The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (24 page)

When challenged to justify his number of 25,000 per year on
Newsnight,
Denis MacShane had no firm sources to hand.
¹⁰⁹
He said he read it in
the
Daily Mirror
and that it came from the Home Office, but the relevant article does not contain that claim.
¹¹⁰
MacShane was then forced to
admit he did not know the origin of the numbers he was using.

Nick Davies, who reported on the phenomenon, commented,‘. . . The cycle has been driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda . . . an unlikely union of
evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all
prostitution.’
¹¹¹

Grahame Maxwell, chief constable for North Yorkshire, put the hype about sex-specific trafficking into perspective. ‘There are more people trafficked for labour exploitation than there are
for sexual exploitation. We need to redress the balance here. People just seem to grab figures from the air.’
¹¹²

And what of the Eastern European women, whose sudden influx into the sex trade in Western Europe sparked recent concern about trafficking?

Only a few years ago, traffickers would send scouts into small towns to lure girls with promises of work abroad and force some of them into prostitution. But things have rapidly changed with the
opening of Eastern European ports to the West . . . not to mention the rapid changes in the economy.

Today, few Eastern European prostitutes need to be tricked to enter the sex industry. Ports like Odessa, in southern Ukraine, have witnessed an above-ground boom in sex services. ‘An
experienced girl gets off the plane covered in gold, diamonds and furs, and goes back to her home village,’ says psychologist Svetlana Chernolutskaya in an
interview
with
Time
magazine. ‘She finds the girls who are in a tough spot and tells them how much money they can make turning tricks in a foreign country.’
¹¹³

Leaked US diplomatic cables confirm that would-be rescuers hoping for glory in Armenia would be disappointed by the reality. ‘We went to Vanadzor expecting to hear stories of illicit
smuggling across borders and of girls lured into prostitution under false pretenses. What we heard was significantly more pedestrian . . . And while the prostitutes and the NGO employees we met
said sometimes women are abused in the brothels, or aren’t paid in full, they said the greater part of women generally understand what they are getting themselves into, and may already have
worked as prostitutes for years.’
¹¹⁴

‘Reporters always come here demanding to see the victims,’ says Olga Kostyuk, deputy head of a charity providing help for Odessa’s sex workers, in the same piece. ‘They
want to see the men, the pimps, the manipulators behind all of this. But things are not so simple now.’

Indeed, television crews looking for simple answers can quickly find themselves perpetrating a hoax. In 2008, an ITV programme related the tale of a fourteen-year-old girl sold for sex at a
petrol station in Romania. The problem was, it wasn’t true. The woman was actually twenty-five years old. And a career sex worker.

In the report, broadcast worldwide on CNN, an ITV journalist claimed Monica Ghinga’s identification papers proved she was fourteen years old. The journalist met with alleged traffickers,
saying he would pay €800 for her and take the girl to London. Romanian police discovered the truth when they investigated the television claims, to see if forced child trafficking was really
involved.

Ghinga later admitted that she lied about her age to a foreign television crew, and agreed to have sex with them for one night.
¹¹⁵
A claim that, if
true, throws into question just who is taking advantage of whom in the trafficking panic.

WT Stead’s nineteenth-century claims about sex slavery were successful for several reasons. Rather than focus on the trade of girls outside of Britain, Stead’s
exposé took place right under the noses of his
readers – right in the heart of London. The same is true of anti-trafficking proponents today. There is far more
concern about sex slavery in the EU than in the rest of the world, even though it has been shown to be far more prevalent elsewhere.

Instead of being concerned with the daughters of the unsympathetic poor, Stead’s victims were from the new middle class. There is now, as then, something more sympathetic about the thought
of attractive, innocent girls being exploited. Weirdly enough, if you do an image search of anti-trafficking campaign posters and billboards, one trend is immediately apparent: that most of them
depict naked, bound women, usually very good-looking, in some form or other.

Now, don’t get me wrong . . . I like a little bondage as much as the next person. But really? How is anyone meant to take the message to stop exploiting women seriously, when the image
itself is exploitation? I’m not sure if they’re trying to educate their intended audience, or titillate them. Looks like the latter to me.

Stead portrayed aristocrats as being secret consumers of prostitution, with access to virgins for the best connected and most well heeled. Again, modern campaigners like to claim that access to
trafficked women is in brothels or by invitation only (that’s why no one can prove it exists.)

Crucially, Stead declared that a change in the age of consent was not only necessary, but sufficient to end the horror. This is a key element of his campaign’s success. He worked as an
Agenda Setter, Constellation Maker, and Evangeliser all rolled into one. He not only described a problem, but also manufactured the evidence and proposed a solution to eradicate it. People like to
believe things can be easily solved. Today, the popular impression is that criminalising prostitution is all that is needed to end trafficking.

The current debate has followed many similar lines to previous panics: keep the focus at home, instead of overseas. Portray the victims as unknowing innocents, instead of unsympathetic addicts
or poor. And if no one is able to detect the problem? Easy. That’s because the bad guys are evil plutocrats who have the resources to keep their unsavoury habits well hidden. The solution?
Very simple: total crackdown.

In 2007, police forces across the country started a wide-scale investigation into sex trafficking. Called Pentameter Two, it was hailed by Jacqui Smith
as ‘a great success’. Claims were made that it exposed nationwide crime networks and was directly responsible for rescuing vulnerable women. With the co-operation of all fifty-five
police forces in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the Border Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service, you would expect the result to be nothing short of comprehensive.

What Smith and others failed to mention was that this all-encompassing operation, using every method at police disposal, including brothel raids, undercover operations, and co-ordinated
information, was not successful. As Nick Davies detailed in a series of articles for the
Guardian,
Pentameter Two resulted in five convictions of men accused of importing women and forcing
them to work as prostitutes. Five convictions across the entire country.

