Sex Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Sex Slavery, Prostitution FACTS in Denver Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO, Boulder Colorado, Fort Collins, Pueblo Colorado, Front Range, Rocky Mountains, West, United States of America, Research, essay, term papers, reports, study, fact sheet, myths, lies, victims, USA, Washington, government, films, The following information is from a report from the Crimes against children research center which talks about the Unknown Exaggerated Statistics of Juvenile Prostitution. Crimes against Children Research Center ● University of New Hampshire ● 126 Horton Social Science Center ● Durham, NH 03824 (603) 862‐1888●Fax: (603) 862‐1122●www.unh.edu/ccrcHow
Many Juveniles are Involved in Prostitution in the U.S.? There have been many attempts to estimate the number of juvenile prostitutes within the United States. These estimates range from 1,400 to 2.4 million, although most fall between 300,000 and 600,000. BUT PLEASE DO NOT CITE THESE NUMBERS. READ ON.
A close look at these diverse estimates reveals that none are based on a strong scientific foundation. They are mostly educated guesses or extrapolations based on questionable assumptions. They do not have the substance of typically reported crime statistics, like the number of robberies or the number of child sexual abuse victims. The reality is that we do not currently know how many juveniles are involved in prostitution. Scientifically credible estimates do not exist.The most often cited estimates on juvenile prostitution will be described here and their source, along with the major problems with their validity. Estes and WeinerPerhaps the most commonly used estimate of juvenile prostitution comes from Estes and Weiner (2001). These authors concluded in a large, publicized report that about 326,000 children were “at risk for commercial sexual exploitation.” However, there are several problems with treating this number as an estimate of juvenile prostitution. First, although this is often cited as an estimate of juvenile prostitutes, even the authors call it something much more nebulous: youth “at risk” of commercial sexual exploitation. “At risk” means it is compilation of youth in various categories (14 in total) – like runaway kids, female gang members – who could become or be involved in commercial sexual exploitation. But the authors had no evidence of how many or what proportion of these youth actually were involved. Secondly, the numbers that form the basis of their various “at risk” categories are themselves highly speculative. One large portion of the estimate is simply a crude guess that 35% of a national estimate of runaway youth out of their home a week or longer were “at risk”. Another large portion was a guess that one quarter of 1% of the general population of youth 10‐17 were “at risk”. Together these two groups constitute nearly 200,000 of the at risk youth. But it is essentially a guesstimate and not a scientific estimate.A third problem is that no one has any idea how much duplication there is among the 14 at risk groups. Some of the runaways are also gang members and living in public housing, etc. so one cannot simply add together estimates from these various sources. A scientific estimate would have to “unduplicate” the numbers from the various categories. In sum, no one should cite the 326,000 number from Estes and Weiner as a scientifically based estimate of the number of juvenile prostitutes. Add Health Survey Another estimate with some research credibility is from a recent study by Edwards, Iritani, and Hallfors (2005), which found that 3.5% of an Add Health sample endorsed an item asking if they had “ever exchanged sex for drugs or money.” The nationally representative sample was comprised of 13,294 youth in grades 8‐12 during the year 1996 who completed an in‐school questionnaire. The majority (67.9%) of those saying they had participated in a sex exchange were males.A first caveat about this estimate is that it is not clear that what the respondents were endorsing really constituted prostitution. For example, could a juvenile who had paid a prostitute for sex consider that to have been an “exchange of sex for money” and thus said yes to the question? Could a sexual encounter that involved sharing drugs with a partner as part of consensual sex have prompted someone to say yes to the question, even though the drugs were not necessarily a sine qua non of the sexual encounter? The similarity between prostitution and exchanging sex for goods needs to be clarified if this estimate is to be accepted as an estimate of juvenile prostitution. In addition, the fact that the majority of those endorsing the question were boys raises an important validity question about this estimate. Virtually no analyst of the problem thinks that there are truly so many more boys than girls engaged in juvenile prostitution; because the survey found more boys engaging in prostitution, there may be some misunderstanding of thequestion at work. It may be possible to obtain an incidence estimate for juvenile prostitution through a general population survey, but the questions and details will have to be more specific to confirm that what is being counted is truly prostitution or sexual exploitation. General Accounting Office Report In 1982, the General Accounting Office attempted to determine the basis of existing juvenile prostitution estimates. The General Accounting Office (1982) found that the “general perception” estimates ranged from “tens of thousands to 2.4 million.” One set of estimates from 1982 seemed to trace back to the “gut hunches” of Robin Lloyd, the author of the 1976 book, “For Love or Money: Boy Prostitution in America,” who used a working figure of 300,000 male juvenile prostitutes. The President of the Odyssey Institute adopted this figure, then doubled it to cover female juvenile prostitutes, increasing the estimate to 600,000. Because the Odyssey Institute president believed that only half of juvenile prostitutes were known, the 600,000 figure was doubled; the estimate was doubled once more to 2.4 million because the president believed that the estimate did not include 16 and 17 year old prostitutes. These wereall just hunches without scientific basis. The General Accounting Office (1982) report also located an estimate by the Criminal Justice Institute Inc., which stated that 20 to 25 percent of all prostitutes were juveniles. The Criminal Justice Institute, Inc. estimated that there were 450,000 prostitutes of all ages, leading to an estimate of 90,000 to 112,500 juvenile prostitutes in the U.S. However, these Criminal Justice Institute Inc. estimates are not linked to any citation for methodological verification or explanation. Finally, a New York City shelter president estimated that there were “tens of thousands” of juvenile prostitutes across the nation. These “gut hunch” statistics assembled by the General Accounting Office may have been the basis for some rough consensus about the magnitude of juvenile prostitution among advocates. But there were no hard statistics. Moreover, whatever the rates were in the 1970s and 1980s, they almost certainly no longer apply. That was an era when the juvenile runaway problem was considerably larger than at present. There is indication that since the 1970s and ‘80s, running away has declined (Finkelhor & Jones, 2006) and, in the era of AIDS, casual sexual behavior among the young has also become less frequent (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2005). So it is likely that estimates from 20 or 30 years ago have little applicability to the U.S. atthe present time. Despite the fact that the General Accounting Office estimates are obsolete, current groups concerned with child welfare still use this estimate. For example, Children of the Night (http://www.childrenofthenight.org/faq.html) cites the 1982 General Accounting Office estimate of 600,000 juvenile prostitutes under the age of 16. This organization also cites UNICEF estimates of 300,000 juvenile prostitutes (In a 2004 textbook entitled “Child Labour: A Textbook for University Students”, the International Labour Organization cites the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as estimating 300,000 juvenile prostitutes. When asked to verify this, U.S. DHHS could not locate this estimate.). When asked about the estimates on the Children of the Night website, founder and President Lois Lee responded: “I am always pressured for statistics and I have said, there is no way to know for sure because there is no counting mechanism, no quantitative analysis on the subject. Several years ago, I suggested to a lot of [government] agencies and NGO’s that about 1/3rd of all runaways have some kind of “brush” with a pimp or prostitution. All the professionals agreed that was a good estimate. UNICEF published it as their own.” L. Lee (personal communication, September 29, 2007).A considerable number of the estimates of juvenile prostitution do start with more scientifically based survey statistics on running away (for example, Hammer, Finkelhor & Sedlak, 2002), which suggest that hundreds of thousands of youth runaway every year. It might seem plausible that a significant percentage of runaway street youths engage in survival sex or get recruited into prostitution. But it is important to remember that most of the youth identified as runaways in survey samples are not truly on the streets (Hammer et al., 2002). Most runaways run to the homes of friends and family. Thus, it is not accurate to simply think about the experience of street runaways and generalize from that experience to the experience of all runaways.Other Estimates Other organizations do not cite sources that have reliable methodologies. The Coalition against Trafficking in Women (http://www.catwinternational.org/factbook/usa2_prost.php) estimates that there are between 300,000 and 600,000 juvenile prostitutes in the U.S., citing a BeaconJournal news article from 1997. The article, entitled “Danger for Prostitutes Increasing, Most Starting Younger,” cited Gary Costello of the Exploited Child Unit of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but