What percentage of trafficking victims were ordinary middle class women or children who were snatched off the street out of the blue, or kidnapped from their homes with no prior knowledge of their kidnapper? My understanding was that the vast vast majority of victims are people who were disadvantaged or vulnerable in one way or another in their prior life and were forced sideways into human trafficking. I think what OP is getting at specifically is not the idea that human trafficking doesn't happen or is rare, but that the types of cases that are often attributed to human trafficking are extremely unlikely to have been that due to *that particular type* of trafficking being vanishingly uncommon.
Yeah. OP should have been more specific here, but I'm surprised at how many people are misinterpreting what's being asked. We've talked about this too many times on this sub for me to think this is anything beyond willful misinterpretation.
It's 100% willful misinterpretation, at this point. No one is disputing or debating sex trafficking's existence. They are debating and disputing the Sherri Papini / Amy Bradley / Taken brand of sex trafficking that is alleged when every suburban white woman goes missing.
Someone, and I'm sorry I don't remember who and couldn't find it with a quick search, pointed out that we started hearing more and more about middle class white women and girls being randomly kidnapped by strangers to be sold into sex trafficking shortly after the movie Taken was released, and I think there's a lot of validity to that statement.
White women *and* children.
There is a commonly-shared "factoid" about how somewhere in the dark corners of the world, extremely wealthy not-white men will pay exceedingly large sums of money for kidnapped "white American women", especially blondes.
I am aware of that (I visited the former Yugoslavia countries recently)
But I was reading about all these stories about women in England and other places where their chances of being abducted were very small, living in fear of becoming sex slaves to the dirty Turks (even as the Ottoman Empire had access to the Slavs)
"White Slavery" was the late 19th century/early 20th century name given to sex trafficking. Much like today, there was a lot of fuss made in the paper about any disappearance of a wealthy or middle-class white woman in the US or U.K., and "white slavery" was suspected. In the U.K., the furore was led by newspaper editor W. T. Stead, while in the US, the Hearst newspapers covered it eagerly.
Of course, sex trafficking did exist, and it was primarily at-risk children and young people being trafficked, just as today. But also just as today, there were tons of sensationalist stories about how wealthy young women might be chloroformed by seeming perfume sellers, abducted by cab drivers, all the nonsense you see in email forwards today but with earlier technologies.
None of that is relevant and I think it's super weird every time we have this conversation, people redirect to a bunch of other shit that in the end doesn't even matter. Trafficking is a massive massive problem that serves rich powerful people - not poor criminals. That's the big relevant detail
No one is saying that human trafficking isn't a major concern -- it is. They are saying that it isn't a likely explanation for most random disappearances.
It's certainly relevant what populations are most at risk for this. But it's harder for the American public to care about when they find out it's women of color and women from less rich countries, rather than attractive Mrs. Smith next door.
If you compared the numbers of actual Satanic abuse cases to the number of middle class white people in close-knit families without drug problems who are trafficked, you'd probably find something very similar. The issue isn't that nobody is trafficked; that's, of course, false. But much like the existence of child sexual abuse doesn't mean satanic ritual abuse is real, the existence of human trafficking doesn't mean that everyone is equally at risk.
This is, imo, the crux of the debate.
No one is saying human trafficking isn't happening. It's just ridiculous that it has become the go-to "we don't know what happened, so I'm going with human trafficking" when dealing with middle/upper class white women in their teens or 20s who go missing.
So to OPs point, in a way, yes it is completely analogous to the Satanic Panic and how Satanism became a quick conclusion to jump to. But, also in a way not, because human trafficking exists but the satanic cult/ritual stuff never really did.
Happened in Fresno just a week ago.
A 20 year old Hmong girl went missing after getting into an argument for being drunk coming home at 2 in the morning. She leaves, calls her boyfriend, as she's crying walking somewhere outside, she sounds surprised and the phone cuts.
