Stay classy, Rescue Industry

In the cutthroat world of filmmaking it must be hard to get noticed. Some make their names by honing their craft over years or even decades, learning the business from the ground up, and keeping their egos in check. Others sleep their way to the top. But that's kind of lame. Why make good films or suck off a decent producer when you can hop on the concern-porn cause of the week and gain tasty, tasty attention that way?

Enter 'Balkans the Movie', a yet-to-be-made film that aims to expose the seedy underside of human trafficking by, er, cobbling together a lot of ethnic stereotypes and asking NGOs for funding. Nice work if you can get it. Certainly seems to have worked out for Nefarious: Merchant of Souls (which, incidentally, is so my next character if I ever take up RPGs again. Or alternatively my thrash metal band's debut album).

The Balkans site is looking to cast such no-doubt sensitively and intelligently written characters as "Big Mama" (a large cockney lady married to a Jamaican) and "Fats" (a Kosovan by way of New Orleans). Cast extras include "10 Prostitutes," whose roles are not entirely clear apart from the fact there will be a "porn scene" and an "auction". Don't worry about the lack of scripts, though, ladies: the director assures you "I shall ask you to improvise on the day." Is your asshole-ometer up in the red yet? No, nor mine. Not. At. All.

The site also makes clear that not only is the film gritty with potentially crude sex portrayed, it's also unpaid. Yes that's right, if you're lucky enough to get this gig you'll be pulling down not union rates or even minimum wage, but you will score a complimentary DVD. With profits to go to "anti-trafficking charities". The film will however be sent to "top industry contacts" who no doubt will dispatch it directly to the circular file. So basically you get to re-enact "harrowing scenes of torture" for free!

Executive Summary: We're going to stick it to those horrible people exploiting young women by, er, exploiting young women.

There isn't a mainstream porn studio in the world that could get away with this shit.

If the concept of the film hasn't made you roll off your chair yet then get a load of the script. What there is of it, anyway, since most of the film will go all Mike Leigh on our asses and depend on the actors' improvisation skills. We experience the story through the eyes of Joe, who is "Unstoppable, determined, curious, witty, vulnerable and a good liar ... educated at Cambridge ... Joe's heritage enables him to infiltrate this group as his father is from Eastern Europe." 

So far, so Misha Glenny. Minus the credibility.

"Joe is one of the remaining few journalists committed to the ethos of investigative journalism – to uncover the truth using all methods in spite of the risks."

As long as "all methods" means "getting handjobs," yeah? Has someone alerted Leveson yet?

Our Joe may be green, but by gum, he knows a good story when he sees it.

"I'm onto a new story with the break-in thing--absolute page one stuff-- ... It's gonna be bigger than Watergate!"

All the President's Men this ain't but please, tell me more, maybe I've missed what's so exciting here...

"Guys get into arguments over nothing and before you know it, one of them is dead. They're shooting each other all the time."

Oh. Never mind then.

More dialogue WTF: 

"Fats had killed a made man, elite Mafioso."

Now, I may be no expert - I'm only half-Eastern European and half-Sicilian, so what the hell do I know? I'm pretty sure - not 100% certain, but pretty sure - that Eastern European gangsters are not, kind of by definition, "mafiosi". 

Enter Natasha. Nats here is our hooker with a heart of gold. You can tell because she's giving Joe a rubdown and guided tour of her singing ability by page 2. She sounds all sorts of awesome:

"Natasha left her country in Eastern Europe to find a rich man in the West. Unfortunately she was conned and is now serving as a prostitute."

Serving as a prostitute? Bitch, I'm a sergeant in the Hooker Corps!

On a more serious note, though, sounds to me she found exactly what she was looking for and needs to reframe this new arrangement not as a problem but as a solution. A rich man in the West. Only, you know, an hour at a time. Why put up with a guy full-time when you can get cash in hand and have the odd evening to yourself? Hell to the yes.

The best part about Natasha is she speaks like a minor character from Isaac Bashevis Singer:

"When I was 15, my parents married me, against my will, to a man aged 35, whom I did not love. So started my miseries."

Feel free to imagine the sad violin here. Or alternatively some jaunty squeezebox à la Gypsy Weddings. Your call.

But wait! There's more. So much more:

"Smart Nick is Downtown Joey's son and a possible successor to him but first he must learn the business. "

Unlike the writer, this may entail more work for Smart Nick than merely watching The Wire with the sound turned off. I like this Nick fellow, not least because

"He has developed an upper class Oxford accent..."

I didn't know the university had its own accent! Learn something new every day. Smart Nick deploys his hard-won knowledge of Received Oxford Pronunciation on such gems as: "Next to him dancing with sexy girl is Jim Whip, number 2 top porno star in UK."

If Mark-Francis Vandelli doesn't get this role it will be a crime against Thespis.

Oh wait, there is an Italian in the film! His name is 'Sammy Cigar'. We Italians are all called things like that, you know. We're also orange puppets made of sponge who sit around eating Dolmio every Saturday night with Mamma. He owns a nightclub too? You could have knocked me over with a feather.

