Guess a way to guess numbers of trafficking victims and win a big prize!

The Monty Python team have entered the anti-trafficking field. They must have, as who else would draft an initiative as daft as this one from the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking?

As everyone knows, it’s impossible to know how many people are real trafficked victims (they didn’t register with anyone at the border, remember). Year after year institutions claim they have got the right numbers and year after year the figures are debunked. The high-end figure I mentioned the other day – 27 million slaves worldwide – changes the terms of the guessing game to include vast new groups of people.

When the game announcement was sent around my networks yesterday, all sorts of suggestions were made: fill a jar with beans and ask someone to guess the number, count every third person that passes your window over a certain period, make up a fancy algorithm, put a keyboard in your mouth and bite down and so on. I’ve commented on some of the nuttiest lines in orange, which seems an appropriately circus-y colour.

UNIAP announces second round of human trafficking estimates competition

The UNIAP Human Trafficking Estimates Competition is a revolutionary step forward in our tackling of human trafficking and determining the prevalence of human trafficking. Revolutionary? Tackling?

UNIAP is looking for innovative, creative methodologies to estimate the number of trafficking victims, traffickers, or profits in or from Asia that are logical, feasible, and defendable. We are hoping to engage innovative, rigorous thinking find a way to get the numbers that the anti-trafficking community so desperately needs. Desperately? Could that be because so much money is spent on this with so little to show for it?

Despite the underground and clandestine nature of human trafficking, UNIAP believes it IS possible to estimate the magnitude of the crime. Ta-da! Belief is everything.

The Competition Challenges are:

Challenge 1: Estimate the number of trafficking victims within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.”

Challenge 2: Estimate the number of traffickers within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.” Not only victims, then.

Challenge 3: Estimate the amount of financial profit made by trafficking-related criminal activities within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.” These estimates might be the most fantastic of all.

What do you get if you win? The best entries will be short-listed by a panel of independent judges. Who? Maybe Emma Thompson? Ashton Kutcher?

Soon afterward, each short-listed entry will be brought to a final judging competition in Bangkok, to defend their approach in front of a panel of independent judges and audience. (Translation support will be available for Mekong languages). Oh! It’s a Reality Show! The best sales pitch wins! I’ll bet they televise it.

The winners will receive prizes (and glory!), but more importantly: Top entries will be published and disseminated globally, and Funding ($40,000 US) will be provided to pilot the top methodologies in the field.

How To Enter: see the Python website. Go on – put a keypunch machine on your head and see what number appears as you walk around during a six-hour period.

I know – this is impossibly silly. That’s how desperate they are.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

18 thoughts on “Guess a way to guess numbers of trafficking victims and win a big prize!

  1. Kris

    It is difficult indeed to estimate the number of people in slavery or in forced prostitution.

    In the Netherlands you hear a lot of negative stories about De Wallen in Amsterdam. It is reportedly impossible to work there independently without being extorted. There work some 400-600 prostitutes in that area. If you estimate that at least half are forced, then you arrive at 200 forced prostitutes on De Wallen. Reportedly the large majority of forced prostitutes in Amsterdam work on De Wallen, so I say that there are 200 forced prostitutes in Amsterdam at least. Roughly 16-20% of all forced prostitutes in the Netherlands work in Amsterdam. So you can extrapolate the 200 forced prostitutes in Amsterdam to say: 1000. So there are a 1000 forced prostitutes in the Netherlands, at any moment.

    Now I assume that the situation in the rest of the world is the same. The Netherlands has 16,7 million inhabitants. The world around 7 billion. So 7 billion divided by 16,7 million times 1000 forced prostitutes = (approximately) 420000 forced prostitutes worldwide, at east moment.

    But I guess this is just a hunch. :-P

    Reply
  2. Maggie McNeill

    I’m actually glad for things like this; the more absurd the guesses and the more obviously fabricated the methodologies, the sooner the day will arrive that no reasonable person will be able to accept any of this nonsense as valid.

    Reply
  3. Andrew hunter

    UNIAPs previous method of making up a figure, announcing it at a workshop, sending it in a press release then using the newspaper article in a footnote of UN documents is how they currently prove figures…

    What I find fascinating with insider knowledge is that they did an excellent new method at the Thai Cambodian border crossing where every cambodian deported from thailand is processed. They interviewed a huge random sample over a period of months. They interviewed twice the number the statisticians told them they needed for a 95% confidence. Over 1000 in depth interviews.

    Problem was they didn’t find nearly enough people. They found the vast majority of people who met the Palermo definition were men forced onto fishing boats, followed by women and men in construction, followed by women into farming. No child sex slaves, 2 women who met the definition of trafficked into the sex industry (but who qualified this by saying they would do it again) and only 2 other sex workers.

    So they proved that the global centre of the evil trafficking of women and children into sexual slavery does not exist.

    Then the UN and government partners of UNIAP must have realized this would turn of the funding tap, so study suppressed.

