Biography
Christen M. Price serves as Senior Legal Counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Law Center, where she represents sex trafficking survivors in civil litigation against various perpetrators and facilitators, including X/Twitter, Pornhub, and OnlyFans. She is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and is licensed to practice law in New York and the District of Columbia.
Abstract
It is well-documented that legalization and other forms of official protection for prostitution lead to an increase in sex trafficking, including by encouraging demand for prostitution. This paper will consider the relationship between official protection, organized crime, and sex trafficking in pro-prostitution legal regimes, both historical and contemporary. Prostitution is legal in rural counties in Nevada that have fewer than 700,000 residents, if prostitution occurs within a brothel. There is significant overlap between sex trafficking and legal brothel prostitution in Nevada, as well as a nexus to corruption and organized crime, illustrating the normalization of coercion that occurs within legalized prostitution systems. The paper will set forth the legal framework for and the standard practices of the legal brothels, relying on the lived experiences of Nevada sex trafficking survivors, as well as the direct knowledge gained from service providers and other practitioners. The paper will place special focus on data uncovered through the author’s litigation against these brothels and the government entities that upheld them, particularly the brothels’ use of debt and physical restraint. Finally, the paper will analyze these practices through the lens of federal laws against organized crime, as well as federal anti-trafficking laws in the United States, which forbid any commercial sex act that is induced by force, fraud, or coercion.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Price, Christen (2026) "Impunity: A Case Study of Sex Trafficking in Nevada Brothel Prostitution," Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence: Vol. 11: Iss. 2, Article 5. https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2026.11.02.05
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