trafficking

I have objected to the use of the word myth to describe how trafficking is talked about nowadays. Myth implies fabrication, whereas I describe what’s going on as exaggeration, reductionism, over-simplification, stubborn refusal to recognise diversity and victimisation.

Here is a piece of trafficking news in which victims of the crime spoke up and got themselves rescued. Authentic victims who simultaneously acted to take control of their own lives:

Before the raid, one of the seven women had managed to contact the Thai Embassy in Spain and complained that herself and the others were forced into working as prostitutes at the club.

I am not saying this is always possible, but it illustrates how victims can and do act to help themselves. In the terrifying versions of the story told so often nowadays, traffickers exercise total control over sex slaves’ lives. But most sex jobs cannot involve guards remaining beside victims full-time, since the work they are meant to do involves private sex with customers. This Thai-Spanish story illustrates that Great White Rescuers are not always required and that third-world women are not so helpless and ignorant as the rescuers usually imply. Note that the women have also filed complaints against the trafficker back in Thailand.

Spanish sex ring exposed

29 August 2010, Bangkok Post

The Anti-Human Trafficking Division (AHTD) police have arrested a Thai man who is accused of luring seven Thai women into prostitution in Spain. . . allegedly sending seven women to work as sex workers at a night club in Spain’s northern city of Burgos.

The Thai Embassy in Madrid had alerted Spanish police to the suspected forced prostitution at La Boheme, the club, where 20 people, including the seven Thai women, were later rescued in a police raid earlier this year, said Pol Lt Gen Thangai. A Thai woman identified as Jinda Khetwat, who owned the club, fled before police arrived, he said.

Before the raid, one of the seven women had managed to contact the Thai Embassy in Spain and complained that herself and the others were forced into working as prostitutes at the club.

The AHTD investigation showed Mr Noppadon had lured the women to work at the club by telling them they would work as traditional Thai massage therapists. He had arranged their trips to Spain, including finding Thai men to be registered as their husbands to convince officials at Spain’s embassy in Bangkok they were newly married couples on a honeymoon trip to Spain.

Four victims have lodged complaints against Mr Noppadon, and his wife has been arrested in Spain, said the police.

A Spanish newspaper confirmed this story last November, by the way:

Ellas denunciaron: Al parecer, fueron las propias víctimas las que lograron hacer llegar la denuncia de estos hechos hasta la Policía, que desarticuló la parte ‘burgalesa’ de la trama. . . Estos hechos fueron puestos en conocimiento de la embajada del país de procedencia de las mujeres y posteriormente se procedió a la inspección del local. Diario de Burgos, noviembre 2009

All week people have been sending me a news story whose source is a press release from the Spanish National Police claiming another triumph in the crusade against sex trafficking. In the years I lived in Spain such stories of breaking up gangster networks were published continuously - so often that I wondered why police didn’t soften the claim. The implication was, and is, that endless police actions are necessary against an infinite number of organised trafficking rings. The possibility that police are not actually breaking up rings but rather taking down a few organisers and lots of undocumented migrants is not mentioned. The theory and practice of policing of this social problem is crude and ineffective, like sticking a finger in a leaky dam.

The Policía Nacional, in charge of keeping smuggled migrants and smuggled drugs out of Spain, issue press releases to advertise successful operations. The investigation in question led to picking up both undocumented migrants and people moving them around the country, finding them jobs and making money off them - whether you call them traffickers, entrepreneurs, fixers or pimps. The fixing they do is standard in migration settings and can be done abusively or in a normal, businesslike way, whether the migrants work selling sex or doing some other job and whether they are men, women or transgender. As the police acknowledged, many of the migrants admitted they knew what sort of work they would be doing in Spain.

Of course it’s crap when migrants have been misled about the conditions they’ll have for living and working and feel trapped. The press release referred to the squalid flats some migrants were living in. Look at the police video and judge for yourself ow demonic it looks. The narrator says migrants had to give 50% of their earnings to the people in charge plus pay for food and lodging. It’s a bad deal but it isn’t slavery and it is not unusual amongst undocumented migrants. The debt mentioned, €4 000, is also not a high amount for a trip from Brazil, where most of the migrants were said to come.