The there's Leo, the Obligatory American.

"Leo was born into music, although his family were not in the industry he managed to make the right connections,  is in his early forties and is American. His break came when he graduated from Harvard in Art History and dated the daughter of the Chairman of Warner Music. He has managed huge acts, is a millionaire, loves young women (18+) and sometimes dabbles in cocaine."

The actual Chairman of Warner Music, Lyor Cohen, has a daughter all right. She turns 10 this year. Way to score, Leo!

The film's website helpfully informs us that 

This story is fictional and is not intended to be racist or to offend anyone. 

It's not intended to be racist. Like, I didn't intend to steal that cupcake, it just ended up stuffed in my gob unpaid for, officer. (For what it's worth I'm not offended. I'm more bemused and slightly mystified but not actually offended. Kosovan gangsters from Louisiana may feel differently.) Also:

All characters are fictional and any resemblance to any person/event or situation whether present or in the past is coincidental.

Don't worry, hon. There is absolutely no danger anyone is going to mistake these characters for real people.

Do you know what the script reminds me of? This date I had years ago. I met up with a guy from Guardian Soulmates who told me he was an aspiring novelist who eschewed a career as a postdoc chemist for two (yes! two!) masters' courses in writing. He then proceeded to tell me in much detail about this amazing book of his that was mysteriously unpublished. It involved a super-secret society at Oxford whose bitch-queen was a virginal descendant of the real Royal Family (whoever they are) and gets deflowered by her super-secret fraternity at the end. He saw Emily Blunt in the lead role for the film adaptation. There wasn't a second date.
 
I could go on. But I won't. Because I'm not even past page 12 yet and you probably have other things to do today. Suffice it to say that I actually hope a rubbish trafficking hype film with characters like "Detective Inkling" and "Chinese Man" gets made. If only so I can MST-3K the shit out of it. And let's be honest, if I had no conscience and no qualms about not paying the talent I would be kicking myself right now for not coming up with this lucrative wheeze first.

In fact I actually hope this is the product of some some hard-eyed cynic grabbing what cash he can out of the system before the whole trafficking panic collapses in a heap of invented moral scares and bullshit statistics. In which case, mate, I owe you an apology and a drink.

Why Scotland should not make sex work illegal

UPDATE: MSPs have voted that Grant's bill will have to go to consultation and will not be fast-tracked. Which is good news. But the fight is not over, and expect more to come when the consultation hits.

At the same time that the Moratorium 2012 campaign kicks off in London, spearheading a common-sense approach to sex work, there appears a bid in Scotland to try to make prostitution illegal. Just to recap: soliciting, running a brothel, and kerb crawling are already illegal (as too are trafficking and sexual exploitation of children). Exchanging sex for money at this point is not. Not yet.

Labour MSP Rhoda Grant claims "Scotland should become an unattractive market for prostitution and therefore other associated serious criminal activities, such as people trafficking for sexual exploitation, would be disrupted." Grant is, unfortunately, badly informed and wrong. I'm going to keep this one short and sweet because the points are pretty straightforward...

Scotland does not have a sex trafficking epidemic

Sex trafficking is the excuse frequently given these days to harass and criminalise sex workers. Problem is, it's not remotely the "epidemic" they would have you believe. If you're not already up to speed on the whys and wherefores, I highly recommend reading Laura Agustin's work on this. Or if I may be so cheeky to suggest you could also buy my book. 

Specifically, it is not happening in Scotland.  “In Scotland, to the best of my knowledge, we don't have a conviction for human trafficking,” said police constable Gordon Meldrum. Meldrum had previously claimed research “proved” the existence of 10 human trafficking groups north of the border, and 367 organised crime groups with over 4000 members. “We had one case which was brought to court previously but was abandoned. My understanding is it was abandoned due to a lack of evidence, essentially.” Strange how the evidence seemed to disappear precisely when someone was asked to produce all these fantasy baddies, isn't it? 

It's not only Scotland where the trafficking hype falls flat though: investigation throughout the UK has comprehensively failed to find any supposed sex trafficking epidemic.

Not convinced by the evidence? Then consider this: criminalising sex workers and their clients removes the most reliable information sources police have for investigating abuses. Police don't have a great track record on this: In interviews by the Sex Workers Project with 15 trafficking survivors who experienced police raids, only one had been asked by law enforcement if she was coerced, and only after she was arrested. SWOP-NYC make this case clearly.

Criminalising sex work has been shown in Scotland to make criminal activity worse

Criminalisation has all kinds of effects on the behaviour of sex workers, but unfortunately, none of those effects are good. Fear of police forces sex workers to get into clients’ cars quickly, and possibly be unable to avoid dangerous attackers posing as clients. When vigilantes and police roam the pavements, sex workers wait until the wee hours to come out, making them more isolated and vulnerable to harm.

