In November 2024, Arizona voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that will require convicted sex traffickers to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was 65% yes to 35% no, with a nearly 1 million-vote margin separating the two sides. It was a blowout, a landslide.
And who could blame them? The term “sex trafficking” rightfully carries an immediate, visceral response. It brings to mind coercion, abuse, and the devastating manipulation of the most vulnerable among us, our kids. It’s not difficult to understand how a great majority of the electorate believe that those who kidnap, rape and subsequently pimp children into hundreds, even thousands, of subsequent rapes, deserve life in prison.
But what if you found out that it wasn’t just those worst-of-the-worst predators who get convicted of “child sex trafficking”? What if you found out that law enforcement, at both the federal and state levels, not only prosecutes the very worst bad guys for child sex trafficking, but they also use the same laws to lump in other, far milder (still stupid and still perverse, mind you, but still far milder) acts than actually sex trafficking anyone at all?
Sex trafficking laws blur the lines between true trafficking and what many would consider a far less culpable category of offenses—attempts to commit an act based only on intent and a so-called “significant step.” While these laws claim to target traffickers, in reality, they allow law enforcement and prosecutors to group individuals who have never trafficked anyone in the same category as dangerous predators, raising serious ethical and legal questions.
What? Why? Great questions. To answer those correctly, we first need a quick look at a few of your local police department’s favorite things: stings and reverse stings.
A sting is when police discover an ongoing criminal enterprise, then go undercover and do business with that criminal enterprise, capturing all kinds of evidence along the way to assist in later prosecution of the bad guys who run the enterprise. Stings make a ton of sense; it’s cops finding criminals who are doing crimes, and bravely going in to collect evidence and eventually make arrests. Stings are also hard, though, because it’s often very difficult to discover a criminal enterprise doing its thing. Put a pin in this because we’ll come back to it later, but — sometimes it’s difficult because criminals cover their tracks well. Sometimes it’s difficult because cops are understaffed. Other time it’s difficult because the crimes the cops are looking for simply aren’t happening in any great number, sometimes at all.
For instance, let’s say the Milwaukee police are one of the best police forces in the country, maybe the whole world. But if they decide they want to run a sting to uncover the illegal importation and sale of the tusks of endangered African elephants within the city of Milwaukee — that’s probably not going to have much success, as great as the Milwaukee cops may be. Why? Because sometimes, despite your passion for busting up a certain type of crime….it’s simply not happening in your area. So stings are great, as long as the crime is actually happening, and the cops can pin down who’s doing it.
Then we have reverse stings. And although they sound similar, they’re very different. In a reverse sting, no real-life criminal enterprise is involved, because your cops haven’t found one (perhaps because they’ve tried and failed, but more often than not, because they’ve never tried at all). Instead, in a reverse sting, the cops pretend to be the criminal enterprise in hopes of attracting/inducing as many very stupid people as possible to wander into their orbit and do something, anything at all, that they and prosecutors will later allege was your intent to do the pretend crime that the police’s pretend criminal enterprise offered to help you do. (Your local news station almost always gets this wrong, and refers to reverse stings as regular stings, and just as often, your local police make no effort to correct them, because the mission of having the media gush to the citizenry about what amazing crimefighters and children-savers they are has already been accomplished.)
So what’s the difference? Well, the big one is that stings pursue criminals. Live, active, existent criminals who are already out there committing crimes against you and me. Reverse stings do not — reverse stings’ goal is to create new criminals. Let’s use our ivory trade example again.
Let’s say the Milwaukee cops failed to uncover anyone at all trading rare-elephant ivory tusks, and thus switched tactics to a reverse sting. The cops then place online classifieds all over Milwaukee that say “Rare African ivory from a recent trip, need to get rid of it asap but my loss is your gain, anonymous transaction preferred, with patience and the right contacts you’re looking at a huge gain.”
