The Mirage of the “Rescue”
Public discourse around sex trafficking is a carefully curated fiction. The “rescue” narrative—filled with high-profile stings and dramatic “hero” moments for law enforcement—dominates the headlines, but the data tells a far grimmer story of victimless arrests and the relentless recycling of the poor through the carceral system. This investigative synthesis is built on 15 years of exhaustive research by COYOTE RI (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics Rhode Island). The evidence reveals that the current anti-trafficking apparatus is a profit-driven “magic trick,” a shiny object designed to distract the public from systemic poverty, broken institutional pipelines, and the state’s calculated refusal to provide basic human stability.
On June 23, 2026, the Rhode Island State Police executed a “sting” operation, “Operation Red Card,” which was ostensibly tied to the World Cup. While framed as a strike against the sexual exploitation of children, these operations are frequently empty spectacles—arrests made without actual victims to justify the “social entertainment” of a “heroic” police force. Data from GAATW’s “What’s the Cost of a Rumor?” The report exposes these surges in trafficking during major sporting events as fabrications or “clickbait” designed for public consumption. These rumors serve as a predatory policy tool, allowing law enforcement to secure massive budget increases and high-tech surveillance equipment under the guise of public safety.
The Cost of a Rumor
The manufacturing of trafficking hysteria around sporting events creates a fiscal feedback loop. Unsubstantiated claims justify increased policing and bureaucratic expansion, prioritizing law enforcement funding over the material needs of marginalized populations. It is the monetization of myth.
In February 2024, COYOTE RI members traveled to Nevada and joined the “Stop the Raids Committee” to protest sex trafficking stings and educate the public that there is no credible evidence that sporting events increase trafficking or prostitution. In fact, Bella Robinson, Executive Director of COYOTE RI and who has been a sex worker for forty years, argues that there is no credible research that proves prostitution causes sex trafficking. It would be like saying marriage causes domestic violence or that strip clubs are the cause of rape.
Robinson goes on to say that:
“The sex workers’ rights movement is first and foremost a workers’ movement. Lawmakers and police create our working conditions, so they are the “bosses” that we turn towards to negotiate for our labor and our safe work conditions.”
COYOTE RI’s book on sex work policy, A Tribute to December 17th: The COYOTE RI Project, is available on Amazon:
The Two $800,000 Women: The High Price of Perpetual Punishment
The state’s fiscal insanity is laid bare in its treatment of the vulnerable. COYOTE RI’s Prostitution and Prostitution-Related Charges-Charging Document Report case study followed two women in Rhode Island who were arrested more than 20 times each for prostitution. Despite this constant state “intervention,” the only thing provided was circular punishment. The following table contrasts the staggering taxpayer resources wasted on cages versus the total absence of support to create stability:
The state effectively chooses to spend thousands of dollars on jail beds while refusing to spend hundreds on rent, ensuring these individuals remain trapped in a profitable cycle of criminalization.
The state does not just fail to prevent trafficking; it creates the conditions for it. The Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) scandal at Bradley Hospital is a prime example of institutionalized neglect. Children were housed in the hospital for weeks or months after clinical discharge, not attending school, with the state paying a predatory $1,000 per day per child.
While the state attempted to blame “pandemic backlogs,” an FBI investigation confirmed these “boarding” practices were standard operating procedure as early as 2019. Contrast this $1,000 daily expenditure with the a table family environment—is not “protection”. It is an institutional pipeline of displacement that leaves youth susceptible to the exploitation the state purports to oppose.
Furthermore, the state-contracted group home system replicates the very vulnerabilities it claims to fight. Placing a 28-year-old male supervisor in charge of a teenage girl group home—where staff rotate in eight-hour shifts rather than providing a stable family environment—is not “protection”. It is an institutional pipeline of displacement that leaves youth susceptible to the exploitation the state purports to oppose.
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Systemic Shaming: The “No Human Involved” (NHI) Philosophy
Law enforcement culture has long utilized the “NHI” (No Human Involved) label for sex workers and marginalized populations. This classification isn’t just slang; it is a philosophy of dehumanization that justifies “death by neglect.”
While the state obsesses over the “shiny object” of trafficking, it ignores the 56 people who died homeless in Rhode Island last year. The average age of death for a homeless person was just 48. This is the true “NHI” philosophy in action: a state that allows its citizens to die on the street while spending millions on the police who arrest them.
Systemic Shaming: The “No Human Involved” (NHI) Philosophy
Law enforcement culture has long utilized the “NHI” (No Human Involved) label for sex workers and marginalized populations. This classification isn’t just slang; it is a philosophy of dehumanization that justifies “death by neglect.”
While the state obsesses over the “shiny object” of trafficking, it ignores the 56 people who died homeless in Rhode Island last year. The average age of death for a homeless person was just 48. This is the true “NHI” philosophy in action: a state that allows its citizens to die on the street while spending millions on the police who arrest them.
