By Andrea Nichols, Ph.D., Professor, St. Louis Community College Forest Park; Lecturer, Washington University in St. Louis; Gateway Alliance Against Human Trafficking Member.
Very few research studies specifically examine people who sex-traffic others. The available data are drawn from prosecuted cases, information from the National Human Trafficking Hotline, case studies, and empirical research studies. Contrary to public depictions of sex trafficking, people who experience trafficking are typically sex trafficked by someone they know rather than by a stranger.
Social media, popular films, and the news media commonly focus on sex traffickers as kidnappers, or those using abduction and overt force to gain control of survivors. While this form of trafficking does occur, it is not particularly common. The National Human Trafficking Hotline (NHTH) data show this form typically composes 7-8% of sex trafficking experiences. Other studies examining data provided by police, prosecutors, and social service providers show this form to be infrequently occurring. While such instances of sex trafficking are important to highlight, due to the serious harm experienced by survivors, it is important to discuss sex trafficking in all its forms—particularly the most common forms—to better identify and address it.
Sex traffickers as intimate partners consistently appear in research studies to be one of the most common types of sex traffickers. NHTH data show intimate partners were involved in nearly 35% of sex trafficking instances in 2021. A study in Missouri also showed this to be the most common type of sex trafficking. Traffickers who are intimate partners typically either manipulatively initiate a romantic relationship with the intent of trafficking the victim/survivor from the start, or trafficking is another abuse experienced in an already abusive relationship. The trafficker often is, or poses as, a romantic partner, and then the situation develops into a sex trafficking situation later on. In such instances, other dynamics of coercive control that are typically present in relationships involving intimate partner violence co-occur, such as isolation, economic, emotional, verbal, physical, and other abuses.
Sex traffickers can also be family members. At times, parents sex-traffic their own children, or other relatives may be involved. Prosecuted cases of family-involved sex trafficking show fathers, mothers, and other family members sexually abusing and trafficking their children, through child sexual abuse imagery, and commercial sexual exchanges. Sometimes family members directly traffic their children for money or drugs, and other times they look the other way while others abuse the child. The NHTH indicated that about 46% of survivors were trafficked by a family member in 2021. A statewide study in Missouri found about 18% of sex trafficking experiences involved a family member.
People who buy sex may also be considered sex traffickers when purchasing sex involves a child, or purchasing sex from an adult who is compelled by force, fraud, or coercion. There is no buyer exception to the legal language of sex trafficking in the U.S. TVPA, as established by appeals cases in 2012. No third party is required for a situation to be labeled as sex trafficking. The buyer is obtaining a child for the purposes of commercial sex, which legally entails sex trafficking. Survivor narratives depict buyers approaching them and offering cash, food, or shelter in exchange for sex. In these instances, minors are engaged in survival sex, one of the most common forms of sex trafficking, and it is at times the buyer who first gets them involved in the commercial sex industry. Children report being approached in the streets, outside of shelters, bus stops, and public parks.
Perhaps one of the most complex dynamics involved in examining people who traffic others is when sex trafficking involves a sex trafficking survivor trafficking another. At times, survivors are compelled to traffic or otherwise become involved in trafficking others during the course of their own victimization. Such dynamics appear in about one-third of federally prosecuted cases. Some survivors report being coerced by their own traffickers to become involved in trafficking others, while other survivors report trafficking others to find a way out of their own trafficking situation. Victim-offenders are more likely to experience significant emotional and physical abuse, have children with their trafficker, and experience other aspects of coercive control. Traffickers may also be groomed by their parents as children to traffic others in their adulthood (e.g., it is a family business), and in such cases, often experience child sexual abuse. In fact, sex traffickers who are also victims typically experience a trajectory of trauma that leads to their trafficking of others.
Demographically, according to prosecuted cases of sex trafficking, nearly 90% of traffickers are men, 94% are U.S. citizens (contrary to inflammatory political rhetoric), and the median age is 33 years. According to arrest data, 52% of traffickers are between the ages of 20-39; 76% are men, 19% are women, and 5% are unknown/unspecified; and a small majority are white. 15% are Hispanic/Latino, yet this group makes up 19.5% of the population, so the number arrested for trafficking is disproportionately low (again, contrary to misguided political rhetoric).
Another key point to note about traffickers is that traffickers are not created in a vacuum. Research shows that traffickers consistently come from problematic home lives involving exposure to intimate partner violence, child abuse (including sexual abuse) and neglect, commercial sex involvement/family history in commercial sex, parental substance use disorders, early child substance use disorder, food insecurity, housing instability, and more. Perhaps most striking is that the background risk factors for the perpetration of sex trafficking are eerily similar to risk factors for victimization. This research highlights the importance of prevention and identifying and responding to these issues to prevent victimization and sex trafficking. This includes calls for education, training, and screening in key organizational sectors such as healthcare, schools, and the child welfare system to provide resources for identification and service referral. Expanded funding to address intimate partner violence, food insecurity, poverty, child abuse and neglect, and substance use disorder are also implicated by the research in this area as preventative measures for sex trafficking and other forms of victimization that are often intertwined with it.
Sources:
FBI. 2022. “Arrest Offense Counts in the United States, 2012–2022.” Crime Data Explorer. https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/arrest.
Henderson, A., and S. M. Rhodes. 2022. “ ‘Got Sold a Dream and It Turned Into a Nightmare’: The Victim–Offender Overlap in Commercial Sexual Exploitation.” Journal of Human Trafficking 8, no. 1: 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322705.2021.2019530.
Motivans, N., and H. Snyder. 2018. Federal Prosecution of Human Trafficking Cases. NCJ 251390. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice.
Nichols, A. J., K. M. Preble, and A. Cox. 2019. “A State-Level Analysis of Demographic Characteristics and Sex Trafficking Experiences of Survivors.” Journal of Human Trafficking 10, no. 1: 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322705.2021.2016268.
Nichols, A. J., M. Oberstaedt, S. Slutsker, and K. Gilbert. 2023. “Practitioners’ Perspectives of Family Involved Sex Trafficking of Minors: Implications for Practice.” Journal of Family Violence, online publication, September 26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-023-00644-1.
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