And then they wait. They wait for some doofus — as many doofuses as possible, actually — to initiate interest in what is clearly black-market ivory, by answering the ad. Maybe a pawn shop answers the ad, and a history buff. The undercover cops tell the pawn shop hey, it’s legally iffy at best, but it’s the real thing — and the pawn shop tells them to get lost, the pawn shop doesn’t need that headache. But the collector is an amateur and he’s fascinated, and even after the undercover tells him it’s legally iffy, the collector says, “Do you mind if i come take a look at it?” And let’s say he gets there and offers money for the tusks. He’s arrested immediately and headlines come out the next day:
“Milwaukee police sting nets arrest in African ivory-smuggling operation”
(because they never know a sting from a reverse sting)
or…even worse…
“Milwaukee police sting uncovers illegal ivory-trading ring”
(much of the media loves to assume a “ring” was broken up every time they learn of a sting)
So my question to the reader is: Do stings and reverse stings target the same criminals? Of course they don’t. Stings target real criminals doing real crimes. Reverse stings have a completely different goal: interrupt a currently law-abiding citizen and do their very best to convince him/her to do something illegal. Stings target criminals, reverse stings create criminals — and barely, at that.
So surely you know where this is going already, because Arizona Prop 313 wasn’t about elephant tusks, it was about child sex trafficking. You may say ok, elephant tusks trafficking is illegal but we’re talking about the very worst crimes against the most vulnerable people in society, our children. The cops and prosecutors wouldn’t play games with definitions and loopholes and anything that would distract from their true goal — taking real, actual sex traffickers off the street.
If only it were so. In fact, the dishonesty and deception from cops and prosecutors balloons to new levels when it comes to sex trafficking.
Why? Because of reverse stings. If the cops use a regular sting and infiltrate a real-life sex-trafficking operation, then that’s the best outcome. You catch and jail real bad guys, and real victims are rescued. But with reverse stings, there’s an obvious problem. If the letter of the child sex trafficking law repeatedly references acts done to or with a minor child, or the attempt to do so, then it doesn’t take the world’s smartest defense lawyer to say “Hey, wait a minute — there never was a minor child. Never-ever. Officer Jones was just pretending to be one, and he’s really 38 years old. So if there was never a minor child, there couldn’t have been a victim, and thus there couldn’t have been a crime.”
Makes sense, right? Especially if the point is to draw a distinction between a child sex trafficker who rapes and facilitates the large-scale rape of children, versus someone’s who’s simply a very stupid person without enough sense to stop talking to anyone online calling themselves a minor. Very stupid does not equal viscerally evil, and thus if our goal is to jail traffickers, better to pursue traffickers, no?
Well, the problem with that is — turns out, it’s really really hard to catch actual sex traffickers in the act. Actual sex traffickers don’t respond to ham-fisted online classifieds that scream “undercover cop!” to anyone with an IQ above 50.
And it *also* turns out, that actual child-sex trafficking rings aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as your Facebook aunt or your block’s Nextdoor Karen Squad loves to believe — not in the US, anyway. In 2022, the National Crime Information Center reported 296 stranger abductions in the United States. That’s almost exactly the same number of people who are struck by lightning each year. If you’re married to the idea that sex traffickers are around every corner, waiting to snatch kids off the street and thrust them into a global prostitution pipeline, then I have bad news for you — it’s absolutely, positively, not happening. (Although, to be fair, I would characterize that as the best bad news I’ve ever delivered or heard).
But unfortunately, truth has taken a back seat to the warped BS reality that both traditional and social media and its most ignorant participants have promulgated. At the weakest local news stations around the country, young reporters who aren’t terribly good at their jobs broadcast, verbatim and unchallenged, that “nine sex trafficking arrests” really means “nine sex traffickers were stopped apprehended!” while police smirk in the background and think “your words, not mine, but ok.” The ugliest nextdoor and Facebook users obsessed with an unfamiliar car that drove down their street twice today wait mere seconds before helpfully suggesting “IM THINKING THEY WERE SEX TRAFFICKERS, CALLING POLICE IF THEY COME THROUGH AGAIN.” (Your local police looooove this by the way….when you make a fantastically delusional claim about sex trafficking based on things like…you not recognizing a car. Or someone driving slowly. Or fast. Or the speed limit. Really. It’s why they signed up to be a crime fighter. Great job, McGruff.)
