How We Got Here: A Brief History of Child Sex Trafficking in the United States

Child sex trafficking is not a new problem in the United States. But it has evolved dramatically over the past 30 years, embracing technology to scale faster and hide deeper.

The tools we use to stop child sexual exploitation are evolving, too, however. Looking back at the history of this grave injustice, we inform our strategy to outpace it — and put a stop to child sex trafficking for good.

Trafficking in a Pre-Digital World

Before the internet, trafficking was a physical crime. Recruiters, often called "Romeo pimps" or "loverboys," operated in person, targeting the most vulnerable children they could find: runaways at bus stations, teenagers aging out of foster care, homeless youth sleeping in parks and shelters.

The playbook was simple and consistent. A trafficker would pose as a romantic, attentive, and protective partner. He would meet her family, buy her gifts, and tell her she was special. Over the course of weeks or months, he would spend time building trust and emotional dependency, all while preying on her vulnerabilities.  

And then, gradually, he would introduce the exploitation — framing it as necessity or love or the only way to keep what they had together. By the time a victim understood what was happening, the psychological bond was already complete.

Advertising happened in print. Newspapers and publications carried explicit escort and massage postings. Phone books advertised escort services. Physical flyers and business cards circulated in specific neighborhoods. There was infrastructure, and trafficking was geographically concentrated. 

Every major American city had known physical corridors — "the track," "the stroll," "the blade" — where commercial sexual exploitation occurred in the open and was policed inconsistently. Cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, and Las Vegas had well-documented corridors.

Large-scale operations were often run by organized crime — motorcycle clubs, street gangs, and international networks that physically moved victims across cities and borders. A trafficking network in 1985 was constrained by geography, communication, and the friction of doing business in the physical world.

That friction was the only thing that limited the crime. And then the internet arrived.

Late 1990s: Trafficking After the Internet

In 1993, the Mosaic browser launched, marking the beginning of public internet access. By 1995, approximately 14 million Americans were online. By 1999, that number had grown to more than 100 million. 

For most Americans, this transformation meant newfound access to information, communication, commerce, and community that had never before been possible. For trafficking networks, it was something else entirely: the removal of every constraint that had previously limited their reach, efficiency, and scale.

The first changes were in recruitment. The loverboy model moved online. A trafficker in one city could groom a victim in another — or multiple victims in many cities — building the groundwork for exploitation before ever making physical contact.

Online chat rooms became the new bus stations. The same vulnerable young people who had always been the primary targets of trafficking recruiters were now online. And they could be reached from anywhere.

Law enforcement was almost entirely unprepared. The tools, techniques, and legal frameworks that existed had been built for a physical world. Internet-based recruitment and exploitation existed in a legal and investigative gray zone — acknowledged as a problem, but addressed with almost no resources nor expertise. 

Then, things got more complicated. 

2000s: Online Marketplaces, Smartphones, & Social Media

In 2004, Backpage launched. Backpage launched as a simple classified advertising website, akin to Craiglist. Within a decade, it had become the most significant trafficking marketplace in American history. At its peak, Backpage operated in hundreds of cities across the United States and dozens of countries internationally. Its adult services section generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. In that sea of data, children were being bought and sold for sex. 

Meanwhile, in June 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. Like the internet a decade earlier, the smartphone made trafficking significantly more frictionless. Recruitment, which largely had already moved online, became fully mobile. A trafficker no longer needed a computer, and neither did the children they targeted so long as both parties had a smartphone. The same was true for individual buyers, independent of trafficking networks. Technology made it easier than ever for someone casually curious to act on that curiosity and contact another at the touch of a screen.

Then social media arrived. Facebook reached 100 million users in 2008. Twitter launched in 2006. Instagram in 2010. Traffickers learned to use social media with precision. They identified vulnerable young people through their public profiles: the teenager posting about a difficult home life or the young girl looking for community and understanding online.

The loverboy model, already devastating in its physical and early online forms, became something else. The constant connectivity that smartphones enabled meant that the psychological manipulation could be sustained around the clock.

2010s: Shutting Down Blackpage

By the early 2010s, Backpage was estimated to control more than 80% of the online commercial sex advertising market in the United States. Tens of thousands of ads were posted daily. In response, task forces were established. Training was developed. And tools were built — including the first version of Spotlight in 2014 — to combat child sex trafficking on this very platform.

For probably the first time in the digital age, law enforcement agencies across the country were equipped to identify victims in ads through photos, phone numbers, location data, and subtle behavioral patterns. But only on one platform.

In 2017, a Senate subcommittee investigation found that Backpage executives had knowingly facilitated sex trafficking; they had been aware of the presence of minors in ads on the platform, had taken steps to conceal rather than report it, and had continued to profit from their exploitation. 

In April 2018, the U.S. government seized and shut down Backpage following the passage of  the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA-SESTA). The legislation held platforms liable for facilitating sex trafficking and was celebrated as a landmark victory in the fight against exploitation.

The reality was more complicated. Backpage's shutdown did not end trafficking. It fragmented it.

Post-2018: Fragmentation Across the Web 

Within months of Backpage's shutdown, trafficking advertising had dispersed across dozens of smaller platforms, domestic and international.. The sheer number made it vastly more difficult — almost overnight — for law enforcement to access, monitor, and take action. 

Meanwhile, the total number of commercial sex ads posted each day across these platforms exploded. For reference, today, Spotlight ingests roughly 375,000 of these ads each day, and that’s far from the actual total. 

Over the following years — a trend that continues today — traffickers navigated to darker parts of the web, leveraging anonymity, private accounts, and paywalls to shield their activities and scale their operations across these open platforms. 

At this point, law enforcement who built expertise around Backpage found themselves starting over. And the tools that had been developed for a centralized platform, including Spotlight, had to do the same. 

Today: The Role of AI in Hiding Exploitation

The most recent chapter in the story of internet-facilitated child sex trafficking — the one we’re living through now — is perhaps the scariest one of all.

Artificial intelligence has given traffickers new tools for exploitation and evasion. AI-generated images make it possible to create convincing advertising content without exposing real victims to the risk of identification. AI-written text makes it harder to identify trafficking indicators through language pattern analysis. Voice synthesis tools make it possible to impersonate victims in phone communications with buyers or with law enforcement. The list goes on. 

Technology has also empowered traffickers to structure their financial activity to evade detection. They commonly use $Cashtags, cryptocurrency wallets, prepaid gift cards, and peer-to-peer payment apps to move money faster, in smaller denominations, and with minimal identity verification.

A survivor recently shared, “We had to send quotas through [a money transfer service] and [pre-paid credit cards] using passwords/secret questions and staying under $1,000 so he didn’t have to show his ID to pick up.”

And yet, despite all the headwinds, this current era also holds the most hope for dramatic change in our fight against child sexual abuse. 

Looking Ahead: Evolving Tools to Combat an Evolving Problem

The same technology that traffickers are using to exploit children can be used to find them. Artificial intelligence that generates deceptive content can also recognize deceptive patterns. Machine learning models that analyze millions of ads can surface the signals that human investigators would take weeks to find manually. And the digital trails that traffickers leave across platforms, payment systems, and devices are, with the right tools, more visible than ever. Spotlight by Canary is one of those tools. 

Spotlight was first built in 2014 to help first responders find child sex trafficking victims on Backpage, faster. It has evolved every single year to keep pace with new technology, new platforms, and new tactics employed by traffickers. Today, 8,300+ investigators across the United States and Canada rely on AI-powered Spotlight to transform millions of data points into actionable insights that lead to child safety. You can learn more about Spotlight’s impact here and be part of the next chapter we’re writing together: a future in which every child is seen and safe.