Ignored by society, Afghan dancing boys suffer centuries-old tradition

Dear Friends:

Below is a truly tragic report concerning the sexual exploitation of boys in Afghanistan in a practice known as "bacha bazi." If you follow the link provided, you can also see video-taped news report on this subject.

Abolition!

Lisa

Ignored by society, Afghan dancing boys suffer centuries-old tradition
By Atia Abawi, CNN
October 27, 2009 1:21 p.m. EDT

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A young boy dressed in women's clothing, his face caked in make-up, dances the night away for a crowd of men.

The bells on his feet chime away, mimicking the entertainment and sexual appeal of female dancers. But there is no mistaking his pubescent body and face as he concentrates, focusing on every step in order to please his master and his master's guests.

This all played out in a video that CNN obtained from a person involved in the parties.

The boy is but one youth among many throughout the country forced into an age-old underground tradition known as "bacha bazi," or "boy play," in which young boys are taken from their families, made to dance and used as sex slaves by powerful men. The number of boys involved is unknown -- the practice has been going on for centuries, in a country where such practices are overshadowed by conflict and war.

"It's pretty much unappreciated by [the] society, unaccepted and illegal," said Mohammad Musa Mahmodi of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, one of the few organizations in the country working to end "bacha bazi."

Islamic scholars have denounced "bacha bazi" as immoral but the practice continues in Afghanistan, where the government is in the throes of an increasingly bloody battle with insurgent Taliban militants and is also working to recover from decades of conflict.

The abuse stays on the backburner of issues in Afghanistan. People are aware of it, but they don't really talk about it. Almost everyone in the country is coping with some level of injustice, and they are just trying to survive.

It is widely known among the population that, most of the time it is commanders, high-ranking officials and their friends who partake in the abuse of the boys.

"It continues because of the culture of impunity and lack of legal provision against this practice," Mahmodi explained.

Farhad,19, and Jamel, 20, are two grown dancers who were forced into "bacha bazi" about five years ago.

Farhad was 13 when his older neighbor tricked him into coming to his home. He was made to watch a sex tape and then raped. After the brutal assault, he was taken to another location where he was locked up and used as a sex slave for five months.

"I got used to him," Farhad said, trying to explain why he stayed with his neighbor after the traumatizing experience.

"He would sometimes take me to parties, and sometimes other places. I was with him all the time," he said.

In Afghan society the victims of rape and assault --- both male and female --- are often persecuted and punished rather than the perpetrator. The shame forces boys like Farhad to continue in leading such lifestyles, even when they have the chance to break away.

Jamel, Farhad's friend and dance partner, is now married but he was the "bacha bereesh" -- or "boy without a beard" -- of a powerful warlord who has since left the country. He said the only reason he continues to dance is to provide for his younger brothers and sisters.

"I make them study, dress them, feed them. Any money I make I spend on my family. I don't want them to be like this, be like me," he said, brushing his shoulder length hair away from his eyes, framing his thin oval face.

Farhad and Jamel say their families know what is going on now but are powerless to stop it -- in fact they need the money and income they make.

Both Jamel and Farhad look and act more like women than men, a trait that can be deadly in Afghanistan's male-dominated society. Even the police can't be counted on for protection.

Farhad said that he was taken from a party by four police officers one night and almost gang raped at the station Before their commander walked in and stopped the assault. But then, "He said if I wanted to be set free I should give him my money and my mobile," Farhad said. "I had no real choice, so I gave him my money and mobile."

The boys said they are continuously threatened, beaten and raped by men who attend the parties they dance at; parties fueled by alcohol and drugs.

"The nights we go out, we are scared," said, Jamel, who is the more talkative of the pair and the one who more resembles a woman. "We always think about how we will be able to get out without someone attacking us."

Despite the dangers, they continue to dance, making $30 for the night -- a night that usually ends in assault -- because they say it is the only thing they know and their only way to make money. There are no opportunities in Afghanistan for people like them.

And once branded as men who danced as women, there is no turning back.

"We are not happy with this line of work," Jamel said. "We say that it would be better if God could just kill us rather than living like this."

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10 men arrested for soliciting sex

Dear Friends:

Here is some more good news. One doesn't often see articles like this--reporting on the arrests of men caught soliciting for sex. Remember this type of law enforcement is vital for creating decent community standards, creating behavior change in men thereby curbing demand in the commercial sex industry (essential for reducing/eradicating sexual trafficking).

Question: What is law enforcement in your community doing on this issue? Perhaps you need to request that they follow the lead of police in Wasilla and Palmer, Alaska.

Also, note the age ranges of the men arrested: sadly young and old alike are in the "market."

Abolition!

Lisa

10 men arrested for soliciting sex
By Frontiersman staff

PALMER — A prostitution sting operation last week landed 10 alleged johns in jail, police announced this morning.

According to a press release, the Palmer Police Department teamed up with the Wasilla Police Department on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week in a joint investigation of prostitution in the Valley. Arrested for soliciting prostitution were:

Steven A. Brown, 58, of Wasilla; Carl D. Cook, 44, of Anchorage; Jeremy Firth, 30, of Wasilla; Tyler Henslee, 31, of Anchorage; Gregory S. Hutchins, 50, of Wasilla; Scottie R. Mack, 27, of Wasilla; Gregory C. Ray, 42, of Palmer; Christopher J. Schoff, 46, of Eagle River; Christopher Seeley, 31, of Palmer; and Vitaly Zhuchkov, 18, of Wasilla.

Detective Sgt. Kelly Turney with the Palmer Police Department said the operation was set up using an online account. The johns agreed to meet for a rendezvous, set up a specific price for a specific service and were arrested.

Asked if prostitution was a problem in the Valley, he replied, "by the number of phone calls that we received in a two-day period, I'd say it's a problem."

Read more!

"Tennessee Proclaims It White Ribbons Against Pornography Week"

Dear Friends:

I am happy to bring you some good news. The Tennessee House of Representatives (this matter was not taken up by the Tennessee Senate) has issued a proclamation encouraging all TN citizens to recognize White Ribbon Against Pornography Week! This is wonderful and something everyone should think of working towards in their states for next year. Spread the word!

Also congratulations to Girls Against Porn (http://www.girlsagainstporn.com/) for their efforts to help make this happen!

Abolition!

Lisa

www.girlsagainstporn.com

"Tennessee Proclaims It White Ribbons Against Pornography Week"

Nashville, TN – October 25-November 1, 2009, is White Ribbons Against Pornography (WRAP) Week, in the State of Tennessee. The state proclamation encourages all citizens to recognize WRAP Week by wearing or displaying white ribbons as a sign of their commitment to community standards of decency and their support for the enforcement of laws against obscene materials. The background of the WRAP campaign is available at www.moralityinmedia.org. White ribbons are available for purchase at www.wrapfamily.com. An excerpt from the Proclamation states:

"Whereas, pornography degrades and dehumanizes both female and male participants; and Whereas, pornography presents youth with a false and distorted image of human sexuality, devoid of love, commitment, and responsibility; and

Whereas, pornography features criminal and other anti-social behaviors, including adultery, bestiality, incest, child abuse, prostitution, teen promiscuity, unsafe sex, and the degradation, rape, and torture of women; and

Whereas, pornography leads males and females into sexual addictions that prevent and tear marriages apart; and

Whereas, the explosion of obscenity helps create the demand for women and children trafficked into sexual slavery; and

Whereas, so-called "adult" pornography is used by adult predators both to stimulate themselves and to entice, desensitize, and instruct their child victims; and

Whereas, children molest other children in imitation of what they see in pornography; and

Whereas, the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not protect obscenity and that legitimate governmental interests are furthered by enforcing obscenity laws, including the protection of morality, public safety, the community environment, and family life; and

Whereas, a poll conducted by Harris Interactive in July 2006 found that 73 percent of adult Americans think that viewing pornographic Web sites and videos is morally unacceptable; and

Whereas, in April 2008, Harris Interactive conducted a poll that found that 75 percent of adult Americans said that they would support the next president were he to do all in his constitutional power to ensure that federal obscenity laws are enforced vigorously."

Girls Against Porn would like to thank Representative Susan Lynn, of the 57th House District, and the State of Tennessee House of Representatives for officially proclaiming it WRAP Week.

Girls Against Porn (www.girlsagainstporn.com) is an on-line resource and action coalition for women who have a loved one involved in porn, and for anyone who wishes to get involved in the fight against porn and enforcement of obscenity laws.

Read more!

For Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys Survival

Dear Friends:

An excellent article that spells out the tactics of pimps in perfect detail.

Abolition!

Lisa

For Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys Survival
IAN URBINA
Published: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 5:10 a.m. Last Modified: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 5:10 a.m.

ASHLAND, Ore. — She ran away from her group home in Medford, Ore., and spent weeks sleeping in parks and under bridges. Finally, Nicole Clark, 14 years old, grew so desperate that she accepted a young man’s offer of a place to stay. The price would come later.

They had sex, and he soon became her boyfriend. Then one day he threatened to kick her out if she did not have sex with several of his friends in exchange for money.