Even nonprofits jump in for their pound of flesh. We have countless religious nonprofits advertising that they “help sex trafficking victims” when really they are absolutists about banning all sex work entirely, even and especially consensual transactions between adults, because their pastor says it’s wrong, and they justify the dishonest claim of helping sex trafficking victims by claiming that all sex work is crime and there’s no such thing as consensual sex. Oh, and also pornography, that’s all sex trafficking as well, because all pornography is performed under duress. “Donate now and get a tax deduction, ask me for a receipt, god bless!”)
And of course, let’s not forget the Instagram vigilante groups who have sprung up over the past few years, claiming to be crowdsourced warrior-kings/queens in strenuous battle against sex-trafficked children everywhere. It’s the saddest virtue-signaling there is Instagram, and that’s sayin’ something! There are more “anti-sex trafficking organization” IG accounts that anyone can keep track of, many with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers — which would be wonderful news if most of them actually did anything helpful (or at all). Let’s have a brief diversion about that, too, shall we?
My favorites (real favorites, not sarcastic favorites) are the ones who use the money they raise to provide services to victims (as long as those services don’t include religious indoctrination). That’s good shit, good people, not gonna hear me complain about those guys.
But then you’ve got the Awareness Brigade and the Commandos. Awareness — well, we all can have our opinions about the good actually done by awareness-focused organizations, and most likely it depends on the cause. If it’s not a well-known cause then great. If it’s already super duper well known like breast cancer, then I’m not sure what’s actually happening there because I think we hit peak breast-cancer awareness years ago. We can’t be any more aware than we already are.
The Commandos are the ones I find most (unintentionally) hilarious. These are the ones who declare that by god, they’re hitting the road and doing surveillance and are gonna go where the trail takes them and knock down doors and do daring, live-on-webcam rescues of real kids, across the globe! I mean, can you imagine being an officer of the law, intimately familiar with your area’s laws, culture, etc, in the middle of an investigation. And boom, out of nowhere, who comes crashing in but a couple dozen internet sleuths with a webcam and a lot of beard wax and a sponsorship from Lions Not Sheep and abso-fucking-luuuutely no jurisdiction whatsoever, cocking up your whole investigation? And why exactly….because they got some good intel from another instagram sleuth? Because they just assumed *no real, actual, credentialed police organization might be running their own investigations, so the world was desperately crying out for a group of entirely unqualified and under-skilled hobbyists, dying for a little bit of adulation in their lives, to parachute in for a big rescue?
I can’t speak for woefully underfunded LE in third-world countries, but I can tell you what the unanimous reaction from actual police in the US would be, and it’s something like this: GET THE FUCK BACK IN YOUR CARS AND GO HOME, OR YOU’RE ALL GOING TO JAIL. Do you know how many law enforcement agencies have said “what we really need to clean up the violent crime in this country is an army of a dedicated yet entirely untrained hashtaggers who are fired-the-fuck-up to tar and feather the perpetrators of an allbeit awful crime that’s being perpetrated mostly in their imaginations”?
Zero. Zero times. Real cops have never asked for that. But anyway, we digressed a bit — those real cops have a difficult-to-detect and somewhat-rare crime to focus on, but the deluded public wants more results than are possible. So what do we do? “Well….we could completely “move the goalposts,” as they say. Since it’s so hard to find actual child sex trafficking, because it’s not terribly common and those who do it are hard to root out…we could just widen the definition of what “sex trafficking” technically is, to include stuff that’s a lot more easy to bust and prosecute. Then we go announce a bunch of “sex trafficking” busts without really explaining the new definition of sex trafficking, and then everybody just assumes we’re catching real sex traffickers, and they love us!”
That’s pretty much how it went. It didn’t take long before laws were rewritten to include not only crimes against actual living breathing minors, but also the imagined and assumed future crimes of creepy Internet perverts against the minors that police were pretending to be on the Internet. Despite the vast chasm of reality running through the divide between evil child-rape entrepreneurs and some very dumb people having very ill-advised theoretical conversations about sexual activity with theoretical minors who did not exist — pretty much every jurisdiction fell over each other to rubber stamp this expansion of the law. After all, those very dumb people having those conversations with imaginary minors are not a group that inspires a lot of sympathy. But this is still America, and we’ve always been pretty resolute against prosecuting thought crimes at all, let alone prosecuting them in the same basket and under the same laws we prescribe to deal with society’s true monsters.
Is This Thought Crime?
One of the most troubling aspects of the “significant step” provision of federal sex trafficking law is that it brings us precariously close to prosecuting individuals based on thought crimes. Under this law, if a person communicates with an undercover agent they believe to be a minor and arranges a meeting — even if that’s a public meeting, in a grocery store parking lot for example, they can be charged with an attempt at sex trafficking, despite no actual victim ever being in jeopardy. What was once a clear, severe charge for actual trafficking has evolved into something murky—criminalizing thoughts that prosecutors couldn’t possibly know with any degree of certainty, regardless of whether a real crime against a real victim ever took place.
Consider the case of Jerry Lane Golliher, who was convicted in September 2014 of commercial sex trafficking in federal court. Golliher answered a Craigslist ad from a police officer posing as a girl looking for sex. Golliher answered, and the “girl” told him she was 13; he immediately rejected her and told her she was way too young for them to be having this conversation. The officer persisted with multiple replies, one of which included a photo of the actual undercover officer, a mid-20s female officer sitting on a playground swingset. Despite some painfully amateurish photoshopping by techno-illiterate officers to make her look like a child, the picture was very clearly an adult woman. After a few more emails, Golliher agreed to meet the “girl” in a Safeway parking lot to chat further, in person.
So, what happened next? Nothing — because it was game over already, thanks to the bastardization of the federal sex trafficking law. Golliher was swarmed and arrested upon showing up at the grocery store, because he was already guilty of commercial sex trafficking simply by going to the grocery store. You read that correct. When Golliher agreed to a public meeting — with an adult, pretending to be a child, whose adult photo Golliher had in hand — that constituted the “significant step” toward money changing hands for sex that checked the box for Golliher breaking the sex trafficking law. Again, for clarity — the trip to Safeway was what made Golliher a sex trafficker in the eyes of federal law. Not what he wanted to do or what he might have/have not done (because none of us knows this, not even Golliher himself). He didn’t need to show up and talk to a woman or little girl or woman dressed like a little girl, and then agree to sex with her for money. All that mattered was the “significant step” of going to Safeway, because hey, going to meet in person is undoubtedly advancing a conversation that was previously taking place over email, and that’s all that mattered to federal prosecutors.
Whether he got there with intent to immediately rape a minor, or with intent to further their previous conversation in which he encouraged her to get off craigslist because she was too young to be there, or if he wanted to ask the adult woman in the pictures why she was pretending to be a child when she was obviously closer to 30 than 13 — none of us know. The difference between us and the government, though? The government doesn’t care. The minute he *agreed* to go to Safeway, he was ready for arrest and subsequent conviction. And as usual, they were ruthlessly efficient; Golliher got 15 years.
In essence, someone who never met or trafficked anyone can still be prosecuted as if they had. While no one denies that attempting to meet a minor for illegal activity is concerning, it is far from the heinous crime of sex trafficking, where individuals are repeatedly and systematically exploited. By lumping these cases together, the law unfairly equates thoughts and potential actions with actual, fully realized crimes.
