The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (22 page)

As citizens, and as families, we should be asking harder questions when the debate comes up . . . of who will decide where the line is, what their credentials are to make these decisions, and
how we feel about that.

7

I
n the years after the Berlin Wall fell, Eastern European gangs set up operations to smuggle highly profitable items, like
drugs, guns, cigarettes. And women. They usually transported young women from their hometowns in the Eastern Bloc south to Greece. Once successfully inside Greece, the women could be transported
within the EU without being stopped at the borders.

As stories of sex trafficking in mainland Europe emerged, people became concerned about Eastern European women coming to Britain. Were they the usual economic migrants, working as call girls for
ready cash? Or were they part of a more sinister trend, being controlled by gangs of thugs? It was hard to tell who was coming to the UK on their own for the money . . . and who was being forced
into working as a prostitute.

In the absence of any sensible figures, people assumed the worst in all cases. The conventional wisdom was that the women were being trafficked. Government agencies, police forces, and charities
joined forces – and obtained funding – to deal with what they claimed was a widespread, insidious criminal trend. Numbers that were inflated, misreported, or in some cases completely
made up and wrong started to circulate as if they were fact.

Now, no one supports kidnap or rape in any circumstances. Where forced sex trafficking occurs, and it does occur, it is a heinous crime against the women (and men) who are its victims.

At the same time, there are people who have manipulated the facts to suit various agendas. By presenting the issues as strictly black and white, they have laid claim to
the moral high ground. In virtually everything written about trafficking, the victims are by and large women, by and large used for sex. But the majority of real trafficking cases are in fact not
like this at all. Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

No one would ever argue about whether or not forced sex work is right, or whether it occurs. It’s very wrong, and it does happen. The point is that the closer we look at the truth about
trafficking, the more we find not women and children being saved from terrible fates, but powerful Agenda Setters and misguided Constellation Makers claiming money and attention for themselves.
They often focus solely on women and sex workers, and they often have an agenda against sex work and want to outlaw it even for consenting adults.

Meanwhile, Evangelisers step in, spreading fear and panic, yet rarely coming back to correct mistakes or admit to errors later. Open any newspaper or magazine, and the story is the same.
‘Sex Slave in Suburbia’, a May 2010 article in
Glamour
magazine, claimed there are half a million women trafficked in the EU for sex. Is the number even plausible? As far as
figures go, it’s absurdly high. And no source for the number is offered.

The article goes on to claim that punters are ‘more likely’ to visit a trafficked sex worker than a non-trafficked one, though police records and research do not back this up. Again,
where exactly
Glamour
got this juicy titbit from is anyone’s guess. Women’s glossy magazines aren’t the only ones who have been throwing improbably high figures around, and
surely they must be getting their numbers from somewhere. So, where is all the misinformation coming from?

The problem starts with a deceptively simple question: how many trafficked sex workers are there in the UK? It’s an easy question to ask, but almost impossible to answer. That hasn’t
stopped people who have claimed – wrongly – to know the answer from quoting unrealistic totals, though. How the desperate fate of a few unlucky women
became one
of the starkest examples of media hype and exaggeration is a very interesting tale.

In 2009, Labour MP Denis MacShane wrote a letter to the
Guardian
claiming 18,000 young women were trafficked into Britain ‘as sex slaves’. Later he told Parliament that the
number was in fact 25,000. The source for these numbers was reportedly a Home Office document.
¹⁰⁰

However, some doubted the figure was accurate. The then solicitor general, Vera Baird, challenged MacShane and his supposed source, the
Daily Mirror.
She claimed that the real number of
women was closer to 4000.

But, as it turns out, even this was a major exaggeration. This is the story of how a speculative number tentatively suggested by researchers became a vastly inflated ‘truth’. It
involves media and government and misinformation – with each iteration of the story straying further and further from reality. And, ironically, potentially putting at risk the very lives they
intend to save.

It’s time to shed a little light on who is generating this expensive moral panic – and what they stand to gain from it.

Human trafficking is a challenging problem. Once brought into a country, trafficked people rarely turn up on the radar unless crime or death is involved. When nineteen Chinese
cocklers drowned in Morecambe Bay in 2004, it highlighted the appalling conditions forced workers live in. Of the survivors, nine were registered as asylum seekers and five were completely unknown
to immigration services.

