Under the guise of "stopping sex trafficking," authorities tend to ramp up prostitution stings around Super Bowl time. The ostensible motive behind this is that large sporting events like the Super Bowl draw an influx of traffickers and their victims to the locales hosting these events.

Yet no one has managed to marshal evidence of these hordes of traffickers allegedly descending on Super Bowl cities. The best authorities can do is sometimes point to a spike in Super Bowl weekend arrests of sex workers and their customers—a spike easily explained by the fact that cops are making a concerted effort to catch people offering to sell or pay for sex.

The Super Bowl sex trafficking myth is a sequel of sorts to an earlier idea—that domestic violence increased around the Super Bowl—for which there was also no evidence. Both myths have served a political agenda.