Such an approach can also result in a transfer of activity from streetwalking to other ways of getting money. High-profile crackdown results in repeated arrests of prostitutes, which translate to fines that sex workers, now burdened with criminal records, are unable to pay except by more prostitution or by fraud, shoplifting, and dealing drugs.

Take Aberdeen, for instance. From 2001 onward, the city had an established tolerance zone for sex workers around the harbour. That ended with passage of the Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act in 2007. In the following months the city centre experienced an influx of streetwalkers and an increase in petty crimes.

Quay Services, which operates a drop-in centre for streetwalkers, reported that sex workers became more afraid to seek assistance, and the number of women coming to the centre dropped to “just a handful”. There was also evidence that displacing sex workers led to more activity in the sex trade, not less – convictions for solicitation tripled.

This kind of ‘crime shuffling’ takes prostitution out of one area and dumps it on another. It only resembles an improvement if you fail to look at the full picture.

Prohibition never works

There is a lot of talk in the political sphere about the need for “evidence based policy”. This means rejecting approaches that are moralistic and manipulative. Sex workers have suffered the tragic consequences of prejudicial social attitudes that lead to bad policy. The prohibition approach has not worked. It will never work. The people who endorse this view are putting people in danger and should not be guiding public opinion any longer. Disliking sex work is not a good enough argument to justify criminalising it. Is there any public interest served by preventing adults from engaging in a consensual transaction for sexual services? No, there is not.

Bit like the war on drugs: making the business profitable only to criminals, awaiting the inevitably grim results, then claiming that it’s the drugs themselves, not the laws, wot caused it. Few reasonable people believe that line of argument when it comes to drugs. Why does anyone believe it when it comes to sex?

Moral disapproval is a bad basis for policymaking. I don't find the idea of taking drugs at all appealing, but I don't assume my own preferences should be the basis for law.

The condescension heaped on people who do sex work is embarrassingly transparent. All this mealy-mouthed, 'oh but we want to help them, really’. How’s that again? By saddling people with criminal records and taking away their children? Do me a favour.

As well as the happy prostitutes there are unhappy sex workers in need of support. Society should protect the unwilling and underage from sexual exploitation and provide outreach for those who need and want it. We already have laws and services for that. Maybe the laws should be more intelligently enforced and the services better supported. But prosecuting the victimless crimes does neither of these. It helps no one.

The potential existence of abuses does not mean such work should be automatically criminalised if for no other reason than doing so makes the lives of people in sex work worse, not better. Criminalisation is the very opposite of compassion. Rhoda Grant is hiding behind an "end demand" approach that will not achieve what she claims it will, but will punish sex workers and send those with already chaotic lives further into a downward spiral. If that isn't punishing them with no hope for change then I don't know what is.

It's time we started acting like grownups and stopped pretending that making something illegal makes it cease to exist.

London 2012: Will the Olympics bring more prostitutes?

It's a well-known rule in journalism that if the headline asks a question, the answer is invariably "no". So to see the question above on this blog will probably not surprise you.

What might surprise you is to learn it was also the headline of a prominently-featured article on the BBC website yesterday. Of course, as is the current fad, when they say "prostitutes" they mean "trafficking", and vice-versa.

It's been long known that there is no connection between major international sporting events such as the Olympics, the World Cup, and sex trafficking. But don't take my word for it. Take the word of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who hosted a meeting on this very topic earlier this year. Take the word of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, who produced a must-read report (pdf) on the actual effects of sports events on human trafficking. Go check out Laura Agustin's excellent summary too.

The facts:

• 2010 World Cup, South Africa: the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development did not find a single case of trafficking over the Olympics time period.

• 2010 Olympics, Canada: no evidence of trafficking and sex workers reported a fall in business.

• 2006 World Cup, Germany: 33 cases were referred to the police for further investigation, out of which 5 cases were confirmed to be trafficking (4 women and 1 man). No other cases were found, despite the fact that the police conducted 71 brothel raids (these raids did not identify the 5 confirmed trafficking cases, but did lead to 10 deportations).

• 2004 Olympics, Greece: When trafficking statistics were compared for all of 2004 with all of 2003, there was an increase of 181 trafficking cases (which is a 90% increase). According to both the police and the International Organization for Migration, none of these cases were linked to the Olympics.

• Super Bowls in the USA in 2008-2011: Although law enforcement increased, they made no additional arrests for sex work-related offences during this time.

You might be wondering, and it is a good question, why there isn't sex trafficking during these events. The answer is simple. Criminals may be criminals, but organised crime does not exist for the purpose of being evil. It exists to make loads of tax-free dosh. Does it make financial sense for sex trafficking to occur at these events? With London rents skyrocketing around the venues, with the Home Office plans to tighten border security, with the police already well misinformed about the magnitude of the trafficking problem, you'd have to be mad to pursue this as a business plan.