This Spanish press release relates how police captured members of a network dealing with (and in) men rather than women. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t such networks before, or that smuggling rings are all gender-specific, or that things are really getting bad when men begin to be treated like women.

It also doesn’t mean something specially demonic is going on because drugs are mentioned -the Policía Nacional are also charged with stopping drug trafficking, remember, so they mention any they find. The presence of viagra makes the scenario sound more titillating and sex-slavey, but I think one can understand that drug in the same way one can understand alcohol, hash and cocaine in these settings - substances some people use to feel better or more capable of performing or enduring unpleasantness or having fun. Without knowing how many of the migrants complained that these drugs were forced on them or that they were not allowed to sleep, we might refrain from getting all het up.

Police interrogations of migrants picked up in raids tend towards fruitlessness and dodgy information. Undocumented people want to avoid being deported at all cost. The police want to find traffickers above all. The atmosphere is conducive to telling a certain kind of story of ignorance and victimisation: interrogations are not moments for the detained to strongly assert agency about buying false documents, selling sex or taking drugs.

This ring-bust might be a significant one, there’s no way to know. The proliferation of the limited, exciting-sounding information from a single press release into all the major media, treating it as Big Terrible Urgent news is about the Internet - not journalism, or not what we used to think of as journalism. An egregious example comes from Diario Vasco: Prostitutos forzosos 24 horas a base de viagra (prostitutes forced 24 hours with viagra), followed by the typical thoughtless cliché Venían con la promesa de ser bailarines o ejercer la prostitución de alto ’standing’, pero vivían hacinados y explotados.

So, could this be a particularly bad trafficking story? Maybe, but I doubt it. Does it deserve all the hullaballoo it’s getting? Definitely not.

If you didn’t read the comments on my recent post about Important Enemies you really should. Nearly every one is interesting, thoughtful or nutty-entertaining, far from the tedious comments often heard at places like the Guardian. No, this was an authentic conversation with drama. My original idea was to have a section on my cv where important slag-offs would be listed, but the latest characterisation of my work is quite wonderful. In a round-up review of several recent books on the sex industry, Ken Plummer has called me an Intellectual Feminist Maverick after finishing up his take on Jeffreys’s Industrial Vagina:

Of course, I think [Jeffreys] is over the top and lacks some subtlety – but that is often what is needed so that the big issues can be seen. . . she would make a great starting point in a classroom and elsewhere for a debate on these issues.

But then, immediately, one needs to read the work of Laura Agustín as a counterpoint. Laura María Agustín is an intellectual feminist maverick who seeks to deconstruct the entire field and challenge much thinking. In Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, she draws from years of researching and thinking about the position of women travelling in the global economy, many of whom engage in various forms of ‘selling sex’. Much of what Jeffreys claims, I guess Agustín would dismiss as myth. At the core of her argument is the idea that migrants often make ‘personal choices’ to travel and work in the sex industry. Her specific interests though are not with groups like street workers but with migration and trafficking. She sees them as a part of a dynamic global economy; and one where often the sex control industry makes the situation worse, not better, for them. Indeed the core of this book is an attack upon the ‘rescue industry’, which ostensibly has a long history of ‘saving women’ while in fact it is driven by a ‘feminist fundamentalism’ which frequently and actually harms women. This book is reviewed elsewhere in Sexualities (Vol. 12, no. 6) and her ideas are developed in a special issue of Sexualities in 2007 (Vol 19, no. 4). But it has to be mentioned again here. She problematizes the whole area of those who work to help these women – and who place them ‘in need’. She advocates listening to the voices of the migrant women. Between the work of Agustín and Jeffreys there is a major and long-standing feminist tension at work on many levels.

The only thing I’d take exception to is Plummer’s guess that I’d call Jeffreys’s ideas ‘myth’. Numerous reviewers of my work use this word, but I personally don’t. To me, myth makes it sound as though I think fundamentalist feminist ideas about trafficking are fabrication, which isn’t right. Instead, I see those ideas as gender ideology and a campaign strategy: change the language, reduce complexity to a simple, quickly comprehensible type, hold fast to the line. I don’t think the world is a happy, unsexist place, that globalisation is fair, that no one is ever made miserable by migration or sex work or any other simplistic thing. The long-standing tension Plummer mentions is between a hard-line reductionist (or totalising) view of women as always exploited and a nuanced and doubting view that wants to recognise as much female agency as possible, on principle.

The excerpt is from ‘A Round Up of Some Recent Books on Prostitution and Sex Work’, by Ken Plummer. Sexualities 13(3): 394-400, (2010).

Running a website with erotic advertisements as sex trafficking: the mind boggles at how anything connected to the sex industry can now be given the scary label trafficking.

In the USA, where Craigslist is headquartered, the website’s advertisements for paid sex are causing a furore amongst moral entrepreneurs who want the ads stopped on the grounds that ‘child sex trafficking’ is going on. Craigslist and the sex trade shows a cnn reporter attempting to make the owner of Craigslist himself personally responsible, pointing at ads, challenging him to explain. Some of this resembles scapegoating, the desire to find a single responsible villain for a Great Social Evil, implying that stopping this advertising would be a significant battle against it.

The fear fueling this campaign is captured in one NGO’s statement that An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. This figure is not even an irresponsibly extrapolated number of victims, which we are now used to, but an estimate of how many might be vulnerable. The cnn reporter describes the torso-photo in one ad as young-looking. Such imaginings are not the basis for policy! And note that where there would have been a distinction in terms not long ago (commercial sexual exploitation v trafficking), now there is not. Everything becomes trafficking.

The argument against stopping all commercial sex ads centres on freedom of expression/information, a key principle in human rights law. This principle takes in written, oral and print media, including the Internet, and covers not only the content but the means of expression. Of course there are situations meant to override this freedom, nowadays usually called Hate Speech, the Harm Principle and the Offence Principle. One could certainly make a strong argument that sex ads are harmful if one could prove that all those running them were criminals forcing other people to perform sex acts against their will. To do that would require real evidence, not panicky guesses about young victims. Not scare tactics.

Another aspect of this crusade is about something else: the ‘accusation’ that Craigslist is like Wal-Mart. This appears to be hostility both to big profits and a comparison with Wal-Mart’s unadorned, high-volume, warehouse-like style. Or perhaps it refers more to Wal-Mart’s legendary lack of social consciousness, poor community relations, environmental disinterest, use of badly paid foreign labour and so on. The problem is: Wal-Mart is also enormously popular. Would a personalised boutique style make Craigslist more acceptable?

Some of the ads on Craigslist might be the work of bad people. The ways they might be bad range from taking too much of the money a worker earns right through to kidnapping and slavery. But should the possibility that bad things could happen be allowed to justify shutting down all the ads, including those placed by competent adults? See Amanda Brooks on that.

Classified adverts are the subject of a similar crusade in Spain at the moment. In that case, mainstream newspapers are the accused businesses, but the issue is just the same.

The women in this kind of drawing are often described as prostitutes (or loose women, with the same moral value), which would make all the men potential clients. Is that a useful way to think about this sort of socialising? At the time, patriarchy was an overwhelming determining reality in the Europe pictured. But even so, I think it’s wrong to reduce such a social scene to a one-dimensional story: Men Exploit Women. In the following story, an obviously impressive person (described as ‘one of the world’s most respected legal brains’) talks about trafficking in a similarly unuseful way. My comments in italics interlaced with excerpts from the story, with the emphasis on her implausible assumptions.

Inquiry into sex trafficking in Scotland wants to hear from men who use prostitutes

Annie Brown, 30 June 2010, DailyRecord

An inquiry into sex trafficking in Scotland is asking punters who use prostitutes to talk to them - in secret. Baroness Helena Kennedy, who is heading the probe, said men who buy sex can help build a realistic picture of the extent of the trade.

