For the past month, all eyes have been on the field for the 2026 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. The United States hosted the majority of the matches, with over 1 million travelers pouring into 16 host cities. As fans focused on the game, a troubling reality persisted across the country—human trafficking.
Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery and a violation of human rights. It occurs when force, fraud, or coercion is used to control another person for commercial sex or labor against their will.
For the first time in World Cup history, each host city in the United States was required to publish a Human Rights Action Plan. This requirement was put in place due to widespread criticism of human rights violations during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, sex trafficking accounts for most reported cases in the United States.
Major sporting events have often prompted an uptick in sex trafficking awareness campaigns and investigations, with media highlighting the results of mass arrests. However, non-profit leaders are pushing back on the narrative that these events are the driving force behind sex trafficking.
“ We’ve heard people talk about how the Super Bowl is the biggest trafficking event, and it’s not necessarily a fact that trafficking increases or decreases,” Yazmen Vafa, executive director of Rights4Girls, told NPQ in an interview.
While major sporting events may not cause sex trafficking, they offer a timely moment to examine the social and economic forces that drive this underground economy.
California: The Eye of the Storm
California has the most reported cases of human trafficking in the country. Since 2007, the state has reported 16,780 cases and identified 31,764 victims. The majority of the reported cases are sex trafficking incidents involving women as the victims, though trafficking impacts people from all backgrounds.
World Cup matches were held at Levi’s Stadium (Santa Clara/Bay Area) and SoFi Stadium (Los Angeles), ramping up anti-trafficking efforts and cross-collaboration across the state.
The South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking (SBCEHT), working with 69 agencies across nine counties in the Bay Area, has organized around multiple major sporting events this year, including the World Cup and Super Bowl.
For the Bay Area, events like the Super Bowl provided a real-time preview for how to strategize around trafficking prevention leading up to the World Cup.
“Sporting events don’t cause trafficking, but economics drives exploitation.”
During a pre-Super Bowl FBI sting operation in San Jose, 11 arrests were made, including a middle school assistant principal who was arrested for allegedly attempting to pay for sex from someone he believed was a 13-year-old boy.
Jennifer Lyle, executive director of MISSSEY, discusses how this case challenges the myth that traffickers are merely coming from outside of the country to commit these crimes. “What we know is it’s Jeffrey Epstein, it’s families and next-door neighbors,” Lyle told NPQ.
This reality calls attention to communities to take a closer look at an industry that is hiding in plain sight.
Director of the SBCEHT, Sharan Dhanoa, told NPQ, “The reality is that no city has the capacity to respond to safety issues with only a law enforcement approach. So when we talk about safety, it’s a community safety approach.”
While targeted arrests make headlines during major sporting seasons, the pervasive nature and close proximity of human trafficking remain in the fine print.
“Policies that impact eating, survival, and housing—that’s where we see the changes. The Super Bowl, not so much.”
Beyond the Headlines: Economic and Social Disparities
The human trafficking industry generates an estimated $245 billion dollars a year globally. Major news coverage tends to highlight isolated events in a specific area. However, anti-trafficking experts speak to a more complex reality.
“Sporting events don’t cause trafficking, but economics drives exploitation,” Sharan Dhanoa, director of the SBCEHT, told NPQ.
Nonprofit leaders like Lyle point to social and economic disparities that cause a rise in human trafficking. She reflects on the 2025 federal cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. “That’s when we saw a significant increase in need. Policies that impact eating, survival, and housing—that’s where we see the changes,” Lyle explained. “The Super Bowl, not so much.”
Economic and social disparities create power dynamics that enable the exploitation of people. Yet, misconceptions of the trafficking market can deflect from these dynamics.
Misclassifications and Criminal Consequences
One of the key factors that can cause misconceptions about sex trafficking is language. Language shapes the public perception of criminals and victims. This can influence the reporting of cases, data collection, and human trafficking policies.
