Myths About Human Trafficking That Make the Real Victims Harder to Find

The most dangerous thing a good cause can acquire is a bad statistic, because a bad statistic feels like a gift and behaves like a trap. It raises money, it fills a church hall and it gets a bill through a committee. Then it sends investigators to the wrong place, and the real victim, who does not match the poster, goes unnoticed.

Human trafficking is a real crime. It is slavery, plain and simple, and a country founded on the proposition that all men are created equal has no business tolerating it. Because the crime is real, it deserves to be described correctly. The popular picture, a stranger in a van, a teenage girl, a border, a ransom note, is a story. The law describes something different, and the difference decides who gets rescued and who gets walked past.

So let us test the popular claims against the text of the statute and the record, one at a time, and do it in the spirit of people who care more about victims than about slogans.

First, the definition

Congress defined the crime in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, signed on October 28, 2000. The act defines "severe forms of trafficking in persons" in two parts, and every myth below is a departure from this definition.

1. Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform the act is under 18 years of age.
2. Labor trafficking: the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion, for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.

Read it again, because three words carry the whole structure: force, fraud, coercion. Not "movement." Not "stranger." Not "border." The crime is the compulsion of a person into sex or labor. For adults, the government must show that compulsion. For minors in commercial sex, the statute dispenses with it, because a child cannot consent to be sold. The criminal provisions sit in Title 18 of the United States Code, including section 1589 on forced labor, 1590 on trafficking with respect to peonage and slavery, and 1591 on sex trafficking.

The Thirteenth Amendment is the constitutional root: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Trafficking is that evil in a modern costume.

Myth one: trafficking always means kidnapping by a stranger

The claim: Traffickers snatch victims off the street, a grab in a parking lot, a van with no windows.

The test: The statute does not mention abduction. It mentions force, fraud and coercion, and fraud comes second for a reason. A great many trafficking cases, as described in prosecutions and by service providers, begin with an offer: a job, a romance, a promise of a better life. The recruiter may be a boyfriend, a relative, a labor broker or an acquaintance. The compulsion arrives later, as a confiscated passport, a debt that never shrinks, a threat to a family back home or a threat to call the police on an undocumented worker.

Verdict: mostly false. Stranger abduction exists, and it is horrific, but it is not the template. The template is a relationship that turns into control. An investigator who looks only for a van will miss the manager at a restaurant who holds his kitchen staff's papers.

Myth two: trafficking spikes around the Super Bowl

The claim: Every year, around the big game, a flood of victims is shipped into the host city, and the number rises by the thousands.

The test: The claim has been repeated by officials and activists for years and has been examined by researchers and by journalists. A 2011 review published by an international alliance of anti-trafficking organizations looked at the major sporting events in question and reported that it could find no evidence of a surge in trafficking tied to them. Law enforcement operations timed to the events often produce arrests for ordinary prostitution offenses, which is a different category in the law from trafficking, and the counts get blended.

Verdict: unsupported. That does not mean no trafficking occurs in a city that hosts a major event. It means the specific claim of a game-day surge has not been demonstrated, and a crime that exists year-round in the same city is best fought year-round. Resources spent on a one-week show are resources not spent on the labor trafficking case that sits unexamined for the other fifty-one weeks.

Myth three: trafficking requires crossing a border

The claim: Trafficking is something that happens to people who are brought into the country, or smuggled across it.

The test: The word "trafficking" suggests movement, and the word misleads. The statutory definition lists "harboring" and "obtaining" along with transportation. A United States citizen born in Ohio can be a victim of sex trafficking in Ohio. A man who never leaves his county can be held in forced labor. Nothing in the definition requires movement of any kind, let alone movement across a national boundary.

It also helps to separate trafficking from smuggling. Smuggling is a crime against the border: a person pays to be moved across, the transaction is consensual, and the offense is complete on arrival. Trafficking is a crime against the person: exploitation by force, fraud or coercion, which can occur wholly inside the country. The two overlap, since a smuggled person can be trafficked once he arrives and owes a debt to the smuggler, but they are different offenses, and confusing them lets politicians use trafficking as a talking point in border debates that have nothing to do with the exploitation actually at issue.

Verdict: false. Many victims are citizens. Many are exploited without ever being moved.

Myth four: trafficking is only about sex

The claim: Trafficking means commercial sex, and everything else is a labor dispute.

The test: The statute's second prong exists for exactly this reason. Labor trafficking is forced labor, peonage, debt bondage and involuntary servitude. The settings that appear in prosecutions and in advocates' reports include farm labor, domestic work, restaurants, construction, landscaping, door-to-door sales crews and other sectors. A worker whose employer holds his documents, threatens him with deportation or insists that he owes a debt that grows faster than he can pay it is not in a wage dispute. He is in servitude, and that is a federal felony.

Sex trafficking draws far more public attention than labor trafficking, and it is a real and serious crime. But a public that thinks of the issue only as a sex-crime issue will not ask whether the hands that picked the vegetables or built the subdivision were free. A conservative who believes in the dignity of work and in the free labor contract should be among the first to care.

Verdict: false, and the omission matters. Labor trafficking is part of the statute from the start, and it is harder to see.

Myth five: victims will ask for help

The claim: If someone were really being trafficked, he would run to a police officer, or at least a neighbor, and say so.

The test: Victims often do not. Reasons in the cases include fear of the trafficker, who may have threatened the victim's family; a debt the victim believes is real and owes; shame; a language barrier; distrust of police, sometimes because the trafficker told the victim he would be arrested; and, for a foreign national, fear of removal. A victim may also not think of himself as a victim. A young woman who believes her boyfriend loves her is not going to flag down a patrol car to report him. A worker who has been told that the police are the employer's friends will not either.