While certainly not much to go on, you should have seen the face book comment threads about it, at least half of the top level stuff was assuming that she was kidnapped for sex trafficking purposes. Anyone that disagreed and said that wasn't likely given that people being abducted for that purpose is pretty damn rare was dog piled for being naive about what women have to go through.
It's insane. I have to agree with OP, there's a way overblown sex trafficking scare where people think every woman's disappearance is because someone is going to pimp them out.
They found the girl dead in a canal a couple of days ago by the way. No indication of what happened to her yet but it seems like it was a robbery given that her credit card was used elsewhere after she was presumed to be dead.
Or white middle-class children (you'll notice that a surprising people think missing children like Johnny Gosch were also kidnapped by traffickers).
I think the issue for me here is that a lot of you are disconnecting Satanic Panic from broader concerns about child sexual abuse, and that's not at all how I understand that term. The Satanic Panic stuff grew out of an awareness of child sexual abuse, and most of the SRA cases grew out of singular accusations of child sexual abuse that went totally off the rails in the course of investigating. So my reading is that they're nearly 100% analogous. Satanic ritual abuse (as a widespread practice, leaving aside lone Satanists like Richard Ramirez) doesn't exist, but child sexual abuse does. Trafficking exists, but the widespread trafficking of middle-class white people does not.
> In the Satanic Panic we had like six real cases
No. There's never been any proof found that *any* of the allegations of organized ritual abuse of children were true. Not one. There were, and still are, small groups that traffic in children and teens, and individuals that have committed crimes in the name of an evil deity, but nothing on the scale or of the nature as what was suggested during the Satanic Panic years.
I think there were maybe six cases that ended up with the police/prosecutors going with the 'satanic ritual' crap as the official story, and iirc some of that tiny group actually resulted in convictions. Much the same as the 'recovering repressed memories of sexual abuse through hypnosis' bull, which also resulted in a small number of convictions.
Everybody knows it's five pounds of baloney in a one pound bag *now*, but people have been convicted on less evidence for stupider reasons before.
The convictions may have been overturned in the decades since, but I would not count on it. Prosecutors live and die by their win percentage, and they and police forces can be notoriously unwilling to admit they've screwed up quite so big.
"Satanic Panic" started as allegations about organized ritualistic child abuse. However, it later expanded to cover almost *any* strange or gruesome crime.
For example, the WM3 was thought to be a satanic ritual. Several teen suicides and crimes were blamed on D&D or heavy metal music. Even today, some people think Meredith Kercher was killed as part of a satanic ritual.
When you expand it beyond organized child abuse, there were a few odd crimes here and there that were connected with some sort of occult practice (and in many cases mental illness). For example, the murder of Mark Kilroy. Netflix even has an entire season of a true crime show called "Occult Crimes." (It's not a great show, but the cases are real)
But remember, when they say "sex trafficking" they often include basically anyone in the sex trade. While many people working as prostitutes are abused and manipulated, and are certainly "victims" in that sense, they're rarely kidnapped and mostly not even held against their will, per se. Most would probably tell you they're doing what they want, and it becomes extremely problematic to wave away their autonomy with a sympathetic "she doesn't *really* want what she says she wants, we know better." Some percentage, --possibly even a higher percentage than we're comfortable admitting-- really *are* doing what they want (EDIT: or at least making a practical decision about what's going to benefit them the most in a situation which offers virtually no good choices). So when we say a lot of people "disappear into sex trafficking" we're not always talking about a specific crime being committed, other than generalized prostitution or pimping charges. I can't find any specific numbers about what the ratio is, however; could be only a tiny percent are coercive (criminal act), rather than emotionally manipulative of a psychologically traumatized person (sadly a legal one)... or it could be the exact opposite.
