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Lost Boys and the disclaimer about sex-trafficked ‘foreigners’

12 November 2011 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

Those who want to save women and children from sex trafficking have a ready-made excuse every time research shows people have taken up selling sex for their own reasons: Whatever methodology was used for the study could have missed the really enslaved people, the ones in chains in a back bedroom or cellar.

This idea is not informed by quantities of research carried out with migrants who sell sex, including my own, and fails to see how difficult it would be to hide people for long who, by definition, are meeting and interacting with members of the public (as clients) every day, and who cannot provide sexual services while chained up or tied down. Moral crusaders promote the idea that all possible customers are monsters who don’t mind violating slaves, but the majority of those buying sex are not demons and are likely to be disturbed by miserable-looking women and sometimes willing to carry distress messages to the world outside.

The Rescue Industry always transfers the conversation to a discussion of the Worst Cases, avoiding the ambiguous, ambivalent, everyday majority who sell sex – which is the large group of people I insist need more attention. It’s not a question of who’s happy or whether life is fair but of what kinds of proposals are useful to those selling sex, or, if Rescuers are not interested in them, what interventions have a chance of ameliorating injustice and social conflict.

The study discussed by the Village Voice last week is not new but was published in 2008; these are the relevant excerpts commenting on the research methodology.

Lost Boys
Kristen Hinman, The Village Voice, 2 November 2011

. . . Finkelhor’s single caveat: While RDS is efficient in circulating through a broad range of social networks, certain scenarios might elude detection—specifically, foreign children who might be held captive and forbidden to socialize.

. . . “It turns out that the boys were the more effective recruiter of pimped girls than anybody else,” Curtis says. “It’s interesting, because this myth that the pimps have such tight control over the girls, that no one can talk to them, is destroyed by the fact that these boys can talk to them and recruit them and bring them to us. Obviously the pimps couldn’t have that much of a stranglehold on them.”

The same, of course, might be true of the elusive foreign-born contingent Finkelhor mentions.

Curtis and Dank believe there is indeed a foreign subpopulation RDS could not reach. But with no data to draw on, it’s impossible to gauge whether it’s statistically significant or yet another overblown stereotype. . .

So, no evidence means the possibility is still open, but how likely is it that this possibility will involve large numbers of people after years and years now of Rescuers and researchers trying diligently to find them? Not very likely, is the answer. The old cliche about hidden populations is abused easily.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Good intentions: what religions have, right? Nonsense on sex trafficking

26 October 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

 

So a bunch of clergypeople want to stop sex trafficking. Well, their expensive move against Backpage and The Village Voice is silly, and how much does a full-page ad in the New York Times cost these days anyway?

There are no rules of the moral universe because there is no moral universe, even about children and sex, not to mention about the exchange of money for sex. The idea that there is some absolute place where everyone will agree on morality is an illusion held by some people with little imagination, who universalise their own experiences. On top of that fantasy they build campaigns in which all other moral senses are turned into crime, sin and perversity. Shame on these members of the clergy for taking such a cheap shot, for ignoring the subtleties of what many people say about their own experiences with money and sex and for spending precious money on such promotional self-congratulation. Ashton Kutcher is clueless, okay, it is understandable. But the clergy?

There is no universal clergy either, for that matter, so I imagine there are plenty of people employed by institutionalised religions that do not appreciate this advertisement.

To add insult to injury, the Huffington Post, which is rabid on the subject of sex trafficking, has illustrated their story on this clergical error with a repellent photo of Demi Moore, an archtypal white saviour-lady, patronising a brown Indian lady. Rank colonialism, ghastly. Words fail.

–Laura Agustin, the Naked Anthropologist

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Teen prostitutes don’t want to be saved so they must be brainwashed, right?

20 October 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

Psy theories brought to people exchanging sex for money (again) – child prostitution, so-called. We have already seen ludicrous psychologising in reports on Lithuania, and police confusion when migrant sex workers refuse rescue in India and China. Here it’s New York, and a new anti-sex-trafficking division, heaven help us. Law & Order will start a new series for this, mark my words (subcategory of Special Victims). My comments in green.

