Senate Report on Backpage.com: Background Section

The Senate report on Backpage accuses the company of knowingly facilitating child sex trafficking. The accusation depends in part on claims that child sex trafficking is a big problem online in the U.S. and has increased due to online advertising for sexual services. The Background section of the report makes these claims and provides a number of citations in support of the claims. However, none of the citations provide factual evidence that support the claims, as I show below.

The Senate report can be downloaded here: Senate Backpage report

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Claim: "In 2013, social scientists estimated that there were as many as 27 million victims of human trafficking worldwide, including 4.5 million people trapped in sexual exploitation."

There are two different figures here from two different sources. The "27 million victims of human trafficking worldwide" comes not from "social scientists," but from U.S. Dep't of State "Trafficking in Persons Report 2013", which got the figure from a single person named Kevin Bales, who made the estimate in the 1990s. According to Ronald Weitzer, "Bales says the figure is 'a good guess,' but offers no evidence or even a rough idea of how he arrived at it." [1]

Glenn Kessler of the Fact Checker blog at the Washington Post awarded four Pinocchios to anybody who quoted Bales' estimate. "The estimates may be done in good faith, so these Pinocchios are for all-too-credulous acceptance of them."[2]

The Senate report cites the Polaris Project for the "4.5 million people trapped in sexual exploitation" claim. The Polaris Project web site says it came from the ILO. The ILO has some credibility, but their estimate is extremely controversial. Quoting Weitzer again, "The glaring evidentiary problems are so severe that even rough estimates of the worldwide magnitude of this hidden enterprise are destined to be fatally flawed."[3]

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Claim: "In the United States the percentage is much higher; over eight in ten suspected incidences of human trafficking involve sex trafficking."

This comes from a DOJ report. According to the report, "Data in this report are from the Human Trafficking Reporting System (HTRS), which was designed to measure the performance of federally funded task forces."[4] In other words, it's was data collected to provide oversight on the use of federal funds by the law enforcement agencies that received the funds. It was not designed to estimate the proportion of sex trafficking in overall human trafficking in the U.S. Any such estimate was beyond the scope of the report and would most likely have been impossible to produce.

Claim: "... more than half of all sex trafficking victims are 17 year or younger." This comes from the same report. Again, the report doesn't provide estimates for the U.S. It only describes the performance of a group of task forces.

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Claim: "Last year, the NCMEC reported an 846% increase from 2010 to 2015 in reports of suspected child trafficking--an increase the organization has found to 'be directly correlated to the increased use of the Internet to sell children for sex.'"

Claim: "Children who run away from home are particularly vulnerable to [child sex trafficking]. In 2015, one in five endangered runaways reported to the NCMEC was likely a child sex trafficking victim."

Claim: "... most child sex trafficking currently occurs online."

The first two claims cite Yiota Souras of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as the source. An 846% increase over five years averages to a 53% increase per year. In 2011, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline had a 64% increase in calls over the previous year, with Texas the second most common source of calls. A Texas state commission concluded that the most likely cause was an increase in education and outreach, not an increase in trafficking.[5] Staca Shehan of the NCMEC has acknowledged that the number of reports to the NCMEC could have increased because of better reporting, rather than an increase in trafficking.[6]

The "one in five" claim was calculated from cases reported to the NCMEC. It is not a national figure based on a study of runaways across the U.S. Shehan has stated "It is not from empirical research. It is literally a trend that we see, but you could not extrapolate to say this is a nationwide statistic."[7] The 2002 NISMART study, which was the last of the DOJ NISMART studies to try to estimate the number of runaways who engaged in sexual exchange, estimated that less than 1% of runaway/throwaway children under the age of 18 "engaged in sexual activity in exchange for money, drugs, food, or shelter."[8]

The third claim comes from an affidavit filed by Shehan in a court case involving Backpage. But as we've already seen, neither Shehan nor anyone else at the NCMEC knows how much child sex trafficking is occurring online.

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Claim: "Online advertising has... contributed to the explosion of domestic sex trafficking."

The research report cited only says that the sex market has expanded. It doesn't give evidence about online advertising's role in sex trafficking.[9]

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Claim: "Sex trafficking has thrived on the Internet..."

The report cites three sources for this. The first is the Urban Institute study previously cited.[10] The study says that the Internet has helped expand the sex market, but it doesn't say what effect this has had on trafficking.

The second source is a DOJ report that actually does make claims about child sex trafficking and the Internet. However, it does so in the context of the urban myth that child sex trafficking increases during major sporting events. It offers no evidence to support its claims and cites no sources.[11]

The third source is a report that quotes Ernie Allen: "... online classified ads make it possible to pimp these kids to prospective customers with little risk." At the time that he said that, Allen was president and CEO of the NCMEC. Like everyone else at the NCMEC, he wasn't in a position to know how much pimping was occurring on online. Neither he nor the report's author give any evidence that would support Allen's statement.[12]

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The citations can be divided into two groups. The first group consisted of credible sources that offered evidence, but it wasn't evidence that supported the Senate report's claims about child sex trafficking in the U.S. The second group of citations made statements that agreed with the Senate report's claims, but had no evidence. None of the citations had evidence that supported the claims about trafficking in the U.S. made in the Background section of the Senate report.



[1] "New Directions in Research in Human Trafficking" by Ronald Weitzer, in "The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2014
[2] www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/24/why-you-should-be-wary-of-statistics-on-modern-slavery-and-trafficking/?utm_term=.e085ef9d8675
[3] Same as [1]
[4] "Characteristics of Suspected Human Trafficking Incidents, 2008-2010" by Banks and Kyckelhahn, DOJ 2011
[5] The Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force Report 2012
[6] www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/02/are-there-hundreds-of-thousands-of-sex-trafficked-runaways-in-the-united-states/?utm_term=.c80c7d212bdb
[7] Same as [6]
[8] "National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Throwaway Children", Hammer et al, DOJ 2002
[9] "Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major U.S. Cities", Dank et al, Urban Institute 2014
[10] Same as [9]
[11] "The National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction: A Report to Congress", 2010
[12] "Human Trafficking Online: The Role of Social Networking Sites and Online Classifieds", Michael Latonero, 2011