did not include a discussion of the way that the estimate was calculated. The 1995 Progress of Nations report by UNICEF (http://www.unicef.org/pon95/progtoc.html) offers a “guesstimate” of 300,000 juvenile prostitutes in the U.S. under the age of 18. The UNICEF report cited a U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimate used inUNICEF’s “Breaking the Walls of Silence: A UNICEF Background Paper on the Sexual Exploitation of Children” report from 1994. Again, there was no discussion as to how this number was derived in the Progress of Nations report. Similarly, the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) of the U.S. Department of Justice (http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/prostitution.html) reports that 293,000 juveniles are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation. This estimate was made based on the Estes and Weiner (2001) article discussed previously.Some figures about the related problem of “sex trafficking of children” are also available, but once again with a speculative methodology, a “computer simulation.” Clawson, Layne, and Small (2006) estimated in a very statistically complicated report that over 800,000 females, including over 100,000 under age 19, were “at risk” of being trafficked to the US from eight nations: Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico. These include trafficking for all purposes including for employment. Of those at risk, the authors estimate that roughly 15,000 females under nineteen were being trafficked for sex from those nations. However, the authors concede that these estimates are not informed by any real statistics or research about the true rates of adult or child sex trafficking, but rather that the estimates are “probabilit[ies] based on a mathematical equation, not a reality” (M. Layne 2/4/2008). Police DataThere are also national estimates from law enforcement sources about the number of juveniles taken into custody because of prostitution and related crimes. For example, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data analyzed by Snyder and Sickmund (2006) shows that 1,400 juveniles were arrested nationally in 2003 for prostitution and commercialized vice. These data come from aggregating data from most of the local law enforcement agencies in the U.S., and are the same data used to estimate year‐to‐year estimates in violent and property crime. This is a plausible estimate of the number of youth arrested for prostitution and commercialized vice because, in truth, not many law enforcement agencies are actively arresting youth in regard to this problem, as a soon to be released CCRC study will show. But there is undoubtedly more prostitution involving youth; law enforcement officials believe many youths involved in prostitution are arrested for other crimes (e.g., drug possession, curfew violation, etc.) but not prostitution per se. Most observers believe also that there are also many youth engaged in prostitution who are never arrested by police. So, while this UCR estimate is plausible, no one believes this estimate fully characterizes the problem. It is rarely cited, even as part of a spectrum of estimates, perhaps because it would so lower the range as to make the higher estimates seem more extreme. Conclusion:
As the critique of estimates suggest, there is currently no reliable estimate of juvenile prostitution. Some current estimates are based upon “gut hunches” and “guesstimates” from almost thirty years ago. Others offer definitions of sexual exchange that may not actually constitute prostitution. Also, the methods used to create these estimates are often difficult to find, making them methodologically suspect. These organizations often recognize these problems but continue to cite such poorly calculated estimates. People concerned about the problem very much want there to be a number that they can cite. Because other people have cited numbers, there has come to be a “collective intuition” about the rough magnitude based on these earlier claims. But in reality there is little scientific substance behind any of them. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in social problem analysis and has been called the “Woozle Effect” (Gelles 1980). The “Woozle Effect” occurs when one writer reports an estimate based on a typically weak methodology or guesstimate that is subsequently cited by other writers, but without the first writer’s caveats (Gelles 1980). Estimates of juvenile prostitution seem to have taken this path: the “gut hunches” of one author and the compiling of such hunches by the General Accounting Office have seemed to provide a basis for contemporary estimates of juvenile prostitution, despite the fact that the General Accounting Office states that the estimates in the literature are “general perceptions” (General Accounting Office, 1982).What are journalists and scholars to do?It is our suggestion that in the absence of any estimates with any good scientific basis, that scholars, writers and advocates stop using the unsubstantiated estimates and simply indicate that the true incidence is currently unknown. It is very frustrating to write about a topic and not have an estimate of its magnitude, but we believe that continued citation of unsupported estimates gives them credibility. Even writing that “No one knows how many juveniles are engaged in prostitution, but estimates have been made from 1,400 to 2.4 million,” contributes to the problem. It gives people the impression that these are knowledgeable estimates about the current situation and that the real number lies somewhere in the middle of that range, which it may not. For brief treatments of the problem, one can say simply: “Unfortunately, there are no credible or supported estimates about the size of the problem.” For more extended treatments of the problem, one can cite some of the statistics, but then indicate that these numbers are based mostly on guesses or extremely imprecise and speculative methodologies. It would be a good idea when citing any numbers to be sure to include the low end estimate from law enforcement of 1,400, since this is among the most recent and clearly defined of the estimates, and counters the assumption that all the estimates are large. Crimes against Children Research Center ● University of New Hampshire ● 126 Horton Social Science Center ● Durham, NH 03824 (603) 862‐1888●Fax: (603) 862‐1122●www.unh.edu/ccrc Fact sheet written by Michelle Stransky and David Finkelhor. (2008).
REFERENCESBoyer, D. & Breault, S. (1997). Danger for prostitutes increasing, most starting younger. Beacon Journal, September 21.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2005). Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Available at:www.cdc.gov/yrbs. Accessed on 1/14/08. Children of the Night. (2006). Frequently asked questions. Van Nuys, CA: Author. Retrieved,November 12, 2007 from (http://www.childrenofthenight.org/faq.html).Clawson, H. J., M. Layne, and K. Small. (2006). Estimating human trafficking into the UnitedStates: Development of a methodology. Fairfax, VA: Caliber.Edward, J.M., Iritani, B.J., & Hallfors, D.D. (2005). Prevalence and correlates of exchanging sexfor drugs or money among adolescents in the United States. Sexually TransmittedInfections 82(5): 354‐358.Estes, R.J. & Weiner, N.A. (2001). The commercial sexual exploitation of children in the US,Canada and Mexico. Philadephia, PA: University of Pennsylvania.Finkelhor, D. & Jones, L. (2006). Why have child maltreatment and child victimization declined?Journal of Social Issues, 62(4), 685‐716.Gelles, R.J. (1980). Violence in the family: A review of research in the seventies. Journal ofMarriage and the Family 42(4): 873‐885.General Accounting Office. (1982). Sexual exploitation of children—A problem of unknownmagnitude. Washington, DC: General Accounting Office.Hammer, H., Finkelhor, D., & Sedlak, A. (2002). Runaway/thrownaway children: Nationalestimates and characteristics. Juvenile Justice Bulletin – NCJ196469, (pgs. 1‐12).Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.Hughes, D.M., Sporcic, L.J., Mendelsohn, N. Z., & Chirgwin, V. (1999). The fact book on globalsexual exploitation: Coalition against trafficking in women. Retrieved, November 12,2007 from (http://www.catwinternational.org/factbook/usa2_prost.php).International Labor Organization. (2004). Child labour: A textbook for university students.Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Organization.UNICEF. (1995). The progress of nations. New York: Author. Retrieved, November 12, 2007 from(http://www.unicef.org/pon95/progtoc.html).United States Department of Justice, Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. (2007). Childprostitution. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved, November 12, 2007 from(http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/prostitution.html).Snyder, H.N., & Sickmund, M. (2006). Juvenile offenders and victims: 2006 national report.Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office ofJuvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.Fact sheet written by Michelle Stransky and David Finkelhor. (2008). From the Department of Justice Stats pages: Human Trafficking/Trafficking in Persons According to The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) and its 2003, 2005, and 2008, human trafficking has occurred if a person was induced to perform labor or a commercial sex act through force, fraud, or coercion. Any person under age 18 who performs a commercial sex act is considered a victim of human trafficking, regardless of whether force, fraud, or coercion were present.The Department of Justice (DOJ) funded the creation of the Human Trafficking Reporting System (HTRS). This system provides data on human trafficking incidents investigated between January 1, 2007, and September 30, 2008.An incident is defined as any investigation into a claim of human trafficking or any investigation of other crimes in which elements of potential human trafficking were identified.Summary FindingsBetween January 1, 2007, and September 30, 2008 task forces reported investigating 1,229 alleged incidents of human trafficking.
