When you think of the people involved in a sex trafficking case, you likely picture the victim as a young girl or woman from a difficult background and the trafficker as an adult male. While this is possible, it’s only one of the thousands of possibilities. Here’s why it’s important to rid ourselves of these stereotypes and understand the diversity of victims and traffickers alike.
Who Can Become a Victim?
Anyone can be a victim of sex trafficking, regardless of race, age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, citizenship status, family structure, sexual orientation, or other differentiating factors. Victims of sex trafficking are diverse. Common stereotypes do not portray the true diversity of sex trafficking victims. For example, traffickers do not only victimize females. They do not only exploit foreign nationals. They do not only prey on people from low-income situations. Traffickers exploit anyone they can. In 2018, a trafficker in Connecticut targeted vulnerable teenage boys and young men. Traffickers don’t care about a victim’s background. Traffickers care about the ease of exploiting their victim and the monetary gain they obtain from doing so.
Vulnerabilities that Increase Your Risk of Being Trafficked
There are factors that can increase the vulnerability to victimization including recent relocation, substance use, mental health concerns, involvement with the child welfare system, and being a runaway or homeless youth. These factors are considered risks because they are leveraged by traffickers to create dependency. Traffickers seek out vulnerabilities and use them to manipulate their victims.
Additionally, the ease of disguising and hiding one’s identity through social media also poses a risk for youth who are more easily psychologically manipulated because of their developmental stage. In many cases of grooming, the trafficker forms a trusting bond with their victim before either manipulating or threatening them into exploitation. Social media is one of the most convenient and common ways by which traffickers make initial contact with youth. However, social media is merely the platform in which traffickers use, it is not the approach. The approach of traffickers is based primarily on leveraging the victim’s vulnerabilities.
Who Can Be a Trafficker?
Traffickers can be just as diverse as victims as they span all racial, ethnic, and gender demographics. Some traffickers are privileged, wealthy, and powerful, using these attributes against their victims. Michael Mearan is just one example of a trafficker using their position and power against their victims. As a city councilman and attorney, Mearan was thought to be untouchable and abused his power and connections to traffic women. Other traffickers experience the same socio-economic oppression as their victims. Traffickers can work alone or within a network. In many cases, the trafficker has some sort of relationship with the victim, whether the trafficker is a parent or guardian of the victim or otherwise related to the victim, an intimate partner of the victim, or the trafficker groomed or otherwise manipulated and bonded with the victim, oftentimes causing the victim to experience Stockholm syndrome.
It is important to recognize that anyone can be a trafficker. Sex trafficking is often portrayed as a male trafficker exploiting a female victim to a male customer. However, any one of these roles can be filled by any gender. Just as easily, it can be a female trafficker exploiting a male victim to a female customer. If we automatically assume women cannot be traffickers, we are not effectively working to combat sex trafficking, and are likely to miss instances of exploitation.
The Harmful Effects of Stereotypes and Myths
Unfortunately, many popular media surrounding the issue of sex trafficking such as the film Taken or the Wayfair scandal perpetuate misinformation and myths. One such piece of misinformation is that victims are most likely to be kidnapped by a complete stranger. In reality, traffickers often know their victims, whether that be due to a familial or intimate relationship or a relationship built through grooming and manipulation. There are numerous accounts of family members or significant others being the trafficker.
Usually, it is not a case of kidnapping, although that is possible. More so, unlike what is portrayed in the film Taken, even if a case begins with a kidnapping, it is not typical for the victim to be snatched up off the street. Particularly now with social media, traffickers make strategic plans to learn about and groom their victims before exploitation begins. They may begin by connecting with a potential victim on social media, growing a bond that may cause the victim to experience Stockholm syndrome, or otherwise manipulate, scare, threaten the victim into exploitation. In our current digital world, it is less and less common that the trafficker is lurking around a park, waiting to snatch up their targeted victim.
Similarly, the Wayfair scandal caused a lot of misinformation to circulate. While some information that populated the Internet in reaction to the Wayfair scandal was true, much of it was false or misinformed; this was further exacerbated because the theories went viral before any evidence was shown to prove them. One example of misinformation is the many varying statistics on the supposed average age of the victims. Some sources stated the average age was early to late teens, others expressed the average age to be earlier twenties, and so on. For more details on misinformation in the anti-sex trafficking space, check out our blog, Information and Misinformation on Human Trafficking.
Although myths and theories like these are effective in grabbing attention and going viral online, they only harm the efforts to combat human trafficking as they conceal and distract from accurate information that can be used to recognize situations of sex trafficking and recover victims. And if you only think of sex trafficking victims in terms of the common stereotypes—females, runaways, or foreign nationals—you will miss the plethora of other people who may be victimized and exploited.
Interested in learning more about human trafficking? Check out our educational blog series!
Stay connected to Marinus Analytics! Follow us on Linkedin and Twitter.
Do you want to learn more about human trafficking, bring awareness to the issues, or join the fight to end it? Sign up for our FREE Guide to Joining the Fight Against Human Trafficking where we delve into the importance of big data for human trafficking investigations; provide educational resources including books, documentaries, and podcasts; sources to turn to for reliable information; and give you examples of how you can raise awareness and take action no matter your time constraints, comfort level, or skillset.