The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (34 page)

Everyone wants to see trafficking investigated correctly and intelligently, but holding out services on condition of police co-operation? That would be a little like telling rape victims that only the ones who go to court deserve counselling. Or telling domestic abuse victims they can only go to shelters if they go to the police first. Not a great idea in so, so many ways.

Some have questioned their policy of encouraging police investigation. As Laurie Penny wrote in 2008, ‘Feminists and sex workers alike have been appalled at the insistence by members of the Project that prostitutes agree to give up sex work forever and to turn in their traffickers – sometimes a very dangerous step for them to take – before they receive any help whatsoever.’ This is ‘highly conditional help’, to use Penny’s words.
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Other observations questioned the cost-effectiveness of such a system against the assets that could be seized and the number of people helped. In 2009, Liberal Conspiracy hit out about the money said to be involved: ‘£1.8 million per year in prosecution costs and £2.1-£3.4 million for a national referral system and specialist victim support services against £1.2 million a year recouped from projected seizures of traffickers’ assets ... all of which is based on this new system dealing with 500 trafficked adults and 360 trafficked children a year. A figure that appears, like the estimated unit cost of providing these support services, to have been derived exclusively from information provided by the Poppy Project.’
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There are many excellent charities for women’s services run by committed staff and volunteers – and fantastic people within every organisation. And there are others whose reliance on
media attention and government grants has perhaps damaged their effectiveness.

The bun fight currently going on over funding to help trafficking victims is one example, pitting London-centric feminists from Eaves against evangelical Big Society projects from the Salvation
Army.

When the main recipient of anti-trafficking funding is a self-professed feminist organisation that mainly offers its services to women in London, then something has gone wrong, and there are
people who will suffer as a result. When the only competitor for the government grants to fund such work is an evangelical outfit . . . well, that is a choice I am glad I don’t have to
make.

Charities aside – and, let it be said, there are many worthy and honest ones – there are also the academics, researchers, and writers who
earn their living not through hands-on effort, but by writing papers. Papers that allow them to win grants. Grants so that they can write more papers.

This, as a former cancer research academic, is a world I know well. We can’t all save lives. But we do all have to earn a crust. Still, sometimes the ratio of money available to size of
the problem seems far out of whack. You do start to wonder how much of what is said and written is born from genuine concern, and how much is just chasing another year’s salary.

Is there enough money in these grants to even bother making this criticism? Well, thanks to a little tool that compares the money from funding grants over time, we can make a rough guess of what
they are worth. The website Fundingtrends.org, a US-based site, shows trends in research grants funded since 1991. The site processes project-funding data from the US National Institutes of Health
(NIH), European Commission (EC), Canadian and Australian research councils, and many others. It also includes keywords from MEDLINE article abstracts, forming an overview of what kinds of research
are being funded, and what the amounts involved are.

The site demonstrates that funding for studying trafficking is a growth area. From almost nothing in 1991, it was funded worldwide by 2010 to the tune of over $1 billion. This is a total greater
than the amount of grant money awarded to study lung cancer, which of course is also devastating, and affects far more people.
²¹³
And spending on
trafficking since 2000 has dwarfed the grant awards on such important international health concerns as malnutrition, malaria, or tuberculosis – conditions that kill millions of people
worldwide every year, and affect hundreds of millions more. Funding for trafficking research is not only greater than each of these, it’s greater than all of the funding for these health
crises
combined.
²¹⁴

This trend has happened at the same time mentions of trafficking started to become interesting to the media. According to a recent article, news database searches showed there were only three
references to ‘human trafficking’ or ‘trafficking in humans’ before 2000. It was mentioned 9 times in 2000 and 41 times in 2001. Use of these terms in
the news reached 100 mentions for the first time in 2005. In 2010, there were more than 500 references.
²¹⁵

While trafficking is a serious concern, there is a lot to be said for the benefits of even modest funding saving far more people when it comes to issues like controlling TB, or attacking
malnutrition. They are not sexy but they are just as, if not more, important. In countries where trafficking is the most rife, health concerns like these are often far more acutely serious in
day-to-day life. It’s a bit like chucking loads of money at education, only to learn no one’s too bothered about the fact the school itself is burning down.

Another way in which opposing sex work brings financial benefit is through the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Police know, for instance, that if a brothel owner is prosecuted, since running a
brothel is illegal, any money and property retrieved from the ‘crime scene’ becomes theirs. When police resources are limited, does the temptation of proft possibly influence victimless
crimes being prosecuted more vigorously than they otherwise would? Hard to know for sure. It’s to no one’s surprise that the pre-Olympic crackdown on brothels is coinciding with the
recent cuts in police funding.

Hanna Morris, who ran a brothel, lost her ‘abuse of process’ case against the police. She rang 999 when masked and armed gunmen threatened her business . . . only to find herself
arrested, and the violent criminals never pursued or apprehended.
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It’s impossible to know for certain, but one can imagine plenty of situations
in which police – with restricted time and money – must make choices: unknown violent criminals who may be difficult and expensive to catch, or women technically breaking the law
standing right in front of you, with cash assets?

The outcome of the Morris case certainly sends a message, but I’m not convinced it’s the message of ‘protecting women’ that some people prefer to promote.

It’s an approach that shows lack of compassion for people in real trouble, and puts the agenda of the rescuer above what’s best for the victim.

