The International Justice Mission is a nongovernmental organization that works to identify and rescue young victims of cybersex trafficking. It has found that the median age of the victims is between 15 and 16 years old, but more than half (54 percent) of those rescued were under the age of 12. The group’s extensive research found that men will pay almost twice as much for a pre-pubescent girl’s virginity as for one who has already reached puberty with prices sometimes reaching up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On the dark web (the unindexed section of the internet that operates without regulation and can only be accessed through specialized browsers), the virginity of women sold into sexual slavery is commonly offered up to the highest bidder through anonymous auctions using cryptocurrencies. Street children from Cambodia and the Philippines are the most common victims, often sold into sexual slavery by their own financially desperate parents, but there are children—and their virginity—from all over the world being offered online.
In Colombia, as The Daily Beast reported in 2016, girls as young as 10 are sold to the highest bidders, many of whom are men from the United States, Mexico, or Japan who join the auctions as part of lurid sex tourism packages.
The virginity of young Nigerian teenagers sex trafficked into Italy used to be a very popular sell, with private auctions run by madams a common part of the initiation for many young women arriving in the country. But now that most young women get caught up in Libyan detention centers where they are raped, they are rarely virgins when they arrive and the auctions are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
There is a massive difference, of course, between those who are forced and those who choose to sell themselves to the highest bidder. For one, those who choose to sell themselves can do so via legitimate or semi-legit websites while those who are forced are hidden on the dark web.
A quick Google search turns up scores of registered websites recruiting virgins who allegedly want to sell their first time. Many require doctors’ certificates to validate virginity and some claim to provide psychological care because “once virginity is gone, you can’t get it back.” (This ignores the thriving business of hymen reconstruction in countries where lost virginity sometimes leads to loss of life.)
One site called Virgins Wanted, hosted on an Australian server, offers to send information about “how to sell your virginity online” to anyone who dares fill out an online form.