The shaming of sex workers mirrors the historical harms of the “War on Drugs” and gay conversion therapy. The state’s “trauma-informed” rhetoric often pathologizes normal physiological reactions to abuse. As seen in patients receiving medical-grade heroin for hip surgery—who rarely become “addicts” because they remain integrated in their social support systems—it is isolation and shunning, not the substance or act itself, that creates the “victim” or “addict” label. The trafficking narrative is a “magician’s trick,” a distraction used to shield the public from the state’s failure to address housing and poverty.
The financial industry acts as a secondary arm of this carceral machine, executing a system of state-sanctioned financial erasure known as “de-banking.” Because federal regulators hold the power to trigger devastating, ruinous institutional reviews, the government threatens to audit banks that accept money from the adult industry—even when that income is 100% legal, taxable, and generated through compliant mainstream platforms like OnlyFans. Terrified of drawing regulatory crosshairs, banks act as moral police to protect their own interests, arbitrarily shutting down the accounts of independent adult workers without warning.
The financial industry acts as a secondary arm of this carceral machine, executing a system of state-sanctioned financial erasure known as “de-banking.” Because federal regulators hold the power to trigger devastating, ruinous institutional reviews, the government threatens to audit banks that accept money from the adult industry—even when that income is 100% legal, taxable, and generated through compliant mainstream platforms like OnlyFans. Terrified of drawing regulatory crosshairs, banks act as moral police to protect their own interests, arbitrarily shutting down the accounts of independent adult workers without warning.
For the worker, this structural violence happens in an instant: they go to use an ATM card to pay for basic necessities, discover the card has been deactivated, and eventually receive a cold cashier’s check in the mail from the bank. Under federal banking laws, institutions are not required to provide any explanation or justification for destroying a person’s financial life. In a hyper-digitized society, this is an economic death sentence—today, a person cannot even park a car, rent an apartment, or buy groceries without a debit card.
Yet, while the state forces banks to hunt down independent creators over legal earnings because the government threatens to audit banks that step out of line, the multi-million dollar international transactions of Jeffrey Epstein moved through major global banking institutions for decades completely unobstructed by red flags or warnings. Banks will instantly comply with any unwritten federal directive to crush vulnerable, independent workers to avoid a confrontation, while simultaneously providing a friction-free pipeline for billionaire abusers.
This systemic rot and complete erosion of institutional integrity is exposed on a massive scale by the “kids for cash” scandal, where Pennsylvania judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan accepted millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks from private prison developers to guarantee occupancy rates. To keep those beds filled and secure their own illicit wealth, these corrupt judges systematically weaponized the court system against the most vulnerable members of the public—trapping young children in private detention centers for petty, minor offenses. The scandal proved a damning truth: when there is a financial motive to lock people up or shut them out, the state’s judicial machinery operates as a highly profitable commercial enterprise driven by quotas and financial incentives rather than public safety.
Understanding History: How Did We Get Here?
When a system is completely broken, the only way forward is to trace its steps back to the history of how it got there. The institutional architecture of this deception tracks directly back to 2014, when a co-founder of the Polaris Project was speaking at her university alumni event. At the time, the well-funded organization was raking in six to seven million dollars in carceral grants, yet when she stood up to speak, she claimed that while thousands of individuals were calling their national hotline to “self-identify” as wanting to exit the sex industry, Polaris had absolutely no material resources or direct services to offer them. Instead, she pleaded for private donations, claiming the effort “must be a community effort.
Recognizing the stark hypocrisy of a well-funded organization pleading for private wealth while actively tapping into millions of dollars in annual carceral grants, Robinson stood at the microphone, waving a massive compilation of empirical data containing every single prostitution and disorderly conduct arrest record across the United States over a 30-year period. She confronted Chon directly with the hard factual truth: the research proved that minors accounted for a mere 1.8% of all prostitution-related arrests nationwide, and the actual average age of arrest spanned from 25 to 65 years old.
Robinson demanded to know why Polaris refused to stop terrorizing the public with their “average age of entry myth”—the completely fabricated claim that the average age of entry into prostitution is just 12 to 14 years old, a narrative designed strictly to secure federal funding by manufacturing a public crisis. Because of this relentless public exposure, Polaris was eventually forced to quietly back down from the 12-to-14 rumor. They retracted the claim from their official platform and updated their website to state the average age of entry was actually 19, admitting it was based on a completely skewed sample size of just 123 people. Although Polaris has since scrubbed that retraction from their platform to hide the evidence of their administrative malpractice, COYOTE RI captured the original screenshots, permanently preserving the proof of their deception The Effects of Polaris Project in Rhode Island
Why do Rhode Island legislators keep getting it wrong? Could it be because of the out-of-state special interest group with deep pockets?