She agreed, fearing she had no choice. "Where was I going to go?" said Nicole, now 17 and living here, just down the Interstate from Medford. That first exchange of money for sex led to a downward spiral of prostitution that lasted for 14 months, until she escaped last year from a pimp who she said often locked her in his garage apartment for months.

"I didn’t know the town, and the police would just send me back to the group home," Nicole said, explaining why she did not cut off the relationship once her first boyfriend became a pimp and why she did not flee prostitution when she had the chance. "I’d also fallen for the guy. I felt trapped in a way I can’t really explain."

Most of the estimated 1.6 million children who run away each year return home within a week. But for those who do not, the desperate struggle to survive often means selling their bodies.

Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay, according to a variety of studies published in academic and public health journals. But this kind of dangerous barter system can quickly escalate into more formalized prostitution, when money changes hands. And then, child welfare workers and police officials say, it becomes extremely difficult to help runaways escape the streets. Many become more entangled in abusive relationships, and the law begins to view them more as teenage criminals than under-age victims.

Estimates of how many children are involved in prostitution vary wildly — ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. More solid numbers do not exist, in part because the Department of Justice has yet to study the matter even though Congress authorized it to do so in 2005 as part of a nationwide study of the illegal commercial sex industry.

But many child welfare advocates and officials in government and law enforcement say that while the data is scarce, they believe that the problem of prostituted children has grown, especially as the Internet has made finding clients easier.

"It’s definitely worsening," said Sgt. Kelley O’Connell, a detective who until this year ran the Boston Police Department’s human-trafficking unit, echoing a sentiment conveyed in interviews with law enforcement officials from more than two dozen cities. "Gangs used to sell drugs," she said. "Now many of them have shifted to selling girls because it’s just as lucrative but far less risky."

Atlanta, which is one of the only cities where local officials have tried to keep data on the problem, has seen the number of teenage prostitutes working in the city grow to 334 in February from 251 in August 2007.

The barriers to rescuing these children are steep: state cuts to mental heath services, child welfare agencies incapable of preventing them from running away, a dearth of residential programs where the children can receive counseling.

After years of abuse, trauma and neglect, the children also tend to trust no one. The longer they are on the streets, experts say, the more likely they are to become involved in crime and uncooperative with the authorities.

"These kids enter prostitution and they literally disappear," said Bradley Myles, deputy director of the Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that directly serves children involved in prostitution and other trafficking victims. "And in those rare moments that they reappear, it’s in these revolving-door situations where they’re handled by people who have no idea or training in how to help them. So the kids end up right back on the street."

The Flip Interview

That revolving door is what an F.B.I. agent, Dan Garrabrant, desperately hoped to stop in Interview Room One at the Atlantic City Police Department on Sept. 5, 2006.

Conducting what the police call a "flip" interview, Mr. Garrabrant was trying every tactic he knew to persuade a petite 16-year-old girl named Roxanne L. from Queens, N.Y., to stop being a prostitute and to inform, or flip, on her pimp.

Sending the girl home was not the answer. Home was where her mentally ill, crack-addicted mother lived. Home was where the problems had started.

But Mr. Garrabrant also knew that she would flee if he sent her to a youth shelter. And with her would go his best chance at prosecuting the real criminal, her pimp.

A social worker for six years before joining the F.B.I. almost two decades ago, Mr. Garrabrant has been honored by anti-trafficking experts, prosecutors and the police as one of the best flip interviewers in the country.

On this day, however, he was getting nowhere, according to a recording of the interview and his notes.

While Roxanne had all the signs of being controlled by a pimp — a tattoo with initials on her neck, a rehearsed script about how she was new to the work — she adamantly denied working for anyone.

Mr. Garrabrant had only an hour before the local police would take Roxanne to a shelter. Trying to ease the mood, he started by asking her why she had run away from home. She told him she had been raped by a relative when she was 12 years old. At 14, she left home because her mother’s boyfriend had become abusive.

Soon, running out of time, he zeroed in.

"What’s the worst part about working the streets?" he asked.

"Honestly," Roxanne said, giving him a cold stare, "having to look at the tricks and tell if they are cops or not."

"So a pimp never approached you and tried to turn you out?" Mr. Garrabrant asked.

"Yeah, they tried, but I ran," she said, maintaining that she was "renegading," or working without a pimp.

Mr. Garrabrant’s task was to get Roxanne to consider leaving her pimp without forcing her to admit she had one. He needed to push hard enough to break her from her rehearsed script, without descending into a frustrating game of wits, a contest in liar’s poker. And he had to do all this at exactly the wrong time and place — at the police station after an arrest for solicitation, when the girl felt most panicked and most angry about being treated like a criminal.

"Look, I want to help you," he said, after several failed attempts to get her to acknowledge her pimp. He told her that he might be able to enter her into a residential program in California that offered counseling and classes to girls leaving prostitution.

"Yeah, I know," she said, as she looked down and pensively picked at her nails.

"Give me some time," Mr. Garrabrant pleaded as he handed her a card and asked her to keep it handy. With no time left, he released Roxanne back to the local police, who took her to the youth shelter.

Four hours later, she disappeared. Seventeen days after that, according to the F.B.I, she was found stabbed to death by the pimp she had so adamantly denied existed.

In one of her pockets she had Mr. Garrabrant’s card.

"Two days, that’s all I needed to get her to stay away from her pimp and I think things would’ve ended up differently," said Mr. Garrabrant, shaking his head in frustration. "I still don’t understand how these guys loop these girls in so far."

A Dangerous Dependency

A runaway’s relationship with a pimp does not occur by accident. It takes work.

After using court records to compile a database of over a hundred convicted pimps and where each is incarcerated, The New York Times began interviews more than two years ago. In interviews by phone and in letters, more than two dozen convicted and still incarcerated pimps described the complicated roles they played as father figure, landlord, boss and boyfriend to the girls who worked for them. They said they went after girls with low self-esteem, prior sexual experience and a lack of options.

"With the young girls, you promise them heaven, they’ll follow you to hell," said Harvey Washington, a pimp who began serving a four-year sentence in Arizona in 2005 for pandering a 17-year-old and three adult prostitutes. "It all depends on her being so love-drunk off of me that she will do anything for me."

While most of the pimps said they prefer adult women because teenage runaways involve more legal risks, they added that juveniles fetch higher prices from clients and are far easier to manipulate.

Virtually all the juveniles who become involved in prostitution are runaways and become pimp-controlled, according to law enforcement officials and social workers. Built of desperation and fear, the bonds they form with their pimps are difficult to break. Some girls continue working for pimps even after the pimps are incarcerated.

"The problem is that there is no methadone for a bad relationship," said Rachel Lloyd, a former child prostitute and the director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a program in New York that helps girls escape and stay away from prostitution.

The pimps view themselves as talent mangers, not exploiters.

"My job is to make sure she has what she needs, personal hygiene, get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted," said another pimp, Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006 to three years for pandering and related charges in Buckeye, Ariz. "But I keep the money."

Wayne Banks Jr., a pimp serving at least 40 years in Hazelton, W. Va., for the sex trafficking of a minor and related charges, wrote that the girls have to be convinced that the pimp is best equipped to handle their clients and finances.

"Seems more despicable to me to give something so valuable away as opposed to selling it," he wrote, describing his pitch to persuade girls that prostitution was a smart business decision.

When recruiting, some pimps said they prowled homeless shelters, bus stations and shopping malls or posed in newspaper advertisements as photographers and talent scouts. Others said they worked Internet chat rooms and phone-sex lines.

"I’ll look for a younger female with a backpack," said Mr. Thurman, describing how he used to drive near schools after hours. "I’m thinking she’s leaving home, she’s leaving for a reason, she had a fight with her parents or she just wants to leave home."

Mr. Banks wrote that he preferred using "finders’ fees": $100 to anyone who sent a prospect his way. His only condition was that the girl had to be told up front that he was a pimp.

Runaways are especially attractive recruits because most are already engaging in survival sex for a place to stay, said Evelyn Diaz, who is serving a nine-year sentence in a federal prison in Connecticut for three counts of sex trafficking of minors.

"Some become very loyal to you since you take them under your wing," she wrote.

Controlling girls through beatings or threats was common, but coercion was not an effective basis for a lasting relationship, most pimps emphasized.

"Everything about the game is by choice, not by force," said Bryant Bell, who is serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence in Georgia after pleading guilty in 2002 to helping run a prostitution ring that involved girls as young as 10 years old.

For those girls not already engaged in survival sex, the grooming process was gradual and calculated. At first, the sex is consensual. Before long, the girl is asked to turn occasional tricks to help pay bills.

"I might start by asking her to help me by sleeping with a friend," Mr. Washington said in a telephone interview. "Then I push her from there."

A Better System

Ten years ago, the Dallas Police Department found an average of fewer than 10 minors working as prostitutes every year, along with one pimp working with them. In 2007, the department found 119 girls involved in prostitution and arrested 44 pimps.

The city’s child prostitution problem has grown over time. But the bigger reason for the change is how the department handles the cases, using a special unit and some unusual techniques.

Previously, said Sgt. Byron A. Fassett, who leads the department’s effort, girls working as prostitutes were handled as perpetrators rather than sexual assault victims. If a 45-year-old man had sex with a 14-year-old girl and no money changed hands, she was likely to get counseling and he was likely to get jail time for statutory rape, Sergeant Fassett said. If the same man left $80 on the table after having sex with her, she would probably be locked up for prostitution and he would probably go home with a fine as a john.

