On February 3rd, Paul Crawford, 64, was sentenced to serve 30 months to 10 years in state prison following Crawford’s entry into a plea deal negotiated with the Commonwealth. As part of Crawford’s plea deal, the Commonwealth dropped seven charges and maintained three: (1) attempted patronizing of a victim of human trafficking, (2) attempted statutory sexual assault, and (3) criminal use of a communication facility. Crawford’s sentences will run concurrently and he must now register as a sex offender.
On June 25, 2025, Crawford was arrested in a sting operation orchestrated by Lancaster County Police. Police posed online as a 14-year-old girl, using an advertisement on an unreported online platform. Crawford solicited the decoy for sex through the platform. Upon arriving at a Manheim Township hotel to meet the teen, Crawford was arrested by the Lancaster County Human Trafficking Task Force.
Children cannot consent to being bought or sold for sex. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (“UNODC”) has reported that one out of every three victims of human trafficking worldwide are children. Though no real victim was harmed in this case, the successful sting illustrates how commonly sex buyers seek victims through online advertisements. As we previously explained, paid-sex sting operations, in practice, frequently target people who are exploited rather than perpetrators of exploitation, causing more harm than good. But stings that are targeted at would-be buyers alone can help detercommercial sexual exploitation by targeting demand.
While we commend prosecutors and police who target known channels of commercial sexual exploitation, we also urge them to get the charges right. Sex trafficking under Federal and Pennsylvania law does not require a showing of force, fraud, or coercion where the victim is a minor. Under Pennsylvania law, a person commits a trafficking offense where the person knowingly “recruits, entices, solicits, patronizes, advertises, harbors, transports, provides, obtains or maintains” another for sexual servitude. Pennsylvania law defines “sexual servitude” as a commercial sex act induced or obtained from a minor, or from an adult who is induced into commercial sex act through certain means, including, among other things, threats of physical violence, extortion, or fraud. While prosecuting sex buyers like Crawford is important, Crawford, who solicited commercial sex from a minor, should have also been charged with sex trafficking under Pennsylvania law.
Sex trafficking operates under the laws of supply and demand, underscoring the importance of prosecuting sex buyers like Crawford. Because the ‘demand’ for commercialized sex can never meet the ‘supply’ provided by people in prostitution, sex buyers create the economic conditions that make sex trafficking profitable. This is why we endorse the Equality Model, which rests on four pillars: (1) the decriminalization of victims of prostitution and sex trafficking, (2) criminalizing sex buyers and their facilitators for their role in fueling gender-based violence, (3) educating the public about the harms of prostitution, and (4) funding exit opportunities and services for victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Put simply, prosecuting sex buyers like Crawford is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure gender equality and an end to the gender-based violence of commercial sexual exploitation.
The CSE Institute commends the Lancaster County Police Department and District Attorney Fritz Karl Haverstick for their efforts in combatting the commercial sexual exploitation of minors and holding sex buyers accountable.
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University.