Texas headline indicated, the term is often used to describe what used to be called merely prostitution. And while anti-trafficking advocates quote alarming numbers and offer heart-tugging stories, no one can say for sure how many trafficking victims there are. One commonly-heard figure of 300,000 American children can be traced to a non-peer-reviewed 1990s paper in which researchers estimated that certain situations—living in public housing, being a runaway, having foreign parents—put minors at risk for sexual exploitation; the researchers then simply counted up the number of youth in those situations to derive the figure. To say that a population is at risk is, of course, very different from counting actual victims. Those, as Brown shows, are far more rarely found through policing operations.
Brown’s research shows that most young people involved in the sex trade have not been “trafficked,” contrary to what the alarming websites tell us. Studies indicate that children and teenagers who sell sex do so primarily because, having run away from home, they trade their bodies for a place to sleep or other necessaries. Few of these occasional prostitutes have “pimps.” Few of them were enticed by a stranger lurking outside their school or courting them on the internet. If they have been coerced, it’s often “at the hands of a family member or romantic partner, not some child-snatching stranger.”
This is not to minimize their circumstances or to suggest that they do not deserve help. But they are not being “trafficked.” Harsher criminal penalties for trafficking offenses—the common response of law enforcement agencies in many countries—do not help them, and complex sting operations such as the one in North Texas often take money away from “more mundane but more effective strategies for helping at-risk youth, such as adding more beds at emergency shelters.” The stings, furthermore, clog the criminal justice system with people whom it is difficult to see as especially dangerous.
Brown cites the case of a 29-year-old man who is facing federal sex trafficking charges for “facilitating” the sex work of his 16-year-old girlfriend by purchasing the girl a cellphone and sometimes texting clients for her. He faces a mandatory minimum of 10 years and possible life in prison, thanks to a joint effort of Irving, Texas police, Homeland Security, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Brown’s excellent article does not mention men’s demonization as predators and the false accusations they suffer, but these are inevitable consequences of the trafficking hype. We know that girls and women will continue to be seen as the primary victims of trafficking and boys and men as the sole perpetrators. Many of the men who end up facing child sex trafficking charges never set out to buy sex from a person under 18. They responded to an ad on a website to arrange for sex. The prostitute (actually a police decoy) then disclosed that she was only 16 or 17. When the client agreed to proceed with the transaction, he found himself arrested for child sex trafficking. It’s impossible to say how many men are being prosecuted as child sex offenders (10 years minimum) in cases where there was no sex, no pedophile, and no under-age victim.
Even worse are the cases in which the “predator” is a falsely accused man, his life turned upside-down by a hideous story. As explained here (a must watch), Patrick Graham found himself charged in 2016 as part of a pedophile ring on the word of a woman who had already admitted to one past false allegation, and who now claimed to be remembering incidents that had occurred 25 years earlier when her father allegedly shared her with friends at weekend sex parties in Cardiff, Wales. Graham had never met his accuser (neither had a number of the other men brought up on charges of child rape), but was still investigated for 78 weeks until the case at last collapsed. Victims like Graham are often so damaged by the experience as well as the lingering stigma that they refuse to speak about it, and many people focused on saving children will not give such men a moment’s thought.
Moral panics do not allow for the recognition of nuance. Tapping in to deep-seated communal fears and the felt need for certainty, they call to what is best and worst in human nature. As communities mobilize to protect children, we would do well to guard against the creation of scapegoats and the unleashing of blind rage.
My friend died last year of liver cancer. He died because while in jail for alleged pedophilia, he was not getting his radiation treatments that kept the cancer at bay. He was a porn addict, and also had a collection of free pics and videos that he would compulsively download, some of minors. When I asked him about it, he said the minors were mostly anime! But he made the mistake of showing these to a random stranger he met and helped, who told the Arkansas police. They came and Chris just gave up his computer. They got most of his possessions (he had been a farmer so they got a whole bunch of farming equipment) that they presumably sold at auction. He spent about a year in jail, finally working out a deal where he had to admit that he had sex with a minor (a blatant lie) in order for them to let him off, and died about a year later, with a broken body and a broken heart (labeled as a sex offender). The criminal system, at least in Arkansas, is corrupt beyond redemption. And the irony is that Chris was one of the most caring and moral persons I have met. He would never harm anyone, let alone a child (he was indeed a pacifist). His worse failing was the porn addiction and his OCD. Yes, we humans like to have scapegoats to vent all our anger and rage against.
Thanks again, Janice, for bringing this issue to our attention.
Great critique. A couple of things: we've been here before, in the 70s, 80s, and 90s when the child abuse witchhunt of that time was hatched by feminists and Christian right-wingers, not to mention corrupt law enforcement officials, morally corrupt journalists, opportunistic politicians from all sides of the political spectrum, and money-grabbing parents (insurance and lawsuits) and quack child "therapists" (who still exist and still have police-state powers today). It reached across America into western Europe, England, and Australia and along the way morphed into "repressed memory syndrome," a complete hoax that was applied to criminal and civil cases, destroying many thousands of families. The witchhunters went too far, affecting too many people and were forced to become more subtle in their ways (no more mass witchhunts like McMartin for awhile, keep a lower profile, etc.). The witchhunter changed tactics but didn't and never will completely disappear. Now, they are emerging again as a sort of redux of the 70-90s era. But, in fact, this witchhunt has been with western culture in similar forms (fit for different times) since at least when the Romans used to kill Christians and take their money based on accusations of alleged demonic-like sex practices with children--followed by Christians who killed and robbed each other for the same reasons (sex orgies with children and the devil, flying witches, etc.) in mass witchhunts which killed thousands of men and women and at least hundreds of children (so, too, in the 90s, therapists were advocating strongly for locking up children as young as 5 for "sex play" with other children or just being gay). The particulars vary somewhat through the ages but the form never does. It's a good bet that, just as in the 70s-90s era, the current iteration is largely a product of liars and crazies. There is just something in our evolution that might have had an actual protective purpose in pre-civilization times but that we still can't shake off. Please read at your leisure The Dark Truth about the Dark Tunnels of McMartin (http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume7/j7_2_1.htm), if you wish to learn more.