But as details emerged about the strip-mall massage parlor and the women working there, the mood toward Kraft’s alleged involvement shifted. The prostitution ring, police say, uses trafficked sex workers who are forced to live and sleep at the parlor.
Kraft has previously donated to groups that fight the sexual exploitation of children, such as the Boston nonprofit My Life My Choice. He and his family also endowed a professorship at Brandeis University, and the woman currently in that role studies slavery, sexuality and religion.
Bernadette Brooten, the Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies, is the author of Beyond Slavery: Overcoming the Religious and Sexual Legacies. When asked about Kraft’s arrest, Booten said the allegations were “disturbing” and “very saddening.” She emphasizes that modern-day slavery goes beyond sex workers. “To many people, [slavery is] simply invisible, and yet it may be just around the corner,” she says. “It may be that we are consuming goods that are produced by the labor of enslaved persons.”
Kevin Malone, president of the U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking, says we’re “completely missing the point” by focusing mainly on Kraft’s alleged crimes. “Human trafficking is modern-day slavery” he writes, with “the wealthiest of the wealthy” often exploiting “the weakest of the weak.” But trafficking happens anywhere, and buyers come from “all walks of life.”
People who buy sex may not consider that the women are enslaved, Malone adds, but they’re “real victims, who have difficult recoveries ahead of them.” And the only way to put an end to the problem of trafficking, he says, is to end “the demand that drives it.”
Kraft’s arrest may raise public awareness about the issue, Malone adds, but “it shouldn’t take the public shaming of the owner of the winning Super Bowl team for this issue to make headlines. What happened in Florida is what happens all across America on a daily basis. As a nation that prides itself on being a land of liberty, our continued avoidance of this issue is deeply hypocritical—and has devastating consequences for the most vulnerable among us.”