- About 78% of these incidents were still under investigation at the end of the reporting period. Investigations were completed and closed during the 21-month reporting period for the remaining 22%.
- Less than 10% of alleged human trafficking incidents reported by task forces were confirmed as human trafficking, 10% were pending confirmation, and 23% had been determined not to involve any human trafficking elements.
- Sex trafficking accounted for 83% of the alleged incidents,12% involved allegations of either labor trafficking, and 5% were other/unknown forms of human trafficking.
- 391 (38%) involved allegations of child sex trafficking and 627 (62%) incidents involved allegations of adult sex trafficking, such as forced prostitution or other sex trafficking crimes.
- Forced prostitution (46%) and child sex trafficking (30%) represented the largest categories of confirmed human trafficking incidents.
- Allegations of forced or coerced adult prostitution accounted for 63% of human trafficking investigations that were ultimately found not to involve human trafficking elements.
Below is a article from the Washington Post:Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence
U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall ShortBy Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2007Outrage was mounting at the 1999 hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building, where congressmen were learning about human trafficking. A woman from Nepal testified that September that she had been drugged, abducted and forced to work at a brothel in Bombay. A Christian activist recounted tales of women overseas being beaten with electrical cords and raped. A State Department official said Congress must act -- 50,000 slaves were pouring into the United States every year, she said. Furious about the "tidal wave" of victims, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) vowed to crack down on so-called modern-day slavery.The next year, Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and is now a top Bush administration priority. As part of the fight, President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice Department task forces and spent more than $150 million -- all to find and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced prostitution or labor in the United States.But the government couldn't find them. Not in this country.The evidence and testimony presented to Congress pointed to a problem overseas. But in the seven years since the law was passed, human trafficking has not become a major domestic issue, according to the government's figures.The administration has identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year the government had estimated. In addition, 148 federal cases have been brought nationwide, some by the Justice task forces, which are composed of prosecutors, agents from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and local law enforcement officials in areas thought to be hubs of trafficking. In the Washington region, there have been about 15 federal cases this decade.Ronald Weitzer, a criminologist at George Washington University and an expert on sex trafficking, said that trafficking is a hidden crime whose victims often fear coming forward. He said that might account for some of the disparity in the numbers, but only a small amount. "The discrepancy between the alleged number of victims per year and the number of cases they've been able to make is so huge that it's got to raise major questions," Weitzer said. "It suggests that this problem is being blown way out of proportion." Government officials define trafficking as holding someone in a workplace through force, fraud or coercion. Trafficking generally takes two forms: sex or labor. The victims in most prosecutions in the Washington area have been people forced into prostitution. The Department of Health and Human Services "certifies" trafficking victims in the United States after verifying that they were subjected to forced sex or labor. Only non-U.S. citizens brought into this country by traffickers are eligible to be certified, entitling them to receive U.S. government benefits.Administration officials acknowledge that they have found fewer victims than anticipated. Brent Orrell, an HHS deputy assistant secretary, said that certifications are increasing and that the agency is working hard to "help identify many more victims." He also said: "We still have a long way to go.''But Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, said that the issue is "not about the numbers. It's really about the crime and how horrific it is." Fratto also said the domestic response to trafficking "cannot be ripped out of the context" of the U.S. government's effort to fight it abroad. "We have an obligation to set an example for the rest of the world, so if we have this global initiative to stop human trafficking and slavery, how can we tolerate even a minimal number within our own borders?"He said that the president's passion about fighting trafficking is motivated in part by his Christian faith and his outrage at the crime. "It's a practice that he obviously finds disgusting, as most rational people would, and he wants America to be the leader in ending it," Fratto said. "He sees it as a moral obligation."Although there have been several estimates over the years, the number that helped fuel the congressional response -- 50,000 victims a year -- was an unscientific estimate by a CIA analyst who relied mainly on clippings from foreign newspapers, according to government sources who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the agency's methods. Former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales told Congress last year that a much lower estimate in 2004 -- 14,500 to 17,500 a year -- might also have been overstated.Yet the government spent $28.5 million in 2006 to fight human trafficking in the United States, a 13 percent increase over the previous year. The effort has attracted strong bipartisan support.Steven Wagner, who helped HHS distribute millions of dollars in grants to community groups to find and assist victims, said "Those funds were wasted." "Many of the organizations that received grants didn't really have to do anything," said Wagner, former head of HHS's anti-trafficking program. "They were available to help victims. There weren't any victims."Still, the raw emotion of the issue internationally and domestically has spawned dozens of activist organizations that fight trafficking. They include the Polaris Project, which was founded in 2002 by two college students, and the Washington-based Break the Chain Campaign, which started in the mid-1990s focusing on exploited migrant workers before concentrating on trafficking after 2000.Activist groups and administration officials strongly defend their efforts, saying that trafficking is a terrible crime and that even one case is too many. They said that cultural obstacles and other impediments prevent victims from coming forward.Mark P. Lagon, director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said that such problems make the numbers "naturally murky. . . . There are vigorous U.S. government efforts to find and help victims in the United States, not because there is some magic number that we have a gut instinct is out there. Any estimate we're citing, we've always said, is an estimate."But Lagon said he is convinced that "thousands upon thousands of people are subject to gross exploitation" in the United States.Few question that trafficking is a serious problem in many countries, and the U.S. government has spent more than half a billion dollars fighting it around the world since 2000.Last year, anti-trafficking projects overseas included $3.4 million to help El Salvador fight child labor and $175,000 for community development training for women in remote Mekong Delta villages in Vietnam, according to the State Department. Human trafficking, in the United States and abroad, is under attack by 10 federal agencies that report to a Cabinet-level task force chaired by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.In the United States, activists say that trafficking has received far more attention than crimes such as domestic violence, of which there are hundreds of thousands of documented victims every year.The quest to find and help victims of trafficking has become so urgent that the Bush administration hired a public relations firm, a highly unusual approach to fighting crime. Ketchum, a New York-based public relations firm, has received $9.5 million and has been awarded $2.5 million more."We're giving money to Ketchum so they can train people who can train people who can train people to serve victims," said one Washington area provider of services for trafficking victims, who receives government funding and spoke on condition of anonymity. "Trafficking victims are hidden. They're not really going to be affected by a big, splashy PR campaign. They're not watching Lifetime television."Yet the anti-trafficking crusade goes on, partly because of the issue's uniquely nonpartisan appeal. In the past four years, more than half of all states have passed anti-trafficking laws, although local prosecutions have been rare."There's huge political momentum, because this is a no-brainer issue," said Derek Ellerman, co-founder of the Polaris Project. "No one is going to stand up and oppose fighting modern-day slavery."
