The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (25 page)

Plenty of speculation, and very little sense. And, no doubt, considerable spending on a project that many taxpayers may find wasteful. After all, this report is the culmination
of two years’ study, and found very few women, a tiny fraction of whom met the threshold circumstances of forced sex trafficking. Pentameter Two found barely any more potentially trafficked
women in the entire country . . . and no actual sex slaves. The whole outcome has the whiff of what Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon, a reader in psychology and social policy at Birkbeck, has called
‘Carry-On Criminology’.

Figures from the UK Human Trafficking Centre confirm that the number of trafficked women is far smaller than is widely reported. In the 12-month period from April 2009 to March 2010, 709
referrals were made to the centre, with the majority detected by border control
rather than police. Of the 709 in that year, just 319 were referred as suspected cases of sex
trafficking. Only about half the cases had been processed by the time of the report, but of those, 68 per cent were dismissed as not trafficking.
¹²⁴

Even before the failure of Pentameter Two it could have been predicted that the projected numbers were not only inflated, but also conceptually unfeasible. This is partly to do with the
difficulty of getting past British borders – despite what the immigration panickers think, it’s still harder to get into the UK than anywhere else in the EU. But also there is a near
total absence of sex tourism in this country.

Sex tourism in countries with land borders is straightforward, and its existence in mainland Europe well documented over the last couple of decades. Consider Eastern Europe, within easy reach of
Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and other EU countries. If you want to get to a thriving area of sex workers, it’s only a short flight or drive away. Sex tourism is also popular in areas
where British pounds go a bit further than they do at home: places like Cuba and Thailand.

Sex tourism to the UK, however, is rather implausible. In an age of cheap international flights from Britain to virtually anywhere, and ample numbers of women at home who go into the work
willingly, it makes no financial sense for traffickers to bring women here for sex when they could operate more easily, and with a more ready supply of customers, in mainland Europe or the
developing world.

This logic is supported by the results of investigation. After all, Pentameter Two, to date the most wide-ranging investigation of sex trafficking in the UK, failed to result in enough evidence
to suggest that anything remotely resembling a crisis is happening here. That poster girl for the Trafficking Panic, the wide-eyed teenage girl kidnapped into a life of ill repute, is not
representative. She is nearly an urban myth.

Short-term failure has never stopped Agenda Setters. When the disappointing outcome was revealed, some people claimed Pentameter Two was not a failure at all. ‘Pentameter Two has been a
great success,’ claimed Nick Kinsella, head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre. ‘Now the results need to be analysed in depth, to see what we have actually found.’ Wait, what was
that? It’s been a great success, only no one knows what the numbers say yet?

‘In Scotland, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t have a conviction for human trafficking,’ said Police Constable Gordon Meldrum. Meldrum had
previously claimed research ‘proved’ the existence of 10 human trafficking groups north of the border, and 367 organised crime groups with over 4000 members. ‘We had one case
which was brought to court previously but was abandoned. My understanding is it was abandoned due to a lack of evidence, essentially.’
¹²⁵
Strange
how the evidence seemed to disappear precisely when someone was charged with putting cases together.

Others invoked fiction to explain shortfalls.
‘The Wire,’
wrote Catherine Bennett in the
Observer,
‘showed just how tricky it can be when, with the best of
intentions, the authorities attempt to organise human squalor.’
¹²⁶
The Wire
was a television series about criminals and police in
Baltimore, Maryland. It was critically lauded for showing how investigations can fail because of lack of political motivation. One series even had a storyline about trafficked women who suffocated
while being smuggled in a shipping container.

And yet,
The Wire,
for all its gritty semblance of reality, is not a documentary and no reflection of the situation in Britain. Pentameter 2 received explicit government support, was
co-ordinated across police areas, and diverted large amounts of resources. Assuming that the kind of bureaucratic red tape and farcical errors encountered in a US-based drama are an insight into
police work in Britain is an argument that is at best lazy and at worst laughable.

