Thaindian News

Washington, Feb 2 (ANI): When fans flock to the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium on Sunday for Super Bowl, Texas police will have a tough time keeping vigil on the game’s ‘dark side’.

For many children, the Super Bowl marks the brutal time when they are sold for sex.

Texas authorities have stepped up efforts to prevent children from being sold and sex traffickers from gaining business during the game.

“People are thinking of the Packers and the Steelers and the game on the field, having a good time and Super Bowl commercials. Most don’t think about a 12-year-old being forced to dance naked,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told ABC News.

“There are several things at play here. There are maybe 100,000 or more coming in and out of town for a single event, and it seems to be a testosterone filled event,” he said.

“The Super Bowl is a magnet for child sex traffickers,” he added.

Texas is creating a taskforce of federal, state and city agencies to combat child trafficking in Arlington during the big game.

“The link is that with any sort of major event and planned event there is going to be unfortunately corresponding influx of various crimes,” said Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the taskforce.

“And one of those very unfortunately is going to be prostitution and or the child prostitution or more directly human trafficking,” he added.

Abbott said that Texas law enforcement officials wanted to ‘get ahead of the curve’ this year in combating the problem of child prostitution during the Super Bowl after hearing stories from Miami Beach and Tampa, where the last two Super Bowls were held.

During the 2010 Super Bowl in Miami Beach, child outreach professionals said they saw a surge in young women working the streets in the week leading up to the big game.

“We saw at least four times as many, if not more, young women on the streets,” said Sandy Skelaney, who headed the Super Bowl outreach project at Kristi House, a child advocacy organization in Miami.

Brad Dennis, the director of the KlaasKids Foundation, an advocacy group that works to find missing children, many of whom may have become involved in child prostitution, has travelled to the past two Super Bowl host cities and plans to travel to Dallas ahead of this year’s game.

He said that the child prostitutes he has met with had told him that they were there because there was such a great demand for their services.

“The Super Bowl is a traffickers playground. You have an influx of money and the party atmosphere,” he said.

Monitoring online message boards such as Craigslist and Backpage.com showed an increased number of ads for escorts. Prior to the Super Bowl, there were 38 ads and then two days prior to the game there were 192 ads, said Skelaney.

In 2009, in the days leading up to the Super Bowl held in Tampa, agents arrested two alleged pimps who had advertised the sexual services of a 14-year-old girl in a Craigslist ad titled, ‘Super Bowl Special’, according to news reports at the time.

Police in Phoenix, Ariz., where the 2008 Super Bowl was played, broke up a child prostitution ring that they believed at the time had come specifically for the championship game.

Sgt. Joel Tranter, who was the public information officer for the Phoenix Police Department during the Super Bowl, told ABC News that the agency was aware that pimps who are involved in a ‘prostitution circuit’ were coming to the area to profit off the Super Bowl. (ANI)