The department’s flip interviews almost always failed, and even if they worked, there was no place to put the girls to receive treatment. Officers resisted investigating what they viewed as a nuisance, not a crime. Prosecutors regularly refused the cases against pimps because the girls made for shaky witnesses and unsympathetic plaintiffs.

Frustrated with this system, Sergeant Fassett started combing through old case files, looking for patterns. One stuck out: 80 percent of the prostituted children the department had handled had run away from home at least four or more times a year.

"It dawned on me, if you want to effectively deal with teen prostitutes, you need to look for repeat runaways," he said.

In 2005, Sergeant Fassett created the "High Risk Victim" unit in the Dallas Police Department, which flags any juvenile in the city who runs away from home four or more times in a given year. About 200 juveniles per year fit that description. If one of those children is picked up by the police anywhere in the country, the child is directed back to Sergeant Fassett’s unit, which immediately begins investigating the juvenile’s background.

The unit’s strength is timing. If the girls are arrested for prostitution, they are at their least cooperative. So the unit instead targets them for such minor offenses as truancy or picks them up as high-risk victims, speaking to them when their guard is down. Only later, as trust builds, do officers and social workers move into discussions of prostitution.

Repeat runaways are not put in juvenile detention but in a special city shelter for up to a month, receiving counseling.

Three quarters of the girls who get treatment do not return to prostitution.

The results of the Dallas system are clear: in the past five years, the Dallas County district attorney’s office has on average indicted and convicted or won guilty pleas from over 90 percent of the pimps arrested. In virtually all of those cases, the children involved in the prostitution testified against their pimps, according to the prosecutor’s office. Over half of those convictions started as cases involving girls who were picked up by the police not for prostitution but simply as repeat runaways.

In 2007, Congress nearly approved a proposal to spend more than $55 million for cities to create pilot programs across the country modeled on the Dallas system. But after a dispute with President George W. Bush over the larger federal budget, the plan was dropped and Congress never appropriated the money.

Read more!

Dear Friends:

Here's some news that should cheer us all! Really and truly we should profusely thank the FBI and all those involved in the Innocence Lost Initiative for all they are doing to rescue America's children from pimps and sex buyers. Just think 60 pimps in jail! Maybe at last it is getting hard out there for a pimp!
And 900 children rescued since the beginning of this initiative! That's both good news and bad. It's is absolutely wonderful that 900 children have been removed from these terribly abusive situations, but so tragic that our society is so careless with children that such things happen in the first place. Even so, let's take this moment to focus on the positive and be grateful that authorities are so aggressively pursing these cases.

Abolition!

Lisa

FBI: 50 Children Rescued From Prostitution in National Sting
Monday , October 26, 2009

The FBI said it has rescued more than 50 children who were being victimized through prostitution in a national sting.

The operation, part of the Innocence Lost National Initiative, took place in 36 cities over the past 72 hours.

The FBI said 631 others, including 60 pimps, were arrested on local and state charges.

"Child prostitution continues to be a significant problem in our country, as evidenced by the number of children rescued through the continued efforts of our crimes against children task forces," Kevin Perkins, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division, said in a statement on Monday.
Local and state law enforcement agencies assisted the FBI in the 3-day operation.

"There is no work more important than protecting America's children and freeing them from the cycle of victimization," said Perkins. "Through our strategic partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies, we are able to make a difference."

The Innocence Lost Task Forces and Working Groups have rescued nearly 900 children from the streets to date, the FBI reported.

Read more!

WRAP Week Mobilizes Americans to Take Action Against Pornography

Concerned Americans are being encouraged to help raise awareness of the harms of pornography and highlight the need to enforce obscenity and related laws as they observe the 22nd annual White Ribbon Against Pornography (WRAP) Week.

Mon, Oct. 26, 2009 Posted: 08:41 AM EDT

Concerned Americans are being encouraged to help raise awareness of the harms of pornography and highlight the need to enforce obscenity and related laws as they observe the 22nd annual White Ribbon Against Pornography (WRAP) Week.

From Sunday until Nov. 1, WRAP Week supporters will be displaying white ribbons, sending letters to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, contacting state and local officials, distributing flyers, and simply informing members of their church and the general public of the importance of obscenity laws at a time when such laws are not being enforced vigorously.

"It is clear that the explosion of hardcore pornography on the Internet and elsewhere is fueling this moral crisis," says Robert W. Peters, president of Morality in Media, which sponsors WRAP Week.

"It is also clear that ignoring the problem (the Clinton administration) and failing to take necessary steps to effectively curb the problem (the Bush administration) won't solve the problem," he adds. "The government's ongoing failure to enforce federal obscenity laws should be a matter of great concern to President Obama and Attorney General Holder."

Notably, however, while Peters named the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI and Congress as those at fault for the largely absent enforcement of obscenity laws, he and others have confessed that lack of public action has also played a large role.

Obscenity laws, they note, are based in part on contemporary community standards.

So although national opinion polls have indicated that most adults do not consider pornography morally acceptable or harmless and that they want federal obscenity laws enforced, if there is a lack of action from the public, there is likely to be less action from officials.

"If law enforcement officials do not receive complaints from the community, they are prone to translate that silence into acceptance of the hardcore pornography being sold in your neighborhood," former MIM Executive Vice President Betty Wein explains in an article that has been circulated each year in conjunction with WRAP Week.

Knowing this, participants of WRAP Week are being encouraged to ask their state prosecutor to enforce state obscenity laws and to send a letter to Attorney General Holder.

"In addition to harming children morally and psychologically, addiction to hardcore 'adult pornography' also contributes to the breakup of marriages, to sexual assaults against women and children and to sexual trafficking in women and children," states a sample letter in MIM's website, which provides other action items for WRAP Week including sample sermons for pastors and WRAP Week Flyers.

"The flood of obscenity emanating from the United States also tarnishes our national image in the war against terrorism," it adds.

Though Peters admits that enforcement of obscenity laws is not the whole answer to the pornography problem, the conservative leader says vigorous enforcement by officials will put many hardcore pornographers out of business and encourage others to get or stay out.

"It will also send the message that pornography is a moral and social evil," he adds. "Youth especially need to hear this message."

But Peters notes that in addition to law enforcement, "parental involvement, public education, the involvement of religious groups, and corporate responsibility are all desperately needed."

"Our nation is facing a moral crisis which is giving rise to, among other things, teen promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases (including AIDS), abortions, children born to single mothers, divorces, sexual abuse of children, rape, trafficking in women and children, on-the-job sexual harassment and lost worker productivity," he says. "The costs associated with these problems are incalculable."

Groups that have helped to promote WRAP Week include Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family, among others.

Eric Young
Christian Post Reporter

WRAP Flyer

Read more!

No trafficking?

Dear Friends:

The debate about the extent of sexual trafficking in the UK continues. Remember the recent fervor was created by an article appearing last week, written by Nick Davies, in which he claims that efforts to fight sex trafficking are nothing but a big bugaboo. I provided extensive commentary on that article last week; please read it if you haven't already.

Supporting my point of view that Davies is acting as Advocate-in-Chief for those who want to normalize the sex trade, is this commentary by Catherine Bennett (see the below), who with scathing sarcasm points out some of the flaws and hypocrisy in Davies (and his sex industry cronies) arguments.

Also, please keep in mind that all this debate is going on against a backdrop of potential legal reform. There is a measure being debated in the British Parliament that would criminalize men who buy sex from trafficked women. Perceiving this as a threat to their profit margins (and indeed it is), apologists for the sex industry have come out kicking and screaming. Their fall back tactic is always to claim that fears about sexual trafficking are an overblown "moral panic." This shouldn't surprise us; it is a tactic from an old play book. Read any history of the campaigns to fight sexual trafficking (or "White Slavery" as is was called at the time) from the late 19th and early 20th Century and you'll see that sexual industry supporters of today are merely recycling old strategies.

And in a preview of the Bennet's commentary I leave you with the following excerpt which may get my vote for favorite quote of the week:

Any non-prostitute propositioned by a kerb crawler knows that, in the mind of
your punter [the terms "kerb crawler" and "punter" are British-English slang for
"john" or as I usually call them "sex buyers" -- Lisa], all women have their
price. The legalisation of all aspects of prostitution, in defiance of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights on "degrading treatment", would confirm
this. If this sounds too prohibitionist, perhaps it's for non-practising
advocates of fully legal and normalised "sex work" to explain why selling a
woman's body to a potentially diseased or violent stranger should be no bigger a
deal than her selling a cup of coffee.

Abolition!

Lisa

No trafficking? Well, there's a hell of a lot of women suffering
Beware those who argue that prostitution is just another job. If it is, why do so many women die in this sordid trade?

Catherine Bennett
The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009

If the sex business, like so many other trades, awarded prizes to its favourite journalists, there is no doubt who would come first in the Services to Prostitution Awards 2009. Since his article last week, which likened the government's fictions about the extent of trafficking to its lies about Saddam's non-existent WMDs, reporter Nick Davies has been lionised by prostitutes up and down the land.