Teen prostitutes hard to save, cop tells City Council

Alison Bowen, Metro, 19 October 2011

New York City police say they are trying to rescue teens forced into prostitution, only to find that the girls often don’t want their help. A state law enacted last year considers prostitutes under the age of 18 victims, not criminals, and police are encouraged not to charge them with a crime.

But according to Inspector James Capaldo, head of the NYPD’s new anti-sex trafficking division, their efforts to help girls forced into prostitution are often spurned, he told the City Council at a hearing on sex trafficking yesterday.

So far so good, we know this happens all the time. But where do they go with this? To the cheap psychology department.

The teens are often terrified of being punished by their pimp, or they’re brainwashed into thinking he is a boyfriend, said Capaldo. They also often lie and say they are 19. “Sometimes they refuse to talk,” he said. “If it takes a man six weeks to put this woman in a situation, how do we undo that in 46 hours?”

Lots of people refuse to talk to the police all the time, but here we see how Rescuers use that fact to explain their failures. Brainwashing was the explanation heard at the BBC debate in Luxor, and terror-by-pimp is the idea proposed by social workers on an NPR show on child sex trafficking in Nevada. Not to say it never happens but you need to be suspicious when Rescuers need to justify their own jobs. See, this is a new unit on sex trafficking. They even imply that slowness is not their faults because they are undoing brainwashing. And in an age of cuts and Occupy Wall Street – shameful.

The teen prostitutes often advertise their illegal services on Backpage.com, according to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Earlier this year, in Brooklyn, a tip led police to “Jennifer,” 18, who refused to testify against her pimp. Instead, prosecutors found him through a prostitution website. He was charged with sex trafficking.

Is the assumption that a female under 18 is not capable of placing an online ad? Pure infantilisation of women, inexcusable. Check out recent comments from a lot of men assuming that women would be incapable of flying budget airlines to Amsterdam to sell sex and go home again. Excuse me?

Anyway ‘Jennifer’ was 18, so what is this detail doing here? Did Backpage.com force her to place the ad? Gah!

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Youth on the street, selling sex and End Demand

12 August 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

With all the End Demand rhetoric around, it’s hard to remember that the word demand actually means many things. Hunt Alternatives Fund and people like Melissa Farley have put most of their eggs into a basket that makes men who pay money for any kind of sex the single important cause for all injustices and unhappinesses associated with sex work, child prostitution and sexual exploitation.

The issue of young people on the street who have a home somewhere they don’t want to live in – runaways – is always charged because of a widespread refusal to accept that everyone has a sexuality – babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, old people. In a recent discussion about End Demand campaigns in the United States, Johannah Westmacott made an interesting comment about the whole idea of demand. I first met Johannah when we were interviewed for an NPR show in Nevada last year on the topic of child sex trafficking. She is Coordinator for Trafficked Minors at Safe Horizon Streetwork Project in New York.

There are real demands out there that are forcing people (of all ages and genders) into the sex trade and if these demands weren’t there the people would be free to make other choices, and studies show that many people in the commercial sex trade say that if not for these demands they would leave the sex trade tomorrow. The three biggest demands that coerce people unwillingly into trading sex are the demand for safe shelters, affordable housing, and living wage jobs. Also low-threshold and supportive substance abuse treatment, but I’m not aware of that one being included in studies. Almost everyone I know who has participated in any way in the commercial sex trade has listed at least one of these things as the force that pressured them into the sex trade. The whole men demanding sex thing seems like a red herring to me. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it certainly doesn’t happen at the same rate as poverty and homelessness. Why aren’t we trying to impact those demands since they have a much larger influence?

In example, in NYC there are approximately 4,000 unaccompanied homeless youth every single night. The city funds approximately 200 youth shelter beds. We are providing safe, age-appropriate shelter to less than 10% of the youth in our city who need it. When these young people have no safe way of sleeping indoors, and when they have already experienced violence from being on the streets, or when the weather outside is nasty, what choice do we give them for taking care of themselves and sleeping indoors? Maybe the young person is making a choice to go home with someone for the night, but until we actually offer them another option, we can’t judge them for making a forced choice. Decisions are really only as empowered as the options available.

