Human trafficking vs commercial sex industry

I read a statistic online that claims that sex trafficking is a 100 billion dollar industry in the United States.  

As a hobbyists, do you encounter many providers who have pimps, who appear to be underage, or who work at parlors you suspect the women might have little choice in the manner or forced through debt bondage.  

I want to believe the estimate is being confused with commercial sex work profits and there are not that many sex slaves being exploited in the US but I worry.  

Also can you pls tell me if / when you encountered a provider you suspected was a victim of trafficking, how you responded.  

I hope to get some honest answers because if all I hear back it’s “I’ve never encountered it” I’ll know it’s BS.  

I’ve spoken to many men who told me they found themselves in those uncomfortable situations and I want to know how hobbyists respond in that situation.  

Thank you.

I think sex workers are being confused with those in sex trafficking.  

There was and is a lot of work being done to stop sex trafficking, which is great. That being said, I believe housewives who hate prostitution and want to make it illegal are motivated by keeping the price of pussy priceless. They can then keep their dimwitted boyfriends and husbands under control because pussy is priceless. Once you put a price tag on it, they lose power. Also, they don't want to get infected by a disease their boyfriend/husband brings home. On the flip side, there are women who no longer want to fuck their husband, who either don't know how to fuck or the wife is tired of being a cum bag.

Voluntary Participation:

Massage parlors in the United States, the overwhelming majority of women are independent contractors who use 'mama-sans' as bookers. Look at the number of Asian massage parlor busts where the police and press assume the women are trafficked, they are proven not. K-girls in the condo scene from what I've experienced are free to come and go as they please.

Same with the majority of providers on TER and P411, they are independent sex workers.  

Trafficked girls/women:

i would say street-walkers, back page girls, Las Vegas agency girls, would be a higher number of girls that are trafficked. Back in the day when I worked on K Street in DC, you would see in the morning working girls clad basically in nothing walking around with their pimps visibly in the area keeping an eye on them (or people hired to watch them).

I know for a fact that many girls working truck stops are trafficked; forced sex-work, beaten, pimps, etc. How do I know this? Because I'm from a small town near an interstate. My friend runs a hospital and several of my friends are police officers. They tell me all the time of young girls coming into the hospital; beaten and abused. I was and still am shocked. We're a little town in the West, but apparently it is a back-end highway for drug trafficking. I was shocked, but you never know.

Are women and girls being trafficked? Absolutely. Are young girls being trafficked? Absolutely.  

If a guy encountered such a situation, what is he supposed to do? A major purpose of prostitution for men is the discretion and no-strings-attached aspect of the business. Furthermore, just like interfering in an abusive relationship, the woman isn't going to be helpful or she will tell you to mind your own business. In this case, for her own protection so the pimp or 'handler' doesn't beat her for causing trouble, and probably not wanting the client to get into a bad situation and get hurt.  

Why do people not help?  Look up Kitty Genovese.

Best of luck with the survey. There is no sane guy who will admit publicly to being in such a situation.

-- Modified on 4/15/2020 3:36:03 AM

Not to in any way excuse sexual trafficking, but consider that the sex trade is hardly the only such trade to involve trafficking.   Construction, food preparation, domestic cleaning, etc.  are other fields where people, often undocumented aliens, are coerced into working long hours at often dangerous jobs at sub minimum wage pay.

Looked at that way, the sex work is often seen as the best of the bad lot by at least some women I have spoken to on the matter.

Because I only see ladies on P411 or sugar babes on SA or SB.
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Never used BackPage or dealt with pimps or street walkers.  
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So it really depends on which market segment you are dealing with.  I don't expect I will ever run into an exploitation situation.

I would guess that the vast majority of TER members who stick with "well reviewed TER providers" have never and will never encounter a woman doing this against her will.