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For example, when the terms “sex trafficking” and “prostitution” are used interchangeably, it can distort the lines between being a victim and being criminalized under the law. The usage of “child prostitute” speaks to this point since, by definition, there is no such thing as a child prostitute. If a minor is involved in commercial sex, it is automatically considered sex trafficking.
When victims of sex trafficking are misclassified as prostitutes, they can face greater risks of being criminalized and excluded from receiving resources as survivors. The Rights4Girls Criminalized Survivors Report refers to this discrepancy as the “Abuse to Prison Pipeline.”
The report further explains that victims can face a “catch-22”—whether they choose to act in self-defense to escape their abuser or comply with them out of fear, either decision can lead to criminal charges.
Misclassifying victims of exploitation as criminals creates barriers for organizations to obtain adequate data about the scope of sex trafficking and the populations that need survivor services.
“Although these are legally distinct concepts [sex trafficking and prostitution], the line between the two is very blurry, and their clinical needs are identical,” Vafa with Rights4Girls said.
When discourse about survivors of abuse centers on criminalization rather than support, it can distract from the economic and social disparities that create conditions for human exploitation. Further, it deflects from spotlighting the people upholding the system of abuse.
The Hidden Side of the Market
Mainstream discussions about human trafficking tend to focus on the relationship between the trafficker and the victim. This allows a key driver of the market to remain in the shadows and unaccountable to the public: the buyers.
As Vafa noted, “ It is very important to shine a spotlight on the role that they play, especially in light of this cultural reckoning we’re having with the Epstein case.”
For the World Cup, Rights4Girls launched a national billboard campaign to “put sex buyers on notice.” The organization put up billboards across six major host cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, Boston, Seattle, and the NYC-NJ region.
“ I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years and have met hundreds of survivors. The vast majority of survivors are Black and Indigenous, and the majority of their sex buyers are White men,” Vafa told NPQ.
Vafa’s experiences are supported by a report published by Rights4Girls, Buyers Unmasked. The report unpacks how women and girls tend to face greater criminal charges than buyers, and that arrests disproportionately impact Black survivors.
Nonprofit leaders are advocating to expose buyers, hold them legally accountable, and shift power dynamics that maintain structures of exploitation.
“We’re seeing survivor programs closing down. We’ve seen organizations reduced to a small capacity, which means survivors will not be served with critical support like housing, case management, therapy, and legal services.”
While major sporting events trigger law enforcement to ramp up sting operations and arrests, if adequate legal consequences and policies are not permanently put in place, buyers can continue to cause harm with impunity.
Lyle from MISSSEY also notes how those in positions of power have not been held accountable to the law, further weakening the threat of legal consequences for sex crimes: “ I’m skeptical if any john or any pimp is going to take any threat of legal retribution seriously when we see at the highest levels of government that there’s nothing done about sex exploitation.”
Temporary Response Versus Permanent Infrastructure
While the World Cup prompted agencies to develop Human Rights Action Plans and increase trafficking prevention measures, the work is far from over.
The root causes of human trafficking are insidious and solutions must extend far beyond this season.
Anti-trafficking leaders are calling attention to the social and economic disparities that sustain human trafficking at the national level.
As Karen Romero, co-executive director of the Freedom Network USA (FNUSA), told NPQ, “We’re seeing survivor programs closing down. We’ve seen organizations reduced to a small capacity, which means survivors will not be served with critical support like housing, case management, therapy, and legal services.”
Romero further discusses how federal funding and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policy cuts are “dismantling the infrastructure meant to respond to survivors of human trafficking. It is creating barriers for survivors to access the resources that they need when they exit a trafficking situation.”
These dynamics have resulted in victims remaining in or returning to trafficking situations in order to maintain access to food and housing.
Government officials will need to develop and restore policies that close the economic gap rather than widening it. Until then, communities must continue building infrastructures of support and protection for one another as rates of food and housing insecurity continue to rise, and, in turn, fuel human trafficking in the United States.
