Hampton is a town of about 3,000 residents and is the county seat of Hampton County, South Carolina. Sex trafficking and related violence have been documented in the town.

In August 2022, a former sex trafficking victim from Charleston gave an interview on the violence she experienced while being trafficked, exposing particularly one sex buyer, a Hampton man at the center of a murder investigation who was also suspected of several other crimes. She recalled four specific occasions in 2014-2015 in which she was forced to have sex with the man, during which he choked her, gagged her, beat her, and pulled out clumps of her hair. The woman said she was trafficked – at gunpoint in some instances – by a madam/pimp who was friends with the sex buyer. She was later interviewed again by the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division (SLED), who, along with the Attorney General’s Office, was leading the investigation into the man for murder and various crimes. In March 2023, the man was convicted of murdering his wife and 22-year-old son, and was sentenced to life in prison. He also faced criminal investigations for financial crimes, drug trafficking, obstruction of justice, and a roadside shooting. The woman’s allegations of sex trafficking and rape were never brought to trial, but prosecutors planned to move ahead with over 100 other charges against the man. Because he was never arrested or held accountable specifically for his sex buying crimes, we do not count this as a sex buyer arrest, but as identity disclosure.