“Whatever dude, I just want to get laid.” This was the callous response of a man seeking to purchase a sex act when a volunteer intervened to tell him about the damage this business creates. Our organization, Epik Project has engaged more than 50,000 men like this over the past decade as they attempted to buy sex acts online or over the phone.
What most of these men fail to understand is — regardless of their motivation — they are the essential linchpin in the sex trafficking trade, a booming business motivated by greed. Without them, without the buyers, the business wouldn’t exist.
While buyers often think they are engaging with an enterprising prostitute, the reality is they have no way of knowing the conditions under which the woman whose body they purchase is “for sale.” Willing participants and sex trafficking victims exist side by side in the same ecosystem called prostitution that is largely illegal, yet trafficking persists because prostitution has been normalized.
A 2019 national survey found that 1 in every 25 adult men had purchased sex within the previous three years. Findings suggest paid sex transactions during the study’s three-year period likely exceeded 10 million, yielding $1 billion in profit. And with every dollar spent on purchasing sex acts, the more difficult it becomes to curb sex trafficking.
Consider this: while the odds of being struck by lightning are relatively low, the likelihood of being arrested for buying a sex act is significantly lower. This doesn’t simply leave buyers to operate in impunity; it encourages them to travel further down a dark road that leads to violence, and, very often, addiction — 60% of men who purchase sex indicate a desire to stop.
To be sure, vilifying buyers is not the way to staunch demand. Instead, more needs to be done to enlighten them on the unintended consequences of their behavior and inspire them to become better men.
Unfortunately, media coverage of the issue often narrowly characterizes sex workers as victimized by regulation that reduces their ability to earn, further normalizing prostitution. In this scenario, the law is presented as an unfair barrier to a harm-free, consensual, pay-to-play economy. These empathetic portrayals often lead the reader to draw a false boundary between complicit participants and the countless women who are forced to perform against their will.
Images of young girls chained to beds — as revolting as they are — only tell a sliver of the story. The reality is the exploited often look more like the women we’ve helped along the way, women with names like Zoe, Rebecca, Megan and. Desiree. These are human beings who pimps and buyers treat as inventory useful only for money.
Recently, more attention is being paid to traffickers targeting vulnerable kids at the southern border. Rather than clutch our pearls or look the other way, we must call it what it is: a problem of supply and demand. The demand for paid sex acts by American men is robust. Without it, the economic incentive for traffickers to exploit would evaporate.
Many readers will shrug, convinced that there is really nothing we can do to address a behavior so deeply rooted in American culture. However, as survivor and activist Audrey Morrissey so aptly puts it, “prostitution is NOT the world’s oldest profession, it’s the world’s oldest oppression.”
The new Trump administration has an opportunity to confront a national history of exploitative behavior head on. Change begins by instilling a more robust commitment to individual accountability by ensuring law enforcement has the authority and capacity to hold buyers and traffickers legally accountable.
We must also demand cultural accountability and call leaders across the board to reckon with the forces that foster the kind of sexual entitlement that turns boys into sex buyers — the commercialization of sex, the proliferation of pornography, and the power of technology to exponentially increase access to the prostitution market and the damage it does.
America has a rich history of rallying around justice at the right time and in the right ways. We can do it again to protect the most vulnerable in our communities. That begins by addressing the demand that fuels trafficking.
Focusing our political and cultural will on demand might actually help make America great in ways that all of us can agree on. Otherwise we’re left with another generation of men who look at sex buying and the trauma it inflicts with a shrug and say, “whatever dude, we just wanna get laid.”
Tom Perez is founder and CEO of the Epik Project.