There are plenty of examples of policies that are neither wanted nor needed by the general public being implemented. So, why do they exist?

Writing off issues like the hype around child sexualisation, or sex trafficking, as purely motivated by emotion would be an easy thing to do. But it’s not quite accurate, even if the data
is misleading and at times entirely made up. These ideas actually take hold by following a set of steps that appears very logical to the parties involved. That process includes, crucially, the
public.

The first connection between Agenda Setters and policy making is, of course, the politicians. Agenda Setters know that appealing directly to policy makers enables them to gain sizeable grants or
contracts for relatively small investments. Politicians reasonably believe they have more to gain than to lose by supporting these kinds of agendas. They are not so much public servants as
self-interested agents. Policies may be tied to campaign contributions, or other forms of implied support, such as lobbying positions or chairmanships after leaving public office. The cost of
supporting these projects is low, since politicians are spending the public’s money. They also know that few voters are strictly one-issue voters.

The evidence they demand before changing laws, such as through consultations, is rather shoddy only because the outcome is usually already decided bar a few details. Why invest more in research,
when everyone involved has already decided what will happen?

On the local scale, it’s hard for Agenda Setters to exercise their influence in the same way as they do on the national scale. Partly this is because local interactions have more of an
element of getting along, of maintaining community cohesion. These are not always compatible with the way politics works on the macro level. Paying off a school’s headteacher in order to
implement local internet censorship, for instance, wouldn’t go down awfully well, even if people did agree with the result of the policy.

This is where the Constellation Makers and Evangelisers are vital to the process of gaining consent for an agenda, or at least, the appearance of consent.

Constellation Makers provide the vital content that is needed
to ensure that if people are concerned about this issue at all, their opinions will be the
‘right’ ones. Ask yourself, for instance, why the parents consulted for sexualisation research are only asked about sexualisation and never whether it’s a big concern to them.
That way, the outcome can be presented in a sterile context with no relationship to family life.

The data appear to be asking whether parents think the internet or lads’ mags are more dangerous for children. What it doesn’t ask is whether either of those rate highly on a
parental list of concerns about dangers to their children overall. Realistically, parents are unlikely to feel the content of advertising is the most pressing problem on their plates. The results
of the consultations, however, are presented in such a way as to make it look like it’s all they think about.

This is where Evangelisers enter the fray. By supplying the media with a large number of articles discussing sex education and sexualisation as the most pressing concern parents have to face,
the scene is set for people to start prioritising these issues above, say, the quality of teaching or the success of curricula at the local schools. Newspapers, television news, even the internet
are all subject to a certain bandwidth: whether the number of column inches, the amount of time on air, or simply the amount of time spent online.

Pushing out competing information is an effective way of manufacturing consent on these issues. With many members of the public having never considered the issues in depth at all –
they’re understandably busy – the first thing they see is already prepped and primed to invoke the strongest possible reaction. And those who see the stories but suspect the data in
them is somehow not entirely kosher have little access to the resources that might confirm their suspicions.

Finally, the public have a stake in this as well: the perceived time and energy it takes to overcome what is, in isolation, a relatively small slight far outweighs the perceived benefits of
whatever government is currently in power. People whose livelihoods are insecure tend to focus energy on improving their specific situations; people whose livelihoods are secure are reluctant to
rock the boat. Collective action against these measures is made very
difficult. To be ignorant of the minute detail of policies is a rational decision for members of the
public. The voices of vocal minorities with the most to gain are prioritised over those of the indifferent majority.

10

CONCLUSION:

W
hile many of the debates in this book have little in common apart from the ‘sex’ bit, they tend to get lumped
together in the eyes of the public, government, and media as something that is affecting society more than before. And it is very often implied that it needs attention
now.
Conflating porn
use, sex work, trafficking, and other issues allows Agenda Setters to push a view of the world in which virtually every human interaction is sexually charged – and potentially dangerous.

But the grand plans of Agenda Setters and the ideologically driven Constellation Makers would be nowhere without the helping hand of those happy to spread the word. We want answers. We like
answers. Media strive to give us answers, even if they’re not entirely correct. The complex and indefinable truth rarely, if ever, gets a look-in.

How things are reported can have an outsize influence on what people believe about these issues, and how prominent they are seen to be. In the quest to fill pages and cut costs, few are able to
devote the time to accurately checking stories as they should, and press releases are frequently taken at face value. There is a tendency to re-report information even long after it has been
discredited. Making sure every side is represented often results in emotive arguments being given the same weight as factual material. Also, some journalists summarise without even checking their
sources.

This completes the circle: Agenda Setters defined the problem, Constellation Makers set the boundaries of its existence, and Evangelisers spread the word. The concerned
public rises up in what appears to be a grassroots fashion to put pressure on Agenda Setters to solve this terrible – and previously completely unknown – problem.

As a science student, I was taught early the value of original sources. A science education is a little like the history of science: you spend your school and university years working through
well-known experiments, amassing first-hand knowledge, and learning how to read and interpret research findings. Then, if you stick with it, you get to go on and do your own research someday.

It’s not only science where this happens. Disciplines like history, for example, place high value on the original source. But almost everything you read in the news media is a summary or
an interpretation. How good are those summaries and interpretations? Being able to read and interpret information for yourself is important – vitally so. Because there’s not enough time
in the day for each and every one of us to do that for everything we’re interested in. Hence, the news media has a place of importance as a translator of news and ideas to the public.