Targeted Policing or Sin Taxes on Sex? The Relationship between Adult Dance Clubs and Human Trafficking

• In Event: 406 - Section on Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco Paper Session. Examining Addiction: Critical Perspectives (co-sponsored with the Section on Sexualities)

Abstract

Much of current literature and political discussion argue that adult dance clubs—and the sex addiction and persistent pleasure seeking that inspire—are primary causes of human trafficking into the U.S. This paper reviews prior research on the relationship between sex trafficking and adult dance/strip clubs and reports new analyses of data on human trafficking court cases, 1980- 2015. Despite the prevalence laws restricting adult clubs, the analyses estimate that strip clubs for less than three percent of all the human trafficking court cases. Additionally, the number of total human trafficking cases involving strip clubs was far less than the number accounted for by agricultural industry and domestic services. While only six percent of all cases are categorized as relating to pornography, this still accounted for a more cases in the data than strip clubs. These findings were robust to analyses of only the most recent decade, 2005-2014. A set of Bayesian relative proportion tests showed—for the most recent ten years of data and the entire dataset—a statistically significant difference between the frequency of strip club-related trafficking cases and the average across all categories of human trafficking. Although short- term monetary benefits of sex trafficking may be enticing to some adult dance/strip club owners/managers, involvement in this type of crime would mitigate against the continued existence and profitability objectives of club management. Findings from the present study suggest that adult clubs do not incite human and sex trafficking violations the way some anecdotal claims in the literature suggest.

Authors

• Joshua Fink, Duke University

• Kenneth C. Land