There was perhaps a time, back in the 90s, when sex trafficking in some parts of Eastern Europe might have netted you some cash if you already had the distribution network, but it's not the case now. Add to that a large native population willing and legally able to exchange money for sex and you'd be laughed out of Dragon's Den for even suggesting it as a goer. I've met a lot of dodgy characters in my day - drug dealers and worse besides - and to a person they were not in it to lose money. In many cases the black marketeers I know were actually better businesspeople than anyone in legit trading.

In spite of all this, we are still treated - almost daily now in the run-up to London 2012 - with the same old guff such as stories that sex trafficking 'almost doubled' during the Athens Olympics.

In this particular case, 'almost doubled' means that the number of reported incidents was 181, a 90% increase over the previous year. So yes, they did 'almost double'.

However if you too are underwhelmed by that number, it's with good reason. Applying all the usual disclaimers - any instance of forced sex trafficking is abhorrent and should be prosecuted vigorously, this is an argument about best use of police time, tax money and other resources - what does the reported change from just-shy-of-100 people to 181 actually represent?

Prostitution is legal and regulated in Greece, however, not everyone works legally and not everyone registers, because hello, do you want your name on the Greek government's hooker list? Probably not. Anyway, estimates put the number at about 1,000 legal prostitutes and 20,000 illegal ones. Given that these numbers are the ones put about by the US State Department which does not have a great track record on accuracy, it's a little suspect. But let's say for the sake of saying that represents some kind of starting ballpark figure and probably even an overestimate. The 21,000 total gives us about 1 in every 250 women in Greece working as a prostitute - actually a realistic enough proportion for Europe.

In the year before the Athens Olympics, the reports of sex trafficking at 95 represented 0.45% of all prostitution in Greece. And after the Olympics? 0.86%. Less than 1% of prostitutes in Greece were trafficked both before and after the Olympics.

There is no particular evidence, statistical or otherwise, to suggest that the fluctuation in this rather small number was due to the Olympics per se. In fact it is certainly within the bounds of what we call the 'law of small numbers' which dictates that they can and do fluctuate in a way that represents a high percentage of the values themselves, but given the rarity of the events involved, this is expected and not necessarily significant.

Here's an example. Let's say in the year 2008, there was 1 death in all of Scotland from a vending machine falling on someone. Then let's say a year later, in 2009, there were 2 such deaths. While it would be technically true to say that the number of vending machine accidental deaths 'doubled', is this a fair representation of the data? Is this a significant trend that is likely to continue? (Which would mean that by 2032, there would be 8.38 million such deaths in Scotland, or approximately... er, 150% of the population). No, obviously not. The change from 1 to 2 in a given year seems clearly attributable to chance. You'd be silly to conclude the change from one small number to another "means" very much without a lot of additional evidence.

If you've read my paper on the effects of lap dancing on sexual violence in London, you'll already be aware of how over time these small numbers fluctuate wildly. For context, the UNHCR gives the number of trafficked persons for Greece as 137 in 2005, 83 in 2006, 100 in 2007, 162 in 2008, 125 in 2009, 92 in 2010.

Now if these things had no knock-on effect, and if police resources and tax money were infinite, then sure, why not go after human trafficking even if it's only a very tiny proportion of all sex work in Greece - or in the more immediate case, London? But alas, it is not a matter of infinite police time and tax money. And it is definitely not a matter of no knock-on effects.

According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, "Police crackdowns and brothel closures tend to displace sex workers from flats and saunas to less safe work venues, including the street, and make them wary of all authorities so they are less likely to access services or to report episodes of violence or crime to the police."

Given that the anti-sex lobby are so dead keen to keep claiming that all sex workers are inevitably the victims of violent and sex crimes, that seems like it's going to affect a hell of a lot more than a couple hundred people, no? Why does a small number of people matter to them more than a potentially far larger pool of people? Is it because that's where the grant money and column inches are at?

Not only is this increased danger the outcome in previous incidents of trafficking panic, it's happening right now in London. The Moratorium 2012 campaign, organised by x:talk, confirms:

Stop the Arrests Campaign is aware of ‘clean up efforts’ already underway in London, particularly east London, in the run-up to the Olympics ... Last December in Barking and Dagenham a violent gang carried out a series of robberies on brothels at knife point. Sex workers were deterred from pursuing the attacks after police threatened them with prosecution. Thus many more were attacked and one woman was raped.

Got that? Send the police after non-existent sex trafficking, and they end up cracking down on non-trafficked sex workers. When that happens, people in sex work are put in more danger. No one is made safer by doing this. No one is saved. Moratorium 2012 is calling on an end to the pointless and dangerous harassment. Please, sign the petition.

Something hoist something petard.

It is with some interest that I have been following media reports of the alleged conduct of Ashton Kutcher, a well-known campaigner against sex trafficking. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the "problem" his advocacy claims to address is certainly hugely overstated and possibly being manipulated by people who are at least as interested in money and credibility as they are in philanthropy.

Interestingly, on Quora, which Kutcher has called "the smartest place on the internet" (you know, because academic journals and research forums are where the dumb kids hang out), there was a question not long ago which asked, "Why is it so common to include voluntary prostitution in the category of sex trafficking?"

Kutcher stepped in, as did others, in defence of the idea that foreign-born women voluntarily choosing to enter sex work - such as, say, myself (and yes, one of them did mention me specifically) are trafficked. Also people being transported over state and international borders, or something.

When you hear the word "trafficking", maybe you imagine a foreign child being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. Not only is that not accurate, it's also not what the lobbyists against sex work even seem to believe themselves. But it is an assumption they appear happy to exploit. As the Quora discussion shows, Kutcher and people like him claim that "trafficking" includes people going into sex work willingly and migrating willingly. In other words, equating consensual sex work with involuntary slavery. Actually a lot of other "rescue industry" types buy that as well. It's a stand with a lot of errors of logic, but it's their platform, they defend it, they own it.

Right. Now, let's check out an article from the Daily Mail dated 03 October 2011 (no link since Istyosty has gone now, HuffPo covers it and so does The Frisky, also it's screensnapped below). It includes quotes from someone who not only claims to know the person Kutcher allegedly cheated with, but who also appears to indicate that the presence of girls like her at celeb parties is, shall we say, not entirely without reimbursement.

Here's the bit in the Mail that caught my eye:

Naumoff, who arranges for good looking girls to be shipped to certain hotspots,  also told the newspaper: 'Sara’s a great girl. My job is to round up hot girls and bus them into clubs in San Diego or Vegas.

The girls get free booze, food, whatever, and they attract rich and famous guys to the clubs. It’s a two-way street. The girls get to meet rich men and the guys get what they want.’

Which is? ‘Sex, obviously.’

Is Naumoff paid to do this? If so, by whom? The Mail doesn't say.

You could be charitable and interpret this as kind of an introduction service. But then again, some of the men in question are already married. You could alternatively think this setup sounds an awful lot like people being reimbursed for travel and sex. Which might not only count as prostitution to some people, but trafficking as well. If you were the sort of person who was inclined to see things that way.

Me? I don't believe anyone who enters any kind of quid-pro-quo relationship, be it sex for money or naked hot tubbing for a drinks tab, and does so willingly, is trafficked. So far so sugar daddy. But read the Quora opinions, and consider what's being quoted in the Mail, and ask yourself whether you think this alleged situation would tick the rescue industry's boxes for "prostitution: trafficking" or not. Whatever would the missus think?

When Celebrities Attack

By now, you may already be aware of Ashton Kutcher's campaign against the Village Voice, sparked by an article critical of the substance and message of his anti-trafficking adverts. The Voice has form on this one: their earlier article about dodgy stats that get bandied about in the trafficking discussion is a must-read.

The usual disclaimer... I am (as indeed all of Kutcher's critics are) opposed to trafficking in any form, including child sex trafficking. But we must not let emotion exclusively carry the day; it achieves nothing. The Voice hits the nail on the head when they sum up anti-trafficking efforts: "an emotional reaction, based on good intentions, but grounded in bogus information."

The problem of bogus information is this - campaigns such as Kutcher's conflate all sex work with child sex trafficking, and child sex trafficking with all trafficking. Approaches that do so not only encourage criminalisation legislation that harms consenting adults, but also obscures the real victims. How? By using vastly inflated numbers for one kind of trafficking, and pretty much ignoring everything else. Actual children being actually trafficked for actual sex are rarely, if ever, found by the kind of scatterhsot brothel raids and streetwalker crackdowns so many seem to consider "succeses" in the anti-trafficking effort.

Please, please stop kidding yourselves. The raids you hear about are not successes. They are vast wastes of time, money, and manpower. And many groups receiving funding meant to help victims of trafficking seem instead to be lining their own pockets. There is undoubtedly work to be done eliminating trafficking of men and women for any kind of labour. It almost certainly isn't the approach anti-traffickers think will work.

Kutcher’s response against the Village Voice has included tweeting advertisers on Backpage.com, accusing them of supporting slavery. So far, so "concerned". And then this tweet:

Like a lot of people, Ashton Kutcher seems to have some pretty confused ideas about sex work. To be in a position of wanting to help people, yet still falling back on ridicule and stereotype when talking about them, is inexcusable. Someone who says,

"I’ve spent the last 2 years meeting with every expert on the issue of Human Trafficking that I can find, reading countless books, meeting with victims and former traffickers, and studying effective international models to combat trafficking."

Maybe Ashton should have made time for a little bit of victim sensitivity training in there somewhere? (Not that he's known for politically correct tweeting, mind. He seems to channel the spirit of Littlejohn every now and again.)

Kutcher's response has been strongly supported by the Family Research Council who are regarded by many as a hate group. The FRC is one of the main contributors to the Witherspoon Institute’s “research” on pornography that conflates the adult industry with trafficking. That report contained significant input from Patrick Fagan of The Heritage Foundation – you know, those people whose work inspired Reagan’s covert Cold War military actions.