If there were safe, low-threshold, voluntary youth shelters available on demand in NYC to everyone who requested them, without a waiting list involved, it would absolutely impact the number of youth involved in the commercial sex trade. I’m not saying that funding youth shelters would 100% eliminate youth involved in the commercial sex trade, but I am saying that it would be a game-changer. It would probably also be the most cost-effective and efficient way to impact the most number of youth either at-risk for coercion into the sex trade or who are already in the sex trade and want to exit or even take a break. Funding shelters would not only provide an alternative for youth currently in the commercial sex trade, it would also prevent a huge number of youth from feeling pressured to be involved in the first place. Again, I’m not saying 100%, but I really would guess that this impacts the majority of young people trading sex in NYC right now.

It may be noted also that a recent study in Massachusetts found a trend towards greater numbers of homeless among lgbtq youth. One sort of marginalised sexuality can contribute to another, unfortunately. Doesn’t the suggestion that shelters would make a huge difference make sense?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

 

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Child sex trafficking: why statistics should matter to the Rescue Industry

9 July 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

After the other day’s question about Ashton Kutcher’s ability to count, I received messages from people who probably had not visited me before. One person lamented that we are all squabbling. The Daily Beast calls it a feud. Both words minimise, or even belittle, the issue at stake – numbers claimed as victims of child sex trafficking in the US. Someone said Can’t we just all work together to rid the world of this scourge? ‘Together’ is the difficult keyword here, since working on a common cause requires a common understanding of just what constitutes the problem.

But a consultant who earns a fee choosing social causes for celebrities to sponsor and then runs their campaigns feels no such scruples, writing emotively There are a few things in life I know in that ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt’ way. One is that children shouldn’t be sold for sex. Dismissing the idea of getting ‘perfect data’, Maggie Neilson asks Who is supposed to monitor, collect, analyze and disseminate it? Cash-strapped governments? Nonprofit organizations that work their hearts out every day and spend every last penny helping people?

Which sounds lovely and smarmy but misses a couple of key points: 1) Since the US government already plows very large sums into denouncing trafficking and attempting to catch traffickers and to rescue victims, some of the money could be spent on well-run research, in order to make the whole operation more efficient; and 2) Organisations may be ‘non-profit’ but those that run and work in them make salaries, receive employee benefits and enjoy social prestige and the possibility of long careers. They cannot be considered self-sacrificing, and the pennies they are spending don’t come out of their own pockets.

Not to mention that they often don’t help people, whether they spend all their pennies on it or not, which is why I entered this field in the first place long ago and wrote Sex at the Margins and keep up this blog questioning the Rescue Industry.  So I left the following comment on Ms Neilson’s piece (misleadingly titled Setting the Record Straight):

Posted: 7/6/11 by Laura Agustín

If facts don’t matter, if we only guess about the extent of a problem, then we have a good chance of attacking that problem the wrong way. What about the frightened guesses from spies for the US government on those non-existent weapons of mass destruction? How many people have died in that pointless cause?

Helping people in danger is not easy. They don’t all want the same things, or to be saved the same way. That is why a lot of children run away from home in the first place and run away from helping projects, too.

The original estimate said 100,000 to 300,000 children in the US ‘could be at risk’. Everything about the statement is so vague as to be meaningles­s. If you want to Do Something about the risk, then you have to get better informatio­n about exactly which people are at risk and how. And you have to be very careful not to undertake actions that smash up the lives of a lot of people that don’t need the help you are offering – collateral damage, if you will.

Referring to critical thinking as ‘inaction’­, as Neilson does, is a cheap shot. Some of us work hard to get closer to the truth and base ‘helping’ projects on that: it is not inaction, it is not a lack of caring, and I object to its being called that by someone making a good living from the ‘actions’ of clueless crusades.

Do you suppose these writers read the comments people bother to make? I doubt it, but I read mine, and was gratified the other day to receive this one from an anti-trafficking activist:

I like your writing. It is interesting and I think you are after the truth, not whatever will support your point of view. I admire that. nikki junker

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Only playing stupid about sex trafficking? Pull the other one, Ashton

5 July 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 11 comments | print print

December 2010, Luxor

I have found Ashton Kutcher’s behaviour towards the Village Voice tediously adolescent, but I did finally comment on a blog post I doubt Kutcher wrote himself, despite his claim that he only played stupid as an actor. He won’t read the comment himself, either, and, if he did read all the material he boasts about here, why didn’t he run into long-published warnings about the misuse of data on children and trafficking?

