 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Elizabeth Nolan Brown, an associate editor for Reason.com. Welcome back to Free Thoughts, Liz. Thanks for having me. What is sex trafficking? I mean, that depends, I guess, if you mean in the popular, you know, conception or under the law, under the federal law. I mean, choose between, or maybe both. So, I mean, I think when people think sex trafficking, you know, they think at the most extreme, but I think they tend to think towards the most extremes. They tend to think people that are being held physically, that are, you know, either kept in a room or kept in bondage and, you know, that have been maybe abducted or tricked into it, that are being, you know, threatened, that are being maybe physically abused, things like that. Shipped in shipping containers. Right. Coming over, you know, shipped in shipping containers, things like that. So, I think at very least people think, you know, that there is some element of force or fraud being used in, you know, when you talk about sex trafficking. But under, you know, under the federal definition and under various state and city, you know, the way that they use it in police departments in the media, it often, you know, in the media and police, they can often just mean prostitution. They've just sort of started referring to all prostitution as sex trafficking. Under federal law, it means it's part of, you know, the general trafficking in person statute, which means there's two different kinds of human trafficking in persons. There's labor trafficking and there's sex trafficking. For adults, there has to be an element of force, fraud or coercion involved in order to be sex trafficking. If someone is under 18, there does not have to be any force, fraud or coercion involved. And there actually doesn't even have to be any sort of, you know, middleman or pimp or trafficker or mad or anything like that involved. Can you traffic yourself then? Well, you, so no, but you can mostly not. You never know. Under the MAN Act, you can actually, but that's something different. But no, but the elements of the statute in which you can be a sex trafficker to is not just to sort of compel someone into prostitution or abduct or force or whatever. It's anyone who also promotes or advertises or solicits or patronizes. So customers of anyone who is under 18 could be charged as a sex trafficker. So, you know, in a situation, say like a 17 year old, you know, puts an ad somewhere and meets up with someone and doesn't even say, you know, says they're, you know, 19 and then that person could be charged with sex trafficking. And it doesn't matter if, you know, there's the eight, not knowing the age is not a defense. So there's a lot of difference between sort of what people think of as sex trafficking and what a lot of criminal justice, you know, the way it's used in criminal justice in America. Well, so that ambiguity makes answering this next question more difficult, but roughly do we have an idea of how much of this there is going on? No, but if you, you know, most of the numbers that you have out there from various nonprofit groups are very biased or from the federal government, at least the ones that they advertise are very biased and are very inflated and have been debunked and discredited in various ways. You know, even sometimes the federal government has, you know, said to stop using them, but they still like wind their way through, you know, the internet and everywhere and still get recycled again and again. When it comes to the number of sex trafficking arrests and prosecutions in the United States, you can, you know, get better numbers. Still not exactly though, because it's still, you know, like I said, you know, there's a wider range of conduct. But we're talking about usually, you know, a couple hundred to a couple thousand in the United States prosecutions for sex trafficking every year. So under the broad scope of things. Why are the numbers biased? Oh, because, I mean, there's a lot of people who, one, because it's a hard thing to measure, right? It's a, you know, it's both prostitution and, you know, forced sex trafficking are hard to measure because they're underground and it's very hard to get, you know, reliable populations. It's popular to talk to you, reliable data. But also, I mean, you have a lot of groups who are very invested for various reasons in sort of, in conflating prostitution and sex trafficking. So they're just anti-prostitution groups that have sort of moved into the sex trafficking? Yeah, either, either they're anti-prostitution groups for ideological reasons because they're, you know, certain kinds of feminists or religious groups. Or there are groups that are realized that there's a lot of money in fighting sex trafficking. There's a ton of federal funding for both state and local law enforcement agencies and for nonprofits, small groups, social service agencies, whatever, if they're fighting sex trafficking. So they have a lot of good reasons to sort of inflate the numbers of people that they're helping and the population out there that needs to be served, obviously, so they can, you know, get more attention and get more money. And so they generally tend to either inflate all prostitution, all sex workers as sex trafficking victims, or just rely on really ridiculous methods. You know, one of the most cited numbers is that there are 300,000 children either at risk of being trafficked in the United States every year or being trafficked every year. It was from this one study from the early 2000s that the lead researcher has now been like, don't pay attention to, it's terrible. It was published in a non-pure-viewed academic journal. And in order to determine who was at risk, they tallied up these things that they decided made kids at risk of being sex trafficking, which included anything from being in a single family home to living in like subsidized housing, to having never been in child protective services, all sorts of things. And then they didn't even matter if people were in like a few of those categories and they counted