 
Now speaking for myself, I grew up on "the wrong side of the tracks" and in my youth being around pimps, hookers, drug dealers etc was simply a fact of life and of course that included women who were hardly doing this of their own free will, but of course most of those pimped out girls got their via drug problems and then had no idea how to get out, which of course is a crying shame, but we are talking about things that happened forty years ago and my perspective was a lot different than it is today. Back then it was just "the way things were"

 
Fast forward to today and yes, of course there are still trafficked, pimped, abused women selling sex mainly against their will, but the percentages are minute and mainly limited to the very few street walkers, truck stop ho's, and other lower end sex workers.  There are also women "Turned out" by their abusive boyfriends, but again that is not an endemic problem in the sex industry as it's more a matter of domestic abuse than human trafficking as most of us define it.  

 
Here is my biggest issue where it comes to supposed "sex slavery" and that's the AMP's and other "parlors" that you speak of, I have "dated" several AMP girls over the years and gotten to know literally hundreds of providers over the years both in and outside of their work environment and I have NEVER met an AMP girl who was anything close to a "sex slave" but I have read reviews where some dumb hobbyist "got the feeling" that a girl that I have known personally and even a couple I was dating were supposedly doing this against her will. These comments were mainly made by well intentioned, but clueless Johns who would ask one of these girls out for a date and rather than tell him that they simply weren't interested they would tell him it was "against the rules" and the guy's ego made him believe that the only reason she wouldn't see him outside of work was because she was being held against her will.

that I was 90% certain had girls being trafficked and I left quickly with the "boss" following me out, yelling at me in Chinese.  If I had been new to the Asian AAMP business models, I would probably not have known, but by the time this happened, I already had seen over a hundred Asian AAMP girls, and knew how the businesses were typically run.  AAMP's are typically set up as a two-girl incall at a two-bed, two bath apartment in a huge complex where neighbors typically don't socialize with each other.  The incall owner is at another location, as is the PO or booker, so there is nothing resembling "management" at the location itself.   The girls are free to come and go as they please, and have a right to pass on a client they don't like and ask him to leave without paying if he's being obnoxious or abusive in their sole discretion, so they are not being forced to do anything with anybody they don't want to see.    

 
Both of the slaver operations I inadvertently walked into were 3-bedroom apartments, with three bedrooms and two baths, and had a "manager" on the premises (usually a man, but I'm told can also be an older woman).  In addition to the manager, there were six girls waiting in the living room, all in lingerie.  None of them looked too happy to see me and nobody smiled.  At this point, I also noticed that the apartment smelled of sweat and body odor, something I had never encountered at an AAMP before, and the premises looked like they had not been cleaned in awhile.  The manager urged me to pick a girl to take into one of the rooms.  At this point, all of the red flags were flying, and I said I don't see anyone I like and turned around to leave.  The manager chased after me, urging me to stay, but started yelling when I kept walking.  I let myself out.  He did not follow me outside.

 
As I replayed this in my mind, I mentally catalogued what made this different from the legit AAMP's I had been to before and made a list:

 
1.  Manager on premises.
2.  Apartment not clean.
3.  Body odor smell.
4.  More girls there than there are bedrooms.
5.  Girls not friendly.   Although I did not get that far, it makes sense that a trafficked girl would not be enthusiastic about being "picked" nor would they give you a session that would encourage you to repeat or ask for them next time.

 
Obviously, knowing what to look for, I did not stay as long at the second one.  As soon as I identified some of these markers, I left.  These were both about nine years ago and in the bay area.  SF eventually set up a task force and cleared out most of the slaver operations that were emulating the AAMP business model, along with storefront massage parlors using sex slaves.  They made a documentary about it which was on about 5 years ago.  

 
With this in mind, there are often reports in the news of sex slave busts that were not really slave operations.  The Asian girls working the legit places have learned that if they claim they were being forced to work as sex slaves, they are usually not arrested and referred to counselling.  This is particularly popular in California and a few other states where they have sanctuary cities that do not deport or arrest hookers claiming to be sex slaves.  Its catch and release because the girls are viewed as "victims."

In my experience -- which involves very many women across the country and in several foreign countries -- I have yet to encounter what I'd consider a trafficked woman who showed any of the several signs of trafficking. I presume this is because I have avoided so-called "fast houses" and AMPs, and restricted myself to women charging at least $300/hour (and up to $600) who were usually independent or from agencies that were known and reputable.
Overseas, many of the girls had boyfriends who'd drop them off at a well-known hotel and I'm sure they qualified as pimps. But the girls seemed to be very much free agents who did what they wanted. How much they shared with their boyfriend/pimp was impossible to know, even if I was interested. Still, that doesn't make them "trafficked" in the sex slavery sense.
Many, many years ago I also frequented whorehouses in Manhattan where there would typically be six or so girls and, sometimes, a manager who was usually a woman. Even then -- which was LONG before the word "trafficked" existed -- there was never a hint of coercion.

Where the informal brothel is not made up of independents, but in no way does it prove or even indicate the girls were there against their will.

 
What it is proof of is that what you walked into was more of a brothel than an AAMP, and it sounds like kind of a low class one at that, but it certainly doesn't prove that the girls were sex slaves.

 
I remember the first sex slave scandal in Atlanta with the Brazilian agencies many years ago, the so called "victim" who started the whole thing was a girl I had seen multiple times and I can guarantee you she was NOT any kind of victim" she was actually a go getter who not only worked at the agency but who worked "on the side" with her best clients at her own home. I was lucky enough to be one of those clients and I rode in HER car, stayed the night in HER apartment, and went out in public with her on multiple occasions, all of this unknown to her agency of course. I don't blame her for crying "victim" when she got busted, but I know for an absolute FACT that she was anything but a sex slave. She had amassed quite a bit of savings and used to ask me all sorts of questions about how she was going to transition from being a hooker when she had saved up "just a little bit more" lol

 
Back to actual AMPs, especially the storefront type, even people who should know better commonly believe these women are FORCED to work long hours, sleep at the spa, and have virtually no private time during their "tours" This is not something they are FORCED to do, I used to date a Korean AMP girl and she worked 7 AM to 10 PM every day but Saturday and Sunday, Saturday she would get off at 9 PM and she didn't have to go back to work until 10 AM Sunday morning, and we spent pretty much every Saturday night together at HER place, which was a very nice apartment about ten minutes from the Spa. She didn't stay at the spa because she was forced to, she did it so she could get an extra hour or so of sleep each night. It turns out the 7 AM was a very busy time of day for the spa as guys would stop in right as the doors open, partly to be the "first of the day" I suppose and partly because they would stop in on their way to work. Personally I wouldn't believe much of what I saw on a documentary over what I have seen with my own two eyes. Documentaries need to be juicy enough to get people to watch them, so of these girls live VERY boring lives. They work hard, save their money, and go back home with seed money to buy a house, start a business or take care of their families. The truth is a lot less exciting than the story the documentaries portray, but it's still the truth never the less.

 
Don't bet me wrong, sex slavery does exist, but the "sex slave" working out of a storefront AMP in St Louis or Tulsa most likely has a very nice life during her time off in her real home in upstate New York or LA. For some reason most of the Asian girls that work in these storefront locations for short stints of three weeks or so usually actually live in either So Cal or NY. I used to stay in contact with several of them and I would sometimes pick some of them up at the airport when they would come back to work after their monthly "vacation"

Few clients want to see a trafficked woman which makes it very easy for us to rationalize certainty that a woman we are seeing isn’t being trafficked. I would avoid going by our subjective impression of whether she’s doing something against her will.  