The majority of trafficking cases in the UK are, like that of the Chinese cocklers, unrelated to sex work. Media coverage equates all trafficking with sex trafficking, but most trafficked people
are brought in for domestic labour, agriculture, and food processing. They end up in jobs British nationals don’t want, or are hired by employers who want to illegally pay under the minimum
wage. Vietnamese and Chinese children have been found working on UK cannabis farms, for example. And while the majority of trafficked workers are women, men make up about a quarter of all cases.
The needs of trafficked men are rarely, if ever, addressed in discussion and policy. Putting the
focus on such a specific subset of trafficking cases diverts both public
attention and much-needed resources away from other forced labour problems.
¹⁰¹

So, why the panic about women being trafficked for sex? Chinese cocklers travelling up and down the country, crammed into transit vans and sleeping dozens to a room, are invisible to most of us.
The well-worn cliché of a damaged woman whose purity is compromised, on the other hand, tugs at the heartstrings more keenly than the abuse of mere ‘economic migrants’.

Why is it so important to get the numbers right? Several reasons. First, there is intense competition over government grants for groups that assist victims of trafficking. Until recently, a
large amount of this money went to groups such as the Poppy Project, which only serves female victims. So, if trafficking affects men as well, and occurs in work environments
such as Morecambe Bay, there would be reasonable justification to question whether giving so much money to groups with such a narrow focus is necessarily a good idea.

Another reason is that trafficking puts a lot of pressure on police forces to try to combat the problem. From the point of view of anyone hoping to show encouraging or improved numbers in this
aspect of crime control, it is far easier to focus on and target the sex industry than it is to address a problem that actually is not well understood and is far more diverse than most people
think. It’s understandable that with only so many bobbies on the beat, police forces want to conserve their resources. It’s not necessarily the right approach, or a good one, but given
the cutbacks the police are experiencing, it’s no mystery why they take it.

Finally, it’s hard to generate publicity for a problem if it’s mainly experienced by people no one cares about. People who are poor and from overseas are
personae non gratae
in Britain, especially if they’re perceived to be the cause of British job losses. With the majority of trafficked people working in domestic and labour industries, they are beneath contempt
in the eyes of many. No one is overly fussed about their welfare. But women and – especially – children? Potentially being used for sex? Suddenly, you have a demographic people can be
made to care about. Suddenly, you have the makings of a moral frenzy.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Not all trafficking is sex trafficking of women.

Of national referrals made in the UK in 2009, 74% were female, 26% were male.*

Sexual exploitation accounts for 43% (about four of every ten) victims. Most are actually trafficked for manual and domestic labour, for example in shops or
on farms.†

The popular opinion seems to be that someone trafficked for ordinary, non-sex work deserves whatever horror they get. But once sex is involved, the attitude changes
dramatically.

Trafficking issues have a lot in common with the white slavery panics of the past. The term ‘white slavery’ was originally applied to both men and women, much like the term
‘trafficking’, in fact. But over time it became exclusively associated with sexual slavery of European women – again, in the way people now use ‘trafficking’ to mean
only
sexual trafficking of women and children. By narrowing the meaning from all people to a sympathetic few, it’s possible not only to guide the discussion towards a
specific agenda but also to whip up public outrage.

In the late nineteenth century, prostitution started to be seen as a pressing social problem, but also one that was strongly entrenched in society. While many wrote about the phenomenon, it took
the campaigning of newspaperman William Thomas Stead in the 1880s to really engineer a public fervour. And as with many today, Stead did it not by addressing prostitution as a whole, but by
focusing on an underground trade supposedly supplying young English girls to the upper classes. In fact, his writing and campaigns closely mirror the sort of stories peddled in the media today.

In 1885, Stead published a series of articles in the
Pall Mall Gazette
¹⁰²
called ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. Stead
claimed there was a trade in virgins happening under the noses of the good people of London. He also recounted the sad story of a girl, Lily, sold by her mother for the purposes of
prostitution.

‘Almost every house of ill-fame in London is the centre of a network of snares and wiles and “plants”, intended to bring in fresh girls,’ Stead wrote. ‘That is part
of the regular trade.’ Without presenting a single number or piece of evidence, he manages to claim that all brothels are doing it and it’s happening everywhere.

The language of Stead’s articles is over the top by today’s standards. But it makes arguments that would not be out of place in any modern account of forced sex trafficking.
‘London’s lust annually uses up many thousands of women, who are literally killed and made away with,’ Stead wrote. ‘Living sacrifices slain in the service of vice.’
He breathlessly describes ‘the fatal chamber’ in rich detail, with no observation too small or too unlikely to go unadorned with heavy prose. And the sex act itself is described in only
the most florid terms, with a woman’s virginity called ‘that which a woman ought to value more than life’. It’s practically pornographic in its focus on lurid detail.

Not only did Stead accuse rich Londoners of ignoring the problem, he claimed they were gleefully engaging in rape. He painted pictures of room after room of kidnapped women being flogged, much
to
their torturers’ pleasure. ‘To some men, the shriek of torture is the essence of their delight, and they would not silence by a single note the cry of agony
over which they gloat.’ As with so many modern campaigners, the assumption is that that men possess no feelings other than uncontrollable lust and inherent cruelty. Men with money, in
particular.