them each a separate. And then they added that whole number together and, you know, magnified about how many kids that would be. And then said that was why there were 300,000 children. So it's just, there's just like a lot of bad methodology like that. Well, then given that, do we have, so there is, you said that the hard numbers we have often include prostitution and things that don't fit our kind of common conception of what sex trafficking looks like. Do we then have any sense of how much of the, you know, the image of women basically sold into slavery or imported and kept confined or children pressed into prostitution against their will like that kind of sex trafficking? Do we have any sense of how much of that there is? As far as hard data, no. But I think I kind of, I have so many Google alerts for all these different terms and I've been, you know, for like three years now covering this and monitoring sort of all these and for various features and research projects I've been doing actually digging into who gets arrested for this across the country. I almost never see cases like that. And there's some statements from, you know, various federal agents that give us some clues. Like the former, John Pistole, he was the former director of the FBI, I think. He did a congressional testimony and talked about the underage victims they saw. He said only about 25% of them were forced at all. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they were, you know, tied up in cargo containers. But he said about 25% of the underage people working in prostitution that they encountered and counted among their, you know, underage child victim totals were people who had been, had some element of force involved in their being trafficked. It seems that either way, if this happens, it's a bad thing. I mean, the classic type that we're talking about, maybe for some listeners who think prostitution is a bad thing too or at least under some circumstances if you're poor or have no other options or things like this. So shouldn't we have a fairly broad definition of this in order to combat it? I mean, what's really the problem with having a broad definition of sex trafficking in order to better combat it? Obviously, I think that there's nothing wrong with the definition for adults the same, force, fraud or coercion, you know, involved in sex trafficking. With the sort of, with the teen definition, with, you know, with anything being involved, you end up with, A, you end up with people who, you know, maybe they had a lapse in judgment deciding to go meet a 16-year-old for sex. You know, maybe they didn't even know who knows, but like, you know, maybe they did and they just, you know, but that doesn't seem like it should be a federal crime with, you know, a mandatory minimum sentence and a possible life in federal prison for that. And when we conflate it, that's what you're doing. A, you're making everyone treated like the worst cases under the law. B, that means that basically the FBI and all the federal law enforcement agencies and all the small town police departments only go after those people because that's really easy. And again, you know, they get, they have a whole lot of incentives in order to report on how many sex trafficking arrests they made. There's these crazy reports that the Department of Justice has to put out where the FBI has to put all these, like, different metrics. Like, here's how many investigations we started. Here's how many arrests we made. Here's how many prosecutions. And they're, they brag about how they increased their metrics this many, you know, from year to year, almost just like you're reporting on whatever except they're, you know, arresting people and giving them federal prison sentences. And so it gives them a lot of incentives to go after these because there's, that's really easy. And because the kind of sex trafficking that is really horrible and the kind that we think of as sex trafficking is very rare and is not happening in every community. That's what they say. It's happening in every community. You know, that is not happening in every community. What is happening in every community is prostitution, is sometimes underage people working in prostitution. And so, I mean, I'm not saying that we should, that that should be legal. I'm not saying we should, you know, let, you know, anyone just, you know, pay underage people for sex. I'm not saying that we shouldn't necessarily try to get them services, but the way we go about it now by just, you know, treating, we also treat them. We arrest them in order, in order to get them services. So it's just this, it just creates all these really perverse law enforcement incentives and ends up, you know, making everyone worse off. People who are consensually in sex work and the people that do really need our help. Well, I think that's a good point to kind of get into this story before we got to get into broader things. Because a lot of our listeners may not be aware of how this works. Yeah. And you wrote an excellent four-part piece on a bust in Seattle that was proclaimed as the largest sex trafficking bust in years, or I can't remember exactly what the headlines were. And because if our listeners are sitting here being like, this woman is defending sex trafficking or this woman doesn't care about this. How bad of a problem is this? I think this story is a really good example of how this could happen. So maybe you can tell us what happened in Seattle. Yeah. So this is a case that was, it's actually still ongoing, but it started in January 2016, or that's when the first arrests were made. And, you know, the headlines from, this was in Seattle and in Bellevue just outside of Seattle, and the headlines first in the local media and the TV stations and the local newspapers. And then it sort of spread to AP and Reuters and the New York Times, pretty much every major outlet and even, you know, across in the U.K. we're covering it. You know, that they had busted this league, this international league of sex traffickers. They were trafficking in Korean women to Seattle and also