"Nick Davies's report vindicates what we have been saying for many years," declared the English Collective of Prostitutes, after Davies showed that the Pentameter Two police operation had not caught one trafficker in a country-wide, six-month hunt for offenders. "Most sex workers have not been trafficked but are working to support families."

Clearly, if they want to find trafficked women, the police should start looking somewhere else. Universities? Or will it turn out that these, no less than Britain's backstreets, walk-ups and brothels, are workplaces characterised by harmonious and dignified endeavour? Certainly, most of the female academics I have met insist they were not "coerced" into this ill-paid and exhausting work, even when they had the looks and opportunities to have chosen a far more rewarding career as a call girl.

Evidently, there is some sympathy between the two trades. In his compelling account of the way that politicians, such as Denis MacShane, appear to have simply invented trafficking figures, Davies quotes an academic from London Metropolitan University, Dr Nick Mai. We learn from Dr Mai that, the majority of migrant sex workers have chosen prostitution as a source of "dignified living conditions and to increase their opportunities for a better future while dramatically improving the living conditions of their families in the country of origin". Maybe this is one of those moments when we can even feel proud to be British? Being described, for instance, as "meat" on a prostitution websites may well be preferable to the certainty of poverty, food shortage and an early death. As for Mai, he worries that government plans to criminalise clients will "discourage migrants and UK citizens working in the sex industry".

The academic adds that, for most of migrants he interviewed, "working in the sex industry was a way to avoid the exploitative working conditions they had met in their previous non-sexual jobs". So it's better than cleaning, too, if you leave aside the fact that prostitutes are more likely than cleaners to be attacked or murdered.

Davies's articles did not merely expose the police, Home Office and government to well-deserved criticism and ridicule. As with the government's lies about WMDs, he wrote, the cycle of trafficking misinformation was "driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda".

Leaving aside the question of who represents the heroic late Dr Kelly in this parallel story, he continued: "In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by 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." In yet another similarity between the fabrications that led to 100,000 deaths and those that facilitated a piece of shoddy (though reversible) Labour legislation, the views of "feminist campaigners", like those of Iraqi exiles before them, are now being discounted as manifestly mistaken.
Intentionally or not, Davies's story does more than further embarrass already ludicrous figures such as Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith. In the same way that the government's fabrications about trafficking have been used, shamefully, to prop up its policy on prostitution in general, the good news about the limited extent of trafficking is now supporting the contention that non-trafficked prostitution should be accounted a job like any other.

In the latter project, extraordinary progress has been made within the last week. Mai repeats that the occupation is "dignified". A representative of the Engish Collective of Prostitutes is barely challenged on the nature of her "industry" when she appears to immense advantage on Newsnight, alongside a floundering Denis MacShane. A letter signed by various academics, endorsing the Davies revelations, has added force to the suggestion that "prohibitionists", like feminist campaigners, only add to the "stigmatising of sex workers".

At this rate, no matter what happens to Harman's plan, it cannot be long before prostitute becomes an unsayable P-word, those uneasy about prostitution are dismissed as interfering authoritarians, and the government sets about regulating this occupation into a shape more appropriate to the 21st century. Zones, perhaps? An ombudsman, to ensure consistency of service? A lot of men complain that prostitutes looked more attractive in the pictures. Should all participants be tested for STDs, or – as is normal – just the women? Should any limits be imposed? That series of The Wire in which drugs are legalised within a few blocks of Baltimore, showed just how tricky it can be when, with the best of intentions, the authorities attempt to organise human squalor. Inevitably, these health and safety considerations, probably requiring some sort of trained inspectorate and thorough police checks, will delay the longed for day when a young job seeker loses benefit if she turns down a perfectly respectable place in the sex industry (though evidence from countries where prostitution has been legalised, suggests that the stigma never completely disappears).

Not that these developments would affect many of those now debating the matter in public. There can be a flavour of Borges's two bald men fighting over a comb about the spectacle of academics, journalists and campaigners getting excited about an activity in which, even more than drug dependency or alcoholism, they pray never to have a personal interest. But more than either of those semi-criminalised forms of behaviour, the status of prostitution, its buyers and sellers, affects everyone. Or all women, anyway.

Any non-prostitute propositioned by a kerb crawler knows that, in the mind of your punter, all women have their price. The legalisation of all aspects of prostitution, in defiance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on "degrading treatment", would confirm this. If this sounds too prohibitionist, perhaps it's for non-practising advocates of fully legal and normalised "sex work" to explain why selling a woman's body to a potentially diseased or violent stranger should be no bigger a deal than her selling a cup of coffee.

Objections to neutralised prostitution should not be discarded merely because Pentameter Two convicted nobody of trafficking. As others have pointed out, the police are not much good at prosecuting those responsible for forced marriages and genital mutilation either. To say nothing of bankers and MPs responsible for fraud. But perhaps those stories are, themselves, nothing more than mischievous moral panics?

Read more!

Victims of Human Trafficking Speak Out

Victims of Human Trafficking Demand Better Protection and Prosecution of Traffickers
By EDITH M. LEDERER Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS

A father of two from Nepal who thought he was going to America wound up in Iraq, forced to work at a U.S. airbase. A 14-year-old Ugandan girl kidnapped by rebels spent nearly eight years in captivity as a sex slave and human shield. And a young Venezuelan woman lured to New York by the man she loved wound up in a brothel his family was running.

The three victims of human trafficking spoke Thursday at an event organized by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay who said it was "pressing and urgent" not only to listen to their stories of survival but to get their recommendations on how the international community can help end the growing global scourge.

"In every part of the world, countless individuals are callously exploited for profit," Pillay said. "While trafficking may be a problem related to migration and to transnational crime, it is also — and fundamentally — an attack on the dignity and integrity of the individual. Trafficking involves practices prohibited in every country including slavery, debt, bondage, forced labor and sexual exploitation."

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who opened the event, said the global economic crisis "is making the problem worse."

He urged governments to heed his "call to action" and step up efforts to prevent exploitation, protect victims and pursue traffickers whose conviction rates in most countries "are microscopic compared to the scope of the problem."

The U.N. Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking estimated last year that annual profits from trafficked, forced labor is around $31.6 billion. Some experts say it is now the second-largest illicit business in the world after drugs.

Buddhi Gurung, who calls himself a poor Nepali man, described how he was unable to get a job to support his wife and two sons during fighting by Maoist rebels and the army in 2004. When an agent promised him a job in America for $500 a month, he said he borrowed about $2,800 to pay him — but instead of going to the United States, he was taken to Jordan via New Delhi.

After a month in Jordan, he said he was put in a van with 11 others and driven to Baghdad. Twelve Nepali friends in the van that left just before his were abducted, paraded on television and eventually beheaded. Gurung said he wound up at the U.S. Al Asad Air Base where he was forced to work and paid less than the promised $500 a month.

"We would hear bomb blasts nearby and we knew our life was at risk," Gurung said. "I always wanted to go back to Nepal but neither my passport was with me, nor did I have any money or knew any other way to go back. ... Finally, after 15 months, I was permitted to go back to Nepal. ... This is how my life was saved."

Gurung and the families of the 12 Nepali men have filed a U.S. federal lawsuit accusing Houston-based defense contractor KBR Inc. and a Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners, of human trafficking.

Gurung urged the "big people" at Thursday's event "to develop a mechanism to save people like me from such traps of human trafficking."

Charlotte Awino described how she and 138 other girls were abducted from a boarding school in 1996 by rebels from the Lords Resistance Army, marched for three months into southern Sudan, and used as human shields during fighting against Uganda soldiers.

"As usual, we girls suffered more," she said. "We were distributed to rebel commanders, as objects without rights, and we were sexually abused. ... I was given to a man who had 20 other abducted girls, and he was a brutal man. I had two children with him."

Awino, who escaped in 2004 when the rebels went back to northern Uganda, urged the U.N. to "try to get back the children who have been trafficked through war, some as young as 6."

She also called for victims to be given counseling, health care and education, for countries to better protect their citizens during war, and for improved methods to track and trace missing people. She also urged understanding for the plight of victims.

"One day I was at home. The next day I was among the rebels," Awino said. "Is everyone going to call us rebels or terrorists?"

Kikka Cerpa described falling in love with a man named Daniel while working at a hotel in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, when she was 17 years old. A few years later, she said, Daniel moved to New York and eventually she went to join him, only to discover that his family ran a sex trafficking ring.

Cerpa said her passport and money were taken, she was put in a basement and told she owed the family a lot of money, and the only way to pay it off was to work in a brothel.

"The first night was the worst," she said, her voice quavering. "I have to service 90 men."

Cerpa said she was trafficked from brothel to brothel over the next three years. Sometimes police would raid the brothels, but "instead of rescuing us, they demand that we perform sexual services on them." After her best friend in the brothel was murdered by a customer, she said, she knew she had to leave — so she married a customer, but he beat her and threatened to have her deported.

Finally, she escaped and was helped by an organization to get a divorce and legalize her status in the U.S.

"I'm telling my story to help all the trafficking victims around the world," she said. "We need to pass and enforce laws that will protect us from traffickers like Daniel."

Cerpa said customers should also be held accountable and "treated like a criminal, like they are," and police officers and prosecutors should be trained to identify and protect victims.