A Matter of Faith
Throughout the 1990s, evangelicals and other Christians grew increasingly concerned about international human rights, fueled by religious persecution in Sudan and other countries. They were also rediscovering a tradition of social reform dating to when Christians fought the slave trade of an earlier era.Human trafficking has always been a problem in some cultures but increased in the early 1990s, experts say.For conservative Christians, trafficking was "a clear-cut, uncontroversial, terrible thing going on in the world," said Gary Haugen, president of International Justice Mission in Arlington, a Christian human rights group.Feminist groups and other organizations also seized on trafficking, and a 1999 meeting at the Capitol, organized by former Nixon White House aide Charles W. Colson, helped seal a coalition. The session in the office of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) brought together the Southern Baptist Convention, conservative William Bennett and Rabbi David Saperstein, a prominent Reform Jewish activist.The session focused only on trafficking victims overseas, said Mariam Bell, national public policy director for Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries."It was just ghastly stuff," Armey recalled last week, saying that he immediately agreed to support an anti-trafficking law. "I felt a sense of urgency that this must be done, and as soon as possible."A New Law
A law was more likely to be enacted if its advocates could quantify the issue. During a PowerPoint presentation in April 1999, the CIA provided an estimate: 45,000 to 50,000 women and children were trafficked into the United States every year.The CIA briefing emerged from the Clinton administration's growing interest in the problem. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had been pushing the issue, former administration officials said.But information was scarce, so a CIA analyst was told to assess the problem in the United States and abroad. She combed through intelligence reports and law enforcement data. Her main source, however, was news clippings about trafficking cases overseas -- from which she tried to extrapolate the number of U.S. victims.The CIA estimate soon appeared in a report by a State Department analyst that was the U.S. government's first comprehensive assessment of trafficking. State Department officials raised the alarm about victims trafficked into the United States when they appeared before Congress in 1999 and 2000, citing the CIA estimate. A Justice Department official testified that the number might have been 100,000 each year.The congressional hearings focused mostly on trafficking overseas. At the House hearing in September 1999, Rep. Earl F. Hilliard (D-Ala.) changed the subject and zeroed in on Laura J. Lederer, a Harvard University expert on trafficking."How prevalent is the sex trade here in this country?" Hilliard asked. "We have so very little information on this subject in this country. . . . so very few facts," Lederer said."Excuse me, but is the sex trade prevalent here?" Hilliard asked.Nobody knows, Lederer said. Bipartisan passion melted any uncertainty, and in October 2000, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, significantly broadening the federal definition of trafficking. Prosecutors would no longer have to rely on statutes that required them to prove a victim had been subjected to physical violence or restraints, such as chains. Now, a federal case could be made if a trafficker had psychologically abused a victim.The measure toughened penalties against traffickers, provided extensive services for victims and committed the United States to a leading role internationally, requiring the State Department to rank countries and impose sanctions if their anti-trafficking efforts fell short. The law's fifth sentence says: "Congress finds that . . . approximately 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year."Raising AwarenessJust as the law took effect, along came a new president to enforce it. Bell, with Prison Fellowship Ministries, noted that when Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly in 2003, he focused on the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism and the war on trafficking.Soon after Bush took office, a network of anti-trafficking nonprofit agencies arose, spurred in part by an infusion of federal dollars.HHS officials were determined to raise public awareness and encourage victims to come forward. For help, they turned to Ketchum in 2003.Legal experts said they hadn't heard of hiring a public relations firm to fight a crime problem. Wagner, who took over HHS's anti-trafficking program in 2003, said that the strategy was "extremely unusual" but that creative measures were needed."The victims of this crime won't come forward. Law enforcement doesn't handle that very well, when they have to go out and find a crime," he said. Ketchum, whose Washington lobbying arm is chaired by former U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.), formed coalitions of community groups in two states and 19 cities, to search for and aid victims. The coalition effort was overseen by a subcontractor, Washington-based Capital City Partners, whose executives during the period of oversight have included the former heads of the Fund for a Conservative Majority and the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, in addition to the former editorial page editor of the conservative Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader newspaper.Trying to Get the Number RightThree years ago, the government downsized its estimate of trafficking victims, but even those numbers have not been borne out. The effort to acquire a more precise number had begun at the Library of Congress and Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, where graduate students on a CIA contract stayed up nights, using the Internet to find clippings from foreign newspapers.Once again, the agency was using mainly news clips from foreign media to estimate the numbers of trafficking victims, along with reports from government agencies and anti-trafficking groups. The students at Mercyhurst, a school known for its intelligence studies program, were enlisted to help.But their work was thought to be inconsistent, said officials at the Government Accountability Office, which criticized the government's trafficking numbers in a report last year.A part-time researcher at the Library of Congress took over the project. "The numbers were totally unreliable," said David Osborne, head of research for the library's federal research division. "If it was reported that 15 women were trafficked from Romania into France, French media might pick it up and say 32 women and someone else would say 45."A CIA analyst ran the research through a computer simulation program, said government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing the CIA's methods. It spat out estimates of destination countries for trafficking victims worldwide. The new number of victims trafficked into the United States: 14,500 to 17,500 each year. The simulation is considered a valid way to measure probability if the underlying data are reliable. "It seems incredibly unlikely that this was a robust, sound analysis," said David Banks, a statistics professor at Duke University.The CIA's new estimate, which first appeared in a 2004 State Department report, has been widely quoted, including by a senior Justice Department official at a media briefing this year. It's also posted on the HHS Web site.The Justice Department's human trafficking task force in Washington has mounted an aggressive effort to find victims.But at a meeting of the task force this year, then-coordinator Sharon Marcus-Kurn said that detectives had spent "umpteen hours of overtime" repeatedly interviewing women found in Korean- and Hispanic-owned brothels. "It's very difficult to find any underlying trafficking that is there," Marcus-Kurn told the group.People trafficked into the United States have traditionally been the focus of the crackdown. In recent years, there has been increasing debate about whether the victim estimates should include U.S. citizens. For example, adult U.S. citizens forced into prostitution are also trafficking victims under federal law, but some say that such cases should be left to local police.Washington D.C.: A Trafficking Hub?In a classroom at the D.C. police academy in January, President Bush appears on a screen at a mandatory training session in how to investigate and identify trafficking. The 55 officers who attended watch a slide show featuring testimonials from government officials and a clip from Bush's 2003 speech to the United Nations.Sally Stoecker, lead researcher for Shared Hope International in Arlington, which aims to increase awareness of sex trafficking, takes the microphone. "It's a huge crime, and it's continuing to grow," Stoecker says, citing the government's most recent estimate of victims. The D.C. officers are among thousands of law enforcement officials nationwide who have been trained in how to spot trafficking. In Montgomery County, police have investigated numerous brothels since the force was trained in 2005 and last year. Officers have found a few trafficking victims, but there have been no prosecutions.The Justice Department runs law enforcement task forces across the country. It's a top priority for the department's Civil Rights Division. Justice officials have said there has been a 600 percent increase in U.S. cases. But the department said in a report last September: "In absolute numbers, it is true that the prosecution figures pale in comparison to the estimated scope of the problem."The 148 cases filed this decade by the Civil Rights Division and U.S. attorney's offices might not include what Justice officials call a limited number of child trafficking prosecutions by the Criminal Division, Justice officials said Friday. They could not provide a number.Arlington County Commonwealth's Attorney Richard E. Trodden, who