A total of 406 arrests were made during Pentameter Two; 153 of those people were released without charge. Most of the rest were charged with immigration breaches and unrelated offences.
Twenty-two were prosecuted for trafficking; seven of those were acquitted. Ten of the remaining lot turned out not to have coerced the women they brought into the country. This left five actual
traffickers.
¹¹⁶
And, it was later revealed, none of those was detected specifically by actions in the Pentameter Two effort, but due to other
investigations.

In terms of finding and stopping traffickers, Pentameter Two failed to be responsible for even one trafficking conviction. Still, the operation had another aspect: not only finding the people
involved in trafficking, but also rescuing the women themselves.

So, how well did it do on that count? During operations Pentameter Two in 2008 and its predecessor Pentameter One in 2006, over 1300 locations were raided. A total of 255 women were
‘rescued’. That suggests that the proportion of forced women in sex work is far lower than the 80 per cent claimed by Fiona Mactaggart MP. (Who, it turns out, was using as her source of
information a survey of street-based sex workers. In San Francisco. From 1982.
¹¹⁷
)

Were they trafficked? As ever, the question is hard to answer,
especially since by late 2009, police had lost track of most of them.
¹¹⁸
Of the 255 women, 16 were deported, 36 of them returned home, and 37 accepted victim support services. The whereabouts of the rest – 166 women – are unknown.

It seems that the 255 women, rather than being the victims of involuntary trafficking, were voluntary migrants. Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon at Birkbeck College specialises in sexuality and the law,
and she commented on the phenomenon. ‘We do know a lot of women in the former Russian states who are working in sex industry and who are desperate to come here. They want to earn more money
here – they are migrant workers like any other workers.’

In Northern Ireland, with similar efforts, the numbers again turn out to be far smaller than expected. With 25 cases of human trafficking in 2009/2010, 17 of which involved sexual exploitation
– the number of trafficking victims is less than 1 per 100,000 people.
¹¹⁹
And again, the terminology is vague – is being exploited for sex
the same thing as being forced into sex? After all, one could argue the employees of fast-food restaurants are exploited . . . but no one would say they are forced. From the reported figures
it’s tough to say if even this basic distinction was made.

Still, even if only a small number of sex traffickers are operating in this country, that should be cause for worry, and who could disagree? In theory, yes. If police funding and time were
unlimited, every crime should be investigated to the utmost.

But Pentameter Two was not a case of unlimited money, or of people, or of time. Police forces were made to take part but no additional money and staff were provided. Funding is allocated under
the Reflex project, which receives £20 million a year, but with no specific provision for Pentameter Two.
¹²⁰
In other words, police forces were
required to conduct undercover investigations and raids – in addition to whatever trafficking-detection activities they already carried out – without any extra support. In a practical
sense, this is a diversion of resources that resulted in not one fresh conviction.

In the opinion of Professor Julia O’Connell Davidson, lawmakers should be angry about the failure of Pentameter. Let’s go back to Denis MacShane’s huge estimate of 25,000
trafficked sex slaves from the
Daily Mirror.
That story claimed women were forced to have
sex with thirty men a day. If true, that means 750,000 men exploit sex slaves
every day. That’s huge.

‘How is it that three-quarters of a million men can find a sex slave every day but when highly trained police officers run a special nationwide operation lasting months they can only find
at best a couple of hundred women that they think might be victims of trafficking?’ asked O’Connell Davidson on Radio 4.
¹²¹
At the very
least it represents money wasted on either mass incompetence or mass misunderstanding of the problem.

Pentameter One and Two aren’t the only wastes of police time and money in this moral panic. Other projects have resulted in similarly inflated projections, also with underwhelming
results.

Project Acumen, set up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), released its findings in 2010. Titled
Setting the Record
, the report focuses on sex trafficking and where the
people come from, as well as their circumstances.
¹²²

Based on this, the
Telegraph
claimed 12,000 ‘confirmed’ trafficked women were in the UK.
¹²³
It goes on: ‘In a typical
example, a woman smuggled into the UK does not know that she is going to be used as a prostitute, but is forced into selling her body to pay of a £30,000 “debt-bond”. ’

Does the report actually say this? It doesn’t. And where does 12,000 come from? It’s not clear.

Project Acumen’s report didn’t locate 12,000 women, much less interview anything like that many. It is actually based on interviews with 210 foreign and 44 British sex workers
located at 142 premises in England and Wales. Of the 210 migrants, none was kidnapped or held hostage. Only one was the victim of violence.

Most of the migrants – 202 of the 210 – knew at the time of recruitment that they would be working as prostitutes in the UK. Of the other eight, it is unclear whether they were
misled about location rather than the work. Two dozen were labelled trafficked – nineteen Asians and five Eastern Europeans. The criteria, however, were not determined by the UN’s
Palermo Protocol, but by a complex set of ‘dimensions’, that again, do not seem to distinguish willing (if perhaps illegal) migration from unwilling trafficking.

Only a small percentage of the women were considered
‘debt-bonded’ – owing money to those who had brought them to the UK. These debts could be because of
transport costs, or monies owed by their families. Hardly a ‘typical’ example, as the paper claimed.

The number 12,000 pops up in the report – an estimate of about 4000 trafficked sex slaves pulled out of thin air, with 8000 more from ‘vulnerable’ populations. Again, no
reliable sources for these numbers exist. Interestingly the paper qualifies its statements with ‘Most are likely to fall short of the trafficking threshold.’ Or, in other words, there
is no way to prove their claims either way. Of the made-up number, it continues: