413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

information about populations that have been trafficked 10 or are at risk for human trafficking to derive an
accurate estimate of the problem. 11 However, weaknesses and inconsistencies in the methods and data
used prohibited the creation of a reliable estimate. The study found that estimates of the minimum
number of victims of trafficking in the United States vary considerably. National data collection and
survey studies produce a median estimate of the minimum number of victims each year as low as 3,817
victims, whereas the median estimate of the minimum number of victims produced by economic
modeling studies was as high as 22,320 (Farrell et al. 2010).
Human trafficking was only recently classified as a crime in the national Uniform Crime Report (UCR)
crime-reporting program in January 2013. As such, up until recently, local law enforcement lacked a
standard method for reporting human trafficking arrests and investigations. 12 Even when victims are
identified, their cases often do not progress through stages of the criminal justice system to be counted in
government statistics because victims who are traumatized or are fearful of retaliation by their traffickers
may be reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement investigations (Antonopoulou and Skoufalos 2006;
Clawson et al. 2003; Small et al. 2008). Additionally, state enforcement of anti-human trafficking laws
often do not match federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) laws or enforcement methods,
resulting in many trafficking cases prosecuted as lesser, more familiar charges, such as pandering.
Prosecuting and proving an adult sex trafficking case is also difficult and dependent on several factors,
including the prosecutor’s willingness to apply anti-trafficking statutes and the trafficked individual’s
willingness to identify as a victim and testify against his or her trafficker (Farrell et al. 2010).
Taken together, these studies had important implications for the current research design. First, they
suggested that a bottom-up approach to estimating the underground commercial sex economy would fail
in a majority of the counties in the United States due to a lack of knowledge about the definition of sex
trafficking. Second, these studies illuminated the reality that official data collection on human trafficking
arrests or prosecutions is unreliable since a) it represents the tip of the iceberg for a largely hidden crime
and b) it is not collected systematically. This study employs an entirely new approach at estimating the
prevalence of the underground commercial sex economy.
10 Studies limited to those studies that met the federal definition of severe forms of human trafficking, according to the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act.
11 Data was also disaggregated by type of trafficking and venue (such as households, brothels, and hotels). For over 80 percent of all
identified venues, no systematic sources of information could be found.
12 The exception to this was the Human Trafficking Reporting System (HTRS) designed and operated jointly by researchers at
Northeastern University and Urban Institute. HTRS collects systematic, detailed incident-level information on investigations into
potential and confirmed cases of human trafficking undertaken by the 42 Bureau of Justice Assistance-funded human trafficking
task forces across the country.
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