How, exactly? Does Kennedy imagine they will have more than what is called anecdotal evidence? Or is this about guys who surf escort sites, so she thinks clients will be able to provide numbers of how many sites or escorts or what?

Kennedy said: “I want to hear from these men. I need to hear directly from people who have experiences of trafficking. I think if you want to have a proper sense of the problem, it is better to hear from witnesses themselves directly. It might be they are men who have used prostitutes and they have had an experience where they have been with a woman who was clearly coerced into prostitution. We need help to understand the scope of the problem but those who can do that are often the very people who, through shame or fear, don’t want to step forward. We will guarantee them absolute anonymity.”

The inquiry is into ’sex trafficking’, so why does Kennedy want to talk with clients? As someone who understands legal language she must know that sloppy talk like this is confusing. Or does she think that clients meet people who’ve facilitated migrants travel? And why will talking to a few clients give her an idea of ‘the scope’ of the overall problem? On the contrary it will give her some anecdotes, a few new ideas about how it all works, a couple of leads.

She said: “Senior police officers do think that there has been a shift. Perhaps because men are travelling much more, certainly on stag weekends and buying sex abroad. They are experiencing sex in a more exotic way, activities that they don’t participate in with their wives and partners. It becomes something that they want here.”

This is irresponsible claptrap, castles in the air. Everyone is travelling more, yes. What does experiencing sex in a ‘more exotic way’ mean? Having it with foreigners in a foreign country? What ‘activities’ is she imagining they engage in that they never do in Scotland? And she’s totally guessing that then they ‘want it’ at home - there’s no evidence for that. I’m sure she thinks it’s common sense but it’s just imagination.

The demand for so many different nationalities is perpetuating the horrific trade in human beings. Kennedy said: “This is the underbelly of globalisation. The same things that make global markets work, make black markets work too. You get international crime now in a way that we didn’t have before. Everything is marketable and sadly that includes human beings.”

If Kennedy is doing research, why is she telling us the results beforehand? There is no huge body of evidence proving that men are ‘demanding different nationalities’. Liking the idea of having sex with different sorts of people, maybe?

The size of Scotland is one of the reasons for holding the inquiry here. It will be easier to get a country-wide picture because there are fewer police forces, social work departments and agencies which deal with trafficking. Kennedy said that, contrary to speculation, the inquiry wasn’t rooted in Scotland because we have a disproportionate scale of trafficking. . .

She realises a truly accurate picture is virtually impossible because trafficking is a covert criminal business. She said: “This kind of human rights abuse is like a poison. Trafficking leeches into our society as a whole. We want to identify ways in which it is happening and ensure that weaker members of society aren’t abused in this way.” . .

What does it mean for ‘trafficking’ to leach (not leech!) into society? Again, the results seem preordained.

Different police authorities compete about whose unscientific methods are better - well, why not? It is a Rescue Industry, after all. But many people think, if the numbers were produced by policemen or - gasp, wow - some entity of the UN, they must be better, more scientific, maybe having access to amazing inside information. I have news for everyone, the methodological problems are just as hard to surmount for people working at big institutions as for anyone else (I know lots of these folk, and I myself did some ILO research once). Big money does not mean better methods but even more important does not mean the problems of definition and the inaccessibility of undocumented and stigmatised people go away. There are ethnographic studies of police work, too, that show just how arbitrary and subjective a lot of it is.

The subject here is a report on how many trafficking victims there are in the UK. Both estimates derive from ridiculously crude, subjective and evidence-free methods. Will 10 000 victims in the UK be the new figure to be cited here and yon because a reporter wrote it in a newspaper?

The first estimate is described like this (try not to laugh at the ‘codename’, please):

The study, codenamed Project Acumen, relied on interviews with 254 women in London brothels and extrapolated the remaining national figure using newspaper reports and patchy existing data. It estimates that 17,000 foreign women work in the off-street sex industry but does not give data for the number of women who might be trafficked into street prostitution – or the number of British women that might be trafficked.