Read more!

Celebrities speak out against child sexual exploitation

Dear Friends:

Here is some encouraging news!

Abolition!

Lisa

October 21, 2009
Celebrities speak out against child sexual exploitation
By CBC News

Beverly Hills 90210 Actor Jason Priestley and race-car driver Jacques Villeneuve are among several high-profile Canadians involved in a campaign to end the sexual exploitation of children.

Winnipeg-based Beyond Borders launched the web-based public awareness campaign, aimed at men, on Tuesday. Man to Man is the first campaign of its kind with respect to sexual exploitation, said Beyond Borders president Rosalind Prober.

"Most public awareness campaigns about child sexual abuse have focused on the victim," she said. "That's obviously important, but we've ignored trying to tackle the demand side of the issue. This campaign changes that."

The campaign notes that although women sometimes exploit children for sex, more than 90 per cent of those charged with the offence are men.

"I don't have all the answers of what needs to happen," Little Mosque on the Prairie actor Manoj Sood said at the launch in Winnipeg. "I'm not an expert, but I sense deep down these men know that they're doing something wrong.

"I would encourage these men, wherever you are, to seek help before you destroy your own life, destroy a child's life, destroy the life of your families around you."

Other Canadian celebrities lending their names to the campaign include Corner Gas actor Lorne Cardinal, NFL star Israel Idonije, and journalist and author Victor Malarek.

"We want to encourage men to get involved with this issue and to take a stand. It's important for boys and men to hear that using children for sex and profit is not OK," said Prober.

"Hearing that message from men they admire or look up to is equally important because the message has more weight."

Sood first encountered child sex workers while in Calcutta many years ago. A hotel owner brought a 13-year-old-girl to his room, unsolicited, he said. [Just a reminder to list readers, children are victims of commmercial sexual exploitation, they should NOT be labled "child sex workers." - Lisa]

"The only reason [sexual exploitation of children] happens is because many men will be willing to pay the money to have sex with that young child, so that's a memory that's always carried with me," Sood said.

Beyond Borders is the Canadian affiliate of EPCAT International, a global network of more than 80 groups in 75 countries. ECPAT stands for End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes.

The campaign web page includes a series of myths that offenders tell themselves to justify the exploitation. For example, that viewing child sexual abuse images is a victimless act.

A corresponding fact is displayed along with each myth.

There is also a section about seeking help for those who have carried out sexual offences against children or have thoughts about it.

"I'm sure some may think this is an odd campaign for a victims' rights group to take on, but I think it's realistic," said Prober. "We need men to talk in order to change the offender mindset. This is a first, groundbreaking step."

Read more!

Prostitution, for fun and profit

Dear Friends:

Sady Doyle serves us up a scathing critique of the book Superfreakonomics, rightly pointing out its vapid, obtuse, and misogynistic observations on the "economics" of prostitution. This piece is delightfully heartwarming! Join me everyone in three cheers for Sady Dolye!

Abolition!

Lisa

Prostitution, for fun and profit

The men behind Freakonomics offer a stunningly shallow and flawed view of sex work as a career option for women
Sady Doyle
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 22 October 2009 10.30 BST
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, looking for a good time. Photograph: Michael Scott Berman

Good news, ladies. You, too, can make millions by charging for sex! And you'll just have a slam-bang, gee-golly splendiferous time doing it, too – at least if you absolutely adore the sort of men who pay for it. Be warned, however: Disliking those men will consign you to the minimum-wage ranks of sex professionals, forever longing for the big bucks you could be earning, had you only an appropriately chipper attitude.

Such is the advice of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, of Freakonomics fame. They are back with a new book, Superfreakonomics, and recently they unveiled a bit of it in the form of an excerpt about how to succeed as a prostitute.

Freakonomics, of course, is the science of choosing an appropriately wacky or controversial subject (sumo wrestlers, abortion), applying a little economic analysis to it and coming up with a shocking conclusion that will make people blog about you. In that respect, the how-to-charge-for-sex piece was a no-brainer. Expressing any opinion about prostitution will bring on outrage (and attention) from one corner or another, no matter what your opinion turns out to be. Of course, if you are aiming for maximum impact, it helps to be – as Levitt and Dubner are – really, stunningly, remarkably wrong.

Levitt and Dubner build their piece around a comparison of two prostitutes: Allie, who works from her bedroom and makes between $350 and $500 an hour, depending on the client, and LaSheena, who works on the streets and probably makes about $350 a week, based on statistics (some information – any information – as to LaSheena's specific circumstances and earnings probably would have helped the comparison, but Levitt and Dubner seem, in this instance as in many others, not to have bothered learning about their subject).

LaSheena and Allie are the Goofus and Gallant of sex work, at least in the warped little scenario laid forth in the Superfreakonomics excerpt. Arising, as Levitt and Dubner seem to assume they do, from absolutely no context whatsoever (the fact that Allie is probably white, and that LaSheena is probably not, is never once addressed, for example; neither is the personal history of LaSheena explored in any detail, though we hear about Allie at excruciating length) they are not actual women so much as they are flattened-out, hollow caricatures of Success and Failure. Allie is a good prostitute; she has succeeded. LaSheena is a bad prostitute; she has failed.

What has LaSheena done wrong, you ask? Simple: She doesn't like being a prostitute. "I don't really like men," she is quoted as saying. This is an interesting statement, which the authors fail to follow up. Why doesn't LaSheena like men? Has she been beaten? Has she been raped? Is there a man taking a cut of her money? Was she forced into this job as a child by a man, by a boyfriend she loved, by sheer poverty? And has she seen the ugly side of men too often in this job to trust any?

Hey, here's an interesting thought: Maybe LaSheena doesn't like men because she's trapped in a cycle of poverty, and one of the only ways for her to stay alive is to have sex with men, whether or not she really wants to. Maybe that's enough to make LaSheena dislike men. We'll never know, however, because Dubner and Levitt don't ask. They don't care to humanise her. She's the Goofus in the scenario. Her poverty – which is assumed to be entirely her fault – is only there to provide a counterpoint to Allie's shining example.

Boy, oh, boy, does Allie ever love being a prostitute! Why, do you know that she just went ahead and did it on a whim, as a sexy adventure, and not because of any nasty old compelling factors like poverty or addiction or a man literally arranging for her to be raped over and over again and taking money from her rapists or anything like that? Well, it's true. The Freakonomics gentlemen said so!

They make a point of letting us know that Allie "liked men, and she liked sex". And do you know what men she especially likes? Why, her clients, of course. Allie "is the kind of person who sees something good in everyone". Isn't that nice? She credits this for the fact that she is so successful – and so do Levitt and Dubner.

Say, here's another nicety that Levitt and Dubner genuinely thought was a sane and intelligent thing to write down and publish: Allie's clients "treat her, in many ways, as men are expected to treat their wives but often don't". And Allie, in return, is like the "ideal wife", who "is happy to see you every time you show up at her door. Your favourite music is already playing, and your favourite drink is on ice. She will never ask you to take out the rubbish."

How this qualifies as wifely behaviour, outside of reruns of Father Knows Best, is unclear. But Levitt and Dubner seem genuinely convinced that this one-sided scenario of happy subjugation and infantile, pampered narcissism is good for everyone involved. Allie gets a MacBook! Doesn't that prove that it's working?

Levitt and Dubner seem, at some point along the line, to have missed out on the fact that women have inner lives, lives which do not revolve entirely around servicing men and which may in fact require some servicing by men along the way. It's evident in the way they extol Allie for getting such unmitigated joy out of subjugating herself to her clients.

It's also clear in the fact that they praise prostitution for allowing men to have sex without the "the potential costs of an unwanted pregnancy". (Well, no, sex with prostitutes did not carry the potential costs of an unwanted pregnancy, for men. In fact, I've noticed that very few men tend to get pregnant as the result of sex, whether with prostitutes or with anyone else. Perhaps Levitt and Dubner can take some time, in their forthcoming book Superduperultrafreakonomics, to puzzle that one out for us.)

It's clear in the way that they classify women who do not charge for sex as "competition" to prostitutes – as if those women were offering the same, or even comparable, experiences, and as if Levitt and Dubner genuinely cannot believe that sex is not a service performed for men by women, but a thing that women do for their own satisfaction.

It's most clearly, cruelly evident in the way they blame LaSheena for her own poverty – placing the credit for it not on any of the multiple obstacles she may have had to overcome, but on the fact that she simply doesn't love to be a prostitute the way Allie does. Deep down, there is the assumption that servicing a man is all a woman can reasonably aspire to, and that those who don't love to do it are somehow faulty.

And as for how much Allie loves to be a prostitute ... well, we don't have her direct testimony, do we? What we have is the word of two best-selling authors, which has been edited into book form. Allie's story is so romanticised that it seems unlikely the authors bore no agenda in their interviews – or that Allie, a woman whose job is to figure out what men want from her, was unaware of it.

It's entirely possible that, faced with a couple of men who very clearly wanted one specific version of her story, she sized them up and did the same thing for them that she did for all her other clients. That is to say, she told them what they wanted to hear.

Read more!