around the United States. They had a secret message board where they promoted their prostitution and raided them and, you know, talked about how to access them. They had these, you know, high-end brothels where they were kept all day and couldn't leave and had to be there and service all these men all day. And it was this, you know, it had taken months of work and they had been filing the Seattle police in the King County Sheriff's Office working with federal law enforcement agents had penetrated this ring and that was what everyone reported. That was sort of the story. So, you know, I covered it with a blog post like in January and it was kind of skeptical, but there wasn't really much to go on. Other than the fact that the board that they were calling a sort of sex trafficking board was just a board where adult sex workers advertised. You mean a board is in a forum? Yeah, sorry, like a forum, like a message board or, you know, kind of like Reddit or whatever. It's like Craigslist for sex traffickers kind of thing? Except it was not for sex traffickers. It was for prostitution and sex work more broadly. And I actually, you know, it was a Seattle... So, first of all, it was not at all an international or whatever board. It was a Seattle specific or that area region specific board. You know, I know some sex workers out there in that community and they advertised on that board, so I talked to them about it before. It was just a place where adult sex workers could post advertisements for themselves about, you know, here are my rates, here are my hours, whatever. I mean, it was all a little bit coded because prostitution is still illegal. And then customers could look at their profiles, could figure out how to contact them, and then customers could also leave reviews and communicate in messages with each other. They could communicate in private messages with each other. They could review the women and say, you know, I saw this person and here's, you know, whatever. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, if graphic, because they did involve sex, but they weren't like...they were typical things people would say about sex, not anything, you know. Like if there were prostitutes on Amazon, it'd be like the Amazon reviews. So, yeah, so it was definitely not a board that was primarily about sex trafficking. But, you know, at first it was like, okay, well, I don't know. Maybe there were people who were being sex trafficked who were being advertised there and somehow they didn't know this. Were the women in this alleged sex trafficking ring underage? No, no. They were all adults. They were all adults. And so the website was the...so the feds considered...or I guess the local police and some of the feds considered this a massive...I mean, because they were facilitating... I can't remember what words you used for the statue, but facilitating, communicating, all those things can make you a sex trafficker. So now the whole board, the whole forum, is a sex trafficking ring. Yes. Which, of course, is not what you think of when you think of a sex trafficking ring, is statutorily, I guess, true. Right. So they described it as, you know, there being this ring, this board, and then they said there were three...there were three people, only three that got arrested on human trafficking charges. And then there were about 12 men that got arrested for promoting prostitution on this board. So about six months later it started...it was like, I wonder what happened with that case? And it started looking into it and it started looking at the court records. And it turned out that the three that they had described as the huge... that had been charged with human trafficking, the huge leaders of this international ring, had both been quietly offered and taken plea deals months earlier with no promotion by the police. I mean, they had really promoted this when it happened. They had done all these press conferences and all this stuff. Didn't say anything at all in the media about how they gave plea deals to these people. And the plea deals for these, you know, alleged international human traffickers, one of them was for permitting prostitution and two of them were promoting prostitution, which are both relatively minor charges. And the one got off with no jail time and I think the other one had like two months jail time and the most was three months jail time and then some community service and stuff. And that's all that they got. So that was suspicious and it's like, okay, that's what's, you know, why is this the case? So basically, sorry, not to ramble on, but once you look into it, it turned out basically what we had happening here was a lot of Korean women who would come over of their own accord on with, you know, from Korea in order to on student visas or on tourist visas and then while they were here, you know, or overstay their visas sometimes and end up working as sex workers because they could make a lot of money here and they could make it quickly and without people they know knowing about it and send money back to their families in Korea or just, you know, save up and go back home and they could make so much more money here than they did there. You know, there are, there's a huge trail of evidence of them writing and people writing about them that shows that they were not being held hostage, that they had traveled here of their own accord from different cities, they had flown here, you know, if that they could come and go, if they were being held, you know, they wouldn't be allowed any of these things that they were being allowed. So, you know, the police said that maybe some of them were in debt bondage, that they had to pay off loan sharks back in, you know, somewhere else. I'm in debt bondage to the Federal Student Loan Agency. Well, yeah, I mean, they even said that some of them were being, you know, they had loans for credit cards and it was like, they had credit card debt, that's what we're saying was trafficking them. I mean, so, and you can't, we can't fit safe for sure and I don't want to say that none of these women maybe had someone somewhere back in Korea or something pulling some sort of shady strings but there was nothing like a coordinated attempt to smuggle these people here or to keep them here under any sort of force or coercion. It was basically just a lot of different women who were here for different reasons. And what they would do while they was here is they would come to Seattle for a few weeks and then they'd go to LA for a few weeks and they'd go to different places. And then if business was good, they'd come back and things like that. So, the men would post on this board and say, you know, hey, they all had these very Americanized pseudonyms like Chloe, so Chloe's back in town, you know. She's at this agency, this, you know, dream girl, K-girls delight, she's at that for two weeks, she'll be there whatever and they would post about it. These agencies turned out, it was people that, it turns out the people who had been charged as the human traffickers originally and who ended up getting off as permitting and promoting prostitution, they were people that kept apartments. Two of them were men who had been former sex work clients and were now prostitution clients and were now retired. One of them was dating a sex worker. Another one was a Korean sex worker herself. She had an apartment and she rented out the spare bedroom. The two men kept a separate apartment in a high end apartment building and they would organize the things where the girls would come in and they would take care of posting the ads for them, making the arrangement, screening clients, making sure that no one got in and stuff. There were very strict rules. People had to give their real identification, they had to have people vouch for them, they had to shower once they got there and use mouthwash and all this stuff. It was a very safe operation because these men had been very well screened. They were in a very secure building. Nothing was bad was going to happen to these women in this situation. Say what you will about prostitution, but even if you don't support it, this was happening in the safest way possible. You had these people who had these apartments and they were ended up... But those were like the dungeons to the office. That was what was being described as these brothels where they were being held in captivity and things like that. It just wasn't like that at all. Ultimately, the men who had written on the board got charged all with promoting prostitution, which is a felony. You mean promoting as an advertising or saying prostitution is a good thing? Traditionally, promoting prostitution has been a charge reserve for people like pimps or madams or whatever you want to call them. People who financially benefit from a prostitution business or from someone else's sex work. That's how the charge has always been used. There are some lawyers who were working on the case and they had done a lot of constitutional work and they said this is the first time they'd heard of this happening anywhere in the United States. But they used it to mean these people had written good reviews for these women online and since they had decided these women were being trafficked, then they were promoting the prostitution of these women by writing good reviews for them and therefore it was a felony. Even if the women were being trafficked, it was still a felony because they had promoted the prostitution of anyone. Financially because they were setting up these apartments but then in exchange they were taking a cut. So that's the two men who owned the apartments were. The majority of the men, the 12 other men that were arrested and now there's been a whole new crop that's also been arrested for the same thing. The majority of those that were arrested were just people who posted to the board. Some of them would meet up about once a month at a pub in town to get beers and talk about things but it wasn't like they weren't like, only one of the men actually ran the board. None of them had a financial stake in the board. Some of them had never even met the other men. A lot of them were just people who had just posted to this board, hey, here's good things about this person. Go see them. So they're pimps in the eyes of the law basically? Yeah. It has a lot of First Amendment implications obviously because these are just people that a lot of them said that we were just writing stories or whatever. Even if they were going to get someone for solicitation or patronizing a prostitute charges you would have to show that they had gone there and actually been there and actually offered money or at least showed up with the intent to do it that they had the money or whatever in their pocket. In this case they don't have to. They just have to say you wrote about it and they can say, well, it didn't actually happen because I was just making up that story and it doesn't matter because you wrote about it and you wrote a good thing and so you're promoting their prostitution. That was interesting in light of one of the kind of bizarre asides in the article or odd little facts in there was that one of the cops investigating it had spent like two years posting on these things. There's a cop who is writing reviews of prostitutes. Yes, and someone did a FOIA request and got them and posted them online. They had a local media outlet but they're the exact same. They're indistinguishable from the ads that got people arrested as promoting prostitution and they had actually been doing this under cover since 2006. Because this board has been around since 2002 or 2003 they had been under cover in some degree following this board and things. They arranged at least two dozen meetings with undercover cops and these Korean women and that's the other thing. They were being held there in sex slavery and for over six months they had known they were there and had gone there multiple times to visit them and had under cover cops pretend to be clients. They say that then they left and made excuses before any activity happened who knows. It's a little bit shady if you really believe that these people were in grave danger or being horribly