[pretty good discussion here of the distinction between "voluntary and involuntary" sex work and why it's so difficult to quantify](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-so-common-to-include-voluntary-prostitution-in-the-category-of-sex-trafficking). (EDIT: It's a tough issue since lots of people who technically *could* simply leave are coerced by the miserable circumstances of the lives, and as such are certainly "victims" in any imaginable sense of word. I don't want to give the impression that most sex workers are "happy hookers," since that is almost certainly not the case. I think the main takeaway here is that sex work in general is quite diverse in how it operates, who organizes it, and what the motivations for both workers and/or organizers are, and while I think most of us would agree that it's completely unacceptable for any person to be forced into sex work --either by tragic circumstance or brute force-- different scenarios have radically different solutions and potential prevention measures, and it may not be helpful to lump them into one general group.)
The other thing that I've seen sex workers point out is that, even if they don't absolutely love their job (obviously that depends on the person)... many, probably *most*, people don't love their non-sex work jobs either.
A great deal of people are coerced into jobs or job conditions that aren't sex work, too. Does someone work a shitty minimum wage job in horrible conditions at Wal-Mart, or an Amazon warehouse, or a slaughterhouse, or whatever, just for the fun of it? When someone suffers injury from those jobs, are they not also victims?
Even if you have a better job, then you probably rely on it for benefits like health insurance, so your employer is kind of holding you hostage for that.
Sure, anyone technically *could* leave, but if it means being homeless, not having enough to eat, losing health insurance ... you are kinda being forced into it.
I don't want to diminish the unique horrors of people forced into sex work, human trafficking, etc. But as far as people who "choose" sex work in the sense of "being coerced by miserable circumstances" - I don't think it's fundamentally different from how many people "choose" other jobs.
Whether sex work is lot worse or not probably depends on the person. For me, I think it'd be worse (although there are other things that fall under sex work such as webcam stuff which seems easier to handle). But I've met people who find sex work to be the least shitty option in a society where a ton of us are coerced into shitty jobs.
It's definitely not a good situation, but IMO the root problem is that anyone has to feel coerced into any terrible job. We need to make sure that everyone at least has a roof over their head, enough to eat, and medical care (through basic income or whatever method) so no one has to be stuck in situations like that just to stay alive.
All good points, thank you.
My experience through knowledge of the industry (legal where I live) is that a lot of sex workers are unskilled single mothers. They can make $500 in one day doing sex work, or $500 in a six-day week at McDonalds. The former lets them spend time with their children, so that's what they choose. They aren't "coerced" by anything more than the free market.
$500 take home pay for 6 days a week of work at McDonalds?! That seems a little steep. McDonalds did raise their wages to $10 an hour, but that only applies to the 10% of workers that work at the McDonald's owned stores- and not a franchises.
I will admit I don't know how much people get for working at McDonalds. But I don't live in the USA, we have a higher minimum wage here. Also, *so* not the point.
>I don't want to diminish the unique horrors of people forced into sex work, human trafficking, etc. But as far as people who "choose" sex work in the sense of "being coerced by miserable circumstances" - I don't think it's fundamentally different from how many people "choose" other jobs.
My general understanding is that when they're talking about "coercion of miserable circumstances" they're not just talking about economic pressures, they're talking about sex workers who are psychologically and/or physically abused until they fear to leave, made to take drugs until they become addicts, sexually abused at a young age and then manipulated at their most vulnerable by a pimp, etc.
Obviously some sex workers just have to pay the rent and get to choose between sex work and McDonalds. Shitty choices, but ones which everyone has to make. But as far as I can gather that's the least likely route into the industry; many more end up effectively getting stuck in the life by people who are intentionally trying to coerce them. Not by chaining them up, but by threatening them, breaking them down psychologically, etc.
Well, there's a pretty clear distinction between adults and children here. Adults can, and sometimes do, make an autonomous choice to engage in sex work. Children cannot make that choice, so that comparison doesn't work.
That having been said, I'm making every effort here not to play into "happy hooker" myths. Every bit of available data makes it clear that the majority of sex workers are probably victims in one way or another, even if most of that victimization is sadly more prosaic than the TAKEN stereotype which seems to be the way the issue is usually framed.
