The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/sex-trafficking/)
The FBI found nearly 1,000 cases of commercial sex crime in the U.S. last year, but experts believe the actual number is much higher, based on victim reports to medical and social service agencies.
In Part Two of our investigation of America’s sex trafficking crisis, TCR finds a burgeoning “niche” industry of private nonprofit groups—many comprised of ex-cops or military operatives—who operate outside law enforcement. One former FBI agent maintains that if such groups didn’t exist, the picture would be a lot grimmer.
Sex traffickers prey on poor and urban neighborhoods near highways and cheap motels, according to researchers at Texas State University, who examined “clusters” of trafficking arrests in Austin. The researchers say their findings support criminologists’ theories that the presence of a particular crime may depend on the physical makeup of a community.
The trafficking of young girls for sex in the U.S. is often overshadowed by the attention paid to the $150 billion international trade. A Crime Report investigation looks at victims and their families in south Florida, now one of the nation’s major human trafficking centers.
The so-called FOSTA-SESTA legislation aimed at curbing sex trafficking has increased the vulnerability of women in tribal lands for whom sex work is often the only way of earning a living, a Native American call-in show was told Thursday.
Since the federal legislation was passed in April, three women have been murdered and dozens more are missing. That was inevitable when the shutdown of sex sites like Backpage forced sex workers back on the street and into the clutches of pimps, writes an advocate for decriminalization of prostitution.
As the campaign against sex trafficking grows into a $47 million cottage industry, it has also been spurring a “moral panic” that sex workers say makes them increasingly vulnerable to police abuse, and turns them into targets for those with religious or moral objections to prostitution.
Justice-involved women, particularly women of color, are often “exploited” twice: first by human traffickers, and then by a court system that focuses on punishment rather than on providing the trauma services and counseling they need, said a New York City judge.
Few Americans realize that sex trafficking is as close to home as their own communities. As the nation notes “human trafficking awareness” month, a West Virginia advocate explores the special tragedies it inflicts in a state that leads the nation in both poverty and drug addiction.
California’s efforts to implement two major new laws to help sex-trafficked kids are hampered by cultural stereotypes held by law enforcement and some legislators that criminalize the youngsters, a Los Angeles journalist discovers.