harmed you wouldn't just be like okay but cool we're going to take another six months to build a case against 12 men who wrote reviews for them because they knew from the beginning the two men who owned the apartments. They had their information from the very beginning of the investigation. Something I wondered about as I was reading the story because the setup as it actually occurred as opposed to sensationalized headlines was relatively indistinguishable from say what happens in Nevada brothels all the time that these women come in and they work and then they leave and there are lots of people who are opposed to that but we don't discuss it as this grand sex trafficking ring and I wonder how much of it is just that these women were Korean that they were foreign and so it played into like if they came here it must have been because they were shipped over in the way that we often talk about people being shipped over and then how much of it plays into odd ideas about women from that part of the world and their agency or lack of it is there a sense that that was part of the story? Oh definitely definitely and the man who ran the board he went by the name the student in Tahoe Ted he actually you know because they had been undercover for years investigating them and they'd have these meetups between area sex workers and people who were frequent reviewers and contributors on the board and it included all sorts of all sorts of white sex workers all sorts of sex workers of all races and also the Korean sex workers that worked in these places and they're also some Thai sort of agencies that are the same in the area and so in these conversations with Ted they had him saying that he thought that they were getting too many Asian girls advertising Asian women advertising on the thing and he didn't want it not because he thought they were being trafficked he specifically said he knew they weren't being trafficked but it attracted law enforcement attention especially the feds because they wanted they always thought that Asian women were being trafficked so that was like years ago but that he had said like a 2009 or something but yeah I mean so that was definitely I think an element of it is that they so what we have is by all appearances we have probably fairly middle age men who don't usually frequent probably don't I'm just guessing but don't prefer their prostitution by picking up on the street which is dangerous for the women and sometimes the Johns too they prefer as they prefer to go on to a board to protect themselves and maybe even to protect the women involved yeah I mean they said they were very respectful I mean as I said again there was definitely like some lewdness but when it came to like talking about what the women did or boundaries and consent and things like that they were very respectful so yeah I mean they a lot of them considered themselves they called it hobbyists is what they prefer to be called not Johns or whatever is hobbyist and they had you know very ongoing years long relationships with some women that they were regular clients of and then they also like to go and visit these new Korean agencies that were in town and right they they paid for sex and they were very respectful and upfront about it and they just wanted a place to be able to sort of do that and it does benefit both them and the women I mean like I said before this is one of the safest ways you get to screen your clients you get to set your own standards of how much you screen them you have an email trail of them so if anything does go wrong heaven forbid there is like you know a paper record of text messages and stuff like that you have security at these apartment building it's just like all these layers of things that actually do help keep people safe and Seattle has a huge problem with sex workers being murdered when they're picked up on the streets too I mean that's like where the Green River killer is but there's been many more than that they have this huge problem with that and that's the kind of thing that they're you know encouraging happening by by ruining things like this that do help keep people safe that's that there's a some line which I'm paraphrasing in your article that says now by cracking down on this activity the most legally safe way of being a prostitute or John but being a prostitute is the most unsafe way of doing it right which is right really kind of perverse and I mean that brings up this question of if this is how we're prosecuting sex trafficking much of the time we might be making prostitution itself more dangerous I think I mean we're definitely because you have you have clients too who are not going to be willing to do these things they're not going to be willing to give their real names they're not going to be willing to give references or use their real phone numbers or anything that it could identify them because now they're going to be you know charge the sex traffickers so you have them unwilling to take these things that do keep the women safe and just to just to conclude this sort of story the women they just talk to and then let go and I you know talked to him months later and I said what happened oh I don't know we didn't keep track and in the one level that's good because a lot of times in what they would have done was maybe arrest them for prostitution or arrest them and hold them in order to coerce them again into testifying but they said they gave them all the option to testify and no one wanted to testify if you look on some of the boards you know some of their names and are being used in their pictures and are like showing up on boards back in LA so by all intents like they just let them go back right back to this life they say it was so terrible but they got all these arrests and they got all these assets from these arrests and they got all the money from all these arrests I think there's this attitude because we desperately we as a society and the cops and the people who oppose this desperately want to strip these women of agency wanted to be you know that they're forced into it and it seems like it's part