Note here that even the police cannot decide whether ‘national’ subjects qualify as ‘trafficked’ or not.

The second estimate goes like this:

The former Conservative MP Anthony Steen, chairman of the Human Trafficking Centre, said he had spoken to senior police officers who know of 2,300 brothels in London alone. “They reckoned that 80 per cent of those working there were from abroad, and they estimated that 4,000 were trafficked. And that was just in London. My view is that the national figure is probably in excess of 10,000.”

Tiresome man, mentioning that oft-debunked 80% figure from a Poppy Project telephone survey. The pretend-clients rang numbers in classified adverts and asked whether sex workers of different nationalities were available. They were told yes, indeed, different nationalities were available. By receptionists seeking to bring the callers in as customers. Poppy researchers then said if they are foreign, chances are they were trafficked. Well, honestly, you wouldn’t want to put that sort of ‘data’ in a number-crunching machine, would you?

From Police report into brothels dismissed as ‘amateurish’ by other amateurs!

It takes all kinds in the gravy train of trafficking research, so I shouldn’t be surprised that newcomers to prostitution and sex-industry issues jump on with a statistical model attempting to prove that the Swedish anti-prostitution law works. They made this thing known after the government published its methodology-and-evidence-free evaluation of the law criminalising the buying of sex.

Niklas Jakobsson and Andreas Kotsadam, of the University of Gothenburg, did it on a blog, with ‘The Law and Economics of International Sex Slavery’, a working paper - a term academics use when they haven’t published an article yet in an academic journal. Journals send contributors’ submissions out to be reviewed by people in the same field; the process, called peer review, is usually double-blind, which means neither writer nor reviewer know the other’s name. This is not always required with a university-published ‘working paper’ (I don’t know whether it was carried out with this paper or not).

The authors engaged briefly with me, Louise Persson and others on Niklas Dougherty’s blog, shortly after Louise and I published an article critiquing the government’s evaluation on Svenska Dagbladet. Niklas queried some of the information claimed by the authors, pointing out the egregious error they committed when accepting erroneous Danish figures on street prostitution - data that was debunked in the Danish parliament last year as well as in the media more recently. I find it inconceivably irresponsible that researchers desiring to present themselves as ’scientific’ would use known false data.

On Niklas’s blog (see comments), I confronted the authors for failing to recognise that the ‘data’ they claim to be using is inherently faulty and therefore unusable. I said

It’s a fantasy to think you can talk about ‘data’ when there is not agreement about who is to be counted. Some counting projects call all women migrants who sell sex trafficked. Others call all undocumented migrants trafficked. some call all women who sell sex trafficked. The numbers come from small ngos and police departments who use different definitions and often admit to being confused.

I also take exception to being given evidence from tiny, super-homogeneous places like Bergen (Norway). Nordic research is about very small places with recent, short histories of in-migration, undocumented migration being even smaller. It is misleading and silly to compare ‘data’ from such sites with whole large countries with long and varied migration histories.

The defensive (and inexperienced) response was to accuse me of being anti-science. This is nonsense. The principle here is known everywhere as Garbage In, Garbage Out: it doesn’t matter how pretty your statistical model looks or what a fancy machine you have to crunch the numbers in if the original information you put in is rubbish, and I am far from the only one to think so. The ’science’ we want to see is honest.

Here is the peer review the authors would have received had their working paper been sent to Paula Thomas, mathematician and statistics analyst in the UK (and if you are cowed by the language, look at the final paragraph).

Comments on The Law and Economics of International Sex Slavery

1. The vector X_i

Only indicative information is given as to what this is. We are told (p12) that it includes population, GDP, migration share (is this immigration only?), heroin seizures and a measure of the rule of law. It would appear that there were other things in the vector but we are not told what they are.

But the main weaknesses here are threefold:-

(a) The use of categorical data

Categorical data is, in my view, dangerous, because:-

(I) It imposes value judgements.