The practical consequence is large. If officers wait for victims to self-identify, they will find very few. If they train to recognize indicators, including a worker with no access to his own identification documents, a minor with an older "boyfriend" and no school, or a business with workers who live on site and never leave, they will find more.

Verdict: false, and a dangerous assumption for anyone designing a response. Look for control, not for a request for help.

Myth six: all prostitution is trafficking

The claim: Every person in commercial sex is a trafficking victim, so any arrest of a buyer or a seller is a rescue.

The test: The statute does not say this. For adults, the definition requires force, fraud or coercion, and for minors it requires nothing more than a commercial sex act. Many jurisdictions have separate prostitution laws, and policy debates about how to treat adult prostitution, whether to criminalize sellers, buyers or both, are a different debate from the one about trafficking. Blurring the two does harm in both directions. It overstates trafficking numbers, which undermines credibility, and it can lead to treating a coerced victim as a criminal because she is in the same category as someone who was not coerced.

Verdict: the law says no. The distinction is exactly where force, fraud and coercion live, and a good investigation is the work of establishing them.

Myth seven: the law already makes victims safe

The claim: Once a trafficking victim is identified, the system protects her.

The test: The TVPA does create protections, and they are worth knowing. The most important is the T visa, a form of immigration relief for foreign victims of severe trafficking who are present in the United States because of the trafficking, who comply with reasonable requests from law enforcement for assistance (with an exception for minors and for those unable to comply because of trauma), and who would suffer extreme hardship involving unusual and severe harm if removed. The statute caps the number of principal T visas at 5,000 per year. The visa can lead to lawful permanent residence.

The design is a bargain. The government gives the victim a path to safety, and the victim helps prosecute the trafficker. The bargain works only if victims trust it, which depends on investigators who are trained and a system that does not treat an unlawful immigration status as the larger crime. Experts and advocates differ on how well the process has worked in practice, and on how many people who might qualify are actually reached. That disagreement is a good topic for a congressional oversight hearing and a bad topic for slogans.

Verdict: partly true on paper, uneven in practice. The statute sets out protections. Whether they reach the person who needs them is a question of execution.

Myth eight: shutting down the websites ended it

The claim: In 2018, Congress passed a law that dealt with online trafficking, so the problem has been addressed.

The test: The law is known by two acronyms, FOSTA (the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and SESTA (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act), and it was signed on April 11, 2018. It did two things of note. It amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which had protected websites from liability for content posted by users, so that this protection does not bar federal criminal prosecution of trafficking-related conduct, state criminal prosecution consistent with the federal law, or civil suits by victims against sites that knowingly assist or facilitate violations. And it created a new federal offense for operating an interactive computer service with intent to promote or facilitate prostitution. Around the same time, federal authorities seized Backpage.com, a classified advertising site that was a major venue for such advertising.

The debate over the law is serious and divides people of good will, including conservatives. Supporters argue that platforms profiting from exploitation had hidden behind Section 230 for too long. Critics argue that the law pushed activity into harder-to-trace corners of the internet, made it harder for investigators to follow the trail and created risks for people in the sex trade who are not trafficking victims. Both sides cite real consequences. I am not going to pretend the evidence is settled, and I would be suspicious of anyone who does.

Verdict: incomplete. A statute that changes where the crime happens is not a statute that ends it.

What the myths cost

Why does any of this matter? Because every myth sends scarce attention to the wrong place. A police department that trains its officers to look for kidnapping will arrest people for prostitution at a hotel on game weekend and overlook a restaurant kitchen. A legislature that thinks trafficking is only a border problem will pass a border bill and call it done. A church group that expects victims to ask for help will leave a pamphlet on a table and wonder why no one picks it up.

The correct picture asks harder questions. Does the person have control over his own identification documents? Over his own money? Can he leave the job? Is he free to talk to someone outside the business? Is he a minor in commercial sex? Those are the questions that find victims, and they come straight from the statute's own words.

There is a deeper reason, too, one that is as old as the Founding. The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, among them liberty. A person held by force, fraud or coercion has been deprived of the first of the rights the Declaration names. The government that was established to secure those rights has a duty to find him, and the citizen has a duty not to look away. That duty is not discharged by sharing a graphic with a frightening number on it.

Related reading

Prosecutors and agents carry out this work, and we describe what the federal side of that work looks like, and the principle of impartial enforcement that it depends on, in Equal Justice Under Law, From the Fourteenth Amendment to the Courthouse. For the broader question of how to read crime figures without being fooled, see Seven Things Crime Statistics Cannot Tell You, and Two Things They Can, and for the rights of those harmed by any crime, What to Do if You Are a Crime Victim, Your Rights Step by Step. Both share this post's conviction: honest numbers help victims, and exaggerated numbers help only the people who raise money with them.

The case in brief

1. Federal law defines trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, with no border, kidnapping or stranger required, and no coercion needed when the person in commercial sex is under 18.
2. Popular myths, including the stranger in the van, the Super Bowl surge, the border crossing and the sex-only picture, misdirect investigators and the public away from how the crime usually happens.
3. Labor trafficking is half the statute, and victims often do not ask for help, so the response has to look for control rather than wait for a complaint.
4. The T visa and the 2018 FOSTA-SESTA laws are real tools with real trade-offs, and their results deserve honest evaluation rather than slogans.
5. A free people has a duty grounded in the Thirteenth Amendment and the Declaration to find the people held in servitude, and the first step is to describe the crime accurately.

What you can do: learn the indicators of force, fraud and coercion from the federal government's anti-trafficking resources, and if you see them, report to the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or to local law enforcement.