Jason Guinasso’s recent opinion column tries to equate Nevada’s legal courtesans with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s child victims. Federal law defines sex trafficking as the recruitment or obtaining of a person for a commercial sex act through force, fraud or coercion, or when the person is younger than 18. Decades of research are clear: Criminalization drives sex work underground, where violence and trafficking thrive. Some may face difficult circumstances or turn to sex work because they lack other options. But conflating legal sex work with “sex trafficking” is not only inaccurate, it erases workers’ actual experiences, dilutes the meaning of sex trafficking itself and makes it harder to build evidence-based solutions to real problems.