Internet Marketplaces and Child Trafficking in the United States

Desiree Robinson was murdered and left on the floor of a garage in a southern suburb of Chicago. She was 16.

Desiree had run away from her grandparent’s home and met a man who sold her to a sex trafficker for $250. Her sex trafficker, Joseph Hazley, housed Desiree Robinson and a few other women in a house in Chicago’s South Side. She worked in the suburbs near Midway Airport and Orland Park, occasionally in downtown Chicago. Her pimp posted Desiree on the site Backpage.com, one of the largest online platforms for sex ads offering “companions” and “escorts.” Hazley listed Desiree under the name “Nicki,” claiming she was “new in town” and had no pimp. He drove her to meet with clients, sometimes up to six per day, and provided her clothing for her meetups. In their downtime, Hazley often had sex with the 16-year-old himself.

Desiree messaged a friend that Hazley had trapped her. She wrote,

She even called a former prostitute who had left Hazley’s control, asking her how she finally left him.

While other high-school-aged kids relaxed on Christmas break, Desiree worked for Hazley. When she finished with a customer, she would stand on curbs in the record-breaking cold, waiting for Hazley to pick her up. On Christmas Eve, a man in a southern Chicago suburb named Antonio Rosales answered Desiree’s ad like many before him.

Human trafficking can have physical, emotional, and psychological effects on anyone involved. It has the power to impact someone’s life forever. Here are some common ways human trafficking affects victims and perpetrators. As you read through this section, keep in mind that many traffickers also experience trauma because of what they see and do to others, and many traffickers have been victimized themselves at some point in their lives.

In April 2018, the US Government shut down Backpage.com. With the use of new legislation called the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, the site would no longer be able to host sexual ads. FOSTA would not only target Backpage, but many other sites hosting ads for prostitutes. In the Oval Office, as President Trump signed FOSTA into law, Desiree Robinson’s mother, Yvonne Ambrose, stood near him. She wiped tears from her eyes. Over his left shoulder, Jessika cried alongside her family (C-SPAN).

FOSTA punctured the nearly bulletproof Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Essentially, FOSTA now forces websites to determine what they allow their users to generate. Website administrators may now face a ten-year sentence for facilitating user-generated content offering sex, and additionally, “enhanced penalties” of up to 25 years for facilitating the prostitution of five or more persons, or in cases of sex trafficking.” (FOSTA).

Undoubtedly, it is valuable to identify and shut down marketplaces offering trafficked children.

Intervening in the direct sale of minors is crucial in the fight against child sex trafficking. A story like Desiree Robinson’s, or Jessika’s, highlights just how vital it is to remove normalized avenues for criminals to access sex with minors. Their stories also emphasize how instrumental the internet is for their traffickers to contact greater numbers of clients. However, the venue of sale is only the final destination in a supply chain. In the United States, the supply chain feeding trafficked children to online marketplaces tends to be from kids with shared vulnerabilities.

• They tend to be kids that have run away from home.
• These kids tend to be motivated to flee unstable family situations or abusive and neglectful home lives. “Even among those that were not trafficked by their own family, the survey results reveal that many victims of Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST) experienced some form of childhood abuse and neglect, reporting high rates of verbal, physical, or sexual abuse.” (Thorn) Of runaway children in the US, “Over the past two years, the largest increases… have been related to abuse or neglect with increases of 54% for neglect, 48% for emotional or verbal abuse, 33% for physical abuse, and 11% for sexual abuse.” (NRS). Also, they may have run away from their foster care situation.
• “Often they have been victims of other kinds of abuse in the past and so are known to someone in the child protective system. Children in foster care, for example, are at high risk of trafficking.” (Polaris Project).
• In some cases, they may have been released from the justice system. “Given these adverse childhood experiences, two out of three participants had experiences with either foster care or juvenile detention.” (Thorn, 9). These children, when they’ve left their home, may be reliant on even more unstable housing options with members of their social network, shelters, or motels and be forced to survive by some means. Of these means, reliance on the sex industry has shown a 100% increase in the last decade (NRS).

Even further, these vulnerable children are preyed upon by those closest to them. While abduction can still occur, it is not the principal means by which children are trafficked in the U.S. 

For children trafficked under the age of 11, the majority are trafficked by family members. 

For children and preteens over 11, these children are most frequently connected to traffickers via the internet or individuals in the child’s social network. (Thorn, 9). 15 is the most commonly reported age of entering sex trafficking, and one in six were under 12, and most of these children already know and trust their trafficker (Polaris Project).

It is also critical to note that trafficked children in the US are disproportionately kids of color. Of the 316 survivors interviewed by Thorn, 45% were Black, 27% White, 21% Hispanic, and 8% of another race. Almost three-quarters of all these kids were kids of color.