Maine Legislative Hearing Set for Bill Establishing Victim Services Fund to be Supplied by Fines Paid by Arrested Sex Buyers
February 2, 2026
Tomorrow, February 3, 2026, a hearing will be held to discuss an important bill before the Maine state legislature, and we urge you to offer support for the bill.
LD 2168, “An Act to Increase Accountability for Persons Engaged in Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Human Trafficking and to Support Victims,” seeks to impose fines on arrested sex buyers and use this revenue to help rectify some of the damage caused by their behavior. The hearing will occur on Tuesday, February 3, 2026, 1:00 PM EST, in the Judiciary Committee at the State Capitol building in Augusta, Maine.
The bill directs the state’s courts to impose a $500 assessment, or a $1,000 assessment for repeat offenders, on persons convicted of engaging a person for prostitution, sex trafficking, aggravated sex trafficking, soliciting a child for commercial sexual exploitation or commercial sexual exploitation of a minor or person with a mental disability. Money from assessments would be deposited in the Victims' Compensation Fund, and must be used to meet the needs of victims and survivors of these crimes.
The bill advances the cause of pursuing evidence-based practices seeking to minimize, and eventually abolish, sex trafficking and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation. The proven model is to arrest and sanction sex buyers, while taking a far different approach to those who exploited as the “product” of the sex trade, offering support and recovery services rather than punishment. For this approach to work, laws against buying sex must be enforced, and services for victims and survivors must be provided.
LD 2068 promotes these efforts, placing more of the financial burden of coping with the exceedingly harmful sex trade on those who are the root cause of the problem: the “consumers” who provide the revenue motivating all sex traffickers to find, control, and exploit victims. What sex buyers have proven is that they have disposable income, and that the harms they cause are severe – especially those directly impacting the women and youth consumed in these illegal markets. It is not only fair and just, but also pragmatically useful for them to offer a bit of “restorative justice” by providing resources to help their victims. The bill also offers additional incentive for law enforcement to arrest buyers whose behavior is placing such a burden on public sector health and social service systems, in addition to criminal justice agencies.
There is recent evidence from two Maine cities – Bangor and Portland - indicating that arresting sex buyers can help to reduce sex trade activity, in addition to its benefits for supporting restorative justice. In mid-December, 2025, a Transaction Intercept operation conducted by Street Grace featured an ad offering a fictional woman for paid sex posted on a popular site used for prostitution in the Bangor area. Over a two-day period, 95 unique sex buyers responded. In January, 2026, the same ad was posted in the Portland area for the same timeframe (number of days, days of the week, times of day), and just 37 sex buyers responded. When accounting for the fact that Bangor’s population (less than 32,000) is less than half of Portland’s (over 68,000), Bangor had more than five times the number of sex buyers responding to a prostitution advertisement than was found in Portland, adjusted for population size.
While it may be alarming to find that just one advertisement can produce the identification of dozens of actively shopping sex buyers in just two days in small cities, these results certainly vastly under-represent the true level of local sex trade activity. There are many websites, apps, social media platforms, and gaming systems used to solicit commercial sex electronically, in addition to conducting transactions in-persons at store-front brothels (e.g. spas, nail salons, massage businesses, bars) or on the streets. If one could measure activity across all venues and electronic platforms, the numbers in both cities would likely be many times larger.
Why were so many more sex buyers responding in Bangor? Probably many factors contribute, but one difference between these cities is clear, based on years of research tracking demand reduction efforts in Maine for the website Demand Forum: The Portland area has a long history of demand reduction tactics used by police, while Bangor does not.
Portland (and abutting cities such as South Portland) has a history of conducting proactive police operations (reverse stings) designed to arrest sex buyers, and publicizing the identities of the arrested men.[1] We have found no public evidence that similar operations proactively targeting sex buyers have ever been conducted in Bangor or nearby communities.[2]
Sex buyers in Bangor have evidently been able to operate with impunity, with laws against purchasing sex virtually unenforced. It is reasonable to assume that the sex buyer community in the Bangor area feel safe to transact commercial sex locally without fear of legal sanctions. Conversely, sex buyers in the Portland area are more likely to believe that there is a risk of arrest and, if that occurred, their identities would be widely circulated. Research clearly shows that the risk of arrest and – more importantly – the risk of others finding out are deterrents to purchasing sex.
We at Street Grace support legislation that promotes the arrest and sanctioning of sex buyers and support services for sex trade survivors. We urge you to support Maine’s LD 2168, and for those unable to attend the hearing in person, there are several ways of doing so, including contacting the bill’s cosponsors directly via email: Representative Holly Stover of Boothbay, ME (Holly.Stover@legislature.maine.gov); cosponsored by Senator Cameron Reny of Lincoln, ME (cameron.reny@legislature.maine.gov).
You may also provide written testimony at: https://www.mainelegislature.org/testimony/. Once there, select “Public Hearing,” and from the drop-down committee menu select the committee that the bill will be heard in: Judiciary. Then select the date and time (2/3/26 at 1:00 pm), check the box for the bill (LD 2168), and upload a file with your testimony or write it in the space provided. The website also requires you to identify yourself at the prompts.
[1] Reverse stings have been conducted in at least six cities in Cumberland County (Brunswick, Cumberland, Freeport, Portland, South Portland, and Westbrook), and within communities in abutting counties (Androscoggin, Lincoln, Oxford).
[2] There in just one arrest of a sex buyer known to have occurred in Bangor, and it is an anomaly: a corrections officer was caught exchanging favors for sex with an inmate.