Everybody knows that the Super Bowl is the single biggest day of the year for human sex trafficking in the United States. Well, everybody who doesn’t do any research about it at all, anyway.

In all seriousness, I really shouldn’t have to say either of the following two statements, but here goes:

1. People who engage in human trafficking of any kind, be it for sex work, agricultural work, textile work, and so forth, are the scum of the earth and deserve to be thrown into a very dark pit full of spiders.
2. No evidence exists to support assertions that the [Super Bowl, World Cup, Olympics, etc.] draws a massive influx of trafficking victims (which seems to have become synonymous at times with sex trafficking victims.)

In 2011, when Dallas hosted the Super Bowl, people predicted that tens of thousands of children, “some as young as 12 years old,” would be in the city specifically for the Super Bowl. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott even managed to get in a dig at Mexico: “Super Bowl XLV on Sunday in Cowboys Stadium is of particular concern because of Texas’ 1,200-mile border with Mexico, which makes the state a bigger target for international rings, says Abbott, the attorney general.” Here’s the thing, though: there was no evidence to support those predictions, and no evidence that such a massive influx of traffickers and trafficking victims actually took place. It happened, no doubt, but it is unlikely that it happened at any greater rate than during other weekends.

This is an odd issue, because it is one of the few where some people on the right and left are united, in a sense, albeit for different reasons. On the right, you have the usual squeamishness about sex, women, and so forth. It doesn’t surprise me when right-wing news sources parrot the conventional, albeit unsupported, wisdom. On the left, you have obviously valid concern over people’s well-being, but it is often taken to an extent far, far beyond the evidence.

Several serious problems present themselves with this particular myth. For one, little to no effort is made to differentiate people who are forced into sex work against their will from people who engage in it voluntarily, whether from economic necessity or actual enjoyment. (For my part, I think consensual sex work by adults should be decriminalized (PDF file), but that’s an issue for another blog post.)

Second, the rhetoric places almost exclusive emphasis on juvenile female sex workers, to the exclusion of male and transgender sex trafficking victims and victims of trafficking in any other area. This makes the work of stopping actual trafficking more difficult, but don’t take my word for it. Rachel Lloyd from  Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) offers three reasons why the Super Bowl myth harms the effort to help trafficking victims: credibility (the claim gets so overblown that it obscures the truth), false alarms (see “The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf”), and limited resources (if you throw everything into Super Bowl weekend, you have little left for the rest of the year.)

You want an example of misuse of limited resources? How about this:

 Josh Gearheart and his team have spent the last week tracing the digital footprints of Super Bowl sex traffickers with the same technology he once used to hunt insurgents in Afghanistan.

A former Army intelligence officer, Gearheart is part of a two-year partnership between trafficking researchers and a defense contractor called Praescient Analytics, whose 100 employees normally provide intelligence analysis to the U.S. Special Operations Command, the FBI and others from the company’s headquarters in suburban Alexandria, Va.

They arrested eighteen people allegedly involved in what the Chicago Tribune described as a “cocaine and sex ring that was operating in the shadows of the championship game.” I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but I guess now we know yet another place the government is directing their surveillance apparatus.

A very good summary of the overall problem comes from Christian Science Monitor’s Stephanie Hanes, in a September 10, 2012 article entitled “Does US fight against sex trafficking miss the point?”

One of the most public campaigns against domestic trafficking was launched last year by the philanthropic foundation of [Demi] Moore and [Ashton] Kutcher. It was called “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls,” and used a campy, interactive video format that enlisted other celebrities, such as Justin Timberlake and Eva Longoria, to raise awareness about “child sex slavery in the US.”

Moore and Kutcher gave interviews, made T-shirts, and rallied the Twitterverse to the cause. One of the most troubling statistics they shared was that there are 100,000 to 300,000 sex slaves in the US – figures repeated by interviewers, blogs, TV hosts and other movie stars.

The problem: The statistics are wrong.

Those figures came from a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study (“The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico”) that estimated that there might be 100,000 to 300,000 children at risk of becoming trafficked prostitutes because of an array of negative circumstances, from homelessness to drug addiction. The number of actual sex-trafficking victims has been estimated by the US government to be in the tens of thousands, but even those numbers have been criticized as unfounded and far too high; between 2008 and 2010, federally funded human-trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation. Among those cases, only 248 suspected sex-trafficking victims under the age of 18 were identified.

Anti-trafficking advocates acknowledge the goof but say the celebrities’ point is still accurate: Far too many young girls are sold for sex in the US. The Department of Justice numbers, they say, reflect a fraction of the real victims.

But the misstep, say critics, is a prime example of the problem with how American activists have started to tackle the real problem of trafficking. Hype over such high and inaccurate numbers of “child sex slaves” leads to a misguided response at best, they say. At worst, it siphons financial resources away from preventing other sorts of human trafficking. These critics worry that the growing – alarmist – focus on sex trafficking in America, bolstered by this sort of sensationalism, undermines solutions to problems, such as poverty and homelessness, that lead to exploited youth in the first place.

It’s true that a woman from Florida was arrested this past Wednesday for allegedly taking her 15 year-old daughter to New York City “in order to pimp her out to the Super Bowl ‘fetish’ crowd,” whatever that means. The very first person the girl solicited was an undercover cop. A horrific tale, but it has nothing to do with the “prostitution rings” we keep reading about—it was one teenager and her mother, and it seems like the system worked since they got arrested before anything felonious happened.

Meanwhile, people who engage in sex work voluntarily still get ostracized by society.

Photo credits: “Super Bowl XLVIII Preparations at MetLife Stadium January 31, 2014” and “MetLife Stadium Prepares For Super Bowl 48 (XLVIII)” by Anthony Quintano [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr.