Fact Check: No, 27,000 King County men are not buying sex online

For the past year, in the local effort to fight prostitution and sex trafficking, we’ve been told that 27,000 King County men are actively soliciting sex online at over 100 websites each day. This number was intended to shock us into fully grasping how serious and widespread the problem of sexual exploitation actually is. It’s why both King County Executive Dow Constantine and King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg parroted out this scary statistic.

When I saw the number, repeated as recently as last week, it did shock me. I thought it was high. I was right.

Read the study here

It turns out there are not 27,000 King County men buying sex online every day &#8212 at least, not according to any data we can find, and the King County Prosecutor’s Office acknowledges as much.

“There was a mistake in the numbers which prompted us to go back to the report and figure it out,” explains Val Richey, Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for King County.

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The stat comes from the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research from Arizona State University. They looked at the number of men who were actively soliciting for sex after seeing a staged online advertisement.

But, they didn’t look at King County. They looked at Seattle, estimating 8,806 potential sex buyers make contact with sex sellers in the Escort section of Backpage.com every day. That represented about 3.5 percent of the adult male population in Seattle.

From that percentage, King County officials took the percentage of men countywide, assumed the Seattle numbers were similar to countywide behavior, and estimated that 27,000 figure.

“It is an assumption,” Richley admits. “[It is] an inference based on the demographics of the people we arrest. I felt very comfortable making that inference. It’s still a very conservative figure.”

It may very well be. However, according to Richey, ASU revised their algorithm and updated the daily sexy buyer contact in Seattle down to 6,847 and no one at King County noticed until now. Richey will be explaining at a staff meeting that the number was revised and no one should use the old data.

He should be commended for the correction, though as I look at the study, it still seems high. During the study, out of four Backpage.com ads posted, there were only 108 unique contacts. Based on that data, ASU noted there were approximately 282 sex ads the weekend prior (similar to the fake ads they published), then applied the contact rate they experienced to the other ads.

In other words, they received an average of 27 respondents to their fake ads. They found 282 real ads, and assumed an average of 27 respondents would reply to those, the way they replied to the fake ads. So they multiplied that number to conclude 7,625 individual men tried to buy sex online. They then subtracted from that a percentage they believed were individuals responding more than one time (again, based exclusively on the behavior of the people interacting with their fake ads). And voila: they have the number of men they believe are going online buying sex.

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This, to me, seems to make a huge mess of assumptions.

Still, Richley says these kinds of numbers are likely true.

“That experience of volume is very consistent with the anecdotal experience of our detectives in that when they post ads they see a high response in a short time,” he told me.

I’ll let him speak to what his office sees; I obviously cannot. Nor do I want to dismiss any of the great work that his office is doing in fighting sex exploitation (though I’ve found myself vacillating on the whole idea of legalizing prostitution). But, we should be fighting the perceived problems with facts, not assumptions, and I’m at least happy to report that, based on this inquiry, they’ll be using a lower number more in line with what the data actually reports (even though I have significant problems with the data).

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