The Witherspoon report encourages celebrities to “use the bully pulpit” and abuses suspiciously similar dodgy statistics as Kutcher’s campaign. And while it doesn't name particular celebrities to be promoted as faces of such bullying, a similar document from Abt Associates does - it specifically names Kutcher's wife, Demi Moore.

I know a little about what it's like to be asked to comment on issues you don't necessarily have expertise in. Sometimes, journalists and television shows approach people like me to provide commentary rather than, say, academics in the relevant fields. It's unfortunate but it's a fact of media life. And I do try, by following academic discussions and talking with friends who are professionals in, say, sex education or the porn industry, to at least not come off as too much of an ignorant tit. I would shudder in horror, though, to ever be described as a "leading player" in the debate around trafficking or related issues. Something that Kutcher and his wife Moore seem to have no problem with. The strategy clearly works, with significant numbers of Kutcher's followers joining in his Twitter tirade, and the man himself being promoted as somehow more of an expert on the issues than, ya know, actual experts.

Not bad for a guy whose credentials, according to his Twitter profile, are: "I make stuff up."

The Voice article pointed out that it's not known how many of the millions, if any, raised by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher's campaign have actually gone to helping victims directly. With their charity having only been launched 5 months ago, and apparently no financial reports as yet available, it's hard to know when that pointed question will be resolved. I'd like to add another dimension to that question: how many of the millions raised by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher could be coming from groups such as the Family Research Council?

The well-meaning Twitter fans following Kutcher's lead probably don't realise they're being taken for a ride on the facts front. It can actually be very hard to sort the real from the fake when people keep repeating made-up stuff as true. So I guess my question now is, why are Kutcher’s millions of fans seemingly totally okay with this movement's possible links to the far-right hawkish Christian lobbyists? And when will the likes of Kutcher and Moore realise they're the ones being used, not by evil evil sex traffickers, but by conservative groups with a frightening agenda?

How the Anti-Sex Lobby Profits

While various areas of sex work have little in common apart from the 'sex' bit, increasingly they are lumped together in the eyes of the public, government, and media as something that is affecting society more than before and needs attention now.

The reasons for this are numerous. One particular influence is the rise of what is known as the Rescue Industry, an umbrella term coined by Laura Agustin to cover people not in the flesh trade, who nevertheless profit from attempting to end sex work of all kinds. Did I say "profit"? Yes, I sure did.

Issues such as trafficking, sex work, and pornography are hot topics for people who claim their main motivation is to help those involved. Help is a great thing. There are loads of people who could all use a little help, in all professions and walks of life. But when does the reasonable goal of helping others cross the line into infantilising others... and helping yourself?

Cynical? Maybe a little. On one hand many of the people concerned about the welfare of sex workers are no doubt motivated by a genuine desire to help others. Particularly those they think of as unable to defend themselves. But the flipside of this concern is that everyone needs money to survive. As other charities have discovered in the past, sometimes the desire to have a high profile and keep the wheels greased overtakes the benefit to the people you were trying to help.

The bun fight currently going on over funding to help trafficking victims is one example.

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

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

Is there enough money in it to even bother making this criticism? Well, thanks to a little tool that compares the money from funding grants over time, we can make a rough guess of what it's worth. For instance, funding for studying trafficking is enormous - in 2009, it was funded worldwide to the tune of nearly a billion US dollars. This is a total greater than the amount of grant money awarded to study lung cancer, which of course, is also devastating, and affects far more people. And spending on trafficking since 2000 has dwarfed the grant awards on such important international health concerns as malnutrition, malaria, or tuberculosis - conditions that kill millions of people worldwide every year, and affect hundreds of millions more.

Another way in which opposing sex work brings financial benefit is through the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Police know, for instance, that if a brothel owner is prosecuted, since running a brothel is illegal, any money and property retrieved from the 'crime scene' becomes theirs. When police resources are limited, does the temptation of profit possibly influence victimless crimes being prosecuted more vigourously than they otherwise would? Hard to know for sure. It's a handy little coincidence, the pre-Olympic crackdown on brothels and the recent cuts in police funding, isn't it? You can read more about the criticisms of such crackdowns in the Grauniad.

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

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

How trafficking is counted

There is an excellent article by investigative journalist Nick Davies, a primer on how the UK trafficking numbers were blown out of all proportion: Anatomy of a moral panic. (For commentary about US-based numbers, here's a blog about the topic.)

To summarise Davies's article, a paper which estimated a very small range - between 142 and 1,420 trafficked sex workers in the UK per year - was misreported and misinterpreted, ending up with people claiming 4,000 (or even as many as 80,000!) trafficked women entering the UK sex trade every year.

Part of the problem with these kinds of numbers is that while they're very, very wrong, they are also difficult to disprove. And the idea, once it enters mainstream media, is difficult to dislodge, even with facts.

