In advance of Super Bowl XLVIII in the New Jersey Meadowlands, flight attendants were told to be on the lookout for underage girls traveling to the Northeast. The concern was that the teens were being imported by human sex traffickers to be peddled as prostitutes for those attending football’s biggest game.

The problem of child prostitution exists wherever large groups of men congregate, including near military bases and “man camps” of oil drilling operations, as well as at major sporting events, William Rivera, of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF), told a large conference on sex trafficking in Hartford on Jan. 29.