The Police Propaganda Machine—and the Media’s Role in It
Another major issue with the “significant step” provision is the way it enables a seamless partnership between law enforcement and the media, creating a narrative that often misrepresents what actually happened. Police departments regularly feed stories of these questionable “sex trafficking” arrests to the media, which then amplify (and sometimes distort) the police claims even further. In many cases, media outlets frame sting operations as the “shut down of a trafficking ring,” a description that is rarely accurate. Law enforcement typically doesn’t go so far in their own language—stopping short of saying they’ve dismantled trafficking networks based on sting operations. Yet, when the media embellishes, suggesting that a dangerous trafficking ring has been “busted,” police departments rarely, if ever, correct these narratives.
This cycle reinforces a dramatic and often misleading story that the public readily accepts without much scrutiny, especially given the sensitive, emotionally charged nature of sex trafficking. Once the media paints a picture of brave officers rescuing potential victims by breaking up a trafficking ring, the public accepts it as fact. Meanwhile, the reality is that the “ring” may have been nothing more than an individual agreeing to meet an adult undercover officer in a very public parking lot.
In the end, this process creates an accepted “truth” that the police are continuously rescuing victims and dismantling trafficking operations—when, in fact, many of these stings do not involve actual trafficking or any true victims at all. This dynamic allows law enforcement to maintain an exaggerated appearance of effectiveness in combating sex trafficking while avoiding the messy and resource-intensive work of dismantling real trafficking networks.
A Tool for Prosecutors to Look “Tough” on Crime
Prosecutors, too, benefit from this expanded interpretation of trafficking laws. Securing convictions in reverse sting operations is often far easier than building cases against actual traffickers, who might be part of complex, organized networks and who don’t readily respond to sting tactics. But by leveraging the “significant step” provision, prosecutors can appear tough on crime and effective against an imaginary wave of “sex traffickers” without facing the challenges of investigating, tracking, and convicting genuine traffickers.
However, these cases are often legally easier to prosecute because they lack the complexity and resistance that actual trafficking cases present. Prosecutors can rack up convictions under the guise of combating trafficking, yet the real impact on active sex trafficking networks remains minimal. In truth, they’re merely capturing individuals who never even engaged in the crime that the law purports to address.
The Real Impact: Diluting the Seriousness of True Trafficking
Perhaps the greatest harm from this legal overreach is that it dilutes the very meaning of “sex trafficking” among the citizenry. When individuals are charged as “traffickers” without ever having engaged in trafficking, the term loses its power. For those who have been forced into trafficking situations, often facing repeated abuse and exploitation, the term “trafficker” carries a gravity that represents true horror. But when we apply it to sting operations and hypothetical scenarios where no actual exploitation took place, we reduce the term’s gravity, making it harder to galvanize public support and resources for genuine trafficking victims.
Ultimately, by conflating creepy conversations with actual trafficking, we contribute to a criminal justice system far more concerned with how effective it appears versus its actual effectiveness in protecting victims. This erosion of the line between intent and action, between a troubling conversation and an actual crime called “sex trafficking” is a slippery slope. At best, it redirects resources from helping actual victims; at worst, it signals a drift toward prosecuting individuals for what they might have done, rather than what they actually did. And that’s a precedent worth questioning.
At the end of the day, the creeps who get tagged as “sex traffickers” for trading emails with fake adolescents are not a sympathetic bunch, and no one’s going to march to free them. Rather, think of it this way. There absolutely are sex traffickers out there who do abduct, imprison, enslave, rape and destroy children; then there are other “sex traffickers” who, despite being plenty creepy and shady in their own way, haven’t done any of that. Every hour, day, week, month, that law enforcement spends luring and pretending and pursuing the second group is an hour, day, week, month that they’re NOT hunting the most dangerous child predators, in favor of some quick wins that can make them look good for the next promotion, election, etc.
If that’s ok with you, then fine. But it’s not OK with me.