    So i assume if the contest doesnt come up with a way to prove enough slaves to get the millions of dollars, UNIAPs previous method of making up a figure, announcing it at a workshop, sending it in a press release then using the newspaper article in a footnote of UN documents will come back into vogue….

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      they didn’t find sex trafficked victims but also did they not find large numbers of any sort of victims? do you mean palermo trafficking? did they count palermo smuggling?

      Reply
  4. Andrew hunter

    I only got to look at it once. Publication has been suppressed. I was only told about Palermo,definition of trafficking.

    All mumbers of women were much lower than expected. The surprise to them was the number of men trafficked into fishing. But I forget what it was….
    But we’ve been telling trafficking cops in pattaya to get a boat for years and head out to all the ships you see from the shore fishing every night…..
    Dead fishermen wash up,quite regularly on Thai and Malaysian beaches and islands from desperate guys jumping overboard and trying to swim.
    But I think it’s not sexy enough to keep,the sex slave money flowing.

    Ending demand for fish is a hard sell I guess…..

    I am going to,try to get someone to let me look at the results PowerPoint again

    Reply
  5. Pingback: Hey DJ is doing UNIAP second round of human trafficking estimates competition….. Jeremy Clarkson style. | Kevin Burctoolla's gaming world

  6. Antonio Lorusso

    Unless there is a “These entries are all s**t, nobody wins” option for the judges then this competition is a farce. Compare and contrast this to the various x-prizes where nobody wins until someone meets objectively verifiable (and useful) conditions. Reminds me of voting – it doesn’t demonstrate anything because SOMEBODY has to win. Even politicians who can’t tell that The Onion is satire.

    Reply
  7. norskgoy

    Reading this i get an instant urge to watch the whole “yes mr primeminister” once again. The most bizarre moment is that after “winning”, then they go out to test it.

    Reply
  8. sam

    They should ashamed for making a “game show out of it”. For the low number that do need help this is sad.

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      That is a very good point. If, instead of claiming millions of victims and getting into game shows, they focused on how to identify the actual real victims, who have a terrible time but do not number in the millions, they would be doing everyone a great service. And they would get a lot of support from people who now distance themselves.

      Reply
  9. Sexworker Marc

    We call it “Delphi-Methode” and it has a Wikipedia entry in German, where its flaws are outlined. This collective guessing method is broadly used and implemented to periodically check out trends in economy and society by asking gatekeeper, experts, leaders or even consumers…

    The wisdom of the crowd is obviously failing, when they are morally misguided.

    Reply
  10. Adam

    Can’t they just have one super-duper organization to track all human exploitation? Then they can have incredibly high statistics. I mean, seriously, capitalism…

    Reply
  11. kerry owens

    Gee, one could only guess at the real numbers. Are you suggesting that we ignore the subject altogether. Sounds like a bunch of posters from “BASE NEO-CON” . Surely no one is that upset about the alledged fabrication of numbers done by an organization that is donor supported.Maybe some of these posters are motivated by the possibility in loss of revenues. I mean ISRAEL herself has been pimping eastern block women since before the” fall of the wall”. But i guess in typical neo-con fashion we go on to blame those who’ve allowed themselves to become victims. And then those with the balls to keep this subject alive in print. So for the sake of argument.Let’s say the numbers are really closer to 25% of what these organizations claim to be. Still not enough to be BOTHERED with?

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      This is a blog. On any given day I highlight some particular story and point; no day makes all the points. Should you be interested in my ideas, take a look at things in more depth. I have never said there is no problem. I suggest ways to address migration policy and employment policy. Stop being silly.

      Reply
  12. Reb Rose

    In 30 years in the sex industry I have never come across a trafficked worker. The closest would be the women whose partners pressure them into sex work to support a drug habit – usually the partners.
    According to a member of the licensing and gaming squad [previously vice] here – Adelaide – in the past 18 years they have only come across 2 women who had been brought into the country illegaly and forced to work in a brothel. Both were returned to their homes and the brothel owners charged.

    The industry that attracks the most trafficked workers is agriculture, but it’s the sex industry that is targetted. Probably because it’s easier to get outraged over people forced into sex work than forced into farm work.
    I believe it comes down to perception – working on a farm has an almost romantic feel to it, whereas being forced into sex work is equated with rape.

    To kerry I’d like to say that making this into some sort of game is offensive to the victims of trafficking, and if you’d bothered to read the article you would know that. But then you wouldn’t get to be all silly and sarcastic would you?
    Anti-trafficking groups need to focus on ALL victims of trafficking, not just the sex industry which makes up the smallest number.
    But who’s going to boycott the results of agriculture?
    Everyone eats, not everyone pays for sex which is why that industry is targetted

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      Your experience is typical, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been other sorts of people all that time that you didn’t happen to meet. That’s the perennial problem, whether there is a panic going on or not. No one meets everyone, and no research will be really representative.

      I don’t even know what the reference to neocon is about!

      Reply

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