In many social research fields, exact numbers can be hard to come by. Even seemingly straightforward calculations are fraught with error. Let's take a simple example. Imagine you were trying to count the number of people living in the world (and that you, like Father Christmas, are able to get to every household in an unfeasibly short amount of time). It would be a hard job. By the time the count was finished, loads of those counted would have died, and even more would have been born. An actual number that represents the real number of living people on earth at any one time? It's impossible. So, the world population is actually an estimate made based on some facts known about the countries of the world, their last population estimate, and their birth and death rates.

Making this kind of an estimate is a “Fermi problem”. Enrico Fermi, one of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, was reputedly able to make accurate guesses based on limited information.

Here’s an example of a Fermi problem in action. I was at pub quiz one week, and our team was tied for the lead. The tiebreaker was the question “How many performances did Yul Brynner have as the King of Siam in The King and I on Broadway?” As the only former drama geek in our team, it came down to me.

I calculated that Brynner probably did 8 performances a week ("once a day and twice on Sundays", as the saying goes). It’s a full-time job, so minus a two-week holiday, Brynner was probably performing 50 weeks a year. I wasn’t sure how many years it ran but knew he had been in at least one revival of the popular musical, so let’s say ten years of being the King total. That makes an estimate of:

8 shows a week x 50 weeks a year x 10 years = 4,000 shows

Sounds pretty high, right? We won the tiebreak (and the quiz) because, as it turned out, the real answer is 4,525. I was off by over 10%, which would be terrible for science, but was good enough for the quiz. The other team guessed 600... way too low. Picking a number out of thin air, as the other team probably did, is fraught with error. It’s hard to make good guesses with no information. Apply a few basic assumptions, however, and your accuracy goes up rapidly.

Fermi problems are great for pub quizzes, less so for evidence-based reporting. Common-or-garden estimates are not the stuff on which good research is built. At the very least, applying a set of assumptions to estimate a number should meet two major criteria:

1. The assumptions must have some foundation in reality. Eight Broadway performances a week is reasonable; 80 wouldn’t be.

2. The method of calculation needs to be explained. If an assumption turns out to be wrong, the calculation can then be adjusted. I don’t think the other person on my team would have bought 4,000 as an answer if he hadn’t seen my reasoning.

What does this have to do with the trafficking estimates?

The people who claim there are thousands, or even tens of thousands, of sex slaves in Britain are claiming an unrealistically high number. So unrealistic in fact that if it were true, that would mean the vast majority of prostitution in Britain was undertaken by trafficked people. That violates the first principle - basis in reality. Some people involved in sex work have encountered people who may have been trafficked; the vast majority have not. So either there's a whole other sex industry going on that no one in the sex industry knows about, or... the calculations are wrong.

Part of the difficulty with fighting such unrealistic claims, however, is getting good estimates to counter them. There is no comprehensive UK mapping of sex workers, much less trafficked ones, but there are some estimates. As part of the European Network for HIV/STD Prevention in Prostitution (EUROPAP), Hilary Kinnell contacted projects providing services for sex workers. [pdf] She had 17 responses. The average number of prostitutes per project was 665. She then multiplied that figure by 120, the total number of projects on her mailing list, to get an estimate of 79,800. This total includes women, men, and transgender women and men sex workers in the UK.

Kinnell notes there are obvious problems with this particular Fermi problem: the centres responding might be larger than most, some sex workers might use more than one centre. She finds it strange that number - ten years old, a huge estimate, and taken out of context - is still quoted. "The figure was picked up by all kinds of people and quoted with great confidence but I was never myself at all confident about it. I felt it could be higher, but it also could have been lower."

Meanwhile data from the UK Network of Sex Work Projects (UKNSWP) records an estimate of 17,081 sex workers in some kind of contact with centres. Of these 4178 - about 24% - work on the street. A larger total for all sex workers was 48,393. More recent, and rather lower, than the 1999 estimate. So if the trafficking hype is correct, that would make anywhere from one in 12 to as high as one in 2 sex workers in the UK the victim of trafficking.

Let's go back to the paper which kicked this all off, the one that estimated a range of 142 to 1,420 trafficked sex workers in the UK. Now, a note about that number: it included not only women who were trafficked against their will, but also women who willingly arrived (perhaps illegally) to the UK for sex work. In other words, Kelly and Regan’s total included both unwilling and willing sex migrants.

Part of the problem is how different groups define “trafficked”. Some assume that if someone is not British and is working in the sex trade, she must be trafficked. That’s quite a leap in logic! Hold on a sec - I was born abroad. And I worked in the sex trade. Does that mean they count me as "trafficked"? WTF?

The Poppy Project reported in 2004 that 80% of prostitutes in London flats were foreign-born. But there is no evidence that those women were trafficked or that this high proportion of foreign sex workers to natives is true of the entire UK. (In fact, evidence puts the UK-wide proportion closer to 37%.)

‘Foreign-born’ also includes citizens of other EU countries, who have the automatic right to live and work in the UK. Eaves, the organisation that includes the Poppy Project, did an interesting nip-and-tuck on reporting the origins of women working in the sex trade in London. In their 2004 report Sex In the City [pdf], they claimed 25% of women working in London were from Eastern Europe. But look closer - they have classified Italy and Greece as “Eastern European” countries.

