Moral panic about sex work leads to law enforcement practices that reach far beyond anyone engaged in or with erotic labor. The latest example comes from San Diego County, California, where cops are putting up a creepy surveillance tower under the auspice of stopping sex sellers and sex buyers from meeting.

The prostitution surveillance tower, stationed along National City’s Roosevelt Avenue, will record video of anyone who happens to be in the area.

Normalizing Warrantless Surveillance

A supporter of the surveillance tower told a local CBS affiliate that it will help reduce prostitution by recording the license plate numbers of people who enter the area to pick up sex workers.

Schemes to catch people who want to pay another consenting adult for sex are a waste of money and manpower and a violation of privacy, free association, and bodily autonomy, of course. But even if you think that punishing prostitution customers (or sex workers themselves) is a swell idea, it’s hard to see how the surveillance tower makes any sense.

You can’t charge someone for simply picking another person up off the street, even if police think the person on the street looks like a sex worker. Even if money visibly exchanged hands—well, it’s not a crime to give someone cash. Unless the entire sexual exchange happens right in front of the cameras, it’s hard to imagine on what basis cops could possibly make any charges stick.

Besides, the tower is very visible and local media have been publicizing it. Smart sex workers and their customers will simply move to another, less visible area. If the surveillance tower has any impact at all, it will be to drive prostitution from one part of the city to another. That’s it.

It seems clear that the idea here isn’t actually cracking down on prostitution. It’s just a way for authorities to look like they’re doing something about sex trafficking while further normalizing the idea of conducting broad, warrantless surveillance of everyone.

So Many Sex-Trafficking Myths

Local reporting on the new surveillance tower has been heavy on human trafficking myths and dubious statistics. Citing a group called The Ugly Truth, Fox 5 San Diego suggested that “there are over 3,000 to 8,000 sex trafficking victims in the county each year.”

And on what data does The Ugly Truth base this? Its website doesn’t say. But considering that that’s vastly more victims than we see in trafficking arrests across the whole country in a year, and considering the fact that “sex trafficking stings” in California and elsewhere routinely turn up few or no victims, I’m going to guess this data is bogus, if it exists at all.

The Ugly Truth’s website also states that there are “approximately 18,000 victims in the U.S.” If we take that at face value (and again, it’s dubious), that would mean that around 17 to 44 percent of all U.S. trafficking victims are in San Diego County. Why, it’s almost as if these numbers are completely made up…

Such sketchy figures are par for the course when it comes to activism and reporting about sex trafficking.

Fox 5 also claims that the “the average age of entry into sex trafficking is 16” and that prostitution is “an $800 million industry locally.” It does not cite any sources for these statements.

Claims like these tend to be based on shoddy studies put out by anti-prostitution activists and from groups whose funding depends on proving that sex trafficking is a major issue. For instance, there’s a persistent claim that the average age of entry into prostitution or the average age at which someone becomes a trafficking victim is somewhere between 13 and 16. Here’s what sex worker Maggie McNeill told Reason about this “fact” back in 2014:

There’s a researcher named Melissa Farley who does an awful lot of these kind of studies to provide numbers for the anti-prostitution people. And on her site she traced this supposed number of average of 13 to several old studies which all drew back to a study done here in LA actually in the early 80’s—in ’82. And that study found the average age of entry for underage sex workers—not for all sex workers, but only for underage ones—was about 16. In a different part of the study, they listed 13 as being the average age of first sexual contact. First kiss, first groping in a car, first whatever. Farley seems to have conflated the two numbers to represent that 13 as being the age not of first sexual contact, but of first accepting money for it. Even so, she still was only claiming that that was the age of origin for underage sex workers. Normal distortion, the gossip game syndrome, has changed that from underage to average of all.

Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post has fact-checked many statistics like these, systematically dismantling claims about the average age of entry into prostitution, the revenues generated by sex trafficking, human trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border, and the number of total trafficking victims and child trafficking victims. These articles are a bit old by now, but common claims about sex trafficking are still rooted in the same shoddy data Kessler started tracing nearly a decade ago, so I highly recommend checking out his work.