(II) More seriously it obscures the extent of a problem whilst appearing to clarify it.

(II) Is best illustrated using crime figures. London’s Metropolitan Police Service has an excellent crime mapping system. However it does have some weaknesses, and the one that is relevant here is its use of categorical data (fortunately this is mitigated by the use of actual figures as well). My own area went from above average for residential burglary in May 2010 to low for June 2010 on the basis that there were 3 fewer crimes! Do I need to say more?

(b) The lack of any attempt to model (Delta Trafficking), that is the change in trafficking over time.

(c) The lack of any clarity regarding how the weighting variables beta_0 and beta_1 were chosen. In particular doubt must surround beta_1 as it is a single weighting for a whole vector and the elements of the vector have different units, so some dimensional analyses should have been performed.

It would be most helpful if there was a proper ‘methodology’ section explaining the processes used to get the results quoted.

2. The model used

The model is a Logistic regression model the normal formula for which is:-

z=beta_0+sum(from i=1 to n)(beta_{i} x_{i})

Normally this model only applies where the the data are modelled by a binomial distribution.

One question then must be is the data here binomially distributed? This is for the originators of the report to justify.

I also notice the use of a ‘normally distributed error term.’ What error is this term expressing? And how?

Another point is that the variable ‘z’ is not used directly. The probability calculation is:-

P(event=yes)=1/(1-e^-z)

Which indicates the blindingly obvious point that trafficking is not an appropriate z.

The event the variable z gives the probability of must be a yes or no event. Since trafficking is only yes/no on an individual basis (ie the level of trafficking is not yes or no), the model is suspect.

Reviewer’s probable advice to journal: Article not publishable without major revisions.

Media writers are to blame for spreading at least half the misconceptions about trafficking and the sex industry. The London Olympics are two years away but they loom. Prostitutes will flood Essex. Where does the reported ‘information’ come from? Not from any official or researcher but from a social-work campaigner. It’s irresponsible journalism. (I also find the term rape charity unpleasant.)

The other half of the blame goes to people like the campaigner quoted, head of a local rape crisis centre, who appears to want funding to take trips to foreign lands to do ‘research’ where none is necessary. We’ve just had ample and repeated research-based debunkings from South Africa about the threat of trafficking during the World Cup, and nothing happened in Vancouver, either - which this spokesperson admits, but then she cunningly claims the credit goes to people like herself who planned correctly. What nonsense.

Sex trafficking fear as the Games loom

Sarah Calkin, 30 July 2010, The Echo

Prostitutes are expected to flood south Essex during the 2012 Olympics, a rape charity has warned. With the opening ceremony of the Games now less than two years away, experts at the South Essex Rape and Crisis Centre have already begun investigating what can be done to discourage an influx of prostitutes and protect women from being trafficked into the area. Hundreds of athletes and spectators are expected to descend on the county to train and stay for the duration of the Games.

Sheila Coates, director of the centre, based in Thurrock, said: “Research has shown that during large sporting events, sex crime actually increases because of the large number of participants and a lot of people travelling from country to country. Sadly, pimps see that as a way of increasing their income and we will see women trafficked to the area. . . The centre is preparing to research the possible impact and take the necessary steps to mitigate the impact of any increase in sex trafficking and prostitution in the area. We are going to start looking at research available from the winter Olympics in Canada and the World Cup in South Africa to see what the impact may or may not be. In Vancouver it looks like it wasn’t as big a problem as anticipated because they planned for it and planned it out.”

A spokeswoman for Essex Police said the force had not been made aware of any expected problems.

And speaking of panicking-planning early, campaigners in Glasgow have already begun in regard to 2014’s Commonwealth Games.

Before anyone claims these statistics on arrests of traffickers and clients actually mean something, read this, published at The Other Swedish Model the other day.

Swedish sex-buying statistics: What do they mean?

