Since I have to wake-up around 2AM to make sure I arrive at work on time, I need something to wake me up, and keep me up. Since I can’t even afford to spend money on a cup of coffee on my way in, I turn on my Sony Walkman radio and listen to the BBC World News on the local NPR station. Here you’ll learn about the latest turmoil in the hot spots in the world, and for dessert there are interesting discussions about science and economics. It doesn’t often show its hand ideologically, except when some female reporter adds her own “facts” to a news story. For example, this past Sunday there was a story about a Chinese woman who was sentenced to death for running a baby trafficking ring; apparently she “contracted” with poor Chinese peasants, who would offer to sell their babies to childless couples. According to the story, male babies fetched $5,000 and female babies sold for $3,000. The story here should have been the motivation to sell babies, and why this crime warranted the death penalty. But this wasn’t the “story” for the reporter; she claimed, without any actual evidence that I was able to find on the Internet, that the female babies were purchased to become “sex slaves” or “slave laborers.” This is the kind of propaganda we see too much of in the gender “wars.” It simply did not occur to the reporter that female babies might be sold to childless couples (or those who have the money to circumvent the one-child law) for the same reason as male babies are.
Another BBC report was on the “epidemic” of acid attacks in places like Pakistan (I’m not sure if these attacks are worse than having your face eaten off by a crazed naked man, as occurred to a homeless man last month in Miami, but the effect is the same). Again, the focus was entirely on female victims, in one case after the female rejected a male suitor, and another when a wife dressed too “sexily” in front of strange men. Of course these are outrageous acts, but do they comprise an “epidemic?” A month later there was a story on another such incident, except this time the number of victims had declined significantly since the last report—from an “epidemic” to maybe a two-dozen in a country with over 160 million people. Perhaps the only “epidemic” is that of making claims of “epidemics” to advance an ideological agenda. In fact the problem of acid attacks is worse in Cambodia, where there are slightly more attacks in a country with 1/12 the population of Pakistan. A 2003 study by something called the Cambodian League for the Promotion of Human Rights also tried to make several dozen sound like an epidemic, mainly because while it admitted that males were also victims, and women were also perpetrators, “most” of the victims were female, and it made pains to paint the issue as one of discrimination and violence solely against women. However, a 2010 study on the problem by the Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity admitted that of the 34 cases recorded that year, at least half the victims were male. "It's not focused on the women here,” said one organizer of the charity. “Men have their anger against men also and women get really upset with husbands too."
There are other stories along these lines that are subject to mythology, victimology, and propaganda. A few years ago the Seattle Weekly published a report about how local right-wing extremists like Linda Smith—hardly someone with an interest in social justice in this country—were campaigning against “sex slavery” in other countries. It turns out that trips by “saviors” to sex trade rendezvous like Thailand were met with scorn, derision and anger by the presumed victims, who basically told the modern-day abolitionists to mind their own business so they could make a living. More recently there was a story in the publication about Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore pushing their the anti child sex trade campaign in this country, claiming that there were up to 300,000 child sex slaves. However, the researchers who came-up with this number did not actually say that this represented an actual figure, but the number of “at-risk” children, mainly runaways. Again it was characterized as a female victimization issue; however, a government-sponsored on-the-street survey of the problem in major cities across the country discovered that about half the underage prostitutes were in fact male, and most of the “child” prostitutes operate on their own, without the aid of a “pimp.” The original “estimates” trumpeted by the media and activists were also wildly exaggerated; no more than 250 such individuals were actually identified.
Doing some snooping around, I came across a story about a 2007 Congressional hearing that heard testimony from a woman from Nepal who recounted a tale about how she had been “drugged, abducted and forced to work” in a house of prostitution in India. A story in the Washington Post told of Christian activists telling “tales of women overseas being beaten with electrical cords and raped. A State Department official said Congress must act — 50,000 slaves were pouring into the United States every year,” said one of them. “Furious about the tidal wave’ of victims, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) vowed to crack down on so-called modern-day slavery.” Congress then passed a law waging war on human trafficking, providing for the blanketing the country with 42 separate task forces at the cost of $150 million in search of these sex slaves. “But the government couldn’t find them. Not in this country” anyways, according to the Post story. Even a George Washington University criminologist, Ronald Weitzer—who believes that sex trafficking is a hidden crime—admitted that the reality is that the “problem is being blown way out of proportion.” But Bush administration then and now Obama officials prefer to ignore the paucity of numbers and point to how “horrific” a crime it is, regardless if all of the “victims” see it in the same way.
