Jennifer Long, who runs AEquitas, said unwanted contact with ejaculate is a “humiliating” and “egregious” form of sexual assault.

“There is a past and in some ways present tendency to minimize contact or penetration that doesn’t meet the most stereotypical elements of assault: gunpoint, violence, penetration, ejaculation, injuries everywhere,” she said. “But that’s not necessary in order to be a crime of sexual violence.

“Just because a penis or vagina hasn’t physically touched someone but ejaculate has, it doesn’t lessen the crime or its impact on the victim,” she said.

Lewis’s scheme is not uncommon. It’s “just another example of people trying these strategies to discredit victims,” says Jennifer Long, a lawyer and CEO of AEquitas, a nonprofit working to refine and strengthen prosecution practices to help survivors of gender-based violence. “If you have an exam and there’s no penetration noted, I can almost guarantee a defense will try and use it against a victim.”

Although subtler than handcuffs and prison time, the technology confronts one of the most stubborn challenges of bringing down sex trafficking: “the very ingrained fantasy in this culture about commercial sex in that everybody is a willing participant,” says Jennifer Long, founder of AEquitas, a nonprofit that works to improve the prosecution of human trafficking. Bradley Myles, head of Polaris, the NGO that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline, agrees. “Even if men aren’t getting arrested, it’s piercing the anonymity of buying sex,” he says. “It’s a shock to the system.”