studied trafficking for the Virginia Crime Commission, said he doesn't know of any local prosecutions in Northern Virginia.Nearly seven years after it began, the anti-trafficking campaign rolls on. "This is important for me personally," Gonzales said in January as he announced the creation of a Justice Department unit to focus on trafficking cases. Encouraged by Gonzales, who sent letters to all 50 governors, states continued to pass anti-trafficking laws. Maryland enacted a law in May that toughens penalties.Virginia has not taken legislative action; some legislators have said that a law isn't needed.HHS is still paying people to find victims. Last fall, the agency announced $3.4 million in new "street outreach" awards to 22 groups nationwide. Nearly $125,000 went to Mosaic Family Services, a nonprofit agency in Dallas. For the past year, its employees have put out the word to hospitals, police stations, domestic violence shelters -- any organization that might come into contact with a victim. "They're doing about a thousand different things," said Bill Bernstein, Mosaic's deputy director.Three victims were found.The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth: 100,000 Hookers Won't Be Showing Up in DallasBy Pete Kotz: From the Dallas Observer newspaperpublished: January 27, 2011The alarm bells reached peak decibel in November, when Dallas Police Sergeant Louis Felini told the The Dallas Morning News that between 50,000 and 100,000 prostitutes could descend on the metroplex for the Super Bowl. The call to outrage had sounded.His estimate was astonishing. At the higher figure, it meant that every man, woman and child holding a ticket would have their own personal hooker, from the vice presidential wing of FedEx to Little Timmy from Green Bay.And if you believed a study commissioned by the Dallas Women's Foundation, the hordes would include 38,000 underage prostitutes. Doe-eyed beauties from the Heartland would be peddled like Jell-O shots at the Delta Phi soiree.Official Dallas would not be caught flat-footed. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and the FBI pledged extra manpower to fight "human trafficking." The Arlington Police Department put up billboards near Cowboys Stadium. They featured flashing photos of busted johns, warning visitors: We don't take kindly to perverts like you, son.Even the Shapiro Law Firm leaped in. Noting that an estimated 40,000 hookers showed up in Dallas for the NBA All-Star game last year, it wanted to make sure that, should a hedge fund manager find himself ensnared in naked compromise, "our attorneys provide experienced defense for sex crimes, including the solicitation of a prostitute."The city was gearing up for a massive invasion of skanks and sex fiends. It would be like Normandy, only with way more plastic surgery—the largest single gathering of freaks and pedophiles the world has ever seen. At least outside of a Vatican staff meeting.But if Dallas is like any other Super Bowl—or Olympics or World Cup, for that matter—today's four-alarm panic will tinkle as softly as a servant's bell by next week. All evidence says that America's call girls will be at home, watching the game of TV, just like you and me.Judging by Super Bowls past, the mass migration of teenage sex slaves is nothing more than myth.Read between his very terse lines, and you can tell that Brian McCarthy isn't happy. He's a spokesman for the NFL. Every year he's forced to hear from mopes like yours truly, wondering why his customers are adulterers and child molesters.The routine is the same in every Super Bowl city. The media beats the drum of impending invasion, warning that anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 hookers will soon arrive. Politicians lather on their special sauce of manufactured outrage. Cops and prosecutors vow stings and beefed up manpower.By implication, the NFL's wealthiest and most connected fans—captains of industry and senators from Utah—will be plotting a week of sexual rampage not seen since the Vikings sailed on Scotland. And they must be stopped."This is urban legend that is pure pulp fiction," the NFL's McCarthy says. "I would refer you to your local law enforcement officials."So that's what we did. Meet police Sergeant Tommy Thompson of Phoenix, which hosted the 2008 Super Bowl. "We may have had certain precincts that were going gangbusters looking for prostitutes, but they were picking up your everyday street prostitutes," Thompson says of his vice cops. "They didn't notice any sort of glitch in the number of prostitution arrests leading up to the Super Bowl." Conspicuously noted: He doesn't recall a single arrest of an underage girl.Perhaps Phoenix was an anomaly. So let's go to Tampa, host of Super Bowl 2009. Police spokeswoman Andrea Davis says her department ran special operations on the sex trade. They came up empty. "We didn't see a huge influx in prostitutes coming into Tampa," she says. "The arrests were not a lot higher. They were almost the same."Now it could be that both departments are incompetent, mistaking tens of thousands of women in fishnet stockings for a very large synchronized swimming team. So let's travel to Europe, where the hooker influx for the World Cup is routinely pegged at 40,000. If anyone's going to break the record for the world's largest orgy, it's the Godless Eurotrash, right?Germany hosted the 2006 World Cup. U.S congressmen warned the promiscuous Krauts that fleshly opportunism would not be tolerated. So the government spent millions of euros to crush human trafficking. No one could say the Germans were perv enablers.But apparently 39,995 of the blasphemers had carburetor trouble in Prague and never showed. The final Cup tally for forced prostitution arrests: 5. German brothels couldn't even report a surge in business. And a further study by the Swedish government ruled "the 40,000 estimate was unfounded and unrealistic."There don't appear to be solid figures for last summer's South African Cup, but anecdotal evidence says the sex business was slow.The only concrete numbers we have: Museums showed record attendance.This isn't to say that the sex trade isn't alive and well. It is. Nor is it to imply there are no such thing as teen prostitutes. There are. The problem is that most of what we believe remains fixed in a blaxploitation film from 1973, where menacing pimps named Lester beat their weeping charges with diamond-encrusted canes.Ask Maggie McNeill.That's not her real name. It's the pen name she uses on her website, The Honest Courtesan, where she dispenses wisdom on all things hooker. She ran an escort service in New Orleans for six years, supplying ladies for the 2002 Super Bowl. As she sees it, almost all we believe about the industry is fallacy."Pimps do exist," she says, "but they're a relatively rare phenomenon." The vast majority of hookers are willing, independent contractors.Underage hookers are also "extremely rare," McNeill says. Over the years, she fielded a few hundred applications from ladies of the eve. Only one didn't pass a drivers license check.Sure, there are exceptions. But McNeill doesn't think huge numbers of hookers are going anywhere. And they won't be heading to Dallas for a very simple reason: Sporting events suck for the sex trade.The younger fans have already spent thousands on jacked-up hotel rates, airfare and scalped tickets, she says. They only have enough left to nurse Bud Lights and Jäger bombs.The executive caste may have money to burn, but most bring their families along. "What do they say to their wives?" McNeill asks. "'Hey honey, I'm going to see a hooker now?'"As for McNeill's experience during Super Bowl week in New Orleans: "I really saw no change whatsoever."So how do these myths get started? Through good intentions, of course.There's no way to quantify the number of hookers, since most women won't admit to their profession. Public confession only brings an audit from the IRS or a visit from child welfare workers.That leaves the outside world to speculate—usually with stats only appreciated after eight beers near closing time. Professors pitch junk studies whereby every runaway girl is a potential prostitute.Advocacy groups take those numbers and fan them by the thousands, buffing them with lurid anecdotes of "sex slaves" and "victims of human trafficking." The fervent simply can't believe that isolated cases are just that: isolated.But it's hard to kindle interest in the world's oldest profession. So they latch onto the occasional news story or CNN special. After all, children in distress sell."Underage girls make better victims, better poster children," says McNeill, a former librarian with a master's from LSU. "I'm 44. What kind of believable victim would I make?"The study by the Dallas Women's Foundation shows how the numbers are baked. It hired a company to gauge the percentage of juvenile hookers in Dallas. Its scientific method: Look at online escort ads and guess the ages of the women pictured!Never mind that escort services often yank said photos from the Internet to put their most sultry visual forward. And never mind that such methodology wouldn't pass muster at Mert's Discount Community College & Small Engine Repair.The company still decreed that 38 percent of Dallas hookers were underage!