With Super Bowl, Tampa Braces for Surge in Sex Trafficking. Here’s How It’s Combating It.

Expect human traffickers to exploit the Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida, this weekend.

While current COVID-19 restrictions will limit game attendance, there will still be 22,000 fans there, and with Tampa as the home city of the Buccaneers, one of the participating teams, there will be many more in town.

Traffickers are criminal economic enterprises who target the Super Bowl and other large-scale events to take advantage of the increased concentration of men, money, and parties in one geographic area.

Traffickers travel from all over the country and even internationally to bring in their victims for the event.

Most human traffickers are low-level operators, selling one, or maybe two, victims. They can make a lot of money by selling the victim over and over again.

At last year’s Super Bowl in Miami, police made 47 arrests, which led to the rescue of 22 victims. Additionally, eight buyers of sex trafficking and 34 accomplices were arrested. 
Tampa already has the 12th-highest rate of calls per capita made to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. And Florida as a state has the third-highest rate of human trafficking cases reported. 

The New York Daily News has called Tampa the “strip club capital” of the country. And with publicly advertised events like the “Stripper Bowl” taking place after the game (as it has the last few Super Bowls), there is certain to be increased sex trafficking.

Trafficking at large-scale events used to take place primarily at hotels and motels, but in recent years it has evolved to rental properties, time shares, Airbnb rentals, and even yachts. The vast and sprawling nature of these low-level trafficking enterprises can make the job of law enforcement combating it increasingly difficult.