Podcast on Crimes Against Women
The Conference on Crimes Against Women (CCAW) is thrilled the announce the Podcast on Crimes Against Women (PCAW). Continuing with our fourth season, the PCAW releases new episodes every Monday. The PCAW serves as an extension of the information and topics presented at the annual Conference, providing in-depth dialogue, fresh perspectives, and relevant updates by experts in the fields of victim advocacy, criminal justice, medicine, and more. This podcast’s format hopes to create a space for topical conversations aimed to engage and educate community members on the issue of violence against women, how it impacts our daily lives, and how we can work together to create lasting cultural and systemic change.
Podcast on Crimes Against Women
It’s Not “The Oldest Profession”: The real causes and consequences of sex work
The numbers are staggering, but the stories are even more urgent: sex trafficking thrives where demand goes unchecked and myths cloud our judgment. Today we sit down with human rights attorney Yasmin Vafa, co‑founder and executive director of Rights for Girls, to pull the curtain back on how this market really works—and why centering girls’ voices is the key to stopping it. From courtroom biases that turn victims into defendants to the hobby boards where men casually review the people they buy, we map the hidden infrastructures of exploitation with clarity and care.
Yasmin breaks down the “abuse to prison pipeline” and explains how forced criminality and self‑defense cases trap survivors—often Black girls—in adult courts. We discuss adultification bias, the blurred line between trafficking and prostitution, and language that normalizes harm. Then we go straight to the root: demand. Drawing from the report Buyers Unmasked, we examine buyer attitudes, the role of pornography and entitlement, and why credible buyer accountability programs focus on changing beliefs, not just counting arrests.
Policy is where culture meets consequence. We compare full decriminalization—removing penalties for buying, pimping, and brothels—with the survivor model adopted in places like Sweden and Maine, which decriminalizes the sale of sex while holding traffickers and buyers to account. You’ll hear how fines can fund survivor services, how major sporting events attract sex tourism, and why the “Sex Buying Isn’t A Game” campaign tackles this surge head‑on. Practical takeaways include how to support survivor‑led services, advocate for buyer accountability laws, and bring The Right Track documentary to your community.
If this conversation moved you, subscribe, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and leave a review telling us what policy change you’ll champion next.
The subject matter of this podcast will address difficult topics, multiple forms of violence, and identity-based discrimination and harassment. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult and have listed specific content warnings in each episode description to help create a positive, safe experience for all listeners.
SPEAKER_00:In this country, 31 million crimes. 31 million crimes are reported every year. That is one every second. Out of that, every 24 minutes, there is a murder. Every five minutes, there is a rape. Every two to five minutes, there is a sexual assault. Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is assaulted by someone who told her that he loved her, by someone who told her it was her fault, by someone who tries to tell the rest of us it's none of our business. And I'm proud to stand here today with each of you to call that perpetrator a liar.
SPEAKER_02:Welcome to the podcast on crimes against women. I'm Maria McMullen. Today we confront one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time: sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. Every year, millions of girls and young women are trafficked. Statistics reveal staggering numbers that underscore the scale of this injustice. Behind these numbers are lives shattered by trauma, isolation, and violence. Trafficking doesn't just devastate individuals. It imposes a heavy cost on society, eroding communities, fueling organized crime, and perpetuating cycles of poverty and abuse. I'm joined today by Yasmin Waffa to explore the uncomfortable truth about sex buyers and the demand that drives this industry and why stronger laws and policies targeting traffickers and buyers are essential to accountability. We'll also challenge the myth that decriminalizing prostitution solves the problem. Spoiler alert, it doesn't. Instead, it often leaves survivors more vulnerable and traffickers more empowered. Most importantly, we'll amplify the voices of survivors, their stories, their resilience, and their leadership in shaping solutions. Because when victims are criminalized instead of supported, the system fails twice, by allowing exploitation and then by punishing those who endured it. Learn with us as we unpack these realities, examine what's working and what isn't, and discuss how we can all be a part of ending sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. Yasmin Waffa is an award-winning human rights attorney and the co-founder and executive director of Rights for Girls, a national organization dedicated to ending gender-based violence. Her work centers on the intersections of race, gender, and violence, with a focus on advocating for marginalized girls and young women. Ms. Vafa has driven key legislative reforms at the federal and state levels, resulting in tens of millions of dollars for victim services and increased protections for survivors. She has testified before the United States Senate, state legislators, and international human rights bodies, and co-authored influential reports exposing the systemic criminalization of survivors of sexual violence. Her work and advocacy have been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, ABC News, and other major media outlets. In addition to her advocacy work, Yasmin serves as adjunct faculty for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, where she helps lead the National Judicial Institute and the National Multidisciplinary Institute on Child Sex Trafficking. She is also a founding co-chair of World Without Exploitation, the nation's largest anti-trafficking coalition, representing over 200 organizations committed to ending human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Thank you for having me. It's good to be with you. And our topic today is about sex trafficking, in particular, sex trafficking, sex buying, and the dangers of decriminalization. And you are the executive director of Rights for Girls with emphasis on girls. And I'd like to understand why the focus on girls is so significantly critical, not just in the trafficking movement in general, but from a human rights perspective.
