413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

individuals we wanted to interview. For the interview protocol, we needed to ensure that the questions
were asked in a way that were not offensive, but would still elicit informative responses. We decided the
questions would focus solely on the underground commercial sex market and we used business-related
terms. For example, when interviewing a pimp or trafficker, the term “employee” was used to describe the
individual that worked for that person, as opposed to using “woman,” “victim,” or “sex worker.” The
interview protocol included
1. demographic characteristics;
2. how the respondent became involved in the UCSE;
3. the respondent’s UCSE market involvement prior to arrest (age, means, and timing of initial
engagement, type of involvement);
4. nature and types of UCSE activities which include clients, recruitment locations and employee
characteristics, relationship with employees, number of employees, location and volume of
activities and transactions, revenue, financial arrangements, use of technology, contact and
commercial activities with other actors in the UCSE, cross-border activities, law enforcement
involvement, and perception of volume of UCSE in own city and relative volume compared to
other US cities; and
5. non-identifying social network data which includes information on individuals who were
considered colleagues and those considered competitors.
Please see appendix H for a copy of the protocol. We solicited feedback on the protocol from several
subject matter experts and adjusted the questions accordingly.
One important note to highlight: We learned early on from stakeholders that there was very little child
pornography sold for profit within the United States, so many of the questions regarding business
practices would not apply to any respondents who were child pornographers. As a result, we created a
separate section within the protocol that asked questions about the use of technology and networking. We
included these questions as part of the larger protocol in case we spoke to any respondents who did profit
from child pornography sales.
As we were developing the protocol, we compiled an offender database that included individuals who had
been convicted of UCSE-related crimes at both the state and federal levels and who were currently
incarcerated or on probation for one or more of these charges. We were informed at the onset of the
project that we would need to present a list of names of individuals we would like to interview to the
Federal Bureau of Prisons and to each state’s department of corrections, if we were granted approval to
conduct interviews with these individuals. Because there are a limited number of individuals who have
been convicted of human trafficking in the United States, we expanded our search to include the federal
charges listed in appendix C, in addition to charges used by county and state prosecutors, such as
pimping, pandering, and maintaining houses of prostitution. For respondents charged with prostitutionrelated
offenses, our strategy was to approach prostitution court diversion programs and/or probation
departments in each of the eight cities to help us identify individuals willing to speak about their
involvement in the UCSE. As a result, we were not required to generate a list of potential respondents who
had been convicted on prostitution-related charges.
We started our list by searching for online published news stories and press releases on individuals who
were arrested, adjudicated, and/or convicted on UCSE-related charges in the eight cities and their
surrounding metropolitan areas. We reached out to the Human Trafficking Clinic of the University of
Michigan Law School, since they had recently launched the Human Trafficking Law Project (HTLP), a
database that documents cases of human trafficking in the United States. We also used our subscription to
CourtLink to gain access to court documents for these cases. 23 Lastly, we asked stakeholders in each of the
eight cities to suggest potential respondents who were convicted on UCSE-related charges. Our final
database consisted of 298 men and women from the eight cities of interest, convicted at both the federal
and state levels, and located in facilities across the country.
23 CourtLink includes court documents from court cases in the United States (local, state, and federal; civil and criminal). We
received a subscription to CourtLink pro bono from Lexis Nexis.
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