Since we’re talking about America, let’s compare trafficking panics here with similar stings in the US – and the reality there.

The US has a much higher population than the UK, and vast unguarded land borders with other countries, which have been customarily exploited for drug running and illegal
migration.

Portland is a city in the Northwestern US state of Oregon. It’s the state’s largest, lying about 150 miles south of Seattle, Washington along the same highway. The quality of living
is high: Portland is frequently named one of the US’s best cities to live in for its easy accessibility, robust economy, and access to nature.

In 2010 and 2011, the city became an unexpected target of reports on sex trafficking. Respected newsreader Dan Rather dubbed the city
‘Pornland’. Others called
it the ‘epicentre for child prostitution and a ‘hotbed of sex trafficking’. Actors such as Daryl Hannah and politicians descended for the Northwest Conference Against Trafficking
to discuss what should be done to get this pervasive problem under control.

In November 2010, Portlands mayor, Sam Adams, declared to the press that his city had become ‘stained’ as a centre of sex trafficking. Portland police, he claimed, report an average
of two cases of child sex trafficking every week.

The problem with the number? It isn’t true.

According to Sergeant Mike Geiger of the Portland Sex Crimes Unit, police don’t track such statistics. ‘I am not sure where that is coming from,’ he said. ‘That’s
an unreliable number.’
¹²⁷
So how did Portland become the focus of a moral panic?

In February 2009, an FBI investigation in Portland found seven prostitutes under the age of eighteen. This caught the media’s attention in a big way, and they claimed strip clubs and
permissive attitudes led middle-class girls to be tricked into prostitution. With no indication of how many of the seven girls were actually trafficked, it was naturally assumed they all must have
been.

Another FBI sting in October 2009 found four girls under eighteen. Politicians scrambled to do something. (A similar operation found sixteen underage girls in Seattle, but no one seemed as
concerned about Seattle as they were about friendly, trendy, middle-class Portland.)

A frequently cited claim is that 300,000 youths in the US, Canada, and Mexico are at risk of sexual exploitation.
¹²⁸
The US Department of Justice
cites this statistic, as do UNICEF, CNN, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. However, over time, Evangelisers have begun to cite the number 300,000 as an actual count of
trafficked US-only children.

There are two problems. First, being at risk of exploitation does not mean that all, or even many, of those young people will be sexually exploited. Of those who are, there no reason to think
all, or even most, will be trafficked for paid sex. For instance the report itself confirms that ‘Nearly all of it [sexual exploitation] occurs in the privacy of the child’s own home
(84%) . . . 96% of all confirmed child sexual
abuse cases are perpetrated by persons known either to the child or to the child’s family.’ Instances of abuse are
rarely caused by strangers snatching children from their beds in the night, and yet that seems to be the only thing people are concerned about.

What do the authors consider a risk? Well, the tally includes such categories as children of migrants, for instance – in spite of the questionable assumption that immigration is a risk
factor for child sexual abuse.

The study took data counting the number of runaways under eighteen. The authors then came up with a percentage they believed to be at risk of sexual exploitation based on interviews with fewer
than 300 teens. Unsurprisingly, other statistics from the same report, such as ‘Only about 10% of the [confirmed sexually exploited] children we encountered are trafficked
internationally’ are not often mentioned. In any case, extrapolating from such a small group to cover all young people over an entire continent is statistically problematic and not a good
basis for a nationwide estimate.

The other problem is that in spite of extensive efforts against trafficking, the number of confirmed sex trafficking incidents in the US does not even come close to the overinflated figures.
Just as in the UK.

The US Bureau of Justice reports that between 1 January 2007 and 30 September 2008 task forces reported investigating 1229 alleged incidents of human trafficking.
¹²⁹
Sex trafficking accounted for 1018 (83 per cent) of the alleged incidents. Of these, 391 (38 per cent) involved allegations of child sex trafficking.