Jul 03, 2011
Laura Agustin said…
And in Luxor, did you listen to me on the BBC panel? Or did you pull faces and groan every time I spoke, along with others from Hollywood? Were you interested in any of the issues I brought up, or did you simply ignore them and stand up to repeat the wrong statistic that the average age of entry into prostitution is 13? In order to get big applause? I had been talking about diversity amongst people who travel and sell sex, you changed the topic to bring up the erroneous figure of 13, which, if you have done the research you say you have, you know is simply taken from a single study and being misused horribly. You can’t claim to be knowledgeable about a field if you haven’t read a wide range of research – not emotional stories, not ideological rhetoric. Will you take a look at my book, Sex at the Margins? my blog, which has loads of resources your government agencies will never tell you about?

In the photos, Ashton is playing a role the UN wrote for him and other celebrities: pretending to be an expert. Above, he occupies main stage at an event I’ve described as a revival meeting in Luxor, Egypt, last December. I did not take this picture or witness this particular moment, but I was in Luxor at the same time because the BBC World Service flew me there. Also to play a role, no doubt about that, but is it too much to argue that nearly 20 years of reading, field work, publishing in peer-reviewed journals and successfully defending a phd thesis actually do constitute expertise?

Those are the reasons the BBC invited me to be the lone measured voice on the television debate Can Human Trafficking Be Stopped? which you can view on their website. There you will see the film stars heroically standing up for their cause, but the editors have manipulated the footage, changing the order of events, so you can’t see how Mira Sorvino attacked me personally, or understand that Kutcher stood  to declaim about the average age of entry into prostitution being 13 in response to my remarks about diversity amongst people who sell sex. Sex, lies and videotaping tells more of the story.

Now, because I support the Village Voice in its attempt to put facts in the foreground, I am holding them to the same standard they hold Kutcher to. In their Real Men article, the VV claims The thinly veiled fraud behind the shocking “100,000 to 300,000 child prostitutes” estimate has never been questioned, and that is also not true and a bit arrogant. I exposed the slip about trafficked children versus children at risk almost a year ago in a story about CraigsList, but then I suppose the VV means no Big Players questioned it. Or it means that when the authors googled for sources they didn’t bother to go further than the dozens of repetitive items that come up first simply because they sit on Big Players’ websites: media factories of one sort or another. No amount of seo tweaking can change Google’s inherent bias towards the Big Boys; you won’t find an independent like me at the top.

Kutcher writes

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.  We are working with the State Dept, the Department of Homeland security, and multiple NGO’s.

Isn’t it interesting that both Kutcher and Sorvino (the no-goodwill ambassador for the UN drugs and crime people, on the right in the second photo) place so much faith in the Big Boys – government and police? Kutcher has never spoken to anyone I know, and I know a lot of experts. As for his claim about countless books, maybe that’s because he can’t count.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Moving to Africa to save trafficking victims?

9 April 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 14 comments | print print

AP Photo/Anthony Devlin

Have media reports caused people to believe that there are countless trafficking victims wandering around looking for places to be sheltered? Or if it is potential victims of trafficking they want to help, do people think they will be easy to identify and want to live in a shelter? Have things come to this? No organisation or church is mentioned in relation to the people described in the below story, who presumably moved to Lesotho. Where is the money coming from? Have they friends in Lesotho? What will their migration status be there? I hope this project is less naive than it sounds in this report. The desire to ‘make a difference’ is nice, it’s how to be helpful that is so complicated. Neocolonialism doesn’t begin to explain this story. Although, in searching for photos, I found lots of non-Lesotho folk holding children and of Prince Harry playing with them.

South Texans Move To Africa To Stop Human Trafficking

28 December 2010, Spencer Lubitz, KZTV

Corpus Christi – Tears filled the Corpus Christi Airport Tuesday evening, as family and friends gathered at the airport to bid farewell to a group of local residents moving to South Africa to combat human trafficking. “I just can’t believe it’s finally here,” said Sonya Martinez, the group leader. Excitement exuded from those about to take the 10,000 mile journey to Lesotho. “We’re so anxious and excited just to get on the plane,” said Charles Martinez. “Just to be in Lesotho, I can’t get my mind off of that. It’s exciting.”

