Modern Day Criminalization, Bribery and Sex Trafficking

The Place of Bribery and Corruption

When interaction with law enforcement does occur, it generally takes the form of bribery: pimps have to pay individuals from legal authorities in the form of money or sometimes sexual favours (especially female pimps) in order to maintain their business. A study conducted by the DePaul University College of Law in 2010 revealed that, out of a sample of 25 ex-pimps and madams from the Chicago area, sixty percent of them admitted to paying law enforcement “in order to survive in their business.” [2] “We paid who we had to so we could run our business. Police, detectives, and an alderman or two.” [2], one of them revealed. Therefore, relationship with law enforcement has become largely corrupted and can often be confrontational and violent: “Police would harass me, especially if I had more than one lady in the car. Sometimes they would arrest me just to they could take my money, shake me down, punch me, or take my car to the pound.” [2]

Reducing the Risk of Detection through Online Advertising

This risk of physical confrontation with police officers has in fact been a main motivator for pimps to move away from the streets and shift their location of business to the Internet. Indeed,  explains, the Internet allows pimps to improve their ability to advertise their services while reducing the risk of arrest or public intervention by making their activity less visible and detectable. [3] The internet has therefore become the primary tool for selling sex [3] - with websites such as Craigslist and Backpage becoming large hubs of sex advertising. Accordingly, police intervention has focused its efforts on targeting these websites through sting operations, as well as by pressuring the websites themselves to remove sex ads. [4] As a result, Craigslist had to shut down its “adult section” page in September 2010. However, some question the efficiency of such targeting practices as it usually just displaces advertising to other websites (such as Backpage - that has faced the same government pressure) and the deep web.

The Blurry Line between Pimping and Sex Trafficking 

The pressure to eliminate sex ads on advertising websites such as Craigslist or Backpage comes in large part from accusation and worries about sex trafficking. In 2011, a letter by the National Association of Attorneys General described Backpage as a “hub” for “human trafficking, especially the trafficking of minors” [5] and pointed to its “failure to effectively limit prostitution and sexual trafficking activity on its website.” [5] Such lawsuits generally therefore present all prostitution occurring from these websites as coercive sex trafficking. This reflects a broader difficulty for legal authorities to distinguish between sex trafficking and pimping. In itself, sex traffickers and pimps do the same activity of acting as an intermediary between clients and prostitutes. Bhe distinction comes from the level of coercion on the part of the third-party and the level of consent on the part of the prostitute - things which can be hard to examine at a legal level, and which relfects the variety of experiences that occur within the world of prostitution between third-parties and prostitutes.

Indeed, in general, third-party intermediaries can hold different kinds of roles and exert their authority in a variety of ways. In Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking, Alexandra Lutnick describes this complexity: Relationships with third parties can be nonexistent (in the cases where young people work independently) or extremely abusive or formal business arrangements that may or may not involve violence or friendships where people are helping each other survive." [6] In the legal realm therefore, there are many distinctions between various forms of criminalized activities that can be carried out by third parties: "These activities include (a) pimping [...]; (b) pandering - the facilitation or provision of someone to be used for prostitution, including inducing, encouraging or forcing someone to engage in prostitution; (c) keeping or residing in a house of prostitution; (d) leasing a house of prostitution..." [6] Therefore, on a legal level, third-party intermediation can involve a wide spectrum of activities and involvments, and are met with very different levels of punishment. 

In this legal section, we have sought to highlight how the relationship of third-party intermediaries with law enforcement has evolved from 19th century Paris to contemporary days. We have seen how this has gone from a state-sanctioned role - where madams were perceived as managers and almost sub-contracted state agents - to being a highly criminalized activity where bribery and violent confrontation is often involved. To open the legal perspective up, we have seen how third-party intermediaries can go beyond the strict activity of "pimping" to include a wide variety of activities that imply different types of relationships between prostitutes and third-parties.