Pacific Region - Trafficking in Persons Outcome Report

Dear Friends:

For information about human trafficking in the Pacific region please follow the link provided to the report from the Pacific Trafficking in Persons Forum held last month by the Australian Institute on Criminology together with the Pacific Immigration Directors and The Salvation Army New Zealand, Fiji, and Tonga.

Abolition!

Lisa

REPORT:http://www.aic.gov.au/events/aic%20upcoming%20events/2009/~/media/conferences/2009-peopletrafficking/ptp_outcome_report.ashx
Additional information and powerpoint presenations available at: http://www.aic.gov.au/events/aic%20upcoming%20events/2009/peopletrafficking.aspx

About the conference

The Pacific trafficking in persons forum was held in the Cuba Room at the Quality Hotel, Wellington New Zealand on 2-4 September 2009.

The Australian Institute of Criminology together with The Salvation Army, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga, and the Pacific Immigration Directors' Conference, brought together government agencies, nongovernment organisations and academics to identify existing research and its findings to date, to discuss challenges and identify research priorities for investigating and understanding the various forms of trafficking in persons.

More than 70 delegates attended the forum from nine countries in and around the Pacific Islands to hear more than 30 presentations on trafficking in persons and related issues. The forum themes included human rights; background and causal factors; responses to trafficking and capacity to respond; labour trafficking; child trafficking; sex trafficking; and nongovernment organisations' responses to trafficking. Based on the forum themes, identification of key areas drawn from the presentations are summarised below.

Theme 1: Human rights
It was clearly identified by the three presenters in the session on human rights that the observance and protection of trafficking victims' human rights must be at the core of all anti-trafficking activities. The root causes of trafficking in persons are often due to violations of human rights, such that human rights violations are a cause and a consequence of trafficking in persons.

Early and recent key international anti-trafficking instruments centre their activities on maintaining human rights, highlighting their importance and encouraging Pacific Island Nations contemplating adopting anti-trafficking measures to acknowledge a similar human rights approach.

Theme 2: Background and causal factors
The presenters in the split session on background and causal factors had three extremely varied experiences, which provided a valuable awareness raising opportunity for the forum delegates. It is clear that trafficking in persons is highly clandestine and can present in various forms, making the interception of victims and prosecution of offenders challenging.

Key risk factors identified in this session related to cultural, geographical, political, economic and security related issues. Understanding the complexities of the Pacific region is important when attempting to counter trafficking in persons. Issues such as limited resources and capacity to respond to trafficking, lack of legal framework, lack of training of law enforcement and the judiciary, limited victim support provisions and minimal collaboration within and between government and nongovernment sectors must all be considered in anti-trafficking responses.

Theme 3: Reponses to trafficking and capacity to respond
The split session on responses to trafficking and capacity to respond highlighted the varying progress in adopting anti-trafficking measures by Pacific Island countries. The five presenters in this session had varying experiences, including at the frontline, policy development, regional administration, data collection and monitoring and legislation development.

Key issues identified from the presentations included the importance of national and regional collaboration in research, awareness raising, data collection, and information and intelligence sharing. The ongoing challenges due to limited resources were also highlighted as a significant issue, identifying that collaboration may be assisted by pooling resources to achieve positive outcomes.

Theme 4: Labour trafficking
Being an emerging issue, the split labour trafficking session was highly informative both in terms of its status as an emerging issue and its significant links to limited employment opportunity across the Pacific region. The five presenters provided an overview of the labour vulnerabilities, both emerging and ever-present within the Pacific as well as methods to counter the potential for exploitation.

The issue of international migration for employment was a common theme throughout the session, specifically within the seasonal work industries, nursing and rural to urban drift. The concept of Fair Trade Labelling and the potentially positive impact on farmers in the Pacific was addressed along with good practice identified in the recently released New Zealand Plan of Action against trafficking in persons.

Theme 5: Child trafficking
The child trafficking session provided the three presenters the opportunity to share their experiences and counter-child trafficking methods to forum delegates. Presentations provided a wide variety of international experience, highlighting the potential for child exploitation in the Pacific, and a window into what child trafficking in the Pacific might look like.

Identified by the three presenters was the need to ensure protective measures are in place for children from birth, such as the rights to birth registration and education as affirmed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Presenters provided an overview of measures being taken to prevent children being forced into situations of exploitation that may lead to trafficking in persons.

Theme 6: Sex trafficking
The session on sex trafficking aimed to provide delegates with a greater understanding of sex trafficking, a commonly misunderstood topic. The four presenters highlighted issues including demand-driven sex trafficking, gender equality and the ramifications of a patriarchal society, transparency in the sex industry and how to remove 'actual' victims from a situation of trafficking.

Despite varying experiences, the four presenters highlighted that people working with victims of sex trafficking need to understand the victim, their background and their choices in order to provide a supportive service.

Theme 7: Nongovernment organisations' responses to trafficking
This session provided nongovernment organisations working on anti-trafficking activities to provide an overview of lessons learnt and good practice activities that may assist other nongovernment organisations working on anti-trafficking in the Pacific.

The key message drawn from the three presentations was the need for community consultation and collaboration, both within the nongovernment but also the government sectors, to ensure all needs of the community are met.

Identified Research Priorities
Sex industry legalisation and the potential for trafficking in persons and exploitation
Understanding culture within the Pacific including the gender imbalance due to a patriarchal society
Collaboration within and between government and nongovernment sectors to ensure resources are well targeted
What are the vulnerabilities that may lead to trafficking in persons in the Pacific Island Countries?
Who are the traffickers?
Commercial sexual exploitation of children and the potential link into child trafficking and child sex tourism
Role of parenting norms in the Pacific Islands
The impact of labelling countries as source, transit and destination counties within the Pacific
Where are the hotspots in the Pacific region?

Read more!

Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic

Dear Friends:

It's been a while since I've read an article so bent on convincing readers that sex trafficking is mere figment of the imagination of a bunch of over zealous feminist and religious crusaders, but in the article below we have a prime example of just such a "journalistic" endeavor. Given that Mr. Davies, the intrepid pursuer of journalist truth and excellence who wrote this vituperation, has gone to great length to cast us as Chicken Littles who cry, "The sky is falling!" (and thereby waste everyone's time and energy) my comments will be lengthier than usual.

First, I should say, that Mr. Davies has a point . . . there is a tendency in the anti-trafficking movement to be careless about trafficking estimates and bandy about numbers from unconfirmed sources, or to conflate things. For instance, Kevin Bales has estimated that there are 27 million slaves in the world today. I take no issue with this estimate, and use it myself. However, this is not the same as saying there are 27 million victims of human trafficking, yet I sometimes see this 27 million figure used to mean there are 27 million victims of human trafficking. To be clear, the two issues are related, but human trafficking is a process by which some people find themselves in slavery like conditions. Others are born into slavery. I have no idea how one would disaggregate those who have been "trafficked" from those born into slavery. All this to say, this is why personally I loathe to use estimates, even from the best of sources, because they are all subject to specious attacks by those who just want the issue of sex trafficking to go away (more on why later).

Still the world is hungry for numbers. I suppose people feel we have to justify our concern about a problem, based on how many people it is impacting--not on how many it could impact, or already has. I understand this tendency and can even see some logic in it, even so, as Arthur Koestler has reminded us, "Statistics don't bleed; it is the detail which counts." Yes, indeed.

Even given our love of estimates, it is surprising to see so much ink split on a attempt to destroy of the credibility of an estimate. If we weren't discussing a real subject, involving real human lives this excessive effort to pulverize UK trafficking estimates would border on the hilarious. I mean was this level of scrutiny ever given to corporate bandits like AIG, or the smoke & mirror maneuvers of the corporate executives of the world's banking firms that brought us all to the brink of financial ruin?

Davies even goes so far as to compare sex trafficking data to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He writes: "There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein's weapons." What? Somehow military intelligence analysts and anti-trafficking advocates are all reading from the same play book; all intent on distorting facts to suit our nefarious ends? This is utter balderdash! Here Davies seeks to kill a fly with a cannon. This should have us all asking, "Why?"

The answer doesn't begin to emerge till near the very end of his animadversions:

Research published recently by Dr Nick Mai of London Metropolitan University,
concludes that, contrary to public perception, the majority of migrant sex
workers have chosen prostitution as a source of "dignified living conditions and
to increase their opportunities for a better future while dramatically improving
the living conditions of their families in the country of origin". After
detailed interviews with 100 migrant sex workers in the UK, Mai found: "For the
majority, working in the sex industry was a way to avoid the exploitative
working conditions they had met in their previous non-sexual jobs."

The
UK Network of Sex Work Projects, whose outreach workers deal with thousands of
prostitutes, told the home affairs select committee last year: "It is
undoubtedly the case that women are trafficked into the sex industry. However,
the proportion of sex workers of whom this is true is relatively small, both
compared to the sex industry as a whole and to other industries." The chairman
of that committee, Keith Vaz, observed: "We are told that this is the second
largest problem facing the globe after drugs and we do not seem to be able to
find the people responsible."

Now, the veneer of journalist integrity begins to evaporate. Here we see agenda.

