During the 11 days before the Super Bowl, law enforcement arrested 169 people in connection with sex trafficking in Atlanta.
There are pre-Super Bowl sex-trafficking arrests every year, but 2019 saw more than most, perhaps because, Super Bowl or not, Atlanta is one of America’s biggest hubs for human trafficking.
Mary Frances Bowley has some ideas for how to stop it. The founder and executive director of Wellspring Living, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization that rehabilitates women who’ve escaped the illicit industry, says there’s one thing to remember about sex trafficking.
It’s a “business of opportunity.”
First, it is a business: As far back as 2007, sex trafficking was a $290 million industry in Atlanta, and the average weekly income of an Atlanta pimp between 2005-2011 was $32,833.
Second, the business is predicated on opportunity: Traffickers make victims of young women who have nowhere else to go.
One solution is to educate the clients who pay for sex. As Super Bowl LIII tickets cost upwards of $2,500 a pop, thousands of tourists flocked to Atlanta last weekend with cash to spare. But paying for sex is not only illegal, it also makes customers complicit in an industry that sexually abuses children — in its Super Bowl sting, the FBI also arrested 34 people for trying to have sex with minors.
Wellspring, however, focuses more on another solution: keeping the women safe from traffickers in the first place.
“People in poverty do desperate things,” Bowley says. “People don’t know what they’re getting into.” Women need options before they turn to the tall man in the Lamborghini who offers them a ride and a place to stay.
Wellspring volunteers have started working in the highest-risk schools in Atlanta to educate students. At Alonzo Crim High School, just 15 minutes from downtown, Wellspring offers therapy, field trips, and a food bank for it students, 90 percent of whom have experienced trauma and hunger or live at the poverty line.
Human trafficking is not some outdated industry; it’s a multimillion dollar enterprise that preys on our society’s most vulnerable. “It’s happening everywhere,” Bowley says. But to keep women, many of whom are trapped as young as 14 years old, safe from it, we must give them other options.
Despite the enormous task, Bowley is optimistic about abolishing sex trafficking: “I believe our city has said, ‘We don’t want this.’”