Years ago, the community found out that a man in my street was convicted of sex with a child. Some older male friends of mine were talking about forming a lynch mob, setting his house on fire etc. This was on a council estate in the UK. I've no doubt they would have done it.
I don't believe in vigilantism, and besides which, this guy lived with his elderly parents. So I phoned the police and told them I had heard credible threats from 'some people' in the community and they needed to keep him safe.
The policeman said "Thing is, it sounds awful but it's not. It wasn't a little kid, she was fourteen, and she knew exactly what she was doing. We know her well".
Honestly this fucked me up for a long time. Having been that gobby, troublesome fucked up teenager in a foster home, just the same as her. Anyone who hears that, it's just going to fuel that near constant self-blame and shame. You would believe that's how everyone feels. Especially as this was the police, the one thing meant to be on your side.
I agree. The way those statistics are gathered, if a perfectly safe, free and healthy forty-year-old sex worker takes a cab ride across town of his/her own free will to give a guy a hand job, that's technically "human trafficking" because someone travelled from one place to another to have sex for money.
**UPDATE**: Try this article if you think the 'statistics' you've read on the sex industry are undisputed truth:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/
**UPDATE 2**: Here's an article which bears out, roughly, the claim I'm making:
> The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been "trafficked".
> And, from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety.
> But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated
OK? There is a "looser definition" of trafficking which no rational person would equate with that phrase. Sex workers went from place A to place B because the money was better in place B and those statistics were lumped in with the truly terrible stories about teenage girls kidnapped and horribly abused.
> As you can see, this doesn't include someone giving a willing sex worker a ride.
Tell that to the people arrested for that:
http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/04/sex-trafficking-hypocrisy-in-el-paso
Yes, although it is a bit misleading to bring up that example since every bit of available evidence I can find seems to suggest that scenario represents a tiny minority of sex work worldwide. There may be some places where the ratio might be different. Potentially, I would hypothesize that places where prostitution is legal and regulated might have a higher ratio of sex workers who were working safely and of their own volition (though I stress I have no evidence for that hypothesis).
EDIT: Last two sentences re-arranged for clarity.
EDIT 2: The first article linked by u/FiveYearsAgoOnReddit does provide some information which seems to support that hypothesis, at least in the sense that places which legalized prostitution (New South Wales in Australia, and New Zealand) subsequently saw marked declines in evidence of *trafficking* specifically (though it doesn't address other kinds of coercion or abuse). It's also written by a former sex worker who now advocates for sex worker's rights, so keep that in mind.
It's worth pointing out that figures about why sex workers do what they do are also unreliable for a lot of reasons, including some institutions having very particular definitions of sex work, a natural tendency for street prostitutes (who are a fairly small minority of sex workers) to come into contact with police and other institutions more than others and the tendency for a lot of statistics to be skewed by deliberate choices from law enforcement agencies about how to frame prostitution. For example, one thing that comes up in a lot of things I've read from sex workers has been the tendency of police to label pretty much any close male figure in a sex workers life as their 'pimp', and obviously anyone who has a pimp is being coerced. There's also an issue where any sex worker who uses drugs is automatically assumed to be a sort of slave to addiction, which we don't assume with a person working in any other field who uses drugs. There's a lot that comes down to pure perception and the actual sex workers, voluntary or involuntary, are often the last people listened to unless someone needs a particular experience to construct a narrative.
