Trafficking: Blown out of proportion?

Another post about trafficking. And I am pretty sure simply by saying trafficking you know that I actually talk about the 4% of slaves that are forced into prostituion (instead of the 96% of labour slaves).

Anyhow, a recent move against trafficking in the UK really went the wrong way (found via Glenn Sack's blog).

The Home Office estimates that there are between 6,000 and 18,000 trafficked women and girls being forced to work as prostitutes in the UK.

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The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

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Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

Ouch...in a follow up post, we learn that the officials had a hard time to find any evidence for the thousands of trafficked women at all. Also another interesting comment.

Nikki Adams, for her part, has some ideas about that. She and her organization have defended sex workers in court and attempted to help them in many ways for years. She says that in all that time of helping prostitutes in the United Kingdom, she has encountered a grand total of two who had been coerced into the trade. Her very strong opinion is that essentially all prostitutes engage in sex for hire as their free choice for the purposes of earning an income. That view, of course, accords with the findings (or non-findings) of Operation Parameter Two, the police sweep of houses of prostitution, that found no traffickers whatsoever.

After reading this I was reminded of a similar case in Germany. Googling "trafficking world cup Germany" will get you many results. An example

It has been estimated that some 40,000 women, many under age, will have been be illegally trafficked into Germany for the World cup games. Germany, like most countries, has had a problem of illegal trafficking for some time but what is unusual is the scale of the trafficking and the fact that Germany is making so many plans to encourage it.

In Berlin, close to the Olympic stadium, a new mega-brothel has just opened. Covering some 400 square meters, it houses a health club, restaurants, and some 70 rooms where up to 600 clients a day may be serviced. Similar brothels in Cologne and Dortmund will open before the games begin. Other cities have set up drive-thru centers, nicknamed “ Verrichtungsbox” roughly translated as “performance boxes” where sex will be performed in small cubicles to ensure the anonymity of the clients.

One of many articles. No matter what you heard, the 40,000 under-age trafficked prostitutes where all over the net. Apparently just in the net.

Last summer, lurid headlines claimed that 40,000 women would be smuggled by sex slavers into Germany to be prostituted to World Cup football fans. The truth is very different indeed. Newly unrestricted European Union documents reveal that the German police uncovered just five cases of ‘human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation’ related to the international football tournament.

Despite a huge ‘awareness-raising’ campaign, the setting up of telephone hotlines run by non-governmental organisations, and extra police checks on Germany’s borders, the prostitution scare stories, boosted by an unholy alliance of European left-wingers, feminists, police officers, Christians, the American right and US President George W Bush, have turned out to be pure fiction.

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‘The increase in forced prostitution and human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation during the 2006 World Cup in Germany which was feared by some did not materialise’, concludes one report. ‘There was no sign whatsoever of the alleged 40,000 prostitutes/forced prostitutes - a figure repeatedly reported, also in international media - who were to be brought to Germany for the 2006 World Cup.’

German police officers and border guards stepped up operations in the run-up to and during the World Cup, but the huge effort failed to find the pimps, or their victims, said to be swarming across Europe’s frontiers.

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In contrast to the horror stories involving enslaved Africans, Latin Americans, Asians or Russians, the five were from countries that are members of the EU, or which were soon to be members, and all were entitled to travel freely to Germany; indeed, one was actually a German. Of the others, two were from Bulgaria, one from the Czech Republic, another Hungarian victim was a 20-year-old man.

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‘Fifty-one cases of forced prostitution were discovered, 23 of those were suspicions, 28 cases proved to be cases of forced prostitution’, says the report. ‘However, all these cases, as all calls in general, were not connected to the FIFA World Cup, but to trafficking in general.’

It really makes you wonder where these high numbers come from. Probably not the most reliable sources.