Is there, though? Like on any kind of grand scale? What’s your evidence for this? Who by? The pimp lobby?
I don’t want to be too glib - the problem certainly exists and is bad enough. But who is incentivized to downplay the scale of the problem? Sex workers working by choice? Surely not, right? They want the industry kept safe and they don’t want to compete with trafficked labor. Hardly anyone is even pro-sex work period. All you’re left with is a handful of libertarian outlets who are ideologically obliged to argue that sex work is not an exploitative industry. Meanwhile the groups incentivized to exaggerate the problem are numerous and powerful - politicians, law enforcement, NGOs, the media etc.
I am extremely skeptical of using the blunt instrument of law enforcement to solve social problems like this. As an example of the sort of thing that will happen, check out this article:
In our subsample of youth under the age of 18 who were, at the time of interview, engaged in survival sex, 33 individuals — 24% —had a pimp or trafficker, liberally defined as someone with whom the respondent shared their earnings. That definition raises questions of its own, and one young woman’s experience stood out as representative of those questions. Rena, who was 16 at the time of the interview, laughed when we asked if she had a pimp. She tipped her head toward one of her friends.
“That’s my pimp,” Rena giggled. She was an 18-year-old woman who helped Rena use the internet to get clients and was herself engaged in survival sex. The two young women pooled their money together to meet their shared living expenses; Rena’s friend/”pimp” gave her a place to stay after she ran away from home to escape sexual abuse from a family member. The friend/“pimp” taught Rena how to use the internet to find clients and, in Rena’s words, “become independent.”
Rena’s friend could be considered a sex trafficker under the current legal regime — a felony that carries decades in prison and a mandatory, lifelong inclusion on the sex offender registry. A large portion of the adult cases that met the criteria of “ever trafficked” in our study fell into this category. Rena’s friend/pimp began trading sex when she was underage, and therefore was counted, in our data, as a sex trafficking victim. She was also counted as a pimp. The distinction between victim and perpetrator is not as black and white as lawmakers claim, and federal and state policy must reflect this nuance if we are to truly reduce exploitation.
I do not want police wielding “human trafficking laws” against people like Rena’s friend who are themselves victims. When you draft sweeping laws to combat some Very Bad Thing, they will inevitably be used as a weapon by law enforcement in situations for which they are not intended. If people can’t answer basic questions about how big the problem they’re trying to solve is, or what exactly the definition of that problem is, it’s a huge red flag.
Edit: Like I certainly have evidence of law enforcement pretending things are “sex trafficking” when they are not - you probably already saw my posts (1, 2) on 2+2 about the Robert Kraft “sex trafficking” story. Do you have any actual examples of people trying to downplay genuine sex trafficking?