Minneapolis at night (Sanghwan Kim/Getty Images)
A scandal-plagued anti-sex trafficking group has rebranded itself and is moving its headquarters from Utah to Minnesota.
The move is partly motivated by a belief that the state is an epicenter of human trafficking activity, with statistics from several state government websites featuring prominently in the group’s messaging.
But those statistics are largely inaccurate and outdated, and in several cases the agencies publishing them say they should be disregarded.
The confusion underscores the difficulties of accurately measuring the prevalence of human trafficking, and how exaggerated claims about the extent of the problem have featured prominently in public discussion of the issue for many years.
Operation Underground Railroad
The anti-trafficking group, once known as Operation Underground Railroad, faced an existential crisis when former CEO Tim Ballard was accused by former employees of sexual assault and human trafficking. Ballard was also accused of lying to donors and exaggerating the extent of the organization’s anti-trafficking activities.
After Ballard resigned in 2023, the group brought on Minnesota native Tammy Lee as its new CEO and rebranded itself as Our Rescue. Last October it revealed plans to relocate to Minneapolis.
In announcing the move, Lee claimed that “these heinous crimes against children are happening in every Minnesota county, giving our state the shameful distinction of having the third highest rate of child sexual exploitation in the nation.”
She has recently said that the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area “is in the top 13 US cities for child trafficking,” and the group has made similar statements that Minneapolis “is one of the top locations in the United States for child sex trafficking.”
Claims like these have been circulating among advocacy and law enforcement groups for years. They are often based on outdated, incomplete or inaccurate information.
State agencies distance themselves from claims
The Minnesota Department of Health warns that “many common statistics associated with human trafficking are misleading.” But some of those misleading statistics feature prominently on other Minnesota state government websites.
The claim about Minneapolis being a “top location” for child trafficking, for instance, appears on the website of Attorney General Keith Ellison. But the website gives no further data or citation to back up the claim, and it contains several other questionable assertions that have been debunked by fact checkers.
A spokesman for the office said the page was “not current” and recommended looking elsewhere for up-to-date information.
Similarly, the claim that Minnesota has the country’s “third highest rate” of child sex exploitation appears to originate on a Minnesota Judicial Branch website, and has been repeated by law enforcement officers, the Department of Transportation and even the Mayo Clinic.
After the Star Tribune inquired about the factoid, a spokesman for the Judicial Branch told them “no one in his office knew the source of the oft-repeated claim,” and the page was taken down.
The statement that the Twin Cities metro is in the “top 13 US cities” for child trafficking appears to have roots in a 2003 FBI designation of “13 U.S. cities with a high incidence rate of child prostitution.”
More than two decades later it is unclear what criteria were used to make that designation. All but two cities on the list were also part of the country’s 20 most populous metro areas in 2000, suggesting the designation is simply a function of raw population numbers.
Kelly Puspoki, a spokesperson for Our Rescue, said that the group is not a “primary source of data” on human trafficking and that it attempts to cite “multiple reputable sources and consider many data points” in its communications on the issue.
“Sex trafficking is happening everywhere,” she added. “Reported or unreported, prosecuted, or unprosecuted.”
A tough-to-measure problem
The reliance on oft-repeated and hard-to-pin-down statistics underscores a broader problem in public discussions of human trafficking: Like many crimes involving vulnerable people, the actual prevalence of human trafficking is difficult to estimate.
Victims are often fearful of reporting abusers; states vary considerably on their crime reporting practices; and law enforcement agencies sometimes overstate the prevalence of sex trafficking and conflate it with consensual sex work.
“Prevalence data about trafficking is a real challenge,” said Lauren Martin, a University of Minnesota researcher who studies human trafficking. “Human trafficking is hidden, dangerous, and illegal. So it isn’t really possible to do standard sampling or census-style surveys.”
In Minnesota, for instance, law enforcement agencies often announce the results of “trafficking stings” resulting in large numbers of arrests. But those stings typically involve suspects contacting undercover officers online, and who are usually charged with either soliciting prostitution or soliciting a minor — not trafficking.
Actual human trafficking charges, by contrast, are rare: fewer than 20 charges per year under Minnesota’s anti-trafficking statute, according to Judicial Branch data, with conviction numbers in the single digits.
Those charges and convictions represent an unknown fraction of the actual incidence of trafficking in the state. “These numbers tell us what law enforcement and the courts are doing,” Martin said, “but it doesn’t tell us the prevalence.”
Other data sources give a sense, albeit a highly imperfect one, of the extent of trafficking in Minnesota relative to other states.
The national Human Trafficking Hotline, for instance, publishes annual data on the number of tips it receives. The 223 tips received from Minnesota sources in 2023 amounted to the fourth-lowest per-capita rate in the nation, and the per-capita prevalence of cases involving suspected minor victims was the second-lowest.
Similarly, data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children shows that in 2023, on a per-capita basis Minnesota had the 10th-lowest rate of reports deemed credible enough to refer to local law enforcement agencies.
Martin cautions that “the number of calls is dependent on people knowing about the hotline and understanding what human trafficking is. There is a lot of data showing that people are not really aware of labor trafficking and that people who are victims of trafficking may not view themselves that way.”
Federal authorities also prosecute trafficking cases, and data compiled by the Human Trafficking Institute shows that from 2000 to 2023, Minnesota had 31 federal sex trafficking cases, the nation’s eighth-lowest rate of filings on a per-capita basis.
Taken together, those numbers are difficult to square with claims that Minneapolis is a national epicenter of sex trafficking, or that it is unusually prevalent in Minnesota overall.
Martin says the closest thing to prevalence data we have is a regular survey of Minnesota high school students that asks if they’ve ever traded sex or sexual activity for “money, food, drugs, alcohol, a place to stay, or anything else.” A little over 1% answered “yes” in 2022.
Real-world harm
In recent years, misconceptions about the prevalence of human trafficking have provided fodder for rampant social media misinformation, leading to innocent travelers falsely being profiled as human traffickers.
The misconceptions have also fueled wild conspiracy theories — including on the fringes of Donald Trump’s political movement — resulting in real-world violence and harassment campaigns.
Organizations that work with trafficking survivors say those misconceptions distract from the realities of human trafficking — even if those realities are difficult to measure.