(Disclosure: The Dallas Observer and Backpage are owned by the same parent company, Village Voice Media Holdings.)Not ones to miss 30 seconds of free air time, that's when the politicians climb aboard. After all, what would you rather do? Be fitted for the role of child-rescuing hero at a congressional hearing or a press conference? Or sit down to the complex, painful task of addressing America's age-old runaway problem?Of course, we in the media are equally culpable. We dutifully relay the fraud via our Patented Brand of Unquestioning Stenography, rarely bothering to check if it's remotely plausible. And by this time, there's no going back. The fraud must be upheld. Charities have raised money to help the innocents. Politicians have brayed and task forces have been appointed. Editors and news directors have ordered five-part series. No one wants to look like a moron.But the week after every Super Bowl, they all go quiet. Either the 100,000 hookers never showed, or they were in dastardly possession of super invisible powers.Maybe it will be different in Dallas, with its all-hands-on-deck vigilance. Perhaps next week's dockets will be sagging with thousands of runaway middle-school volleyball stars. Perhaps the Shapiro Law Firm will be giving a bulk rate to the entire roster of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.Perhaps.Super Bowl prostitution: 100,000 hookers didn't show, but America's latest political scam did.Pete Kotz: From the Dallas Observer newspaperpublished: March 03, 2011Had elected officials done even the slightest research, they would have known it was myth. But this had little to do with protecting women and children. Think of it as a combination religious revival and political scam.Politicians, women's groups, cops and child advocates were predicting that up to 100,000 hookers would be shipped into Dallas for the Super Bowl. It would be akin to the invasion of Normandy—with silicone and come-hither poses at no extra charge.Yet someone forgot to tell America's prostitutes they had an appointment with destiny. The arrest numbers are now in. The hookers failed to show.It was folly from the outset, of course. To buy the hype, you had to believe that the NFL's wealthiest fans stuffed their carry-on luggage with searing libidinal hunger. Though by day they pretended to be mercantile saints from the pages of the Wall Street Journal, they were actually marauding sex fiends. Their plot: Turn Hilton hot tubs into naked versions of the New York Stock Exchange.And if that wasn't enough to scare the good citizens of Dallas, women's groups slathered the plot with surplus outrage. Up to 38,000 of these hookers would be child sex slaves, according to a study by the Dallas Women's Foundation. They'd presumably been kidnapped en masse while waiting in line at the mall Cinnabon, then shipped to Dallas for deflowering by venture capitalists and frozen-food barons.America's human trafficking epidemic was coming to North Texas. The Super Bowl would be ground zero.Conveniently, the same people making the claims reserved the roles of hero for themselves. Worry not, good people of Dallas: They would repel the infidels at the city gates.Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott puffed his chest and promised dozens of extra bodies. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security linked arms with 13 state and local police agencies in a task force. Even the airline industry leaped in, training flight attendants to spot the indentured.Linda Smith, a former Washington congresswoman and founder of Shared Hope International, announced her date with gallantry in The Dallas Morning News. "Now that I know it, I have no choice but to stand and fight," she said. "This is just brutal, brutal slavery of girls."Deena Graves, executive director of the Christian group Traffick911, took it even further, framing the clash as nothing short of Jesus vs. Depravity. God Himself had naturally anointed her as His general."We believe, without a doubt, that God gave us the Super Bowl this year to raise awareness of what's happening with these kids," she told the Morning News.But since they hadn't bothered to do the research, they would be forced to clash swords with an imaginary foe. Such is the burden of the selfless crusader.From Germany to Miami, the same hysteria precedes every big sporting event, be it the Super Bowl, the World Cup, or the Olympics. The only difference is that Dallas, befitting its perch as buckle of the Bible Belt, jacked up the decibels.Before every big game, church bells ring of a massive hooker invasion. Incurious newspapers parrot the claims;a five-minute Google search being too much trouble. Then politicians and activists climb aboard.The recipe for civic panic is placed in the oven, set for baking to a charred husk.Yet when each event ends with just a handful of arrests, police admit the invasion was nothing more than myth. The panic whimpers away to seclusion, only to resurrect itself just in time for the next big show.Detectives from Dallas to Plano, Forth Worth to Irving saw no spikes in sex traffic or signs of the occupiers."Everybody else is talking about special operations, the AG comes in talking about special operations, but this is what we do," says Sergeant Byron Fassett, head of the Dallas PD's human trafficking unit. "We didn't have to do a special operation. We do special operations all the time, and this was one of them."In other words, it was just another week of playing cat and mouse with the world's oldest profession.Arlington, host to the game, unleashed extra manpower and bagged an impressive 59 arrests. But it found scant evidence of erotic hordes. Of the 100,000 supposedly Lone Star-bound hookers, Deputy Chief Jaime Ayala says, only 13 were found by his guys. Their busts largely involved rousting the local talent.ICE Spokesman Carl Rusnok says there were 105 prostitution arrests metro-wide. But what was billed as a bare-naked onslaught fell rather short. Just to reach three figures, ICE had to include 12 Class C misdemeanors—the legal equivalent of a speeding ticket.Rusnok hints at more nefarious busts for human trafficking, but he refuses to provide names, charges or anything else that would allow for verification.The 38,000 teen slaves also proved elusive. Police managed to find just two—and they were Texas-grown.Anthony Winn, a 35-year-old degenerate from Austin, had been pimping out a 20-year-old woman when he decided to peddle her 14-year-old sister as well.The trio showed up in Dallas for the big game. But the older sister objected to the selling of the younger one. So when Dallas police encountered them on the street, the women quickly ratted out Winn.In Grapevine, another local was busted for chauffeuring a 17-year-old hooker on her rounds.Meanwhile, church groups and activists were out en masse. But if they were truly aligned with God, He preferred they stick to generating headlines and hurling logs on the flames of panic. He apparently neglected to grant them the power of rescue. As far as anyone can tell, not one of their tips led to an arrest. Had anyone bothered to ask police in previous Super Bowl cities, they would have told you this would happen. There's zero evidence that American hookers have ever traveled like Spanish armadas.As for widespread sex slavery, this too is a myth. The U.S. government has known it for years.Like most industrialized countries, the feds began worrying about human trafficking in the late '90s, a fear born from the slavery problems of the Third World. At the time, evidence from police suggested it was an insidious, though relatively rare, crime. But that didn't stop politicians and activists from declaring it a pandemic.Out of thin air, they began to trumpet that 50,000 people were being forcibly trafficked in America each year. The Clinton administration declared jihad. President George W. Bush dilated the war, creating 42 Justice Department task forces countrywide.But when you weld a fabricated enemy, meager scalp counts leave boasting a challenge. Just like the soldiers of pre-Super Bowl Dallas, they had braced themselves for imaginary strife.Six years into his presidency, Bush had burned through $150 million on the fray. But of the 300,000 supposed victims during that time, the Justice Department managed to find just 1,362. Less than half were actual sex slaves. An even smaller number were underage prostitutes.That's because human trafficking, as defined by the government, isn't solely about sex. It's usually about forced labor. Think of the Chinese man made to work in a kitchen to reimburse a snakehead's smuggling fee. Or the Mexican kid forced to toil on a Kansas farm.By the time anyone realized all that money was flowing for naught, no one was brave enough to tighten the spigot. In Washington, it's far better to waste millions than give the appearance you don't care about kids.Steve Wagner knows this. He worked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, serving as director of the Human Trafficking Program under Bush. He threw millions of dollars at community groups to aid victims. Yet as he told the Washington Post in 2007, "Those funds were wasted....They were available to help victims. There weren't any victims."Ten years into the war, one might assume intellectual honesty would sand down the rhetoric. But the opposite is happening. The fight's simply moved away from protecting women and children. It's now a holy war for the sanctity of revenue streams.The church and women's groups who profited from battle are loath to acknowledge they spent the past decade doing little more than polishing their guns. So forgive them for worrying.Recession has made donations harder to field. D.C.'s coming austerity means grants will be macheted. That's left the nonprofit world in a panic.It isn't easy to get donors and congressmen to slap down checks for the time-honored fight against prostitution, runaways and kids seeking the fascinating life of a crackhead.So women's and children's groups simply decided to change their PR. Suddenly, prostitution was no longer about prostitution. It was all about sexual slavery and human trafficking. And they began blowing up their numbers with helium.But maybe Traffick911's Deena Graves is right. Perhaps God has called her and others to fight demons unseen by the re st of us. It's just that he hasn't given them the power to find all those victims. He does work in mysterious ways, after all.--With Reporting by Patrick Michels
WFAA News Dallas, TexasBy JASON WHITELY
Posted on January 31, 2011 at 10:52 PM
Updated Tuesday, Feb 1 at 1:55 PM
DALLAS — For weeks now, police, politicians and non-profit agencies have warned that a wave of prostitutes will be coming to North Texas for Super Bowl festivities.