The FBI Goes to Comic Con

Thankfully, there seem to be fewer nonsense statistics about sex trafficking in the media now than a decade ago, when trafficking panic was reaching a peak. But coverage of the National City surveillance tower serves as a good reminder that debunked myths are still out there—and still being used to justify police antics that otherwise might creep people out.

And while sex trafficking panic is arguably less omnipresent now than it was a decade ago, its press coverage should remind us how institutionalized this panic has become.

Authorities overseeing old-school vice stings routinely call them “human trafficking operations” or “sex trafficking stings” now, and reporters and people on social media just casually parrot this language. See, for instance, a recent announcement from Caflironia Attorney General Rob Bonta, who alleged that “sex traffickers capitalize on large events like Comic-Con to exploit victims” (never mind that these sorts of claims around big events have been debunked again and again) and bragged that “an investigation by the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force” led to “14 individuals [being] arrested.”

Local, national, and even international media have run with Bonta’s framing in their headlines. “14 Arrested at Comic-Con In Anti-Human Trafficking Sting,” NBC reported. “Fourteen arrests in undercover sex trafficking sting at San Diego Comic-Con convention,” Sky News said.

If you read a few paragraphs down into Bonta’s press release, you’ll see that no sex trafficking or labor trafficking arrest resulted from this trafficking sting. The 14 people arrested were picked up for trying to pay another adult for sex. That other adult, however, turned out to be an undercover cop.

The FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service assisted in these efforts.

This is the sort of vice sting that cops have been doing from time immemorial—and which many people started seeing as a waste of taxpayers’ resources when it was done simply to arrest adult sex workers or their would-be clients. So now, authorities dress up their prostitution stings in the language of stopping sexual exploitation and slavery.

In this case, authorities also pretended to be prostitution clients and contacted sex workers. But instead of calling this what it is—a sex worker sting—they say they’re recovering “potential victims of trafficking.” If you frame all sex workers as potential trafficking victims, then you can call luring them to police under false pretenses a rescue mission, even if all that happens once they’re in custody is they get “offered services.” (That is, they get the phone numbers of some local charities.)

And while it’s unclear if the “victims” here were arrested, this isn’t uncommon in these sorts of operations, with police justifying it by saying they need to arrest them in order to save them.

The Comic Con operation did find one 16-year-old selling sex. (A minor selling sex is legally considered to be a sex trafficking victim, even if there is no trafficker.) Helping minors who are selling sex—whether they’re actually being “trafficked” or not—is a good goal, of course, and people will point to this one teen as evidence hat the whole operation was a success. But arresting would-be sex buyers had nothing to do with finding this teenager; you didn’t need to do one to do the other. And is the best way to help teenage sex workers really to terrify them in a sting and then turn them over to child welfare agents? Shelters and social services for victims—teen or adult—seem like a much more effective and humane approach.

More Sex & Tech News

• The Department of Justice is suing TikTok, claiming the company has violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Much of the complaint turns on the idea that TikTok should magically know whether any user is under age 13, even when users lie about their age or sign in with credentials from another website. The Justice Department also alleges that TikTok collected too much data on users it knew were under 13, and it objects to the fact that the company wouldn’t delete minors’ accounts upon parental request unless parents certified under penalty of perjury that they were in fact the users’ parents.

• In a new report titled Abortion in the USA: The Human Rights Crisis in the Aftermath of Dobbs, Amnesty International shares stories from pregnant women in states where abortion is banned.

• The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Amazon is legally liable for recalling products sold by third parties.

• Some New Jersey lawmakers want to require adult-oriented websites to verify visitor ages. Meanwhile, a measure sponsored by Assemblyman Michael Inganamort (R–Morris) would require computer manufacturers to block porn sites unless a user pays a $20 fee, and to block “any website that facilitates prostitution.”

• Another blow to “net neutrality”: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit “blocked the Federal Communications Commission’s reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge,” reports Reuters. The court had already delayed the rules—which were initially adopted under former President Barack Obama then rescinded by former President Donald Trump—after the commission voted in April to bring them back. The court on Thursday said “it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden’s effort to reinstate the rules,” Reuters reports.

Today’s Image