of there's this broader attitude that you know so I wouldn't want to do job acts and I can't imagine doing job acts and so therefore anyone who does job acts must be doing it against their will and so you see this in prostitution but you can see it in you know it shows up in people arguing against sweatshops in other countries or hell it even shows up in like Uber drivers or stay at home mom you know that the only reason they would do that is because their husband is you know patriarchy and all of that sort of stuff that we just can't lack enough empathy to understand the choices of others and so therefore deprive them of agency yeah I think that's definitely true in your interviews with because you did could you interview some of the cops and lawyers involved with this on the government side yeah did anyone seem to what I mean realize what that they were doing it maybe they didn't know when they went in but said you know this wasn't the worst thing I do want to express remorse because also interesting as I talked to Val Richie who is a king county prosecutor and he was sort of the one spearheading a lot of this and spearheads a lot of sort of similar efforts in that area and you know I asked him about why these people who had been described as these huge traffickers got off with you know permitting and promoting prostitution and he said well you know if we discovered that there was something like force or fraud or anything like that being used but we discovered it was more that they provided a place where prostitution happened and he said things directly like that but then still clung to the idea that what they had done was important and right and it's like it's just I don't know and there's a tragic part to this too because I mean they did if you talk to them they and the thing is that's if you read the police reports I mean if you read the police reports themselves the court documents you can see that yes they don't actually think that what was happening was being was happening but they also still think that they did the right thing because no one could choose that's what they say no one you know exactly what you were just saying no one would have chose this life and you know it's fine maybe it wasn't like they were they were being held there in force but you know they did work long days and it wasn't you know he said like it wasn't any picnic or something like that and it's like well okay I mean a lot of jobs aren't any picnic it doesn't mean that we conduct huge years long stings and there are dozens of people and justly and things like that in order to stop them from existing and then don't even help the people in any way I mean those jobs should exist great what are they supposed to do now if they're here in the country illegally and now I mean just it's it's crazy so then given all that and given how much of your career has been reporting on these issues and how many people you know within sex work can you maybe correct some of our misperceptions like why do if they're not if they're not forced into it they're not enslaved into it why do women who go into sex work choose to do it I mean I think for all a host of reasons for for so many different reasons from you know that some just really do want to do it and like to do it to you know the people who have no other options obviously there's a huge spectrum when we talk about the people like a lot of these Asian women who come from Korea or China or anywhere and you know work in these agencies for a short time as I said you know it's a way where they can come over and make way more money than they maybe would back home without the stigma that would maybe come from someone discovering them doing it back home they can say they're here doing a internship or school or whatever how much money were the women in this particular in the Seattle case making so the $300 an hour was generally this the standard and the people who had the apartment kept a hundred and that was for the apartment and you know the the food and the everything there and the advertising and the screening the clients and everything so and then they took a hundred dollars and the women would keep 200 and that was generally the arrangement I've had a couple friends of I brought this story up to a few friends of mine who are of more of the feminist vein who say that the problem here is that the patriarchy basically teaches these women that this is an okay way of making a living that it's not really volitional that they the problem here is we have to make it the demand side has to be considered unacceptable that the men thinking it's okay to purchase sex is just an example of objectifying women and the patriarchy and so we need to shame that kind of demand side like we've shamed I don't know smokers or other types of things that used to be pretty common in order to fight the problem of sex work so this is one reason why they would say we can let the women go because they are victims of their victims of the demand side which is part of the patriarchy how would you respond to that? That's a huge strain of things there's obviously a lot of divides within feminism there's a group that usually consider radical feminists and they are very opposed to sex work and especially in Europe and places like that in the Scandinavian countries it's very popular to criminalize the interest of sex but not the selling of sex theoretically but you see in those countries that the ways in which you can do sex work are very very prescribed and limited so you can't do it with one or more or two or more people in a place you can't do it with a person making the appointments for you because they'll be criminalized as a pimps still or a trafficker or whatever your clients are going to be criminalized so the cops are still tailing you and still doing this and the clients still don't want to be giving you a real number or actually letting you screen them because they're worried about getting arrested so it just recreates all the same harms yes you might have nominally less women being arrested directly for selling sex but you still believe even