The group will be housing and caring for the countless victims of the human trafficking industry, a multi-billion dollar business that revolves around buying and selling people as slaves.

“I am a little excited to go to Africa and help the people where help is needed,” said Maya Martinez, who, at age 13, will join her parents and become the youngest person to make the move. Sonya, who has visited the area in the past, said the children are in dire need of assistance. “They’re just very oppressed, and they’re very unfortunate, and they’re in need. They’re in danger,” said Sonya.

The society’s oppressive nature isn’t enough to deter Sonya’s husband Charles from counting down the days. “I will kiss the ground when I get there, and take a very long nap,” he said. “I’ve been so excited; I haven’t been able to sleep very well.”

This group is just the first wave. Next year, they will be joined by a second group of South Texans who will follow them in making the journey to Southern Africa. Their work will already be cut out for them once they arrive, but they say South Africa is only the first stop, and it’s due to end right back here at home.

“Corpus represents freedom to me,” Sonya said. “I’m just looking forward to going to many different places, but starting with South Africa to help make that dream a reality in other places as well.” In two years, the group will return to establish a similar care center in South Texas. “I am from South Texas, I was born and raised in South Texas,” Sonya said, on the importance of returning to build a local facility. They say they hope to come back with the knowledge to make changes in our own community. “Hopefully make a difference,” Charles said. “That’s all we want to do, is make a difference.” With their suitcase filled with wishes and dreams, they were gone.

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Good news: Strangers Seldom Kidnap Children in New York (a non-trafficking story)

7 April 2011 in migration by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

A reader sent me this story, which I might have missed because it actually doesn’t use any of the scary words we are getting used to: sex trafficking, exploitation, prostituted children. Here instead we hear about runaways, and children taken away by parents, and children safely returned, and low figures for ‘kidnapping’. I like to think both reporter and editor consciously resisted using trafficking in this headline: after all, they could have written Study Undermines Trafficking Fears.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes 18 as the magic moment for becoming adult, thereby reducing teenagers to children who are supposed to be innocent and happy. But teenagers do leave home all over the world, and  sometimes they are running away from something bad and it makes sense to run. Runaways can get into trouble, as a Nevada public radio programme discussed last November, in the wake of an FBI scare initiative with the dumb name Innocence Lost. But sensible people know that adolescence is not the same as childhood and that childhood means different things in different places and times – in terms of the right to work, marry, vote, join the military, drink and have sex. As for selling sex, stories about Poland’s piggies and mall girls and Japan’s compensated dating (enjo kosai) show how conventional that can be amongst teenagers. I can hear some people now saying, no but we are talking about real trafficking, like in West Africa. Well, researchers on supposed child trafficking there have questioned it, too.

This story from The Wall Street Journal should calm a lot of people’s worst fears: few children are abducted / kidnapped / shanghaied / trafficked.

Study Undermines Kidnapping Fears

By Sean Gardiner, 7 April 2011, The Wall Street Journal

The fear that a child could be snatched away by a stranger nags at many parents. But a new report examining cases from last year shows that in New York, it is extraordinarily rare for children to be taken by someone they don’t know. The New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services said Wednesday that 20,309 children were reported missing statewide last year. Just one of them was confirmed to have been abducted by a stranger, the agency reported. The vast majority of the missing children—almost 94% of last year’s total—were runaways. Most of them were teenagers.

The state maintains the Missing and Exploited Children Clearinghouse, a database tracking lost children since 1987. While stranger abductions raise alarm, they are uncommon. A spokeswoman for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said a 2002 Department of Justice study, the most recent national numbers available, showed that of approximately 797,500 children reported missing over the course of a year, 115 were kidnapped by strangers.

In New York, there were 196 reported cases of child abductions statewide last year, less than 1% of all missing-children reports. Of that number, 188 of the kidnappers were family members, and six were family friends. Two cases involved stranger abductions, the report states. But one of the children, reportedly snatched in Broome County, was at a later point determined to be a runaway, a spokesman for the Division of Criminal Justice Services said Wednesday. In the other case, a 14-year-old girl was taken by a middle-age man in Rochester. She was safely recovered.

