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MISSING: Sarabeth Sokolsky, 17, was last seen on Feb. 7, 2025, in Phoenix, Arizona.

Buying to Belong: Youth and the Allure of the Metaverse

Washington (March 4, 2025) – Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) today reintroduced the bipartisan Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which would update online data privacy rules for the 21st century and ensure children and teenagers are protected online. Senator Markey first introduced this legislation to update his original COPPA law in 2011 as a member of the House of Representatives and has introduced the bipartisan legislation in every Congress since.

“We need strong modern legislation that keeps pace with the ever-evolving digital landscape and creates a safer online environment by addressing the youth mental health crisis and protecting the personal information of our kids,” said Senator Markey. “Congress must finally pass my Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act to extend these protections to teenagers, block targeted advertising to kids and teens, and give parents of young people an eraser button to protect them from predatory data collection practices.”

“Every kid has an iPad or smartphone. They’re going to use the internet. Parents should be confident they can do it safely,” said Dr. Cassidy. “COPPA 2.0 is the tool that will give parents the peace of mind they need and keep their children’s personal information secure.”

Read more here.

Taina Bien-Aimé – Executive Director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women

The opening of Sean Baker’s 2024 indie film, Anora, takes you into the back rooms of a strip club called “Headquarters,” peppered with men sprawled in leather seats as young naked women gyrate on their groins. In soft-focus and voyeuristic, a facsimile of the male gaze, these first scenes make one wonder why softcore porn is doubling as an Oscar-nominated movie.

Ani – short for Anora – is 23, and one of the contracted women at Headquarters. Of Uzbek descent, she is feisty, scrappy, and always on alert for the next attack against her.

One night, the manager orders Ani to tend to a patronizer seeking a Russian speaker. Ani begrudgingly obliges and greets Vanya, whom she soon finds out is the son a Russian oligarch. A 21-year-old feckless man-child, Vanya spends his days playing video games and hosting lavish, drug-filled parties at his oceanfront Brooklyn mansion.

He hires Ani for a week-long, $15,000 “girlfriend experience.” the end of which, drunk on his paid-for-sex smorgasbord, proposes they marry in Las Vegas. Though the relationship between Ani and Vanya is manufactured and twisted by an acute power imbalance, Ani accepts as long as she gets a 3-carat diamond ring.

Read more here.  

Watch here.

This report seeks to shine a light on a consistently overlooked dimension of commercial sexual exploitation: the sex buyers who fuel this destructive system. The report features sex buyer quotes from across the country to expose the ways in which these men view and discuss the individuals they purchase for sex acts as well as the overall act of sex buying. By showcasing sex buyers in their own words, highlighting key trends among their attitudes, and revealing demographic data of sex buyers versus sex trade survivors across the U.S., we argue that current prostitution policies must be reformed to address these realities and offer possible solutions to end sexual exploitation.

By examining case studies of Australia, New Zealand, and Rhode Island, we conclude that current calls to decriminalize “sex work” are a failed approach because they result in an expansion of the sex trade, offering more women and youth up to the very men we highlight in these pages, while frustrating efforts to hold sex traffickers and other exploiters accountable. Instead, we offer the Survivor Model—a policy framework that provides services and legal protection to those engaged in prostitution while holding accountable those who exploit them for profit and sexual gratification.

Full Report