The Super Bowl brings in all kinds of business, but it’s not all good. According to a Reuters report, it’s also one of the biggest days on the calendar for the underage sex trade.
The Dallas Police and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot are expecting pimps to traffic thousands of underage girls into the Dallas–Fort Worth area this weekend, with the hopes of picking up extra business from the influx of men.
According to Change.org, the average age of these girls is 13, with a life expectancy of seven years. Unfortunately, it isn’t anything new. The report offered this grim statistic:
Up to 300,000 girls between 11 and 17 are lured into the U.S. sex industry annually, according to a 2007 report sponsored by the Department of Justice and written by the nonprofit group Shared Hope International.
It’s estimated that up to 10,000 adults and underage girls have been taken to previous Super Bowls. Pimps have been known to buy out taxis in order to convert them to “mobile brothels.”
There have been rescues. Over the last two years, 50 girls have been saved from their captors at the Super Bowls in Miami and Tampa. Still, a mere 50 out of thousands seems like a drop in the bucket.
Change.org is trying to get enough signatures on this petition to urge the Super Bowl Host Committee to endorse Traffick911’s “I’m Not Buying It” campaign. It’s already got almost 70,000 signatures.
The campaign has even gained the attention of NFL pro Jay Ratliff, the Dallas Cowboy and three-time Pro Bowler, who put out his own public service announcement. In the ad, Ratliff declares, “Real men don’t buy children. They don’t buy sex.” (You can see an interview with him here.)
He’s right. Real men stand up against abuse. The Super Bowl is one of America’s favorite events, the most viewed TV event all year. But while you’re watching the big game on the big screen, don’t forget about these silenced girls living in the dark.
—Photo cordey/Flickr
The amount of debunking that has gone into the Superbowl/Olympics/World Cup trafficking myths is just astounding. For the World Cup in Germany, 40,000 women were supposedly going to be brought in as “sex slaves”. The police found 8. This sort of thing has been happening for years now and yet here we have Matt Coburn repeating this hoary and much abused myth as if it were God’s own truth. I have a question for Matt, though: don’t you feel that this relentless exageration of trafficking numbers and the conscious conflating of voluntary, self-employed sex workers with “sex slaves” actually makes… Read more »
According to the media hype There was supposed to be hundreds of thousands of under age child sex slaves kidnapped and forced to have sex with super bowl fans. At the Dallas Super Bowl 2011. WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL OF THEM???????????? Well, as I predicted it was all a big lie told by various anti-prostitution groups and the Dallas Women’s Foundation which is a anti-prostitution group that lies in order to get grant money from the government and charities to pay their high salaries. As proved in the link below: Top FBI agent in Dallas (Robert Casey Jr.) sees no… Read more »
Well folks, it’s been a week now since the big game and all of the hoopla and here is all of the actual facts I could find about sex trafficking underage girls at the super bowl. From: http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/super-bowl/local/20110207-austin-man-arrested-in-dallas-for-forcing-teen-girl-sister-to-prostitute-before-super-bowl-xlv.ece A felon from Austin forced a teenage girl and her adult sister to come work as prostitutes in Dallas because “there was big money to be made during Super Bowl,” according to police documents. But Dallas police say they busted Anthony Ladell Winn, 35, before the sisters, ages 14 and 20, arranged any weekend dates. Area authorities had been bracing for a… Read more »
“The Super Bowl: a Haven for Sex Trafficking” I guess this can now be added to the long list of myths about the super bowl like the 1993 mythical link between the super bowl and dramatic increases in domestic violence during the big game.
Maybe some day “journalists” will learn to check up on facts before they repeat these kind of outlandish claims.
Here’s some investigative journalism, rather than just parroting unsubstantiated claims: 100,000 Hookers Won’t Be Showing Up in Dallas “This is urban legend that is pure pulp fiction,” the NFL’s McCarthy says. “I would refer you to your local law enforcement officials.” So that’s what we did. Meet police Sergeant Tommy Thompson of Phoenix, which hosted the 2008 Super Bowl. “We may have had certain precincts that were going gangbusters looking for prostitutes, but they were picking up your everyday street prostitutes,” Thompson says of his vice cops. “They didn’t notice any sort of glitch in the number of prostitution arrests… Read more »
Denis, Thanks for your sleuthing. I appreciate your hard look at the numbers. I had never heard the 100,000 figure, but that does sound overblown, indeed. The truth is, we can’t fully know how many sex workers will descend on Dallas, or how many of them are there because they want to be (my guess, though, is that very few are willing). Human trafficking is, after all, notoriously difficult to track and quantify, partly because the victims rarely report it (if and when they survive it). Additionally, number of arrests does not indicate number of victims, by any stretch of… Read more »
@ Matt, I agree that the motive to stop child trafficking is good, but the methods are flawed. Traffik911 and Change.org are promoting fictitious and unsupported statistics to create moral panic. They have greatly exaggerated the amount of trafficked children and implied criminality of superbowl fans. They are also using coercive tactics to pressure the superbowl committee for free advertising for their campaign. These ad campaigns won’t do anything to stop child trafficking, it is just popularizing false perceptions about men and prostitutes. This type of propaganda campaign is nothing new for these activist organizations. We’ve seen it before with… Read more »
“I had never heard the 100,000 figure, but that does sound overblown, indeed” I suspect that the 100,000 figure is editorial sarcasm. When you’re already several orders of magnitude off from reality then what’s one more? I wonder though, why would you question 100,000 figure but not the “ten’s of thousands” figure? Both are preposterous. Bad statistics make bad policies, be wary of the 1 in 4 claims, they are also a complete misrepresentation. If you want to do something positive, I would suggest opening up the discussion about these issues of abuse that are essentially taboo for polite discussion.… Read more »
Given the numbers and prevalence cited in your article, I can’t understand why this sporting event that apparently is a “Human Trafficking ” event isn’t shut down altogether. Do we really need to watch grown men violently pummel each other over a piece of leather? Shut it down ……the whole thing. Obviously whenever and wherever men gather the community is at risk. Why are you people not advocating shutting the whole thing down. Maybe groups such as this have their priorities all wrong. Shut it down.
Great solution. Shut down the whole world while you’re at it. People going out in public – people *living* – leads to criminal activity. The truth is, the Texas Attorney General is poorly informed about the number of potentially trafficked women. He took numbers from a coalition in Florida who apparently pulled their figures out of thin air. The coalition rescued about a dozen women at last year’s Super Bowl, but somehow the figure “10,000” was extrapolated from that. And then there’s this: could the market support that many hookers? Estimates are that about 100,000 *extra* people will descend on… Read more »
And what kind of idiot would actually believe such obviously inflated figures??
oh, right…Matt Coburn does…
Hey Chuck sensationalizing statistics can lead to oppressive policies, once people accept the BS its often impossible to uneducate them. The response should be as shocking as the exaggeration. It’s unethical to peddle morality for money. It’s a dramitization of the facts that attacks the esteem of most men. If you say 100,000 then how do you correlate that information with how you understand the nature of most men. Wasn’t it Jimmy the Swaggart that railed against sinners every Sunday on TV, until he was discovered to be a pervert. I say shut it down completely, so the NFL can… Read more »
There’s a good article here that does some factual investigation:
Texas Attorney General Can’t Cite “Tens of Thousands” of Super Bowl Sex Slaves Figure
http://www.avoiceformen.com/2011/02/02/texas-attorney-general-can%e2%80%99t-cite-%e2%80%9ctens-of-thousands%e2%80%9d-of-super-bowl-sex-slaves-figure/