Less than 10 per cent of the reported incidents turned out to be human trafficking. Allegations of forced adult prostitution accounted for 63 per cent of the rejected investigations that were
ultimately found not to involve human trafficking elements.

Over 21 months, in a country with 5 times the population of Britain and far easier ports of entry, only 120 cases of human trafficking were confirmed. That’s less than six per month for
the entire country. If we scale the results by population, this makes confirmed trafficking in Britain and the US very similar to each other. It also indicates trafficking is very rare in both
countries.

Most of the US cases did not involve foreigners: 63 per cent of those ‘rescued’ in confirmed trafficking cases were US citizens.
¹³⁰
Of
that
120, it is unclear how many were women, if any were underage, and – crucially – how much of the trafficking was for the purposes of sex. Remember, the number
of people trafficked for labour far outnumber the number trafficked for sex.

The results suggest two things: the laws regarding trafficking and border control are tough enough to ensure it is easier for such criminals to stay outside US and UK borders, and the rewards
for this business are sufficiently low that there is not enough motivation for gangs to subvert those laws.

Now, it is possible, even likely, that there are more people being trafficked than are being found by the raids. There are two reasons why this might happen. One is a focus on sex work as the
exclusive result of forced labour. The second is the tendency for police raids to treat people as criminals first, and potential victims second.

Consider anti-trafficking efforts in the US, where sex work is illegal. As with the UK, most police raids focus on brothels and massage parlours – not factories or farms, the type of sites
where most trafficking violations occur. But the raids are not even effective at identifying trafficked women within the trade. The Sex Workers Project, a US charity, interviewed women who
had
been trafficked.
¹³¹
They report that 60 per cent of those women had been arrested in raids, some as many as ten times. None had been
identified as trafficked at the time of their arrest. Only one was asked whether she was coerced into sex. Even in raids looking for victims, women in the sex industry are treated as criminals
first.

These raids and arrests do not address the needs of people who may actually be trafficked, but rather the presuppositions of those who claim to be helping. There has been little focus on
identifying what potential victims of crime would actually find helpful and effective. A human-rights-based approach to trafficking would prioritise the needs of potential victims over criminal
justice.

With Agenda Setters and Evangelisers at the helm of a crusade, the government can easily be convinced to change laws. Politicians’ understanding of the evidence is
limited, especially if they see a shocking statistic in a newspaper, if it sounds plausible, and it fits with their world view. It is easier to follow a high-profile campaigner than
to question the lack of evidence. They might even be tempted to exaggerate numbers themselves in order to further the cause.

In the case of Victorian newspaperman WT Stead, success in his campaign to change the age of consent resulted in near ruin. Rival journalists discovered that his story of Lily’s sale was
really a story about Stead himself buying a girl named Eliza. Stead did this because he could find no other evidence for the scenarios he wrote about so convincingly. The law he had promoted to
change the age of consent was then used to prosecute him. It emerged that he had lied to the girl’s mother, saying Eliza would become a servant to a rich family. His stories had claimed that
the mother was complicit in selling her child into sex slavery.

What Stead and other opponents of prostitution aim to do is combine the many issues around migration and crime into a single focus. Trafficking has ceased to refer, in the popular imagination,
to anything but young women and sex. Victorian reformers recast the image of all prostitutes as victims of forces beyond their control; the same happens now.

Slowly some people have started to pick up on the real numbers, but is anyone in power listening? ‘Everybody says that there are a tremendous number of trafficked women in Britain, but we
have no idea of the figures,’ said former MP Anthony Steen. ‘The human trafficking centre in Sheffield . . . spends nearly £2 million a year, but we ain’t got the numbers.
We do not know how many people are involved. It is pure guesswork and sensationalism when people talk about 4000 to 6000. The figure is probably in the hundreds, not the
thousands.’
¹³²
Certainly the outcomes of Pentameter Two and Project Acumen support his analysis.