SPEAKER_01:Well, when we first started Rights for Girls more than 15 years ago, there weren't many organizations, particularly in the United States, that had an emphasis on girls and particularly on the issue of girls from a domestic human rights lens. We felt it was really important to center young women and girls here in the United States, their experiences, their lives from a human rights perspective, because in all of the different spaces that we were working in, whether it was youth justice, domestic violence, human trafficking, girls' lives were really invisible. When we were advocating in the juvenile justice space, the emphasis was really on young boys. When we were talking about human trafficking, it was really on foreign nationals. When we talked about domestic violence, of course, the focus was on adult women. And in all of these spaces, girls' lives and experiences were really rendered invisible when they were being very adversely affected by all of these different issues. And so we felt it was really important to start a movement that really centered the voices and experiences of these young girls. And we've come to know that all of these issues are generational and that girls themselves are the experts of their own experiences. At the time, there weren't many organizations that really focused on young girls here in the United States, and certainly not from a human rights lens. Now we're thrilled to see that there's so many other organizations that do take that perspective. But for us, it was really important to take a specific girls-focused lens to all of these different issues. And now, all these years later, we see that there are organizations that focus on girls of color, marginalized girls, and really do focus on that perspective. But at the time there really weren't many. And so now we think it's really important. Several of them don't really take that intersectional perspective looking at those different systems. But for us, it's always been very important to really lift up girls' voices across all of these different issues and spaces.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that makes sense to me. I'm curious, what is the age range of girls that experience sex trafficking?
SPEAKER_01:We've worked with girls as young as nine, and unfortunately, it can be incredibly women who are in their 50s or older. For us, we're typically working with young women in their 20s. We've worked with teenagers as well who've been exploited when they've been 10, 12, 16. So it really varies. But we've worked with service providers here in the Washington, D.C. area who've served very young girls in 9, 10, 12. So it really does vary. But I think again, and I know we'll talk about this more, it comes down to the demand for young girls.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. And we do need to dig into that part of this conversation as well. Can you describe for us the mission of Rights for Girls and the specific work that you and your team do through the organization?
SPEAKER_01:Of course. So our work is really centered on protecting the dignity and rights of young women and girls so that every girl can live a life and live out their full potential without fear of violence or exploitation. And we do a series of different things here at Rights for Girls. We do state and federal policy advocacy, research, training and technical assistance, and coalition building. And a lot of our work really focuses on elevating the voices and experiences of girls and survivors of gender-based violence themselves, whether that's through the federal space or through the state process and through legislative advocacy, testifying, and making sure their voices are heard through different processes, or just making sure that their experiences are reflected in the different policies that we're advocating for, or in the research and fact sheets and reports that we're putting out. And that is really central to the work that we do. We also have a series of judicial institutes and multidisciplinary institutes that we hold throughout the year, where we train judges, child welfare professionals, prosecutors, law enforcement, probation officers, and others on how to recognize and better equip them on how to deal with survivors of child sex trafficking and abuse and to improve their response towards this population so that they're not relying on punitive measures and really improving the outcomes for this population. And there's a whole host of different things that we do at Rights for Girls. We do campaigns and awareness campaigns as well. But our work is really focused on elevating the voices of this population.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I've been on your website and it is very robust. There are a lot of resources, and I've read through some of the reports as well. I encourage listeners to take a look at the website, and we'll mention that again here at the end of the episode. Now, also on that website and throughout the work you do, you note that there are an abundance of myths, misconceptions, and lies about girls and women who are in the sex trade, who are sexually trafficked, or who are sexually exploited, such as through prostitution. What historical and current facts can you share that debunks these untruths?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I think there's just a lot of stigma for individuals who find themselves in the sex trade, whether it's through sex trafficking or sexual exploitation. I think in recent years there's been a lot of emphasis on not conflating prostitution with sex trafficking. There's a lot of emphasis on you're conflating the two. There's a big difference between the two. And yes, there, as a lawyer, there are legal differences between prostitution and sex trafficking. But as many survivors tell us, the line between the two, practically speaking, is very blurry. And there are survivors who will tell us that whereas sex trafficking might be the means, prostitution is the ultimate end. And that practically speaking, many adults in the sex trade first entered the sex industry when they were minors. And so legally speaking, they were child sex trafficking victims. But what happens when those individuals turn 18? Does it automatically become this empowered career choice? Those are really important questions we have to grapple with. And another important consideration is that the buyers cannot meaningfully distinguish whether the people they're soliciting are consent or not. And so it's not as if there's this market for trafficked individuals and consenting individuals, right? This is all happening in the same ecosystem. It's important for people to realize that whereas there might be legal distinctions, an individual in the sex industry can transcend the line between prostitution and sex trafficking many times during the course of a month, a week, and certainly years. And so it's important to understand this is all happening in the same ecosystem and that oftentimes the word choice and agency are very meaningless when, you know, there's only one party who holds all the financial power, social power, and oftentimes physical power. So it's very important for those of us who work in the sexual assault space, the anti-violence space, to really examine what we're talking about when we think of consent in the traditional sense here. And I think we really need to apply that to the sex trade and really do away with some of these traditional tropes around choice and choice feminism when it comes to this issue, because a choice out of no other options isn't really agency. And that's what we've consistently heard from so many of these survivors who virtually all of them have histories of childhood sexual abuse, incest, foster care involvement, extreme levels of aces, adverse childhood experiences. And when you consistently hear the same type of narrative over and over, it makes it very difficult to argue that this was something that people willingly chose. And it was more of an act of survival or a choice out of no other options, and really a means of survival. And that is what we've come to see over the years, and still extreme violence experienced during the course of that time in the industry. And so a lot of the stigma that's attached to the individual who has been prostituted, whether through sex trafficking or through sexual exploitation or prostitution, really ought to be directed to the people who have all of the choice and agency, right? The people who are purchasing them, the people who are profiting off their exploitation. And so that is often what we seek to do is to provide that individual with services and support, argue that they ought not to be punished or criminalized for what amounts to their own survival, and really focus on getting them support and services.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think for the longest time, until organizations like Rights for Girls and others came along, all of this was known as prostitution or people who were prostitutes. And I'd like to explore that a little bit because the adage that prostitution is the oldest profession is something that is a kind of a hanger-on from a bygone era of talking about what sex work actually is and how it occurs, how it's how people are trafficked. So why is referring to prostitution as a profession so demeaning? And how does it disrespect survivors and conflict with efforts to end sexual exploitation?
SPEAKER_01:I think even just that phrase, the oldest profession, is such an interesting term that is just stuck. And I think a lot of people don't even realize that term in and of itself is a colonial construct. So the oldest profession was actually coined by Rudyard Kipling, who is the same writer who wrote The White Man's Burden and Us and Them and the Jungle Book. So he's known as the imperialist poet. And so he was a big proponent of imperialism, the West's kind of conquering of the East. And he actually coined this term in one of his stories called On the City Wall, where he talks about intergenerational prostitution in India and basically uses this as an excuse for why the East could not manage its own affairs. And even this term, in and of itself, it was coined in the 19th century, is a perfect example of a colonial construct. And when people use it, they need to be aware that they are just perpetuating these tropes and really need to understand that in and of itself it's an offensive term. A lot of our indigenous partners will tell us that there is no word for prostitution in their mother tongue because it did not exist as a concept until European colonizers brought it to these shores and to many other nations. It did not exist in many societies. And so it's really important to even unpack some of those terms and terminologies because they're used to kind of perpetrate this type of violence that didn't exist in many cultures and continues to subjugate brown and black women for the profit and pleasure of predominantly white men. And it's important to realize that because it is disproportionately black and brown women who are exploited in the sex trade. And it is overwhelmingly white men of means who are the sex buyers. And we go through all of this data in our reports, we have it all over our fact sheets. And most people who are very in the weeds on the sex trade and sex trafficking are aware of this data. We're talking overwhelmingly, like 74% of sex buyers in Pennsylvania are white men, 75% of sex buyers in Ohio are white men, 73% of sex buyers in Seattle are white men. Again, these are states that have started disaggregating their populations of sex buyers to prostituted people. And so again, this isn't just we're not pulling it out of thin air. This is really what we're seeing. And to use an example from the same jurisdiction in Seattle, King County, in that same jurisdiction where 73% of sex buyers are white men, white people are only 66% of the population. In that same jurisdiction, 44% of child trafficking victims are black children. And black people are 7% of the population, just to give you a sense of that disproportionality. So we're talking about a situation that stems in this country from colonialism, from the slave trade. And so when we use terms like the oldest profession to justify or rationalize this violent industry, we have to understand that there's a reason why people are vested in sustaining this industry. And so I think it's really important to understand that. And terms like sex work and terms that seek to normalize prostitution as a job like any other really do a disservice. And we've had many survivors tell us it wasn't sex and it wasn't work, you know, and to seek to normalize it and sanitize it as a job like any other really is a disservice. And the people who did coin the term sex work were sex industry profiteers, right? They were people with a vested interest in seeking to normalize it like a job like any other. But what other job has the occupational hazards of you know, rape, murder, prostitution has a homicide rate of 200 times that of the normal general population, unwanted pregnancies and forced abortions, and it's incredibly violent. We go into all these stats, we have them on our website, we have them in our reports, and so it's just incredibly demeaning to survivors to pretend like it's flipping burgers or any other type of quote unquote profession.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about survivors now, because there's this criminalization that goes on of women who are forced into sex work, and we need to dive into that. And from everything that you've just told me about this construct of providing a concept that prostitution is some type of profession that's been through the ages, it sounds as if it was set up to create criminals and then punish them for having to do the things that you're asking them to do. So let's just focus on girls and talk about your 2023 publication for the Center on Gender Justice and Opportunity at Georgetown Law entitled Criminalized Survivors Today's Abuse to Prison Pipeline for Girls. Can you help us understand what a criminalized survivor is within a trafficking context?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. So this report was actually an update of our first report called the Abuse to Prison Pipeline, the girls story. And so criminalized survivors was looking at this phenomenon several years out, post the Me Too movement, post Black Lives Matter, post-pandemic, and saying, where are we in terms of the abuse to prison pipeline today? And this concept of the criminalized survivor really arose out of this term that we coined, the abuse to prison pipeline, that really is a term to describe the pathways of gender based violence that fuel the criminalization of girls and predominantly young women and girls of color as a direct result of their victimization. And so a criminalized survivor in the trafficking context is really. A trafficking victim who is criminalized and pushed into the legal system, whether it's the juvenile or adult legal system, oftentimes more likely the adult criminal justice system, because they are a trafficking victim. And so either they have been forced to commit another crime at the behest of their traffickers, and this is what we call forced criminality, or they have committed a crime against their trafficker as a form of self-defense or as a means to escape. And so these are the two forms of criminalized survivorship that we covered in this report. And so we outlined several case studies that really looked into these types of scenarios in more detail. We have worked on several of these cases across the country. And again, we're typically talking about survivors of color, and we can get into why that is. There are several examples of the forced criminality. We have seen instances all over the country of survivors, oftentimes young girls, minors being forced to commit acts of trafficking, kidnap, recruitment of other girls or young people at the behest of their traffickers, sometimes armed robbery, sometimes white-collar crimes. We have many survivors right now that have federal convictions because they were forced to commit all types of crimes because of their traffickers have figured out that they can get their victims to commit all sorts of offenses. And so it's very important for prosecutors, judges, law enforcement to be educated on this and understand that they need to consider the full depth of the power and control dynamics between a victim and their trafficker in order to assess culpability in these types of scenarios. And then in the self-defense cases, I think Centoya Brown Long was probably the most well-known of these cases. But usually what happens is that a young survivor, again, typically a minor, commits an act of violence in order to protect themselves against their trafficker or adult sex buyer and is charged with homicide. So either murder or involuntary manslaughter, typically a very serious charge. Typically, they're charged as an adult, unless there's some extraordinary advocacy or a very enlightened uh DA in this case. So it's very rare. Typically, these are children who are tried as adults. So we saw Crystal Kaiser in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She's now serving 11 years for the death of her adult trafficker. This guy, Randy Voller, was known to be making videos of multiple little black girls all over their town in Wisconsin. And police knew and were aware that he was doing this. He had hundreds of videos of other children and was never taken into custody, never tried. And then Crystal ended up, it was the last straw for her. She killed him, she set his house on fire. And despite all of the evidence that was presented and protective laws in Wisconsin, she was ultimately took a plea deal. And she's serving 11 years in an adult facility. I think she was just 16 or 17 when the crime occurred. Had the police done what they were charged to do, we wouldn't even be in this situation. Hyper Lewis, Alexis Martin, there's dozens of cases just like that, and several that we talk in our report.
SPEAKER_02:I think it's important for people to understand, too, that very often these victims of sex trafficking have no way out. They have no choice but to remain in the situation that they are in, whether it's due to threats against their lives or lives of people they love or friends and so on, or just no other options, no way to escape. They're not only being trafficked, they're being tracked on a regular basis. And thanks to technology, that becomes very easy for traffickers to monitor the every move of the people that they are trafficking. So you mentioned self-defense crimes that survivors are from time to time they are punished for and sentenced to prison time for. But let's dive into that. Why is the understanding of a survivor self-defense against their abuser or trafficker such an elusive concept for the criminal justice system?