Could it be that the efforts of UK police and operations like Pentameter have actually put a squeeze on the UK's brothels? It's not business as usual . . . police are watching, raids have happened, activists are watching, people are speaking out? People are even recognizing that prostitution is exploitive and harmful to women; people want to curb demand for commercial sex! Ouch! That can start having an effect on the bottom line of the pimps (male and female). This makes pimps unhappy. Pimps don't like being unhappy. They want sex trafficking activists to go away, because their efforts are interfering with their profits. Now pimps actually have to work instead of only physically and psychologically abusing the women in their stable. Now they have to rally "happy hookers" to rescue their public image, and find politicians to back their cause. But then again, that really isn't so hard since pimps have the direct dial phone numbers of plenty of politicians who have already sampled what the pimps have to offer.

Moreover, you'll likely notice how much of Davies argument is built on the notion of "willing" prostitutes, or women who "migrate for sex work." First, sexual trafficking is not a process that relies exclusively on brutal physical force. There are tactics of fraud and coercion that are also frequently used. These abuses don't leave bruises or scars, but can be as powerful as any fist. Yet, if you are looking only for signs of the fist, well then you may have missed seeing a victim.

It is also important to understand that a lot of trafficking victims start out as willing --- even in some cases willing to strip or prostitute. But later the situation changes. They want to leave but discover the have a debt to pay off, and/or there are threats to their families and children, etc. But, even in the absence of a debt or threats to family, are women who "migrate for sex work" really "free" to set their own terms? Must they have sex with any man seeking to buy sex, are they required to have sex without condoms, are they required to have anal sex, are they required to meet a quota? Do these conditions conform with your definition of freedom?

Additionally, any pimp worthy of the title is a master of mental manipulation, of sadist psychological abuse. It is their mission to convert the unwilling into the willing. All one has to do is read their literature, or watch their instructional videos to understand that.

So, while I'm not saying that all women in prostitution are victims of sex trafficking, I am saying that all pimps are sex traffickers, and that any pimp-controlled woman is a victim of sexual trafficking. Pimps recruit, harbor, transport, provision and obtain persons for purposes of exploitation in the commercial sex industry, and they routinely use force, fraud and coercion to do so. Tragically most people, especially naive reporters, don't recognize the signs of psychological coercion even when they are literally staring them right in the face.

Pimps are players. They make an art out of playing people -- from the women and girls they prostitute, to the sex buyers, the general public, and in this case even Davies, who is being played like a bad symphony. Who does he think he's helping, poor women from the developing world who just want a chance to feed their kids? Maybe.

But I can promise you, his article will fuel the efforts of those who are opposing efforts in the UK to pass legislation which would crack down on men who buy sex from trafficked women. Yes, this is the backdrop into which this article so conveniently happens to appear . . . just when there could be legislative action affecting men's sexual access to women! Why would anyone oppose such legislation unless they really support the notion of a male sex right to have sexual access to women on demand? Please spare me the humanistic poppycock: "We just want to give women who choose do so a way to support themselves." If any them cared a shred about the suffering of women, they'd being doing cartwheels in support of this legislation, and moving heaven and earth to provide women meaningful and dignified ways to support themselves and their families. I'm so sick and tired of the rhetoric that offers women prostitution as a substitution for genuine social support.

As for how many women in the UK's sex industry are trafficked or not, I cannot say. I can say, it is tragic that the "estimates" are now being used as a way to discredit years of work and effort; as a way to brush the dirt of sexual trafficking back under the rug.

Moreover, I am not embarrassed by, nor do I attempt to hide the fact that I and many others in the anti-trafficking movement do connect sex trafficking with the existence and normalization of the commercial sex trade. Prostitution + Demand - Not enough supply = Sex trafficking. Since sex trafficking is predicated on the existence of the sex industry, we work to curb demand for commercial sex.

And, I personally, view the commercial sex industry (prostitution, pornography, stripping) as an institution that is inherently exploitive and dehumanizing to anyone who sells sex irrespective of whether they were trafficked or woke up one morning and decided it would be fun to turn tricks. The bottom line is that I KNOW that prostitution hurts: it damages, it rips, it tears, it breaks, it shreds, it rapes, it pillages, it steals minds, bodies and souls. So, yes, I have an agenda, and that agenda includes ending sex trafficking and taking down the commercial sex industry . . . one strip club, one massage parlor, one brothel at a time. So, I do not broker dispersions about having an agenda when Davies et al. clearly do as well. It is the height of hypocrisy for Davies to wave a flag of moral superiority as a herald of some supposed agenda-free truth, when in reality his message is rooted in a decades old movement with an agenda that seeks to professionalize exploitation, and codify men's right to have a pool of women at their sexual disposal. Let it be known there is only one real agenda of freedom and liberty here, and doesn't having anything to do with sacrificing women on the altar of men's sexual demands.

Say it with me friends, "Abolition!"

Lisa

(Here is a link to a good rebuttal of Davies article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/20/sex-trafficking-inquiry-nick-davies)

Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic
Nick Davies
The Guardian, Tuesday 20 October 2009

There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein's weapons.

In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.

In both cases, the cycle has been driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda. In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by 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. The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been "trafficked".

And, from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety. [Note: the actual definition states that, "The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagrapah (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used." In other words, a person may begin as "willing" and nevertheless be trafficked if various means are used. The willingess of the victim is irrelevant. - Lisa]

But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety.

Two academics from the University of North London, Liz Kelly and Linda Regan, tried to estimate the number of women who had been trafficked in the UK during the calendar year 1998, an exercise which they honestly described as "problematic".

First, there was the problem of the word, which Kelly and Regan solved by accepting all variations of its meaning. Then, there was the shortage of facts. They spoke to specialists, studied news reports and surveyed police, who reported that 71 women had been "trafficked", whether willingly or not, during 1998. In Stopping Traffic, which they published in May 2000, Kelly and Regan argued that the real scale of the problem was probably bigger than this and, in the absence of any accurate data, they made various assumptions which they themselves described as "speculative".

At the very least, they guessed, there could be another 71 trafficked women who had been missed by police, which would double the total, to 142. At the most, they suggested, the true total might be 20 times higher, at 1,420.

But reaching this figure involved a further quadrupling of the number of victims missed by police, plus quadrupling existing estimates by sex health workers, plus assuming the accuracy of a newspaper report that "hundreds" of women had been trafficked into the UK from Albania and Kosovo, plus assuming that mail-order brides were also victims of trafficking, plus adding women who were transported within the UK as well as those brought into the UK.

Kelly and Regan were transparent and honest about the speculative character of their assumptions. They were clear about their adoption of the widest possible meaning of the term. They presented their conclusion with caution: "It can be estimated that the true scale of trafficking may be between two and 20 times that which has been confirmed."

And they presented their conclusion as a range of possibilities: "It is recognised that this is a wide range, but it indicates the likely scale of the problem while reflecting the poverty of information in this area."

During the following years, the subject attracted the attention of religious groups, particularly the Salvation Army and an umbrella group of evangelicals called Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking Across Europe (Chaste). Chaste explicitly campaigned for an end to all prostitution and, quoting their commitment to the principles of the Kingdom of God, they were enlisted as specialist advisers to the police.

Chaste took the work of Kelly and Regan, brought the estimate forward by two years, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and declared : "An estimated 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK in 2000 for the purposes of constrained prostitution."

The misleading figure was repeated in news stories and adopted by politicians. Even the government's Crimestoppers campaign recycled it. And over and over again, the absence of a definition in the original work was replaced with the certainty that this was about women who were forced to work against their will. Chaste spoke repeatedly about "sexual enslavement" and "sex slavery".

Three years after the Kelly/Regan work was published, in 2003, a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the "walk-up" flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade.

Margin of error

The researchers ringed this figure with warnings. The data, they said, was "very poor" and quantifying the subject was "extremely difficult". Their final estimate was "very approximate", "subject to a very large margin of error" and "should be treated with great caution" and the figure of 3,812 "should be regarded as an upper bound".

No chance. In June 2006, before the research had even been published, the then Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ignored the speculative nature of the assumptions behind the figure, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and then rounded it up, declaring to an inquiry into sex trafficking by the Commons joint committee on human rights: "There are an estimated 4,000 women victims."

The Christian charity Care announced: "In 2003, the Home Office estimated there were 4,000 women and girls in the UK at any one time that had been trafficked into forced prostitution." The Salvation Army went further: "The Home Office estimated that in 2003 ... there were at least 4,000 trafficked women residing in the UK. This figure is believed to be a massive underestimation of the problem." Anti-Slavery International joined them, converting what the Home Office researchers had described as a "very approximate" estimate into "a very conservative estimate".

The Home Office, at least, having commissioned the research, was in a position to remind everybody of its authors' warnings. Except it didn't.

In March 2007, it produced the UK Action Plan on Human Trafficking and casually reproduced the figure of 4,000 without any of the researchers' cautions.

The evidence was left even further behind as politicians took up the issue as a rallying call for feminists. They were led by the Labour MP for Rotherham and former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane, who took to describing London as "Europe's capital for under-aged trafficked sex slaves". In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, MacShane announced that "according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain."

There is simply no Home Office source for that figure, although it has been reproduced repeatedly in media stories.

