Sex Trafficking and Bad Data
8 June 06
The U.S. Government is pressuring Germany to halt the flow of sex workers arriving for the World Cup. The administration is attempting to conflate legal prostitution with the international sex slave trade in much the same manner that it conflates legal pornography with the exploitation of minors here in the States.
A U.S. congressman and other anti-trafficking advocates estimate that thousands of foreign women, many from Eastern Europe, will be forced into sex work during the four-week tournament that begins June 9.
At a briefing, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced “the sordid trade in human beings” and said the fight against trafficking is “a great moral calling of our time.”
The first problem with the State Department’s argument is that Germany has what is probably the world’s most heavily-regulated flesh trade.
Prostitution is legal in Germany, with about 400,000 registered sex workers who pay taxes and receive social benefits. However, the government says forced prostitution is not tolerated and it denies Smith’s claim that it is helping build brothels.
[T]he 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report gave Germany its highest overall rating for compliance with efforts to stop trafficking, and noted German efforts to combat exploitation during the World Cup.
“Nonetheless, due to the sheer size of the event, the potential for increased human trafficking during the games remains a concern,” the report said.
The second problem is that the State Department’s estimate of the size of the international sex slave trade amounts to a wild-assed guess.
As many as 800,000 people are bought and sold across national borders annually or lured to other countries with false promises of work or other benefits, the State Department said in its annual survey of international human trafficking. Most are women and children.
Not only do the numbers produced by various governments and organizations vary widely, but the State Department’s own numbers fail to differentiate between sexual exploitation and other kinds of forced labor—nor is there a clear definition of what “force” actually entails. Over the past several years we’ve been bombarded with breathless accounts of women and children being shipped across borders in shackles, only to find scant evidence that such incidents of sexual trafficking occur in significant numbers.
Indeed, the United Nations has voiced its own concerns about bad data:
When it comes to statistics, trafficking of girls and women is one of several highly emotive issues which seem to overwhelm critical faculties. Numbers take on a life of their own, gaining acceptance through repetition, often with little inquiry into their derivations. Journalists, bowing to the pressures of editors, demand numbers, any number. Organizations feel compelled to supply them, lending false precisions and spurious authority to many reports.
Which isn’t to say sex trafficking doesn’t deserve our attention, but the State Department’s current anti-trafficking campaign smacks of a carefully orchestrated moral panic engineered to call into question the legitimacy of all sex work and, ultimately, to protect white women from themselves.
To me the racial element is what’s most disturbing about all this. For decades Americans were content to ignore sexual slavery in the Far East and elsewhere (a trade designed largely to cater to the whims of horny Western travelers). Only in the mid-Nineties, when reports began to emerge indicating white Eastern European women were in peril, did the West begin to take notice. As a society we still have a difficult time accepting that our “innocent white flowers” choose sex work in the absence of violence or coercion.
More: World Cup, German, Prostitution, Sex Trafficking, Racial Bias