Why? Well, the reason is given that “because these ethnicities are often used to code women from the Balkan region, advised by pimps and traffickers to lie about their ethnicity to avoid immigration issues.” Hey, my dad is Italian... if I said this to a researcher, does that mean they would assume I'm really Eastern European? That violates the second principle of the realistic estimate: show your work clearly. It’s the kind of sloppy calculation that throws all subsequent conclusions into question. It's bad Fermi.

So if some people who come here voluntarily can be erroneously called “trafficked,” then what is “trafficking”, exactly? The Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, part of the 2000 UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime defines ‘trafficking’ as

…the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

In other words, illegal migration for purposes of economic advantage, if undertaken willingly, is not trafficking. If nothing else, it's worth remembering the excellent analogy offered by Charlie Glickman:

Sex work is to Trafficking as Consensual Sex is to Rape.

Just because rape exists (and is rightly both reviled and illegal), that doesn't mean banning sex would solve any problems. What Glickman's statement encapsulates so brilliantly is that while trafficking occurs within sex work, that in and of itself is no good reason to either equate the two, or to ban sex work. Pumping up the trafficking numbers might be great for getting media attention, but it does nothing to solve the real problems of people who are really trafficked.

Claiming huge numbers of trafficked sex slaves where they do not exist distracts attention and resources from the (far smaller) number of people forced into sex who genuinely need assistance. And I for one think inflating a problem is not only unethical, it's dangerous to real victims. Let's get our terminology right, at the very least. Let's start with realistic research and maybe someday we'll get realistic results.

Sex + Sport = Trafficking Hype

There's a lot to be said on the subject of trafficking in general, and in the UK in particular. First off I'd like to link two excellent articles on the topic by investigative journalist Nick Davies as a primer on how the trafficking numbers get blown out of all proportion, and the result: Anatomy of a moral panic, and Inquiry fails to find single trafficker.

For some, the word trafficking evokes scenes of beaten and smuggled women a la The Wire. For others, the image most strongly associated with trafficking is that of the drowned Chinese immigrants of the Morecambe Bay disaster. And for a special few, trafficking invokes the opportunity to attach their agenda to international events... particularly sporting events.

So what's the connection between high-profile sporting events and trafficking - is there even evidence for a connection at all?

One hardly ever sees mention of prostitution anymore where human sex trafficking is not also invoked. It's bizarre, this assumption that the vast majority of men are not only paying for sex, but willing to pay for sex with unwilling partners. Says a lot about what the people making these assumptions think of men, I guess.

“Aids and HIV warning to South Africa World Cup fans” featured prominently on the BBC website in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. The warnings were widespread, not only in the UK, but all over the world. They implied that with the upcoming football tournament, not only were prostitutes preying on innocent fans of footy, but pimps and smugglers were ramping up the trade in sex slavery as well.

According to reports seeded by social work groups and charities, some 40,000 prostitutes were set to arrive in South Africa, many of them trafficked – coincidentally, the identical number that had been predicted (but never materialised) for Germany’s World Cup in 2006. Expect to see similar, if not identical, numbers "projected" in advance of the 2012 London Olympics.

With the expected number of fans going to the World Cup in South Africa estimated at 450,000, that just doesn’t pass the sniff test. One working girl for every 11 people at the World Cup? Wow. That’s hospitality provision on a level Premier League teams’ Christmas parties would envy! And tying these numbers together with anti-trafficking efforts, well, that's powerful stuff. It's basically saying that out of any coachload of supporters turning up to watch the matches, several would have been paying to have sex with unwilling partners  smuggled in to South Africa.

Now, I've never been a big football fan myself, but implying that a large percentage of them are active endorsers of sex slavery? Stretches the bounds of credibility juuuuust a little bit too far for me.

As it happens, the claim about widespread sex tourism was refuted several months later when a UN Population Fund report showed sex workers’ activity didn’t go up at all. Prostitution was not affected. Neither was trafficking

But the propaganda machine continues apace.

Early 2011 saw reports of the tens of thousands of women who were “expected” to be trafficked into Dallas for the Super Bowl. The projected numbers were identical to those supposed to have been trafficked for the World Cup in South Africa, the Ryder Cup in Wales, the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. In every one of these examples, the projections have neither been supported by evidence beforehand nor proven to have happened afterwards. And yet the usual suspects keep trotting them out the same stories and the same numbers anyway. With the London Olympics on their way, conferences and fundraising events are already popping up to ‘raise awareness’ of trafficking issues.

Where does this come from? The consistency points to a well-organised and well-funded campaign to keep bringing the same arguments around again, hogging column inches while the reality goes largely unreported.

Several agendas are involved, without doubt. But one in particular is a strategy devised by Hunt Alternatives Fund to make sure sex for money is presented as badly as possible. And they use celebrities and writers of headlines to do so.

But who exactly are Hunt Alternatives Fund, and what's their agenda? As ever, that's a topic for another time.