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Attacking Sex Trafficking by Attacking Sex Workers?

A terrific post by Marty Klein, PhD

How many people do you think are sex-trafficked in the US each year? Really?

How many people do you think are sex trafficked in the U.S. every year: 200,000? 300,000?

If your blood’s boiling about what sounds these days like an epidemic, here’s good news: According to the U.S. Justice Department, the actual number of people trafficked into the country for all reasons (mostly for labor rather than sex) is about 17,500 people year. In a rare show of bureaucratic consensus, the U.S. State Department’s estimate is between 14,000-17,000.

“But,” you say, “surely that’s too low? What about the numbers I hear from all these anti-trafficking organizations?”

Good question. And here’s the answer: if you define trafficking broadly enough, it does look like there are a million or more victims. The numbers also sound enormous if you’re vague about whether the trafficking involves the U.S. or semi-functional countries like Moldova, Haiti, and Bangladesh.

Some non-profit organizations define sex trafficking to include all prostitutes. Others include all porn actresses. Still others include anyone giving hand jobs in a massage parlor. Forced marriage of teen girls and older men is ugly—and virtually unknown in the U.S.. But some anti-sex trafficking activists count these young people as well. No wonder these activists or “researchers” get such enormous, scary, numbers.

Most manipulative of all, activists keep warning of the number of people “at risk” for being sex trafficked—millions of women and children. “At risk” because they’re poor, or unloved, or drug-addicted, or have trouble with English.

Using that logic, 45 million Americans are “at risk” of dying in plane crashes every month, and twenty million Californians are “at risk” of dying in car crashes every week. No one’s in a panic about that, of course, because such definitions of “at risk” are meaningless.

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  • The mighty Marty Klein Hammer of Truth shatters yet another sex-panic myth. He's good that way.

    Particularly spot-on about the bullshit of "at risk." Many so-called "anti-trafficking" groups literally claim every single minor reported missing in the U.S. every year as "at risk" for trafficking. Breaking that down in to real numbers based on actual cases, however, turns out that the majority of those reported missing are runaways who return home after a few days and parental kidnappings involving custody disputes.

    Every time they hold some giant LE operation to crack down on "sex-trafficking" the result is around a hundred arrests, mostly of sex workers and a few of escort-service operators or even the occasional street pimp here or there.

    As always, the sex workers they're supposedly trying to protect are the ones who end up in jail, stigmatized with records as sex offenders and even less able to get non-sex-work jobs afterward.

    Very constructive.

    • Marty Klein is great at breaking this kind of thing down, in a gentle matter-of-fact way. Everything he (and you) have stated ought to be obvious to anyone with a brain (and a heart), but, sadly, fanatics don't care about facts, or who they hurt to achieve their ends.

  • I have been a witness and participant to the sex industry and trafficking since the late 1970's. While intertwined - they are different. I liken it to very much how the meat industry is in some locations. Some will treat the cattle well, giving them beer to drink and even massaging them as they do with Kobe beef - while others are subjecting the animals to horrible treatment, abuse and murder. A lot of it has to do with demand. As more people started demanding that the beef they were eating was raised "better" and more "humane" - the more industry responded. Of course you also pay more. Just as you will pay less for a trafficking victim - so too are the prices higher for an "independent professional sex worker". What he is talking about here though is very real - because many groups who are desperate for grants and government funding are inflating their numbers by claiming as many as they can for that purpose. So many of them are claiming that "all" sex workers are "trafficking victims". Our group helps both types of victims - no matter whether they were forced or not - all do need help and support with the transitional process so they come to Sex Workers Anonymous. I have taken great heat by these other groups that have popped up lately because I do make a distinction between the two. They honestly are trying to drown out the voice of anyone speaking about the sex industry as a profession - because they have an agenda where they want to make everyone involved in it a "helpless mindless victim" of some sort. Hence why all these "safe houses" they want to build everywhere. When I point out to them that stuffing a man or woman into a house with all their bills paid and taking care of them is NOT recovery from prostitution, and it's not teaching them how to be "self sufficient" outside of the sex industry - boy do they get angry. Because in my opinion that's what many of them are doing - they just want to replace the original pimp. Because that's what I'm finding many of these groups are - pimps in another disguise who want to also exploit the prostitutes and sex workers for their advantage - which isn't that what a pimp is? They want to put them into "their" safe house that they get paid to run - again isn't that what a pimp does? So I'm finding that I'm now fighting two kinds of pimps these days - the ones on the street corners and the ones in the anti-trafficking fields. But it doesn't help when the sex workers want to live in just as much denial as the other side is by claiming it doesn't exist at all. The only way I know of to straighten this out is to actually do a "census" and then find out how many we really do have in this as a profession, and how many are trafficked. Which is what I'm doing now - if you'd like to be counted - please contact me at http://www.sexworkersanonymous.com

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