The amount spent by US government to fight trafficking in 2010: $109 517 783. I realise that may look small compared to some other egregious spending, like military, but then some of us would say there is a distinctly military resemblance in much of the trafficking spending. Note how the money is spread around different agencies, below.

I see that when CdeBaca claimed he had only $25 million to spend (and therefore could not be expected to address root causes of the problem), he was talking about spending in the US only. That was certainly not clear when he said it, in the midst of a rousing description of international interventions. 

Is $109 million a large enough amount to consider spending some of it on other things than catching traffickers, rescuing victims and training police officers? Why not?

Note also that the chart showing what types of trafficking programmes focus on (labour or sex) only shows what they may do – not what they do do. So we don’t know how much of programmes allowed to focus on both labour and sex actually only focus on sex.

Taxpayers: any happier now that you know the details?

PS: I removed the decorative banner at the top of this thing: the cliché of accusing eyes will not be seen on this blog if I can help it.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist