SAN FRANCISCO—The Super Bowl is over, and finally the hysteria about sex trafficking at the Super Bowl has subsided—at least until before next year’s Super Bowl in Minneapolis, when it will most likely start up all over again.
“It feels like Groundhog Day,” said Claire Alwyne of the Erotic Service Providers Legal Education Research and Education Project (ESPLERP), referring to the Bill Murray movie where the star keeps reliving the same day over and over. “Every year the same fake stories about sex-trafficking at the Super Bowl resurface. There’s not a shred of evidence to support it, and even a simple web search or checking Snopes.com would show it is false. Even the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women has debunked it. So why does it keep on coming back?”
The answer is simple: Such paranoia leads to increased contributions for so-called "rescue" organizations, including police, but the annual rash of lurid coverage about hordes of traffickers is actually simply fake news. The facts paint a very different story. Despite enormous publicity and a major police operation, as of February 7, Houston police had made 22 prostitution related arrests during Super Bowl week, but had not made a single arrest related to trafficking.
“The Super Bowl trafficking hysteria is just an excuse for local police to mount lucrative vice stings,” said Maxine Doogan, President of ESPLERP. “Catching real traffickers is too much like hard work. Rounding up prostitutes and their clients who are engaged in commercial consensual sex is a quick way to boost arrest numbers. But all it does is waste U.S. government money.”
Underpinning all this is the criminalization of prostitution. ESPLERP has mounted a ground breaking lawsuit, ESPLERP v Gascon, which challenges California’s anti-prostitution law 647(b) as unconstitutional, arguing that commercial consensual sex between adults should not be criminalized. The case, which was dismissed at the district court level, is being appealed in the Ninth Circuit, where 36 civil rights and LGBT organizations have filed amicus (friend of the court) briefs supporting ESPLERP’s position.
Contributions to support the court case can be submitted through our crowd fundraiser.