arrested for other things then so they can get them to testify against people you still see them falling prey to all the same sort of harms that criminalization of prostitution more generally brings where they're less safe and they are not able to do this in a way that is so I think when people talk about that there's a divergence for arguments that are theoretical at the expense of actual people and what's actually happened people because these people who say this will say we want to help women and it's like okay but you cannot have your way of helping women cannot in actuality harm them and harm underage people and make life worse for them like if that's your manner of helping women it's just I don't know so this is like even if you think that prostitution is an extreme moral harm and if more of that moral harm is on the male side for wanting it since that doesn't seem likely to go away given the world's oldest profession like you should not make it incredibly dangerous and even more harmful to women. They actually did a big study in Ireland where this was the law and or was about to become the law and they were of clients and said will this criminalization of clients of sex or not things make you less likely to do this do this do this and it made very few people say they were less likely to purchase sex. It did make them say they were less likely to do things like give their real names or go to a whatever you know do these various things that make it safer so. You've written about about the moral panic and one of your articles you wrote about how it's like the war on drugs and in the beginning of that one we recovered from this war on drugs well some of us have recovered where we say wow we're just kicking people's doors and we're doing all this crazy stuff based on panics is that something that you're concerned with now with sex trafficking? Yeah because I mean like you see even at these sort of wonky example but like with mandatory minimums and you see this huge push now in so many quarters to end mandatory minimum sentencing and for sentencing reform in general except when it comes to sex crimes. So Rand Paul who's like one of the you know biggest advocates against mandatory minimums and says you'll never vote for mandatory minimums he voted for the 2015 justice for victims of trafficking act which added a 10 year mandatory minimum for people who advertise sex trafficking which is really meant to go after sites like Backpage or Craigslist and things like that and he voted for that law and only one person voted against it and it was not Rand Paul even though he says he's a big advocate and that's just one small example but I think you see that sort of across the board where there are all these ways that we've learned not just libertarians but a lot of people have learned you know about how this is not going to help even if the thing is ultimately bad even if you ultimately think that drugs are bad and people shouldn't do them the way that we have been going about it with this extreme criminal justice approach and not a more holistic approach has been like really detrimental no one is applying that same sort of lesson here because I mean obviously sex trafficking is bad I do not think prostitution between consenting adults is bad but even if you do think that is bad just going after it with this full crazy criminal justice approach that prioritizes getting more people behind bars for longer instead of sort of the underlying causes and problems is not going to help. So this panic seems relatively new I mean that the sex trafficking we weren't talking about this as much 5, 10 years ago is there a reason for that has there been a uptick in the amount of trafficking that might have caused this no not at all if actually if anything the government has lessened its its estimates of trafficking they're still very inflated but it's lessened them by like tens of thousands over the past decade and a half with no explanation people have tried to get worldwide numbers are back no United States and people have tried to get them to be like hey how come there was 80% less trafficking in this one than 5 years ago and just like nothing because the there was actually a GAO the government accountability office report on some of the early trafficking data that the department of justice and various people disseminated and they concluded that it was not reliable it was I'm paraphrasing but the quote was something like because of methodological inconsistencies and the fact that it was all done by one man who did not document his work so like that was the basis of our federal all of our federal trafficking data and knowledge of the first like 5 or 6 years that we had this new law but to back things up in 2000 the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed and that was the first one that set a federal crime of trafficking in persons it wasn't like obviously states had laws against forced prostitution compelling prostitution we had federal laws against indentured servitude and slavery we had the MAN Act which prevents people being transported across state lines for immoral purposes which is still very much used by today but but so in 2000 this law you know first introduced the federal crime of human trafficking and labor trafficking and sex trafficking so that's when really all this started it's been reauthorized every few years since then and with every authorization there has been a lot more grant money for both nonprofits and law enforcement there's been a lot more task forces there's been a lot more federal agencies expanded or given little wings or positions that are going to coordinate and look in at various facets of human trafficking so it's just become this huge sort of thing where there are so many people now dependent on all of this money coming in for trafficking that it just keeps growing and I think that that is really the sort of underline root of it and then you know when those people go to the media I mean obviously stories like this are very salient and very you know people want to write reporters want to write about them