Well, the activists say, if not here then it is a gigantic problem overseas. Like, say, the Philippines. I remember a scene in the film “An Officer and a Gentleman” when the Mayo character has a flashback from his boyhood in that country; he is walking through the streets where prostitutes (probably real-life ones) laugh at the “Cherry Boy” and offer to relieve him of his virginity. They don’t act like “victims,” just people plying their trade. Last year, newspapers in the Philippines ran stories about “hookers rescued against their will,” in one instance where a hundred sex workers detained during raids in the red light district of Angeles City claimed that they were not being “rescued” but being deprived of their rights. Their “rescuers” claim that these women “hate” their “jobs” or were coerced into them, but the reality is that many, and probably most, were doing so by choice. Filipino authorities admitted that they were conducting such raids to satisfy Hillary Clinton’s personal anti-trafficking campaign by the U.S. State Department, in order to receive brownie points and extra foreign aid money. In another case, a dozen or so “cyber-sex” den workers escaped from “rescue” after attacking a security guard who was "protecting" them.
There is this idea by people who view prostitutes as “victims” that if you nail the “pimp,” this this will end prostitution. There is no evidence to support this supposition, because it assumes that women actually require a “facilitator” to ply their trade. The next step is to arrest “customers,” but this is like arresting drug users and ignoring the dealers. Since “love” is a “drug,” like the so-call “war on drugs,” this “war” is also a losing proposition.
Sex-trafficking always gets mixed up with the greater problem of forced labor human-trafficking, which current Republican Washington state gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna has made a centerpiece of his “social” agenda. But like “sex slavery,” perhaps no other issue of this kind has been subject to more wild and unsubstantiated statistics. Sometimes the statistics are blurred by definitions. Take for example a recent story in the Huffington Post about Hispanic immigrants who are brought to the U.S. with the promise of jobs waiting for them. Instead
“We often hear news about busted drop houses where dozens of ‘immigrants’ are found by police piled up in single homes in the most deplorable sanitary conditions, locked up against their wills. They are actually held as hostages until their relatives, in Latin American countries or the U.S. after being blackmailed and threatened, wire high sums of money to the traffickers in order to free them. Some are kept captive and forced to prostitute or work until they pay off their own debts. Once again, this is not the standard scenario where immigrants come on their own risk.”
Were these people “trafficked” against their will? No, they came of their own free will. As horrible as their treatment was, the fact was that they were smuggled—not trafficked—into the country. There is a crucial difference there—one that human and sex-trafficking zealots both in and out of government fail to comprehend when they compile their “data.” Overbroad definitions and mixing and matching is also an issue in domestic violence and sexual assault statistics.
In May 2011, the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law released a report entitled “Fact or Fiction: What Do We Really Know About Human Trafficking?”
It opens with the following two statements:
“64 percent of all the world's statistics are made up right there on the spot.”
“82.4 percent of people believe 'em whether they're accurate statistics or not.”
The report then asks the question “Statistics form the core of many policies, funding decisions and program designs around human trafficking into forced labor and debt bondage. But are the statistics accurate? How can people decide whether statements such as the following ones are supported by evidence?”
“27 million people are enslaved today.”
“The international trade, in which millions of women and children are trafficked into prostitution around the world each year is a most vicious slave trade which is increasing at a fast rate.”
“Of the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders annually, 80 percent of victims are female, and 50 percent are minors.”
The report found no substantiation for these claims. Furthermore, “Fictitious data or information often amounts to hype. Hype consists of extravagant or exaggerated claims that are used to draw attention to an issue. It misleads the public and produces bad policy. Hype presents a simplified, exaggerated or skewed view of the world and supports calls for hard-line or simplistic actions. It can lead to policies that become tools to promote a particular point of view or ideology, rather than to address reality.” But reality means little to the fanatics and moral paladins on both the left and the right in this country. Hillary Clinton—an otherwise inconsequential Secretary of State with no notable accomplishments—has used the State Department as bully pulpit to advance her gender agenda, such as in regard to human trafficking. In so doing, resources have been wasted on “experts” in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) whose data has no “validity or logic, ” and millions of dollars have been wasted on projects based on “non-existent or inaccurately identified problems.”
The report bemoans the lack of rigorous data collection which could do real good for real victims. Instead, we get “warnings” such as the one issued by “concerned” activists before the 2006 World Cup:
“Germany Rolls Out Welcome Mat for Sex Traffickers and Pimps: Thousands of Women Trafficked for Prostitution During World Cup Games.”
