Warning - The Playbook on Sex Trafficking and The Super Bowl
It's the first week of February, and the proliferation of advertisements for spicy wings and beer signals a return to an annual tradition: the debate over whether the Super Bowl causes an increase in child sex trafficking.
The fact is that FBI investigations around this event result in increased arrests of traffickers and sex buyers, along with the recovery of victims. One anti-trafficking advocate described the Super Bowl as “the number one time children are sold for sex.” But others have rightly noted that sex trafficking happens every day of the year and called for increased prevention efforts and victim services nationwide, not just in Super Bowl locales. A 2019 scholarly study of the idea that the occasion is the “largest human trafficking event in the country” characterized it as media hype rather than evidence-based coverage.
To dismiss the relationship between the Super Bowl and child sex trafficking as a “myth” obscures uncomfortable truths: this human rights abuse is a daily reality for its victims, and the location and timing of sex trafficking are not random. Sex trafficking proliferates when men congregate for so-called "masculine" activities: football games, car races, trade shows - even political conventions. To reject that out of hand ignores the victims and leaves children at risk of even greater harm.
As with all our work at ECPAT-USA, this analysis of sex trafficking is informed by the true experts - survivors. I had been skeptical about the pre-game hype around sex trafficking, believing that it was an everyday occurrence, and the Super Bowl was no different from any other day. Then, I was asked to interview survivors for a public service announcement in advance of the 2014 Super Bowl, and a former client gently explained to me how wrong I was. Trafficked through a “delivery model,” in which women and children are ordered in advance and delivered by drivers, the client shared that orders for sexual services skyrocketed every Sunday throughout the fall - and culminated on Super Bowl Sunday. Men gathered in their homes for football parties, ordering pizza, beer - and sex. She was an object to be split among 4, 5, 6 men and then disposed of like an empty pizza box. The men were very dangerous, she said in a soft voice. When a fan’s team was winning, he might get rough because he was so excited. But it was much worse when his team was losing, because he would vent his anger by beating and choking her.
It is this truth - a human being consumed like cheap take-out food and tossed away as worthless - that informs ECPAT-USA’s collaboration with survivors and advocates around sporting events. We are honored to partner with Survivor-Leader Theresa Flores of the S.O.A.P. Project, which provides hotels and motels with soap and personal care products labeled with information about sex trafficking and the National Human Trafficking Hotline. And, with credit to the foresight of local government leaders, the City of Houston has prioritized an anti-trafficking strategy with input from ECPAT-USA’s Private Sector Engagement program as part of its bid for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The link between child sex trafficking and large public gatherings is a tragedy that transcends the digital age. This was made shockingly apparent to me this past fall while visiting the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls. I had been looking forward to an exhibit commemorating the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. I was unprepared, however, for a vintage poster that had been discovered in a South Dakota bus station. Emblazoned “WARNING!”, it described the women of San Francisco's alarm about the impending 1915 World’s Fair plan to permit the establishment of houses of prostitution, a vice that “sacrifices the girlhood and boyhood of this country.” Families and communities, the poster implored, must protect their children from the harms generated by this large gathering. “Let it be remembered that the country will be scoured for girls to supply the demand of this nefarious business, and every means that is possible for man to conceive will be used to snare and mislead these girls in order to secure them.”
The language may sound antiquated, but the message remains equally crucial today: the threat to young people - both to girls and to boys - at large-scale gatherings is both urgent and headline-worthy. The sale of children for sexual exploitation cannot be tolerated or normalized. Not at the Super Bowl. Not ever. And while current naysayers may dismiss the specific connection between this weekend's events and child sex trafficking, the women of San Francisco were prescient: until the demand for children is eliminated, it is incumbent upon all of us to “sound the alarm.”