SPEAKER_01:I think, you know, it's twofold. One is anytime you have a victim, survivor who is involved in the sex trade, there's that stigma. So I think they're battling that to begin with. And then you also have this notion that when we're dealing with survivors of color and particularly black girls, you have this concept of adultification bias. And we talk about this in our report. And this is a concept that has been written about again at length. And our partners at the Georgetown Law Center for Gender Justice and Opportunity wrote an excellent report on this called Girlhood Interrupted. And they looked at this concept and did a survey, and they ultimately found that when it comes to black girls, adults perceive them as less innocent and less in need of comfort and nurturing than their white peers. They also found that black girls are seen to be more knowledgeable about topics, mostly adult topics like sex, from a much younger age, including age five to nine. So what they subsequently found, and what subsequent studies have found, is that when it comes to issues of sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, black girls are seen to be not as traumatized by sexual abuse as their white peers, and in fact are seen as complicit in that abuse. So when they experience that type of exploitation and violence, they are more likely to be seen as offenders. And so when it comes to these situations of exploitation, self-defense type crimes, they're not perceived as victims. They're more likely to be seen as offenders in these types of scenarios. It's not surprising to see that they're not perceived as children, right? Because they're already seen as older and less innocent, but they're also not seen as crime victims in these scenarios because of that adultification bias. It's a form of intersectional bias and it's implicit, right? So that's why it's so important for all of these practitioners to be trained on this form of bias as part of the implicit bias trainings that we all do in these types of fields. But it's been proven, and there's been appellate courts that have talked about adultification bias at this point. I would encourage listeners to take a look at this report, Girlhood Interrupted, to read up on this. There's been subsequent studies that have looked at this, but it's a very real phenomenon. And again, it's implicit bias, so it's unconscious bias that many of us have from being socialized in this culture. But this is why these particular victims, I think girls of color, but black girls in particular, suffer from this form of bias. And a lot of this comes from the biases that we have about adult black women that are projected onto young black girls, but a very important phenomenon to be familiar with.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up. Let's focus now a little bit on the inner workings of sex trafficking and lead into the traffickers and the buyers of commercial sex, who are really the people who are fueling this market and some of these beliefs that you just mentioned. You also co-authored the 2025 publication Buyers Unmasked, Exposing the Men Who Buy Sex and Solutions to End Exploitation. Can you tell us what the motivation was to concentrate on that angle of putting the buyer's voice on display?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. So, you know, this report was a big departure from the typical reports that we put out at Rights for Girls. We typically focus on reports that really tell the stories of young women and girls, and particularly young women and girls who are marginalized and experience violence. But this report really focuses on sex buyers and buyers in their own words, as we like to say. And it really arose out of a lot of the advocacy that we've been doing over the last few years in states across the country that have been seeking to fully decriminalize the sex trade. And for those who might not know, these are efforts that seek to not only decriminalize the sale of sex, but also decriminalize acts of pimping, sex buying, and brothel owning. And we have been really surprised by how robust these efforts have been and organized and across dozens of states. And in many cases, people say these are just consenting adults. We don't want to be concerned about what individuals are doing, and there's nothing wrong with sex buying. So we have just heard the other perspective from so many survivors, both adults and children, all across the country. And we felt it was very important to dispel with the myths that these are shy guys who can't get a date. And really felt that it was important to show that across the country these attitudes are consistent. You don't have to look very far to show the attitudes of these individuals. And that if we as a society feel that it's important not to be racist, not to be misogynist, not to be violent and objectifying, and all of these attitudes that we feel in a civilized society are not to be tolerated, why do these individuals get a pass? Why do we think that this is okay? And so we felt like it wasn't landing when we or even survivors would talk to lawmakers and stakeholders about their experiences and how these individuals would treat them and how they behaved. So we thought, why not let them speak for themselves? And so what we did was go on what are known as these review boards or hobby boards, which for those who don't know function as a sort of Yelp for prostitution. There are many of these different review boards all across the country. We went on two of them that are free. There's many paid ones as well. And these are websites. Yeah, websites across the country where buyers go online and they candidly talk amongst themselves and review the people, mostly women and girls, that they purchase for sex and candidly talk to each other about this one was great. Like, where do I find this one? And they'll be like, where can I find some pot Latinas? Or where do I find a quote unquote black provider? They call them providers, and they'll say this one was terrible or this one looks gross right now, and very candid. How to evade law enforcement, or there's a lot of stings in this area tonight. And you search by city, right? So it's down to the city, and you don't have to look very far. We looked at just like the first couple pages of these cities, and we organize it by region. So like Northeast, Southern United States, West Coast, Midwest, and wanted to just show how interchangeable uh the attitudes were by region and wanted to let them speak for themselves. And these are pretty PG compared to what really is out there. And people can look for themselves, but this is who they are.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I can attest to all of that. I did read the report before having this conversation with you today, and it is PG, but yet I still had to look away on some of it. It was very revealing, and in many ways, just the depravity of humanity at times is still shocking. I already know the answer to this, but what was the commonality among the buyer in terms of demographics?
SPEAKER_01:We couldn't really tell because they don't necessarily reveal their demographics here, but they were overwhelmingly men here. We don't know in terms of race or ethnicity or income level on our report, but we have some of that data based on other jurisdictions. So we were able to, we do have some demographic data from jurisdictions that I shared previously that we did put in the report as compared to survivor or victim data from other jurisdictions. We have a lot of that racial disparity and demographic data on our website as well, if people are interested in that. But the hobby boards don't necessarily reveal that information. It's mostly just men talking candidly about their exploits and what they're looking for online.
SPEAKER_02:I've heard other reports and talked with other experts on this topic who've told me it's overwhelmingly married white middle-aged men.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's consistent with what we've heard as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It's not really all that surprising since maybe the construct that we talked about a little while ago of prostitution being the oldest profession was put forward by a white man, and it kind of fuels white male supremacy, which is rampant in the United States of America. Not all that surprising, not all that revealing in that sense, but the report itself is very revealing. I'd like to talk a little bit about the attitudes and the mentality that these buyers have. What motivates them to continue to buy sex?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we have these quotes from the hobby boards, and then we also have a series of conversations with what we call the section we call market disruptors, and these are volunteers from some organizations that seek to discourage sex buyers at the point of purchase. They're volunteers who are trained and they seek to text with a sex buyer who's thinks they're texting with a person that they're seeking to solicit and will discourage them and say, have you considered that this person might be trafficked, or have you considered what you're doing perpetuates trafficking? And those conversations often don't go well either. Occasionally they might have a success, but we included several of those conversations that are eye-opening as well. And they basically often say, She's an object put there by society for me to use and move on with life, and things like that. A lot of it is just deeply ingrained misogyny in cell culture. And some of these folks, it's unclear how they get to the point where they're at. We have worked with, and in the report, we talk about some of these buyer accountability programs. And some of our partners who run this program have said it varies. Some of these men were conditioned by their fathers or the military and never thought twice about it. Others, pornography has really fueled their desire to purchase and up the annie. And others, it's just a deeply ingrained sense of that incel culture. Whereas others might never change, many can and have gone through some of these programs and have, and we quote one of those buyers who says, This program saved my marriage and it's made me a better person. And I think it's important to realize some of these folks can be reached. And this is not only toxic for the community and for obviously the women that they're harming, but for themselves and for their families. And so it's important to realize many of these men can be reached and changed, while others probably will never change. But it is, it's that male entitlement. I think it's that male entitlement that is really at the root of this, and I think very important to understand and to tackle. And one of the warnings that we put out in this report is we're at a cultural inflection point. And I think we really need to understand that absent greater interventions and us paying attention to what's happening right now, the manosphere and this kind of burgeoning men's rights movement, we really need to understand that things could get a lot worse. And especially with the economy tipping downwards, people get desperate. And I think that women and girls who are vulnerable could really be on the receiving end of so much of this male violence and entitlement.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I agree with everything that you said. And I have so many questions about so many different things. And one of them being has buyers unmasked and some of the results and outcomes from it been put forward to legislators? And what has their response been to that?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So we actually went to the National Conference of State Legislators this past summer. It was like their 50th anniversary, and we brought the report and it flew off the shelves. I will say state legislators loved it. And it flew off the shelves. We ran out of copies. Folks were very interested in it. We've had great responses from state legislators. We have introduced numerous bills this past year and will in the upcoming legislative session as well, many of which deal with buyer accountability. This past legislative session, we passed laws in New Hampshire, in California, and had bills introduced in other states as well that would introduce fines for sex buyers that would go into survivor services. Some of them would also introduce a buyer accountability course as well. So I think there's a lot of interest right now in increasing buyer accountability. And given that federal dollars are scarce and state budgets are uncertain, there is more of an openness to finding sex buyers and putting those resources into victim services. And then hopefully introducing some sort of buyer accountability. And we outline like the elements of what type of buyer accountability course that would be, not your typical John school that we found doesn't really have very good outcomes. You can't really measure it by recidivism because buyers typically don't get arrested, much less arrested twice. So you have to really measure them by changes in attitude or cultural outcomes. We outlined elements of what one of those types of programs should be. But yeah, we've had a lot of interest. And so we're continuing to build on