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  • 2012-02-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Do Prostitutes Flock to the City The Super Bowl is Held Every Year? (en)
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  • According to widely-believed lore, each year the city hosting the Super Bowl is inundated by an influx of prostitutes intent upon partaking of the big bucks brought to that town by hyped-up football fans looking for action well beyond that provided on the gridiron. As each annual Big Game approaches, the rumor surfaces anew that an unbelievably large number of circuit girls are poised to descend upon that hapless burg, with sometimes as many as 100,000 ready and willing hookers asserted to be on their way: Example: [KEPR-TV, February 2012] It's a logical premise: many fans who turn up for the Big Game are long on cash and short on inhibition, and prostitution thrives on both the plenitude of the one and the relative lack of the other. However, the facts don't conform to the hypothesis. While prostitution may take place in Super Bowl host cities during the week of the Big Game, that vice exists in those locales at other times too, and data confirming the presence of thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe even one hundred thousand or more freshly-arrived ladies of the evening in the Super Bowl host city is lacking. Nor is there substantive evidence that large numbers of sex workers are involuntarily trafficked to the area of that event. As Kate Mogulescu, founder and supervising attorney of the Trafficking Victims Advocacy Project at the Legal Aid Society, wrote just before the 2014 Super Bowl: The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women referenced in the preceding passage noted that: Numerous commentators covering this legend have observed that the spread of exaggerated numbers surrounding the Super Bowl and sex trafficking may end up hindering attempts to address real issues concerning the latter: Super Bowl host cities that have braced for the arrival of legions of out-of-town prostitutes tend to discover that the law enforcement manpower expended on this front could have been put to more effective use elsewhere. For example: It is undeniable, of course, that prostitution takes place in and around the environs of each year's Super Bowl, and that some of that activity tragically involves coerced sex trafficking of minors and women, but on a scale of zero to legions (i.e., 10,000 and upwards), the numbers reflected in news accounts are far, far closer to the low end of that spectrum. Typically, the number of persons reportedly interdicted for sex trafficking-related crimes in FBI Super Bowl operations (even though those operations may encompass several states over a two-week period, as they did in 2014) falls in the dozens rather than the thousands, and those numbers don't factor out the locals who took advantage of a major event occurring in their neighborhood rather than importing victims to the area: (en)
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