The warning claimed that 40,000 eastern European women were “expected to be brought to Germany to meet demand for commercial sex at World Cup games.” Did this mass invasion actually occur? After the games, the International Organization for Migration found no evidence of it. It also discovered that the claim originated with the feminist German Women’s Council, and from there newspapers picked-up on the “story” and “expanded” on it without checking if there was any validity to it. It was the same story with the 2010 World Cup in the South Africa: “40,000 women (ironically, the same number as was predicted in Germany) will be trafficked to the 2010 South Africa World Cup. Research conducted afterward found that the 40,000 women did not materialize. The South African government had wasted precious resources to counter a non-existent problem.” For the 2012 Olympics in the UK, there are already headlines like “Vice Girls Hope to Strike Gold.”
Soccer isn’t the only sports event in which enough prostitutes to populate a modest city might invade: “Claims that between ‘50,000 and 100,000 prostitutes’ would arrive for the 2011 Super Bowl did not materialize (only 3 out-of-state prostitutes were arrested). Almost 80,000 people petitioned the host committee to stop the ‘well documented’ trafficking of children for sale at the Super Bowl. Only 2 local minors were arrested (apparently not victims of trafficking).”
Hype without regard to facts is rampant in this country. Take for instance a 2004 New York Times Magazine story written by Peter Landesman entitled “The Girls Next Door: Sex Slaves on Main Street.” Landesman quotes the figures given by a certain Kevin Bales, who claimed that “there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time.” However, the report found that Bales’ numbers were essentially made-up, yet were nevertheless repeated as “fact.”
The UK is no better in discerning fact from fiction:
“NGOs, politicians and the media in the United Kingdom proclaimed (without producing evidence) that up to 25,000 “sex slaves” were in need of rescue and that 80,000 women were in sex work. However, the Operation Pentameter II police raids that looked for the 25,000 sex slaves only located 351 women, all of whom “variously absconded from police, went home voluntarily, declined support, were removed by the UK Borders Agency or were prosecuted for various offences. The 80,000 figure was also shown to have no basis in fact.”
NGOs and assorted victims’ advocates and activists are notorious for inventing or presenting unsubstantiated figures in order to justify their reason for being. In 2010, the Women’s Funding Network presented a report written by a Deborah Richardson to Congress which claimed that, “over a six-month period, the number of minor girls who had been trafficked online increased 20.7% in New York, 39.2% in Michigan and 64.7% in Minnesota. However, Nick Pinto of the Village Voice newspaper wrote a scathing article in which he chastised his fellow journalists for not investigating before publishing these claims. ‘None of the media that published Richardson's astonishing numbers bothered to examine the study at the heart of her claim. If they had, they would have found what we did after asking independent experts to examine the research: It's junk science.’”
The report criticizes NGOs and the media for mixing and matching data to produce inflated numbers. “Data…often does not provide enough detail to know whether the issue was trafficking, forced labor or another issue such as smuggling. NGOs may only serve a small percentage of a particular group of trafficking victims and may also mix trafficking with other types of cases. Newspapers are notoriously inaccurate and often confuse smuggling with trafficking or tend to focus on migrant prostitution and call it all ‘trafficking.’”
What are the real numbers? The report admits that it is near to impossible to get a completely accurate read on the number of human trafficking victims, but the most rational estimates are a fraction of the 27 million figure. A study by the International Labour Organization also contradicted the claim that the vast majority are female: “The ILO estimates that 56 percent of trafficked persons are women and girls and 44 percent are men and boys.”
In 2009, Nick Davies of The Guardian wrote an exposé critical of politicians, the media and activists have exploited the public’s apparently insatiable need for “sexed-up” stories and demands that law enforcement do something about the alleged “epidemic” of sex trafficking into the UK—while academics, Christian organizations, feminist groups and other interested parties hoped to gain government funding to support their activities by making unsubstantiated claims. Armed with such numbers, “Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all,” reported Davies. That massive police raid of brothels and other “sex shops” all over Britain, Operation Pentameter II, in the end netted a grand total of 22 people who were actually charged with the crime of trafficking, of whom 15 were convicted of varying degrees of offense. Yet the sweep did not yield one single female who was trafficked (at least in the sense that they were not actually coerced into the trade or held "captive"), nor was it determined that any of those arrested and charged had actually forced anyone into the sex trade.