so it's spread like wildfire but that's really been in the past you know the late since 2010 or so maybe How can we then I guess rhetorically or strategically move things in a better direction with this especially given that I mean America is a profoundly puritanical society both on the right and to an extraordinary degree on the left and that just the very act of talking about this stuff or I mean you recently there's like basically amount to do a hit piece written about you and the federalist I think it was that you know that the very fact that you're discussing the numbers you're looking into the you know the way that the data was gathered what the crimes actually look like like makes you this evil person who condones the enslavement of children like how do we given that strong cultural bias against even examining this stuff closely how do we start pushing back against the over-criminalization and the runaway prosecution okay so two things first of all I think you know a lot of people in this country as puritanical as we are are not necessarily against legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution between consenting adults I mean they were showing that in polls it's changed now more it's trended down again recently I think because of a lot of this conflation but in the 90s and early 2000s it was pretty majorities of Americans I think supported decriminalization or prostitution which is why you started to see I think some of these anti prostitution activists really I mean there's actually documents from some of these groups back then that were saying like we need to start framing this as sex trafficking so that we can get people to be against it I think that has happened a lot so I think one thing it is always to make sure to distinguish between you know things but distinguish what we're talking about when we talk about sex trafficking and prostitution and sex work and things but from a rhetorical standpoint I think that it's important to emphasize that you have the same goals as people that you are also interested in you know in helping victims of sexual exploitation and that that is you know among the foremost of like your goals I mean I'm very interested in helping adult sex workers and their clients and not be persecuted by the state but I'm also very interested in helping women and children or people of any gender who are being you know who are in prostitution and don't want to be or in the sex trade don't want to be and I think it's important to emphasize that and when you have these activists who say like well you know talking about the numbers at all is who cares you know or whatever or well so what if this operation doesn't get as many people as they say it did at least it's raising awareness and stuff and I think you need to bring it back to the fact that they are actually the ones that are then hurting victims with this strategy because we don't have endless money and resources and attention and law enforcement capabilities to fight this thing what what limited you know if the problem is really as big as they say and as urgent as they say and we have so few resources as they say and we are using them to arrest adult sex workers we are using them to spend years investigating people who post prostitution ads online the FBI does this huge annual singled operation cross country which might actually just our most our April issue of reason I had a cover story about that and it's supposed to be a big you know underage sex trafficking saving victims of it and they ended up maybe arresting five people on federal charges only two of them had to do with underage people and both of them had just been driving them and in the meantime they arrest like hundreds and hundreds of adult sex workers and then they arrest hundreds of men on solicitation charges and things like that and they're they're spending so much time and money that they're saying is going to victims by doing this and so when you're defending these sort of inflated numbers and the moral panic they cause and when you're defending this sort of well at least if it's doing something it's going to help like you are taking away from the things that really would help victims and what what they really need is better you know better social services more places um sorry to bring this back to us before about who people are who are in prostitution who victims are the federal government does actually have a lot of good data on this they just don't like to publicize it and when you look at the people that are in that are under 18 that are involved in prostitution a huge number of them have been in child protective services um a lot of them are runaways there's a disproportionate amount of black and lgbt youth and people of youth of color and just low income family dysfunctions a lot of them have had abuse in their past or neglect um a lot of them have drug habits but there was this DOJ report from last year and it said that sex trafficking or or whatever you know their involvement in the sex trade it just said was the least or one of the least of their problems is what they did all these they did um interviews with like three different agencies that work exclusively with underage sex trafficking victims the salvation army and two others and and that's what they said like these people needed places to stay and often they couldn't get into shelters because if you had a criminal record you couldn't get into a shelter and a lot of them had criminal records because they'd been arrested for prostitution in order to save them from it before um a lot of them were returned to child protective services even if they'd run away three and four times who knows what was happening but you know a lot of them reported abuse from the people that they were living with so this method of just like taking them, putting them in jail sending them back to where they come is not helping but we're spending all of our money and time giving cops more money to do that instead of giving money two things that could actually like give them material resources and help them get out of these situations