“While every parent is understandably and rightfully concerned that their child could be abducted, the fact of the matter is that stranger abductions in New York state are, thankfully, rare occurrences,” said Sean Byrne, the division’s acting commissioner. In 4% of the total number of missing children, or 837 cases, the reason for the disappearance was listed as unknown. . . .

. . . While missing-children reports remained essentially flat statewide from 2009 to 2010, there was a 14% spike in New York City. Reports in the city increased to 6,544 last year—the highest number in a decade—from 5,721 in 2009. Paul Browne, spokesman for the New York Police Department, attributed part the increase to better reporting on the part of he approximately 50 officers who work in the NYPD’s Missing Person’s Unit. Mr. Browne said that 96% of the missing-children cases reported to police were eventually closed, generally because the child returned home.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex on Sunday: Taxi queens, English teachers in Korea and Picasso’s soliciting prostitute

2 January 2011 in sundaysex by laura agustin | No comments | print print

On Sundays I stray outside the usual focus of this website into all sorts of sexual, sexy and gender themes I have run across and consider specially interesting. Welcome!

The taxi queens of South Africa, by Iva Skoch at Global Post

In some of the roughest neighborhoods of Cape Town, as minivan taxis line up to pick up kids and take them to school in the morning, drivers or their assistants routinely select a pretty school girl — some as young as 12 years old — who would be their “queen” for the day. She’ll sit in the passenger seat, act as eye candy and be in charge of the stereo, which is widely considered to be a high-status gig. Once declared taxi queen material, the girl is allowed to ride the minibus for free, saving the equivalent of about $1 a day, not an insignificant amount of money for children from impoverished urban neighborhoods.

South Korea: Should Foreign Teachers Be Tested for HIV?, by Emily Rauhala at Time

This summer, a Korean newspaper, the New Daily, ran an exposé on Itaewon, a Seoul nightclub district popular with teachers and tourists. The headline called the area a “loser’s paradise” where Korean women are “ruined.” “Among foreigners in Itaewon clubs, you’ll see that there are almost no decent ones,” said the story’s lone source, Lee Eun-ung, a prominent anti-teacher campaigner. “Black people or southwest Asians especially like to lie about their nationality and approach women saying they’ll teach them English,” he said. But, he warned, they’re only after one thing: “perverted sex.”

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Child trafficking, or kids who leave home, and their pimps and their friends, in Las Vegas

19 November 2010 in trafficking by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

I accepted an invitation to talk about the much-publicised US child-trafficking sweep last week that resulted in lots of arrests of adults and rescues of a small number of people under 18. I wrote about this FBI-led event the other day, and I was initially reluctant to speak on a public-radio show from Las Vegas, Nevada, that seemed to be composed exclusively of crime- and rescue-oriented people. But the producer asked me for suggestions for other speakers, and I was able to get a couple of names to her fast enough, with the result that the panel became reasonably balanced.

Child Prostitution in Nevada, an audio link to the hour-long programme, illustrates four points of view: a court defender of young people caught selling sex, a psychologist who tries to help them feel better, a harm-reduction project for teenagers in New York (Safe Horizons) and me on childhood, migration and sex.

I find the format of such programmes repressive, the taking turns and inability to converse normally with other participants. The public defender seemed to say the word pimp a dozen times, expressing frustration that the girls refuse to denounce any. How can I help them if they won’t give up their exploiters? she wails. How do you know they actually have pimps? I wanted to ask. There could be some classic pimp figures involved, but it is very possible that she is generalising lots of boyfriends, girlfriends, family members and other folk who live with or share the girls’ earnings as pimps whom the girls themselves do not see that way. I doubt that many of them look like the picture above.

A local paper’s news story about the raids illustrates clearly the police focus. Most of those picked up were adults, and they can’t all be traffickers, which makes it obvious that consenting adults carrying out sex-money exchanges are those suffering most from such operations. The article’s title even admits the operation was a sting, and the gallery of arrested faces, one crying, is enough to make one sick: National prostitution sting nets 20 locally.

There are other ways to think about young people who don’t want to stay home, or who can’t, than trafficking, prostitution and pimps: the children tag on this blog provides a few.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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