But News 8 has learned there is no evidence supporting such claims.
"I think it will be like nothing we've ever experienced before," said Deena Graves, executive director of Traffick 911, a Fort Worth organization dedicated stopping the sale of children into sexual slavery.
Graves is among those warning of an alarming increase in underage girls sold for sex during the Super Bowl.
"Traffickers follow the money, and there's a whole lot of money that comes with the Super Bowl," she said.
Police and politicians have also issued similar statements.
"The Super Bowl is, unfortunately, a major draw for human trafficking," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said during a news conference on the topic at Dallas Police headquarters recently.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott gave reporters similar warnings in Arlington.
But no one can answer the question, "How do you know?" since pimps and prostitutes don't register anywhere. Still, what makes the problem so much worse during the Super Bowl?
Similar stories about the sex trade surround almost every major sporting event — even the Olympics and the World Cup.
To investigate their validity, News 8 began checking with police departments in other cities that have also hosted the Super Bowl.
Phoenix hosted the big game three years ago. Police there told News 8 they received similar warnings about an increase in prostitution and prepared for it, but never uncovered any evidence of a spike in illegal sexual activity.
"I think one of the things people automatically assume is that while you've got influential people in town, people with significant amounts of money and therefore a whole lot of prostitution is going to follow with that," said Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson. "We did not notice an increase or anything out of the ordinary."
Tampa hosted the Super Bowl in 2009. A police spokeswoman there said officers there made 11 prostitution arrests during the entire week leading up to the game.
And last year, Miami police told News 8 they arrested 14 for prostitution.
Those figures are not uncommon for large cities during a seven-day period, experts said.
Last year, Canada debunked similar hype about prostitutes around the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. British Columbia funded a study which concluded that "sex trafficking and mega-events are not linked."
A European group called The International Organization for Migration arrived at the same conclusion in Germany after rumors that 40,000 prostitutes would go to the 2006 World Cup. The estimations are "unfounded and unrealistic," the IOM reported.
Ernie Allen, director for The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he was misquoted last year when predicting 10,000 prostitutes would show up in Miami for Super Bowl XLIV.
Allen said the Super Bowl likely doesn't attract more sex traffickers than any other large event. What's more, he also conceded there is no way to quantify the problem.
Still, he and Graves both said the issue is under-recognized and under-reported.
"Sometimes when numbers are very high, people think it's hopeless and they may not even try to address the issue," said Becky Sykes of the Dallas Women's Foundation.
The organization has commissioned a study to research Internet ads and escort services during February. It's specifically looking for underage girls as prostitutes and hoping — for the first time — to see whether the Super Bowl really increases sex trafficking in the host city.
Critics blame some women's groups for the prostitution myth as they try to raise awareness without facts.
No one disputes that trafficking is a serious and sickening problem, but whether the Super Bowl intensifies it is a prediction no one can yet prove.
Conclusion: The Sex trafficking, slavery issue is one of the biggest lies being told today. It is amazing how people will believe such lies so easily. The media is to blame for this. I wonder why they feel such a need to report wrong stats, numbers and information about this topic without doing proper research. While this may happen in very rare limited situations, the media will say that millions of people are sex slaves without doing any real research on the topic. Only taking the word of special interest anti-prostitution groups which need to generate money in the form of huge government grants from taxpayers, and charities. These "non profit" group's employees make huge salaries, therefore they need to lobby the government, and inflate and invent victims in order to get more money into their organizations. If you look into how many real kidnapped forced against their will sex slaves there are, and not just take the anti-prostitution groups word for it. You will be very surprised. Where are all the forced sex slaves? I would like to meet the "millions" of slaves and see for myself if they were kidnapped and forced against their will. These groups lobby the government in a big way, getting Politicians to truly believe their lies.This is an attempt to over inflate an issue in order to get more government money to these organizations. As a tax payer, voter, and resident I don’t want the government to mislead me.If you agree that you would like to see news organizations do a full truthful report on the lies, myths and exaggerated numbers being told about sex trafficking slaves without taking the Anti-Prostitution groups word for it; Here are some links to help you out. Don’t forget to tell your local News companies also.To email News media publications here is some email addresses to get you all started. (Media companies link below) http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=111To contact USA senators and congressmen to alert them on the lies being told to them about Sex Trafficking and Slavery: USA government officials link:http://www.conservativeusa.org/mega-cong.htmhttp://www.consumer-action.org/take_action/articles/make_your_voice_heard(Don’t forget to tell your local government officials as well)On Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Truth-about-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/135619653172829?sk=wallFeel free to use any information in this website to tell people "The truth about Sex Trafficking and Sex Slavery" The following links will give you more information about sex trafficking especially the Washington post article and the Guardian and BBC links.http://sextraffickingtruths.blogspot.com/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-trafficking-lies-myths/http://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/Washington post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201401.htmlNews night BBC video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtaEdI3aiwghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rvA60zdkD8Guardian newspaper:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-failshttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggeratedNick Davies - About Truth in the Media:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8YGmASiZZ8&feature=relatedhttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/22/gov_proposals/print.htmlSex trafficking in sports:http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-01-27/news/the-super-bowl-prostitute-myth-100-000-hookers-won-t-be-showing-up-in-dallas/http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-03-03/news/super-bowl-prostitution-100-000-hookers-didn-t-show-but-america-s-latest-political-scam-did/http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-03-03/news/sex-traffick911-press-release/Dallas TV News show about super bowl sex slave myth:http://www.wfaa.com/sports/football/super-bowl/Super-Bowl-prostitution-prediction-has-no-proof--114983179.htmlFBI report:http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/super-bowl/local/20110302-top-fbi-agent-in-dallas-praises-super-bowl-security-effort-sees-no-evidence-of-expected-spike-in-child-sex-trafficking.ece
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SPORT/football/07/09/prostitute.gallery/index.html?iref=allsearch&fbid=0Ox1WH9NNplhttp://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8324/www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9843http://www.lauraagustin.com/debunking-the-40-000-prostitutes-story-again-south-africa-world-cupHuman traffic website:http://traffickingwatch.org/node/18http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/OJP/a0826/final.pdfIndia newspaper:http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=3622&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=9&valid=true#Sex Trafficking in Asia:http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9843/Detailed Report and research about sex Trafficking, Sex Slavery, Prostitution:http://myweb.dal.ca/mgoodyea/Documents/Sex%20work%20-%20General/The%20mythology%20of%20prostitution%20-%20advocacy%20research%20and%20public%20policy%20Weitzer%202010%20Sex%20Res%20Soc%20Pol%207%2015-29.pdfOther links:http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Truth-about-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/135619653172829?sk=wallhttp://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1227418/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-The-myth-Britains-foreign-sex-slaves.htmlhttp://www.bayswan.org/traffick/Weitzer_Criminologist.pdfhttp://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2850/http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-03-23/news/women-s-funding-network-sex-trafficking-study-is-junk-science/http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5027/http://www.misandryreview.com/heretical-sex/2010/04/04/more-sex-trafficking-lies/McMartin preschool trial link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8324/http://bristolnoborders.