Since 2010, the FBI has stopped publicizing the numbers of sex workers arrested or total number of arrests. But communicating with field office representatives and scouring local news stories provided some idea of the magnitude. Tallying these figures reveals around 550 people, mostly women, were arrested or cited on prostitution charges as part of Operation Cross Country X. At least 175 people, mostly men, were arrested for solicitation of prostitution. And dozens of others were arrested for outstanding warrants, drug possession, unlawful possession of a firearm, driving on a suspended license, parole violations, outstanding court fees, or other low-level charges.
The real numbers are likely much larger, as there was no information made available to the public about prostitution arrests for 19 out of the 55 FBI jurisdictions, even in places where FBI reports vaguely noted that “local arrests” had been made. But even as an undercount, the prostitution arrest data shows that more than six times more sex workers were arrested in these stings than juveniles were identified. More than twice as many sex workers were arrested as those accused of being pimps or traffickers.
It’s also misleading to draw a bright line between sex workers and “pimps.” To the FBI, “pimp means anyone performing a managerial role, even if no minors, force, coercion, or fraud are involved and even when the person in the managerial role is herself a sex worker,” as Katherine Koster, communications director for the Sex Workers Outreach Project, explained last year.
There’s little evidence that Operation Cross Country is helping trafficking victims in a significant way, but there is ample indication that it’s making lots of people worse off—not just men and women choosing to engage in consensual commercial sex, but teens who meet the FBI’s definition of “victims” as well.
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Federal officials routinely insist that child sex trafficking is an American epidemic, with domestic victims numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Yet for all the nationwide intensity and effort, neither the DOJ trafficking task forces nor other federal agencies on the trafficking beat have yielded evidence of anything like a problem on that scale.
To be sure, the crime statistics for any offense do not represent the total instances of that crime. But they should give us a reasonable jumping-off point for estimating the scope of such offenses overall. This is a non-controversial statement in most crime areas—if there were verified reports of two child abductions, 200 homicides, and 2,000 burglaries recorded in a given city each year, you would probably be skeptical if someone tried to tell you the city actually experienced more than 3,000 kidnappings, 300,000 homicides, and three million burglaries annually. The nature of illegal activity is that it is hidden, but discrepancies of that magnitude defy belief. Where are all the victims of those unsolved crimes? Where are their friends and family members demanding justice?
Yet with sex trafficking statistics, people often lose this perspective. A recent report conducted by the Institute on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault at the University of Texas and the nonprofit Allies Against Slavery (with funding from Texas’ Office of the Governor) estimated more than 70,000 youths are trafficked annually in Texas. Yet the state had, over a seven-year period, opened just 737 human trafficking investigations, convicted just 85 suspects, and identified just 320 minors involved in prostitution. At the national level, a debunked but still oft-repeated statistic says that 300,000 U.S. kids are “at risk” of human trafficking each year. Yet between late 2009 and late 2015, investigations from DOJ-funded anti-trafficking task forces identified just 1,052 minor victims—about 175 per year—according to the 2017 National Strategy to Combat Trafficking.
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The FBI describes these teenagers and others as “children” they “rescued.” But it’s a strange sort of rescue. Sometimes, “child victims” are arrested and jailed themselves, either for prostitution or for charges like loitering. There were an estimated 1,130 youth arrests for prostitution in 2009, according to a 2016 report commissioned by the Justice Department; 55 percent of those arrested were black and 35 percent white. In addition, 4,399 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were arrested that year in the 26 states for which data was available.
Arrest for these young people doesn’t just mean detention and court fees but a potential criminal record that could bar them from being eligible for certain shelters and social services, or from having a fair shot at jobs, scholarships, loans, leases, and other opportunities in the future.
Even when not arrested, they’re subjected to a barrage of armed men bursting into their rooms, handcuffed, coerced into cooperating with law enforcement, and detained at jails or juvenile detention centers until they can be returned to families or foster homes, turned over to child protective services, or placed in some sort of shelter.
The “victims’ service advocates” on hand to help them are generally members of law enforcement themselves, usually from the FBI or U.S. Attorney’s Offices. They’re looking to help, sure, but also to get information that will help their colleagues build a case. And the “services” provided to “rescued” teens are frequently banal or just useless—bags of socks and snacks, “case management” from faith-based charities with missionary motives, referrals to shelters that are full or youth programs that don’t accept kids with criminal backgrounds.
The “narrative of ‘abducted innocents’ was rarely seen,” they note, and “force was rarely identified by young people as precipitating initial engagement in sex trades.” Rather, “the common thread was of young people engaged in sex trades as the least-bad solution to meeting fundamental needs for safety, shelter, social connection, and love.” Furthermore, “sex trade engagement was never the only problem in these young people’s lives and often not their most critical problem.”
Mental health issues were common, as was past or current neglect and abuse from parents or guardians—many had run away because of it. Somewhere between half and three-quarters of the minors were enrolled in school. Around a third to a half were already part of state child protective services, and many had been in the juvenile justice system too.
Both systems frequently failed to “recognize trafficking among their clients, or did not consider it as falling within their responsibility to address,” the researchers note. “At the same time, legal provisions enacted to protect minors, such as required parental notification by shelters, frequently represented barriers to service, particularly for youth whose families do not protect or provide for them.” Children and teens also reported apprehension about talking to police and “experienced violence from law enforcement and in detention.”
The report urged police to “stop arresting minors engaged in prostitution” and stop “using arrest to ‘encourage’ service use, or housing them in jails rather than settings appropriate for crime victims.” But the researchers also note resistance to such recommendations. As one public defender asked them, “How else do you get [juveniles] services but lock them up and force them to engage in services?”
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Advocates of Operation Cross Country often justify the stings by saying that “if it saves even one child, it’s worth it.” That ignores tremendous opportunity costs. The vast array of resources—money, manpower, time—that go into Operation Cross Country come from a limited pool. Authorities are routinely taking money set aside to stop child sexual exploitation and using it to find and punish adults, many just a few years past childhood themselves, for private sexual activities. It’s tough for anyone to defend this type of siphoning, let alone those who claim to be the most concerned about helping kids.
Focusing on the few children who might be saved by such stings overlooks the harms the enforcers are doing to many other children and adults. Remember, the FBI has admitted that the majority of “trafficked teens” are not being forced into selling sex, and many have no pimp or trafficker. They don’t need to be freed from captivity or pried away from a bad guy’s control. For most of the minors identified, “rescue” means—at best—being returned to the places they tried to escape.
At a bare minimum, turning Operation Cross Country into a legitimate framework for combating sex trafficking would require ceasing the massive, multifaceted national vice sting that the feds have grown to rely on for funding and good publicity. But with very few people authentically being helped and a hefty price tag per arrest, perhaps the program simply isn’t worth saving.
Please click through and read the whole thing. I only copied what I thought were the most essential parts, but the whole article is important.
The numbers being tossed around remind me a bit of a story I’ve heard several times about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s – someone finally calculated that the number of children supposedly abducted/sacrificed by Satanists was roughly the same as the number of American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. In those days almost everyone in the US had either lost a family member in Vietnam, or knew a family that had; conversely, almost no one actually knew any vanished children (that hadn’t turned out to be kidnappings by an estranged family member, etc.)
Mooncustafer 