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

• In Event: Sex Work and Demand for Commercial Sex

Abstract

Much of current literature and discussion argue that adult dance clubs—and the sex addiction and 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 clubs, reporting new analyses of data on human trafficking court cases, 1980-2015. We find strip clubs are involved in less than three percent of all the human trafficking cases. Additionally, the number of total human trafficking cases involving clubs was far less than the number accounted for by the agricultural industry and domestic services. These findings were also robust to analyses of only the most recent decade of data, 2005- 2014. A set of Bayesian relative proportion tests showed a statistically significant difference between the relative frequency of club-related trafficking cases and that of the average across all other trafficking categories. We argue that although short-term monetary benefits of trafficking may entice some club owners, this type of criminality would threaten the continued existence and profitability of club management. More research on this topic is encouraged, but findings from the present study suggest that adult clubs do not incite human trafficking the way some anecdotal claims in literature suggest.

Authors

• Joshua Fink, Duke University

• Kenneth C. Land, Duke University