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/more-evidence-that-sex-trafficking-is-a-myth/http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/michael-duffy/much-ado-about-a-small-segment-of-the-global-sex-industry/2008/06/13/1213321616701.htmlhttp://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/2009/10/30/more-on-the-great-sex-trafficking-scam-in-the-u-k/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1227418/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-The-myth-Britains-foreign-sex-slaves.htmlhttp://www.angryharry.com/reHappyhookersofEasternEurope.htmhttp://www.thescavenger.net/people/numbers-of-sex-trafficking-victims-are-exaggerated-13456.htmlhttp://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/http://www.thoughts.com/west999http://open.salon.com/blog/westly99/2011/03/13/the_myth_of_sex_trafficking_and_sex_slaveryhttp://mythofsextrafficking.blogspot.com/http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Truth-about-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/135619653172829?sk=wallhttp://sextraffickingtruths.blogspot.com/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-trafficking-lies-myths/http://westernman952.newsvine.com/_news/2011/03/09/6223238-the-myth-of-sex-trafficking-and-sex-slaveryhttp://westernman952.newsvine.com/_news/2011/03/16/6283889-the-myths-lies-and-truth-about-sex-trafficking-sex-slaveryhttp://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/sex-slavery-lies-and-myths/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/5/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-trafficking-and-slavery/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-lies-and-prostitution/Laura Maria Agustin, book “Sex at the margins”http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Margins-Migration-Markets-Industry/dp/1842778609Detailed Report and research about sex Trafficking, Sex Slavery, Prostitution:
by Ronald Weitzerhttp://myweb.dal.ca/mgoodyea/Documents/Sex%20work%20-%20General/The%20mythology%20of%20prostitution%20-%20advocacy%20research%20and%20public%20policy%20Weitzer%202010%20Sex%20Res%20Soc%20Pol%207%2015-29.pdfRonald Weitzer:
http://www.bayswan.org/traffick/Weitzer_Criminologist.pdfNathalie Rothschild spiked magazine:http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9843/
http://sextraffickingfacts.wordpress.com/
http://sextraffickingfactsmyths.wordpress.com/
http://mythofsextrafficking.blogspot.com/
http://humantraffickingintheusa.weebly.com/
http://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Myth-of-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/191343900903887?sk=wall
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/sex_trafficking_myth_at_super_bowl_world_cup_olympics/
http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/
http://sextraffickingtruths.blogspot.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-06-29/news/real-men-get-their-facts-straight-sex-trafficking-ashton-kutcher-demi-moore/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-07-06/news/stuck-in-trafficking/
http://www.villagevoice.com/sex-trafficking/map/
Crimes against Children Research Center ● University of New Hampshire ● 126 Horton Social Science Center ● Durham, NH 03824
(603) 862‐1888●Fax: (603) 862‐1122●www.unh.edu/ccrc
http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/prostitution/Juvenile_Prostitution_factsheet.pdf
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Truth-about-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/135619653172829?sk=wallFeel free to use any information in this website to tell people "The truth about Sex Trafficking and Sex Slavery" The following links will give you more information about sex trafficking especially the Washington post article and the Guardian and BBC links.http://sextraffickingtruths.blogspot.com/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-trafficking-lies-myths/http://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/Washington post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201401.htmlNews night BBC video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtaEdI3aiwghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rvA60zdkD8Guardian newspaper:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-failshttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggeratedNick Davies - About Truth in the Media:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8YGmASiZZ8&feature=relatedhttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/22/gov_proposals/print.htmlSex trafficking in sports:http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-01-27/news/the-super-bowl-prostitute-myth-100-000-hookers-won-t-be-showing-up-in-dallas/http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-03-03/news/super-bowl-prostitution-100-000-hookers-didn-t-show-but-america-s-latest-political-scam-did/http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-03-03/news/sex-traffick911-press-release/Dallas TV News show about super bowl sex slave myth:http://www.wfaa.com/sports/football/super-bowl/Super-Bowl-prostitution-prediction-has-no-proof--114983179.htmlFBI report:http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/super-bowl/local/20110302-top-fbi-agent-in-dallas-praises-super-bowl-security-effort-sees-no-evidence-of-expected-spike-in-child-sex-trafficking.ece
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SPORT/football/07/09/prostitute.gallery/index.html?iref=allsearch&fbid=0Ox1WH9NNplhttp://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8324/www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9843http://www.lauraagustin.com/debunking-the-40-000-prostitutes-story-again-south-africa-world-cupHuman traffic website:http://traffickingwatch.org/node/18http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/OJP/a0826/final.pdfIndia newspaper:http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=3622&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=9&valid=true#Sex Trafficking in Asia:http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9843/Detailed Report and research about sex Trafficking, Sex Slavery, Prostitution:http://myweb.dal.ca/mgoodyea/Documents/Sex%20work%20-%20General/The%20mythology%20of%20prostitution%20-%20advocacy%20research%20and%20public%20policy%20Weitzer%202010%20Sex%20Res%20Soc%20Pol%207%2015-29.pdfOther links:http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Truth-about-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/135619653172829?sk=wallhttp://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1227418/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-The-myth-Britains-foreign-sex-slaves.htmlhttp://www.bayswan.org/traffick/Weitzer_Criminologist.pdfhttp://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2850/http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-03-23/news/women-s-funding-network-sex-trafficking-study-is-junk-science/http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5027/http://www.misandryreview.com/heretical-sex/2010/04/04/more-sex-trafficking-lies/McMartin preschool trial link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8324/http://bristolnoborders.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/more-evidence-that-sex-trafficking-is-a-myth/http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/michael-duffy/much-ado-about-a-small-segment-of-the-global-sex-industry/2008/06/13/1213321616701.htmlhttp://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/2009/10/30/more-on-the-great-sex-trafficking-scam-in-the-u-k/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1227418/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-The-myth-Britains-foreign-sex-slaves.htmlhttp://www.angryharry.com/reHappyhookersofEasternEurope.htmhttp://www.thescavenger.net/people/numbers-of-sex-trafficking-victims-are-exaggerated-13456.htmlhttp://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/http://www.thoughts.com/west999http://open.salon.com/blog/westly99/2011/03/13/the_myth_of_sex_trafficking_and_sex_slaveryhttp://mythofsextrafficking.blogspot.com/http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Truth-about-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/135619653172829?sk=wallhttp://sextraffickingtruths.blogspot.com/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-trafficking-lies-myths/http://westernman952.newsvine.com/_news/2011/03/09/6223238-the-myth-of-sex-trafficking-and-sex-slaveryhttp://westernman952.newsvine.com/_news/2011/03/16/6283889-the-myths-lies-and-truth-about-sex-trafficking-sex-slaveryhttp://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/sex-slavery-lies-and-myths/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/5/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-trafficking-and-slavery/http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/sex-lies-and-prostitution/Laura Maria Agustin, book “Sex at the margins”http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Margins-Migration-Markets-Industry/dp/1842778609Detailed Report and research about sex Trafficking, Sex Slavery, Prostitution:
by Ronald Weitzerhttp://myweb.dal.ca/mgoodyea/Documents/Sex%20work%20-%20General/The%20mythology%20of%20prostitution%20-%20advocacy%20research%20and%20public%20policy%20Weitzer%202010%20Sex%20Res%20Soc%20Pol%207%2015-29.pdfRonald Weitzer:
http://www.bayswan.org/traffick/Weitzer_Criminologist.pdfNathalie Rothschild spiked magazine:http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9843/
http://sextraffickingfacts.wordpress.com/
http://sextraffickingfactsmyths.wordpress.com/
http://mythofsextrafficking.blogspot.com/
http://humantraffickingintheusa.weebly.com/
http://the-myth-of-sex-trafficking.weebly.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Myth-of-Sex-Trafficking-and-Sex-Slavery/191343900903887?sk=wall
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/sex_trafficking_myth_at_super_bowl_world_cup_olympics/
http://bebopper76.wordpress.com/
http://sextraffickingtruths.blogspot.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-06-29/news/real-men-get-their-facts-straight-sex-trafficking-ashton-kutcher-demi-moore/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-07-06/news/stuck-in-trafficking/
http://www.villagevoice.com/sex-trafficking/map/
Crimes against Children Research Center ● University of New Hampshire ● 126 Horton Social Science Center ● Durham, NH 03824
(603) 862‐1888●Fax: (603) 862‐1122●www.unh.edu/ccrc
http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/prostitution/Juvenile_Prostitution_factsheet.pdf