Two months later, in another Commons debate, MacShane used the same figure, but this time he attributed it to the Daily Mirror, which had indeed run a story in October 2005 with the headline "25,000 Sex Slaves on the Streets of Britain." However, the newspaper had offered no evidence at all to support the figure. On the contrary, the body of its story used a much lower figure, of between 2,000 and 6,000 brought in each year, and attributed this to unnamed Home Office officials, even though the Home Office has never produced any research which could justify it.

MacShane was not deterred.

"I used to work for the Daily Mirror, so I trust the report," he said.

Sources

The then solicitor general, Vera Baird, replied by warning MacShane that "we think that his numbers from the Daily Mirror are off" and then recycled the figure of 4,000 without any of the researchers' cautions. MacShane then switched line and started to claim, for example in a letter to the Guardian in September 2008, that there were "18,000 women, often young girls, trafficked into Britain as sex slaves." He used this same figure in another debate in the House of Commons, adding "We have to get the facts and figures right."

On this occasion, the source he was quoting was Pentameter Two, the six-month national police operation which failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution. But MacShane had a point: presenting the results of the operation to the press in July 2008, its operational head, Tim Brain, the chief constable of Gloucester, was widely reported to have said that there were now 18,000 victims of trafficking in the UK and that this included under-age girls.

Other senior figures who were involved with this press conference say they were taken completely by surprise by Brain's claim. "None of us knew where that came from," according to one senior figure. "It wasn't in his pre-brief. It wasn't in anything: ministers weren't briefed. Tim may have meant to say 1,800 and just got his figures mixed up."

Brain now agrees that the figure is not correct and suggested to the Guardian that he had been trying to estimate the total number of prostitutes in the UK, not the total number of trafficked women.

But the damage had been done. Patrick Hall, Labour MP for Bedford, solemnly told the House of Commons that there was sex trafficking "in towns and villages throughout the land."

Fiona Mactaggart, a former Home Office minister, in January 2008 outstripped MacShane's estimates, telling the House of Commons that she regarded all women prostitutes as the victims of trafficking, since their route into sex work "almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers." There is no known research into UK prostitution which supports this claim.

In November 2008, Mactaggart repeated a version of the same claim when she told BBC Radio 4's Today in Parliament that "something like 80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker." Again, there is no known source for this.

Challenged to justify this figure by a different Radio 4 programme, More or Less, in January 2009, Mactaggart claimed that it comes from the Home Office's 2004 report on prostitution, Paying the Price. But there is no sign of the figure in the report.

In the summer of 2004, The Poppy Project, which is committed to ending all prostitution on the grounds that it "helps to construct and maintain gender inequality", surveyed London prostitutes working in flats and found that 80% of them were foreign, a finding which is well supported. They then added, without any clear evidence, that "a large proportion of them are likely to have been trafficked into the country", a conclusion which is challenged by specialist police, but which was then recycled through numerous media reports and political claims.

Last year (2008), Poppy published a report called The Big Brothel, which claimed to be the most comprehensive study ever conducted into brothels in the UK and which claimed to have found "indicators of trafficking in every borough of London".

That report was subsequently condemned in a joint statement from 27 specialist academics who complained that it was "framed by a pre-existing political view of prostitution". The academics said there were "serious flaws" in the way that data had been collected and analysed; that the reliability of the data was "extremely doubtful"; and that the claims about trafficking "cannot be substantiated." [Who are these 27 academics? On what basis are we supposed to accept their critique? Might they have their own agenda? This is journalism? - Lisa]

Illusion

But by that time, the report had generated a mass of news stories, most of which took the unreliable results and overstated them. Like Chaste, the Poppy Project, which has been paid nearly £6m to shelter trafficked women, has been drafted in to advise police and continues to have its own office in the Sheffield headquarters of the UK Human Trafficking Centre.

The cacophony of voices has created the illusion of confirmation.

Politicians and religious groups still repeat the media story that 40,000 prostitutes were trafficked into Germany for the 2006 world cup – long after leaked police documents revealed there was no truth at all in the tale. [It may be that some groups claim this happened, but I believe most groups note that there was concern that this number might have been trafficked to Germany in advance of the World Cup and accordingly took preventative measures. This number would have only represented a 10% increase in the current number of persons in prostitution in Germany. Lisa] The Daily Mirror's baseless claim of 25,000 trafficking victims is still being quoted, recently, for example, by the Salvation Army in written evidence to the home affairs select committee, in which they added : "Other studies done by media have suggested much higher numbers."

Somewhere beneath all this, there is a reality. There have been real traffickers.

Since the Sexual Offences Act came into force in January 2004, internal police documents show that 46 men and women have been convicted and jailed for transporting willing sex workers and 59 people have been convicted for transporting women who were forced to work as prostitutes.

Ruth Breslin, research and development manager for Eaves, which runs the Poppy project, said: "I realise that the 25,000 figure, which is one that has been bandied about in the media, is one that doesn't really have much of an evidence base and may be slightly subject to media hype. There is an awful lot of confusion in the media and other places between trafficking (unwilling victims) and smuggling (willing passengers). People do get confused and they are two very different things."

She said that in the six and a half years since Poppy was founded, a total of 1,387 men and women had been referred to them, of whom they had taken in just over 500 women who they believed had been trafficked into sexual exploitation or domestic servitude by the use of coercion, deception or force. "I do think that there a lot more trafficked women out there than the women we see in our project. I do think there are significant numbers. I would say the figure is in the thousands. I don't know about the tens of thousands. That's probably going too far."

Certainly there have been real victims, some of whom have been compensated as victims of crime. The internal analysis of Pentameter Two, obtained by the Guardian, reveals that after six months of raids across the UK, 11 women were finally "made safe". This clashes with early police claims that Pentameter had rescued 351 victims. By the time that Brain held his press conference in July last year, that figure had been reduced to 167 victims who were said to have been "saved from lives of abuse, exploitation and misery".

However, the internal analysis shows that supposed victims variously absconded from police, went home voluntarily, declined support, were removed by the UK Borders Agency or were prosecuted for various offences. [Because women flee or decide to return to their country of origin, or decline assistance does not mean they were not victims of trafficking. It does mean they might be afraid of reprisals, and simply want to get on with rebuilding their lives. - Lisa]

Dealing with this, the document explains: "The number of 'potential victims' has been refined as more informed decisions have been made about whether or not the individual is believed to be a victim of human trafficking for sexual exploitation ... Initial considerations were made on limited information ... When interviewed, the potential victim may make it clear that they are not in fact a victim of trafficking and/or inquiries may make it clear that they are not and/or inquiries may show that initial consideration was based on false or incomplete information."

Research published recently by Dr Nick Mai of London Metropolitan University, concludes that, contrary to public perception, the majority of migrant sex workers have chosen prostitution as a source of "dignified living conditions and to increase their opportunities for a better future while dramatically improving the living conditions of their families in the country of origin". After detailed interviews with 100 migrant sex workers in the UK, Mai found: "For the majority, working in the sex industry was a way to avoid the exploitative working conditions they had met in their previous non-sexual jobs." [Friends, this last sentence is outrageous. Sexual harrassment and sexual exploitation are on-the-job requirements in the commercial sex industry. Yes, some women may see prostitution as a way to make more money faster, or may turn to it out of a lack of other opportunties, but the notion that it enables them to escape exploitation is patently false. - Lisa]

The UK Network of Sex Work Projects, whose outreach workers deal with thousands of prostitutes, told the home affairs select committee last year: "It is undoubtedly the case that women are trafficked into the sex industry. However, the proportion of sex workers of whom this is true is relatively small, both compared to the sex industry as a whole and to other industries." The chairman of that committee, Keith Vaz, observed: "We are told that this is the second largest problem facing the globe after drugs and we do not seem to be able to find the people responsible." [The U.S. and its allies haven't found Osama bin Laden, so we should be more successful at finding sex traffickers? - Lisa]

For the police, the misinformation has succeeded in diverting resources away from other victims. Specialist officers who deal with trafficking have told the Guardian that although they will continue to monitor all forms of trafficking, they are now shifting their priority away from the supposed thousands of sex slaves towards the movement within the UK of children who are being sexually abused. They say they are also dealing with more cases where illegal migrant workers of all kinds, including willing sex workers, find themselves being ripped off and overcharged for their transport.

Unheard

However, the key point is that on the sidelines of a debate which has been dominated by ideology, a chorus of alarm from the prostitutes themselves is singing out virtually unheard. In the cause of protecting "thousands" of victims of trafficking, Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader and minister for women and equality, has led the parliamentary campaign for a law to penalise men who pay for sex with women who are "controlled for gain" even if the men do so in genuine ignorance. [Here is evidence of the real reason for this article. Certain people are afraid of this legislation, and they are not prostituting women. - Lisa]

Repeatedly, prostitutes groups have argued that the proposal is as wrong as the trafficking estimates on which it is based, and that it will aggravate every form of jeopardy which they face in their work, whether by encouraging them to work alone in an attempt to show that they are free of control or by pressurising them to have sex without condoms to hold on to worried customers. Thus far, their voices remain largely ignored by news media and politicians who, once more, have been swept away on a tide of misinformation. [Notice how groups like the Poppy Project, who work to help women exit prostitution, are dismissed out-of-hand.- Lisa]

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