More than 100 million people all over the world will watch the Super Bowl on Sunday. Most of them will be wholly unaware of the dirty secret that underpins major sporting events such as the Super Bowl: that children are trafficked into the host city and sexually exploited.
Why is the Super Bowl, and other major sporting events, such a magnet for those who traffic in the sexual abuse of children? It is simple, really. Pimps know that there will be a large concentration of people in the host city. So, it is an opportunity for them to move the abused children closer to a larger concentration of consumers and increase their profits.
Knowing that the Super Bowl draws child sexual abusers, the FBI launched an 11-day operation in 2019 in the days before the game in Atlanta. Nine children and nine adults were rescued from sex traffickers. There were also more than 150 people arrested, some of whom were traffickers and 34 of whom had sought to pay for illicit sex with children. The youngest child rescued was 14 years old.
Before last year’s Super Bowl, local law enforcement in Florida made 47 arrests and rescued 22 victims.
Florida authorities are also gearing up to fight sex trafficking at this Sunday’s Super Bowl. Their focus in the lead-up to the game is prevention. They are inspecting adult entertainment venues to ensure they are complying with Florida’s rules about posting information about human trafficking. They are also working with ride-sharing companies to train them to recognize the signs that someone is a victim of sex trafficking. Florida has increased its awareness campaign, with two counties declaring January as Human Trafficking Awareness Month, and created multiple task forces to address the issue.
“Hosting the Super Bowl in Florida for the second year in a row is a huge win for our state’s economy and tourism, but as we learned from Super Bowl LIV, traffickers will look to exploit this event to advance illegal enterprises at the expense of innocent victims,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said of this year’s event.
The epidemic of child pornography, images of child sexual abuse, drives the sexual abuse of children and motivates offenders to act. The nation’s clearinghouse for identifying children depicted in images of sexual abuse, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has reviewed hundreds of millions of these horrific images to try and identify the child victims.
Tackling the epidemic of child pornography will require more resources for the investigators and prosecutors who work on these terrible cases. Congress allocates these resources, and the president has a large role in shining a spotlight on the problem, which also affects how federal investigators and prosecutors target these offenses.
The Super Bowl is not unique. These children are being abused every day of the year, but an event like the Super Bowl draws a crowd, and sex traffickers seize the opportunity it affords. Both boys and girls are victimized by sex traffickers, and the most vulnerable are children who have already suffered sexual abuse, children in foster care, and children who have run away or had contact with the juvenile justice system. If we focus more on combating child pornography and keeping children out of vulnerable situations in the first place, maybe more children can be rescued before next year’s big game.
Francey Hakes (@FranceyHakes) is a former state and federal prosecutor who previously worked in the Department of Justice and practiced in front of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. She co-hosts the crime podcast Best Case Worst Case.
