Demand and the World Cup: What the Data Showed

Researchers, federal agents, and campaign leaders joined Allies Against Slavery on September 3 to answer a question the field has debated for years: does demand for commercial sexual exploitation spike during major sporting events?

More than 280 people from 39 states and six other countries joined us for a candid look at an assumption that has shaped how our field spends its time and money for more than a decade.

Why We Asked

News coverage linking trafficking to the World Cup ran nearly two to one in the months before the tournament compared to the weeks during it, then fell to a trickle. Our team at Allies Against Slavery tracked English-language coverage across 2026 and found the narrative began in late February, when Santa Clara County announced its Super Bowl operation results and nearly every story pivoted to the World Cup at the same stadium.

Dr. Vanessa Bouché, our Chief Impact Officer, opened by naming the claim directly: when a mega event arrives, trafficking spikes and victims are transported in to meet demand. That claim has driven task forces, emergency funding, and volunteer mobilization. The evidence behind it has been contested for years, and getting it wrong costs resources, credibility, and victims we could have reached during the other 50 weeks of the year.

What the Ad Data Shows

Pooled across U.S. host cities, the World Cup produced no statistically significant change in commercial sex advertising. Dr. Nick Freeman of the University of Alabama's Institute of Data and Analytics presented findings from 108 million ads collected from a single prominent site between February 2020 and August 2026, measuring both ad volume and the number of distinct individuals posting.

The city-level picture was more interesting. Dallas, Houston, and Miami showed activity significantly below baseline during the tournament. Atlanta showed an increase.

"It wasn't necessarily the event. There's an event-location effect. Certain regions, and the ways they were doing awareness or operations, really seem to have had an effect," Dr. Freeman said.

What HSI Saw in North Texas

Special Agents Brent Self and John Jones of the HSI Dallas Field Office confirmed the pattern from the ground. Their own tracking of Dallas-Fort Worth ad volume found the year's highest peak two weeks before Christmas, not during the World Cup. The two spikes visible during the tournament were most plausibly law enforcement's own decoy ads.

During the 2026 World Cup, the Homeland Security Investigations task force in North Texas ran 11 demand operations and arrested 369 people attempting to buy sex. Six of them had any connection to the tournament. One had come for a match. Five worked pyrotechnics for an event off site.

The rest lived there. They were in Dallas before the first whistle, and they are still there now.

What the Campaigns Learned

Aaron Nodjomian-Escajeda, Policy Director at Rights4Girls, presented the Sex Buying Isn't a Game campaign, which ran in six host markets and pairs public messaging with public policy advocacy. Rights4Girls has helped pass felony accountability laws for sex buyers in eight states, with a ninth in New York, and has introduced a sliding-scale fine proposal in Illinois tied to a buyer's net worth. Across the six markets, partners reported more than 250 trafficking victims recovered during the tournament period.

"Sex trafficking isn't a distant threat that appears only during major events. It exists today in every community across the country, rural, suburban, tribal, and urban," Nodjomian-Escajeda said.

Dana Hoyes, US Campaigns Director at It's A Penalty, said her organization does not assume trafficking arrives with the fans. It treats major events as a moment when attention, deadlines, and coordination line up. Its World Cup campaign, the largest to date, spanned all three host countries with 33 direct partners and piloted a microlearning tool that logged more than 31,000 sessions. In Atlanta, the Mayor's Office of Violence Reduction helped create the Alliance Against Trafficking, now more than 65 members strong, with a framework built to outlast the tournament.

"The event is temporary, but the response doesn't have to be," Hoyes said.

Sandy Skelaney, Chief Operating Officer at Parasol Cooperative, closed with Ruth, a trauma-informed AI chat resource deployed on the It's A Penalty’s website during the tournament. Ruth is anonymous, deletes chat histories, and keeps no data with any underlying AI model. Since late 2024 it has handled more than 90,000 conversations with a 92 percent helpfulness rating. The World Cup deployment itself saw 66 conversations.

Bottom line: Did we see the expected spike?

HSI's answer: "No, we did not." Every other panelist agreed.

Demand is real and it is local, with buyers in every host city overwhelmingly from those communities. And the field has been organizing significant energy around a handful of weeks, when the people being exploited this week, with no tournament in town, need to be identified too.

"If we want to be an evidence-driven field, we have to be as interested in the results as we are in the warnings," Bouché said.