COYOTE started lobbying for a study commission in 2019 when it was called H5354: CREATING A SPECIAL LEGISLATIVE COMMISSION TO STUDY THE HEALTH AND SAFETY IMPACT OF REVISING COMMERCIAL SEXUAL ACTIVITY LAWS (h ). An out-of-state interest group with deep pockets, who paid local lobbyists tens of thousands of dollars, took control and reframed it as the Legislative Commission To Study Ensuring Racial Equity And Optimizing Health And Safety Laws Affecting Marginalized Individuals, and thus erased local sex workers out of the process.
By the time they convened via a 2021 resolution, H5250, everyone else got a full hour to present, while Bella Robinson of COYOTE RI was only given 10 minutes to present the report COYOTE invested 8,000 dollars in filing public records requests for charging documents to better understand how the law was applied and who it was applied to: Prostitution and Prostitution-Related Charges in Rhode Island 2000 – 2021
By June 2024, three groups that were part of a Rhode Island House of Representatives Sex Work Study Commission issued a statement calling into question the commission’s final report. In essence, argues AmnestyPVD, The Womxn Project, and COYOTE RI, the commission failed to include the voices of the very people affected by the issues the study commission was seeking to understand. The study commission did not agree on the policy recommendations; in fact, COYOTE’s policy recommendations weren’t even considered
In 2024, COYOTE was writing to the House Judiciary Committee in opposition to H7165. In addition to our letter, please see this petition against the bill which has over 400 signatures. We have also created an index of all prior written testimony on H7165 and H7307 that clearly demonstrates the broad public support for an immunity bill that could be used by ALL Rhode Island sex workers and could not be used against us.
There has been some resistance to allowing Asian spa workers to report crimes like murder and sex trafficking without being charged with Massage Without a License. Rhode Island’s most vulnerable citizens are relying on you to take a strong leadership role in prioritizing public safety over some people’s moral discomfort with sex workers or sex trafficking survivors who have been victims or witnesses of heinous crimes and reported them to the police not being charged with this misdemeanor.
During a previous testimony for H7165, an out-of-state special interest group testified that Asian spa workers don’t need immunity because they plan to ask the Attorney General’s Office to not prosecute spa workers for reporting crimes. This demonstrates an incredible ignorance of the Rhode Island context, where police act as prosecutors in misdemeanor cases. In 2021 the Rhode Island Attorney General used the state RICO law to seize $650k from Grace Kwon, an Asian Spa worker. The money was divided between the Pawtucket Police Department and the Attorney General’s Office. It is not reasonable to think that police or prosecutors will begin to go against their own financial interests because they are asked nicely. Rhode Island’s most vulnerable are counting on our lawmakers to take a strong leadership role in prioritizing public safety over the prosecution of moral crimes.
In 2009 during the re-criminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island under H5044 legislators met with 30 Asian spa workers who pleaded for their jobs and their basic human rights - to be able to call police for help, rather than be hunted by police. Legislators ignored their concerns and made them criminals that year. As a small update on the “unintended consequences” of criminalizing Asian spa workers, we would like to share with you this anonymous testimony from one Rhode Island Asian spa worker:
I worked at 2 Pawtucket spas that were raided. I was out of work during the raids, recovering from a medical procedure. The other workers told me how the police talked down to them like they were trash. Prior to these raids 2 of the officers came into the spa several times and purchased our services. One who called himself Joe and he was pushy. He tried to get the workers to engage in intercourse without a condom. The other man tried to get the workers to date him. He promised them big tips and the last time he left without paying the woman. There were rumors that management got tired of paying off these 2 officers and we think that is why they were raided. Since then I work alone so I won’t be charged with the bigger crimes for working with other spa workers. Since then I have been assaulted twice and robbed 3 times. I can’t risk calling the police on bad men because if I get arrested I could lose my 2 grandchildren that I am raising since my daughter died of COVID. I just want to work and be safe.
Sex workers are once again before you telling you that H7165A would have serious unintended consequences and increase violence towards sex workers and sex trafficking survivors. Please listen to us this time and vote no on H7165A or amend it to include equal protection for all sex workers, include reporting by clients, and focus on crimes against people. By 2025, while Asian spa workers needed our protection more than ever because government thugs/ICE were hunting and deporting them, COYOTE again was the only one that spoke up. COYOTE RI’s 2025 Testimony in Opposition to H5358
Conclusion: Beyond the Click Bait
The anti-trafficking industry is a self-perpetuating machine that converts shame into profit. If the state “cared about trafficking,” it would fix the broken DCYF system and provide secure households rather than chasing the “shiny object” of the World Cup sting.The current system relies on the “NHI” logic to justify the seizure of assets and the expansion of police budgets. It is time to look past the clickbait and demand a society that values human life over the profit of prejudice. We must stop making a profit off of shame and start investing in the basic human right to stability.
The Solution: COYOTE POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
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