Davies traced the twisted road of how a small number can become outrageously large. Two UK academics, Liz Kelly and Linda Regan, were conducting a study to discover how many women were “trafficked” into the country in 1998. Police reports indicated that 71 women had been detained on the suspicion of being trafficked. The two decided that this figure did not reflect the actual number, but like in all Women’s Studies "studies," they made no effort to do any actual field work to discover a more accurate number. Instead, they made “speculative” assumptions. Davies writes “At the very least, they guessed, there could be another 71 trafficked women who had been missed by police, which would double the total, to 142. At the most, they suggested, the true total might be 20 times higher, at 1,420…But reaching this figure involved a further quadrupling of the number of victims missed by police, plus quadrupling existing estimates by sex health workers, plus assuming the accuracy of a newspaper report that ‘hundreds’ of women had been trafficked into the UK from Albania and Kosovo, plus assuming that mail-order brides were also victims of trafficking, plus adding women who were transported within the UK as well as those brought into the UK.”
The Kelly/Regan figure of 1,420 trafficked women (no mention of trafficked men) was widely reported as fact by the media after Christian groups got a hold of it. Hoping to “improve” on the “speculative” numbers, in 2003 “a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the ‘walk-up’ flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade.”
The researchers again cautioned against taking too literal a view of their numbers, which represented the upper limit of their estimate. Would activists take such caution? “No chance,” reported Davies:
“The Christian charity Care announced: ‘In 2003, the Home Office estimated there were 4,000 women and girls in the UK at any one time that had been trafficked into forced prostitution.’ The Salvation Army went further: ‘The Home Office estimated that in 2003 … there were at least 4,000 trafficked women residing in the UK. This figure is believed to be a massive underestimation of the problem.’ Anti-Slavery International joined them, converting what the Home Office researchers had described as a ‘very approximate’ estimate into ‘a very conservative estimate.’” Thus the original figure, 71, had grown to 1,420 to 4,000 to a “massive” underestimation. Just how “massive?”
“The evidence was left even further behind as politicians took up the issue as a rallying call for feminists. They were led by the Labour MP for Rotherham and former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane, who took to describing London as ‘Europe’s capital for under-aged trafficked sex slaves.’ In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, MacShane announced that ‘according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain.’”
After the embarrassingly empty-handed conclusion of the aforementioned sweep, police facetiously claimed that the numbers being cited were not actually referring to victims of trafficking at all, but to prostitution as a whole. But, according to Davies, this hardly stopped those of a radical feminist bent from making ever more outrageous claims. “Fiona Mactaggart, a former Home Office minister, in January 2008 outstripped MacShane’s estimates, telling the House of Commons that she regarded all women prostitutes as the victims of trafficking, since their route into sex work ‘almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers.” Davies noted that “There is no known research into UK prostitution which supports this claim.”
Davies does not dismiss the reality that trafficking does exist in the UK, but the actual number of victims is in the dozens rather than tens of thousands. On the “sidelines” of the ideological “debate” are the prostitutes themselves, who when questioned know few if any themselves. Furthermore, “a chorus of alarm from the prostitutes themselves is singing out virtually unheard. In the cause of protecting ‘thousands’ of victims of trafficking, Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader and minister for women and equality, has led the parliamentary campaign for a law to penalise men who pay for sex with women who are “controlled for gain” even if the men do so in genuine ignorance.” Yet prostitute groups have decried such laws, “that it will aggravate every form of jeopardy which they face in their work, whether by encouraging them to work alone in an attempt to show that they are free of control or by pressurising them to have sex without condoms to hold on to worried customers. Thus far, their voices remain largely ignored by news media and politicians who, once more, have been swept away on a tide of misinformation.”
A 2007 report by the American Sociological Association went further in questioning victim myths:
"In sum, prostitution takes diverse forms and exists under varying conditions, a complexity that contradicts popular myths and sweeping generalizations. Plenty of evidence challenges the notion that prostitutes, across the board, are coerced into the sex trade, lead lives of misery, experience high levels of victimization, and want to be rescued. These patterns characterize one segment of the sex trade, but they are not the defining features of prostitution. Sex workers differ markedly in their autonomy, work experiences, job satisfaction, and self-esteem. It’s time to replace the oppression model with a polymorphous model—a perspective that recognizes multiple structural and experiential realities."
Meanwhile, in the U.S. the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, continues to use fabricated data to push an anti-sex trafficking agenda, forcing foreign countries accused of engaging in such to conduct phony raids, such the aforementioned ones in the Philippines. Critics even accuse fanatical anti-sex “crusaders” as doubling as anti-immigrant xenophobes—and at the very least, they must be “shaken out of the tree” of the real problem, which is forced labor trafficking. As one critic opined, “Is anyone serious about improving the situation or do we want to keep up this wonderful tradition of going through the raid and arrest ceremony?” Another problem, perhaps the more telling one, is that such wild propaganda and inflated numbers does major damage to the credibility of victim activists and advocates (and their “causes”) who seem less interested in true victims than in their own notoriety.
No comments:
Post a Comment