Instead look for the hallmarks of trafficking : low prices, high volume, skeezy motels, high mobility, youth, cookie cutter ads, etc.  

these two places were later busted for trafficking during the San Francisco "cleanup" and the girls opted to return home rather than be released into the US militates strongly in favor of trafficking in my book.  After a bust, if the girls were not being forced, they ALWAYS opt to stay in the US on catch and release and go to work with another booker.   Not all busts for trafficking are unwarranted.  I'm surprised you would go out on a limb with an opposite and speculative (at least I think you are disagreeing with me, but your headline doesn't jive with your content) opinion having never been there yourself.  I have been in enough brothels to know the girls are trying catch your eye because they WANT your business, not hide in the shadows trying not to be noticed like these girls were.  The vibe in a brothel is completely different.  Classic overreaching.  You don't do it often, but when you do, you go as far out on a limb as your imagination and lack of facts will take you. Lol

I appreciate everybody’s feedback.
And everybody’s comments seem very honest.  
I’m sorry if I come across as angry or bitter.

Reasons 1-4 are NOT indicators of "sexual servitude" Reasons 1 & 4 are just indicators that you are in an apartment based brothel and not an AAMP, Reasons 2 & 3 simply prove you were in a "low rent" brothel, not anyplace either of us would want to be. Where I will grant you are correct is reason number 5, When girls have lost the light in their eyes and they have that dull, half stoned look to them, yes you are correct, they most likely are NOT willing participants by any of definition we would want to use.

 
As for going home after a bust, here we continue to disagree, at least slightly. I have known a few girls who have been swept up in a bust who most definitely were NOT being trafficked, but the experience of being arrested, threatened with prison (empty threats that they might be) and treated like dirt by both LE and the judicial system for something they never considered committing a crime, several of these girls have chosen to return home rather than risk going through the ordeal all over again if they were to be arrested again.

I feel defeated.

could mean something else, but when taken as a whole, they're consistent with the kinds of conditions that have been reported in documentaries on the subject of slaver operations.  I probably would be suspect of number 5 if it were standing alone, that it might just be a girl having a bad day, menstrual  cramps, boyfriend problems, or some other problem that she's unhappy about.   That's why my point was to take everything in context.  If the conditions are there, including a manager who doesn't have an office space, when taken as a whole, makes the whole thing more apparent.  With that said, I did say that at the time, I was only 90% certain, and that's why I hesitated on reporting it myself.  If I was 100% certain, I would have.  You point to the possibility of a dirty, smelly, poorly run brothel, and that is where the ten percent of my uncertainty comes in, but my assessment was proven correct when they were busted.  

You come across "as angry AND bitter."
That was mainly a joke but you left the door WIDE open. LOL.

True some folks on here have sharp elbows, but I don't think anyone meant you to feel defeated, more like corrected; but I saw your query as being in good faith, and it helped to air out a significant question in people's minds about trafficking.

wiki--The prostitution trade in the United States is estimated to generate $14 billion a year.
wiki--A 2012 report by Fondation Scelles indicated that there were an estimated 1 million prostitutes in the U.S.
wiki--It has been estimated that two-thirds of trafficking victims in the United States are US citizens. Most victims who are foreign-born come into the US legally, on various visas. State Department estimated that between 15,000 and 50,000 women and girls are trafficked each year into the United States.
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First two sentences mean the average escort earns $14,000/yr.  (simple math, obviously)
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Third sentence: If two thirds of traffic'd are citizens and 50,000 (worst case) are imports, it means there are 150,000 traffic making $100 billion.  That means average trafficked girl earns $666,666/yr.   (simple math again.)  Seems unlikely.

...and can honestly say that I have never seen or heard anything that would have suggested human trafficking.

Whorehouses in Manhattan?   1890's?    I will not call bullshit on you saying you were there.  Lol

Wow, who knew trafficked was a synonym for chauffeured.

(I'll be generous and take everyone's claims on the numbers as good).

-- Modified on 4/15/2020 10:43:31 PM

numbers crunch shows, your initial hypothesis that its a $100 billion industry just in the US is unsupported by any credible source.  I found a lot of different numbers on various websites ranging from $400,000,000 to $32 Billion.  Most would not stand fast on their numbers and admitted they were estimates, but did not say what those estimates were based on or how they were made.    