We live in times where crime statistics are often used to try to prove some social theory or another. Swedish police have just announced that lots more people were caught buying sex in Sweden this year. Those who dislike Sweden’s law against buying sexual services might be tempted to say that these statistics somehow prove that the law is dysfunctional (which might suggest it should be scrapped, for instance). Alternatively, those who like the Swedish law might say that these statistics prove that the problem of men buying sex is much huger and scarier than anyone knew before (which might lead to the conclusion that the law should be strengthened, for example). Both guesses would like to correlate two facts but do not prove any cause-effect relationship.

Does the increase mean more people are buying or selling sex? No. It means the government has injected a large amount of money into trying to find customers, pimps, networks, websites and traffickers involved in sex markets. The same happens with any social phenomenon when there’s an influx of money to investigate: investigators find more, which is often interpreted as uncovering a new, more sinister reality.

Swedish police themselves reject any such interpretation. Note, too, that the Skånian statistics are ascribed to surveillance of the Internet that police hadn’t carried out before. Note these numbers describe cases reported, nothing else. We don’t know how many cases had to be thrown out, were completely unfounded, etc etc.

Big increase in prostitution reports

27 Jul 10, The Local

During the first half of 2009 a total of 148 people were reported for paying prostitutes for sex. The number for the same period this year was 770. A large part of the rise – 430 cases – was due to the discovery of a major prostitution ring in Jämtland county, north-western Sweden. But even when these cases are discounted, the figures had more than doubled.

But police said the dramatic increase was probably not due to a sudden rise in the number of men visiting prostitutes. Rather, they credit increased measures to tackle prostitution and human trafficking. An extra 40 million kronor has been allocated this year to pay for training and strengthening of the police’s operations against the sex trade. “The figures are absolutely a result of the fact that the police have been given the means to dive deep into this,” said Chief Inspector Kajsa Wahlberg, who advises the government on human trafficking issues.

The national pattern was reflected in Sweden’s major cities. In Skåne, which includes Malmö, some 20 cases of paying for sex were reported during the whole of 2009. So far this year, 50 cases have been reported. There, the extra money has been used to increase internet monitoring of the sex trade, which has resulted both in more reports of people paying for sex and in a fall in street prostitution.

Västra Götaland, which includes Gothenburg, also saw a big increase in reports: “I wouldn’t say that everything is hunky-dory. But it’s a big increase and it’s clear that we can be pleased with the good results,” said Mats Palmgren, deputy head of the police in greater Gothenburg.

More and more people who understand that research requires methodology are examining reports on trafficking. This critique comes from Marlise Richter in South Africa.

South African research report on trafficking flawed

South Africa’s premier social science institute, the Human Sciences Research Council, released a report in March 2010 on human trafficking in South Africa.  A consortium of researchers and academics compiled the report, Tsireledzani: understanding the dimensions of human trafficking in Southern Africa, claiming it to be ‘the first comprehensive assessment of human trafficking in South Africa’. A recent article by me (Marlise Richter) and Chandré Gould* discusses problems with the HSRC report, including unrealistic and unreasonable terms of reference, problematic research methods and unsubstantiated claims.

Specifically:

• Very little information is provided about methods used,
• No clear presentation of the data,
• No indication of whether information has been verified for accuracy.

It is therefore difficult to know what one can trust in the report and what is mere scare-mongering. Through over-generalised claims that support popular and often xenophobic perceptions, the report provides the illusion that the researchers have uncovered a clear and comprehensive picture of the situation of trafficking in South Africa. This was misleading and dangerous at a time when people were worried about trafficking to the 2010 FIFA World Cup - an opportunity to shape meaningful legislation for victims of trafficking.

We called on the HSRC to retract the report and its findings but have had no response.

Marlise Richter is PhD Candidate, International Centre for Reproductive Health, Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ghent University, Belgium and Visiting Researcher: Forced Migration Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

* ‘Of Nigerians, albinos, satanists and anecdotes: A critical review of the HSRC report on human trafficking.’ Chandré Gould, Marlise Richter and Ingrid Palmary. SA Crime Quarterly , No 32, June 2010, pp 27-45.