that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think that's great. And one of the terms you used a couple of minutes ago was the cultural inflection point. And I think we can't have that inflection point or continue to have it if we don't continue to have these conversations and put this information from survivors and what their experience is really like out in the public forum for everyone. And that includes buyers, that includes legislators, and many others who can help to turn the tide on the situation. So keeping on policy and legislation for a minute, one of the policies that now we briefly discussed this, but we're going to dive in a little bit more. One of the policies that seems to have an adverse or negative consequence to combating trafficking and commercial sex exploitation is full decriminalization. Could you please describe what that means in a trafficking framework and how it favors the trafficker and buyer and why it is so detrimental to victims and survivors?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. This is a concept that's more commonly known as decriminalizing sex work. And so in progressive circles, we hear this and it sounds great, right? Because we hear it and we think this protects the quote-unquote sex worker. It decriminalizes prostitution for the victim. And many people instinctively support it. But what many people don't realize is that decriminalizing sex work or full decriminalization does a lot more than that. Not only does it decriminalize the act of selling sex, but it also decriminalizes Acts of pimping, sex buying, and brothels. So it's a full decriminalization model. And the problem with that is that the combination of those forces actually increases sex trafficking and expands the entire commercial sex market. People don't really realize this, and it's actually been introduced in a number of states across the country. Since 2019, we've worked in dozens of states trying to defeat these measures. People often think like there's no way that legislators would try to decriminalize pimping. We defeated a bill in Illinois this session, in New York this session, in Vermont this session, in Massachusetts. I mean, they are absolutely introducing these bills in multiple states. We had a ballot initiative in Oregon a couple years ago, bankrolled by a self-professed sex buyer, Aaron Boonshoff, multimillionaire. It's happening all across the country where people are trying to decriminalize sex work, which means legalize or decriminalize the entire industry. So it's very problematic in many ways. And the reason why it is because irrespective of how you feel about, again, sex buying, we already have a sex trafficking problem in every community because the demand for commercial sex already outpaces the supply. So what that means is that even though it's illegal to buy sex in virtually every state in this country, except for a handful of counties in Nevada, there are already enough men who are content to break the law to buy sex, that there's already not enough willing adult participants to provide that quote unquote service, that the demand already outpaces the supply. So traffickers already have to traffic, manipulate, lure victims to meet the demand that it already exists. Irrespective of how you feel about purchasing sex, you can't responsibly decriminalize it because if you did, more men would enter the market as new clients, not just from that state, but through sex tourism. That's what we see in Amsterdam. It's what we see in Nevada. And so who would then be required to meet that new surge in demand? It's not as if when decriminalization happens, a ton of women line up and say, I'm ready to enter the sex industry as a sex worker.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, because they were avoiding it because they were afraid they would be imprisoned for it. Because it was illegal, right?
SPEAKER_01:It's not legality that drives women into it. It's childhood abuse, structural oppression, right? It's poverty. It's trafficking victims will be required, right, to meet that sudden surge in demand. And so that's why we cannot decriminalize patronizing or sex buying. And then, of course, it's terrible to repeal pimping off the books. Those are lesser penalties for trafficking. It makes it much more difficult to prosecute. And we have examples of this from all over the world. And we talk about these case studies in our buyer's report. And people can look more carefully at those examples. We use case studies for why full decriminalization is a failure. Rhode Island is an example of a state that tried it and reverted their laws back. A lot of people don't know. We have a homegrown example of it. All this to say it's not hyperbole, it's happening every session, and there's groups and survivors who are working to defeat it. But there is a better approach, and it's called the survivor model. It decriminalizes and offers services to people in prostitution. So those who are selling sex are seen as people who are acting as a means of survival. It would decriminalize only the act of selling sex, offer those individuals services should they choose, but maintain the prohibitions against pimping, purchasing, and brothels in order to keep the industry in check. And so it's a partial approach. And this is one that's shown to really work given the different approaches globally. It's the leading global policy approach to reforming the sex trade.
SPEAKER_02:Is that the policy in the state of Maine?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And Maine was the first US state that basically experimented with this approach. They passed it, I think, in 2023, and they're still working on implementation. They could do a little bit better with services, that's for sure, because Maine doesn't have the most robust services. But Maine was the first US state to decriminalize just prostituted people, but maintain the prohibitions against pimping, buying, and brothels.
SPEAKER_02:And it is a model that started in Scandinavia, correct?
SPEAKER_01:Correct, correct. And for those like us who do justice reform, we look to Scandinavia as a model for our justice reform policies, our prison policies. And so it's no surprise that this is a model that was really developed there.
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Powell Yeah, there's some references to those models on your website as well, if people are unfamiliar with the concepts, but these have been tested in Sweden and other places and have proven to have positive outcomes. And basically, Sweden declares that they do not have a sex trade culture any longer because of it.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, these countries consistently rank highest for gender equality, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02:It was more or less abolitionist movements. Exactly. Exactly. Trevor Burrus, Jr. So now Rights for Girls also has launched a sex buying isn't a game public awareness campaign. And this also touches a little bit on what you mentioned about sex tourism, because I want to explore that as well. Now the billboards specifically for this campaign are so powerful and attention grabbing because a sports theme is the backdrop, and that does definitely get attention. So what motivated you to spread awareness about sex buying through a genre like sports and how does that intersect with sex tourism?
SPEAKER_01:So we decided to launch this campaign in conjunction with some of the major sports events that were happening. And we launched first with the March Madness games because we really wanted to shed light on the fact that when it comes to major events and of course sporting events, but it could be any type of major event that draws thousands of out-of-town visitors and predominantly men to any host city, traffickers will seek to capitalize off the potential for increased demand. And so we wanted to raise awareness around the fact that just as with the increases in ride shares and hotel bookings and all the events and activities and festivities, there can also be this dark underbelly of sexual exploitation that takes place with all of the celebrations. And we did this billboard campaign with March Madness to begin with in eight cities that were hosting the games with basketball-themed messages on the billboards. So for March Madness, I think it was like it's madness to think sex buying is just a game, or it's madness to think buying sex is a victimless crime. And once people saw the billboards, they could come to our website and then they would see a series of statistics and more information, or it's madness to think buying sex won't land you a penalty, and then they would see how many states that this legislative sessions had made sex buying a felony, for example, and understanding like the different things they could lose their license, they could lose like custody rights and child visitation and all of these different facts about the realities of buying sex and the sex trade. And we felt it was really important to just understand the connection between these issues and for the media to shed light on the role of sex buyers in fueling exploitation. Because again, when we talk about sex trafficking, we always picture the victim, we always picture traffickers, but we fail to really understand that third part of the equation when every dollar that's generated in this multi-billion dollar industry is fueled by the sex buyer. And so we felt it was really important to shine a light on the buyer and understand their role in perpetuating sex tourism and trafficking.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It's brilliant, really. And I recently, within the past several years, interviewed Rita Smith, who formerly worked with the NFL, and we talked about these things like the Super Bowl. And it's the same scenario as what you mentioned with March Madness, the World Series, which we just had here in the United States just a week or two ago. That's another example of where sex trafficking and sex buyers travel specifically to these games and seek out the purchase of sex. Understanding all of this, how can people get involved, get educated, and take action?
SPEAKER_01:Folks can definitely follow us online. Our website is rightsforgirls.org, follow us on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, on X, all of our social media is up to date. There they can take action on different advocacy issues, make sure that they're attending any of our events. We do events all over the country. We'll definitely have things for human trafficking month in January, and we are slated to have events all over the country coming up in California, Illinois, probably Texas soon. Definitely stay tuned for that. And we'll be poised to be working on legislative initiatives all over the country as well. So definitely stay tuned.
SPEAKER_02:Excellent. And just to quickly, Rights for Girls was recently featured in a documentary film entitled The Right Track, a project spearheaded by the Jensen Project that highlights the realities of experiencing and living the life of a trafficking victim or survivor. Do you have any details about how our listeners can access and watch the film?
SPEAKER_01:They can go to the righttrackfilm.com. Hopefully they will be able to see any upcoming screenings. We will hopefully be doing a screening in Chicago in January, I believe. And I think there'll be some other screenings coming up. We hope to get it on a streaming service, I know. But it's an excellent film. If you have the opportunity to see it, we definitely recommend it. I know we'll be hosting a screening in the spring in Washington, D.C. at some point, but definitely stay tuned. I know we'll be announcing on Rights for Girls social media when we'll be do hosting screenings. And I know the Jensen project will be as well. But hopefully we can get it on a streaming service. It's an excellent documentary, really moving. We were honored to be a part of it from the perspective of so many sex trade survivors. And it's just, it's very compelling, I think. If you have a chance to see it, don't miss it.
SPEAKER_02:I also recommend the film and learning more about this topic. Yasmin, thank you so much for talking with me today and for the work you're doing. Thank you so much for having me. It was my pleasure. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe. The 21st Annual Conference on Crimes Against Women will be held May 18th through the 21st, 2026, in Dallas, Texas. Learn more at conferencecaw.org and be the first to know about all conference details, as well as the latest on the Institute for Coordinated Community Response, Annual Conference Summit, Beyond the Bounds, and the National Training Center on Crimes Against Women. When you follow us on social media at NationalCCAW.