 
I  wouldn't say you are defeated, I would just consider that you had some misinformation from the beginning that set you down the wrong path.  There is definitely some trafficking in the US, but not on the scale you are describing.  

OVERLY simple math, obviously. $14 B / 1 M = $14,000 ignores the rest of the people in the supply chain (bookers, agencies, ...) as well as her costs (hotels, ads, ...). More simply, just increase the denominator to include everyone on the provider side and repeat to the calculation.

With a US population of a little over 331m and women across all ages accounting for 50.8% of the US population, that equals 168m women.
• If there are 1 million sex workers, and we assume that like trafficking, two-thirds are US citizens, there are 666,666 US citizens that are sex workers. This means that 0.4% of the US citizen female population is a sex worker (not counting those that are involved but not providing)  
• In other words, 1 out of every 250 women you meet in everyday life (not the hobby life) across all age groups from infant to great grandmother are potential sex workers.  
• As of 2010 there were 6.8m women in the working in the leisure and hospitality industry (restaurants, fast-food, bars, hotels, etc.) or one sex worker for every one of these women.

While there are some providers over 50, if we remove women under 15 and 50 or older from the 168m, that leaves 76m women  
• At 1m sex workers and we still assume two-thirds or 666,666 are US citizens, that means 1.32% or basically 1 out of every 76 women you randomly meet in everyday life between 15 and 50 who are US citizens are sex workers.

Basically, the estimates like a lot of statistics on “bad things” are designed (i.e. inflated, vague and unsupported) to instill fear and a sense of urgency to basically have our government agencies spend too much money on a problem that is not as large as they say. Yes, sex trafficking is not a good thing and anyone who forces women into this should be held accountable for the crime of trafficking.

Plenty of cases of nanny's, house maids, and day laborers that are being trafficked and are on the whole largely ignored.

Now fast forward about 100 years and you'll be right. You might enjoy the change.

Yes it exists. Yes it is horrid. Anyone saying otherwise is ether lying or completely ignorant. I know very well a woman that was a victim of human sex trafficking. It messed her up. If you even remotely suspect a woman is trafficked don't patronize that establishment. If you know she is trafficked get her help.

 
That being said the statistic are often distorted beyond use. They often count every sex worker with a SO as being trafficked. They count every agency sex worker, every non-legal brothel sex worker, every independent sex worker with a driver, security, gooker or other employee as trafficked. There is a huge difference between having a boss or an employee than being a sex slave. They would consider my wife as trafficked even though sex work was her idea and I payed all the bills when she worked as a sex worker.

 
Also there is issues with where most of the information is collected. It is collected often in booking stations and jails where claiming being trafficked often has legal benefits.

 
Third some of the organizations doing the research have been caught using poor practices. One researcher who is often quoted was caught making it all up in the past yet is still employed in sex work research. Why would they taint their research? Money. Groups doing research get more grants based on painting sex work as trafficking as much as possible.

 
That being said trafficking as I also said does happen. I am close to was a victim of it. I met her outside of the hobby after she escaped the situation. She still suffers from PTSD years after.

 
But I have come across in my hobby career that comes close. I met her as a client calling an agency she was working for at the time. She left that agency as she was lied to about the amount of work he could get her. I followed her as a client. A few days after she left while I was just wrapping up after a session her old pimp called her she had me listen in. He threatened her physical wellbeing if she didn't come back and work for him.  

 
I at this point spoke up, and told him I heard what he said and I would come after him if any harm befell her or if I found out he even contacted her again. As far as I know he never contacted her again a year later he was arrested for pandering after another woman he mistreated turned on him. It couldn't have happened to a nicer low rent pimp.

 
It wasn't exactly sex trafficking as she was willing. She was not forced. But threatening her like he did means he was willing to go there. He tried. I hope he didn't have any women working for him under threats of violence, but at least two women I know of was threatened by him. I heard rumors he had one person beat up after she allegedly stole from him but the woman who he had supposably beaten never collaborated the story.