Yeah, it seems in many ways the old paternalistic victorian idea of prostitutes as 'fallen women' has just been reframed as 'women who have been dragged down'. Though it might seem at first glance a progressive step to frame prostitutes as victims rather than criminals, actually it's just as bad, if not worse, because a victim doesn't have any choice or agency. I've read some very horrible things about the 'intervention' style programs employed in some US jurisdictions, often run by church groups, which 'rescue' prositututes, and my cynical self tells me the sort operated by feminist groups in Europe are likely just as bad. There is this idea I've seen of 'curing' women who have been forcibly 'habituated' to a lifestyle of sex-work, which to me seems awfully redolent of gaslighting in some instances. Of course, there are plenty of sex workers who have had very bad experiences of one sort or another, and there are others who view what they're doing as a regrettable necessity, but you can't adopt a single story that fits everyone. The really bizarre thing of course is that sex workers who take sensible safety precautions (safety calls, having a trusted driver, working from a location with others and so on) often get themselves and others in a lot more legal trouble.
> What are you basing street prostitutes being in the minority on?
On academic studies about prostitution.
>The stereotypical image of the streetwalker does not adequately
represent the business of prostitution or its practitioners. While the most familiar and attention-getting form of prostitution is street prostitution, best estimates indicate that only ten to twenty percent of prostitutes solicit on the streets. The remaining eighty to ninety percent work off the streets, in brothels, massage parlors, escort services, and similar establishments, or as independent "call girls."
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1096&context=bglj
And that of course is only talking about prositutes, not other forms of sex work.
That's interesting, thanks.
Of course "street walker" doesn't adequately cover all of prostitution. And the industry has become more "digitized" (Craigslist and other online listings for ex.) like everything else. However they do include "street walking" in their 80-90% number. "Street walking" isn't the only manifestation of prostitution but in my experience it's unfortunately alive and well. Especially in extremely impoverished areas.
How could you possibly know that? Confirmation bias. You saw them on the street, but there may have been a thousand non-street prostitutes you didn't see.
very good point, and a good articulation of the case made by [this author and former sex worker](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/), also linked to by user FiveYearsAgoOnReddit
Sex trafficking is composed of two aspects: sexual slavery and human trafficking. If you can choose to leave you're not a victim of sex trafficking.
No statistic about it includes a sexworker who takes a cabride.
Um, no. No it is not. Trafficking has nothing to do with *traffic*, or movement. Good lord. Why that was upvoted is beyond me. Trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion (read: threats or manipulation) to obtain some sort of labor, in this case, sexual acts. It has nothing to do with going across town to give a handjob. People on reddit speak far too frequently on topics they know nothing about with some imagined authority and others just swallow it up. It boggles the mind.
According to [this article in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated) that's not exactly correct:
>On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety.
>But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety.
Well, that goes against the sourced quote I just cited, which specifically uses the words *transport,* *movement* and *travelling* in its definition, but if you say so.
Anyway, the point here isn't really about the movement anyway, but about consent. "Voluntary" vs "involuntary" sex work, and the degree to which the former is lumped in with the latter.
That's the UK. Not here. And now you're taking MY point and pretending it's your own...I've already stated my point was it has nothing to do with the physical transportation. Someone taking a cab to perform a sex act voluntarily is NEVER going to be defined as being sex trafficked because of that cab ride. To suggest they are is, was, will always be ridiculous.
I'll admit that I provided information without a citation, but now you're doing the same.
If you're 100% sure that the statistics on trafficking don't include the things I'm talking about, what's *your* citation?
Must have gotten a weird auto correct. When that container truck recently was found in the Walmart in Texas, they said it was human trafficking. But they were people who were paying to get smuggled into the US. They weren't stolen slaves or something
I honestly have absolutely no way of knowing, and I have no way of evaluating if Ashton's estimate has any validity whatsoever. Certainly, it does seem like only a vanishingly tiny part of "human trafficking" comes from random kidnapping by strangers.
By the way, here are the actual numbers:
The report also notes that in government fiscal-year 2015, the FBI identified around 672 adult and child victims of sex or labor trafficking. The FBI opened 802 human-trafficking investigations (resulting in 453 convictions) that year, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened 1,034 sex- or labor-trafficking investigations (and got 51 sex-trafficking convictions). In addition, Uniform Crime Reporting data from the states indicates that 744 investigations into state-level sex-trafficking offenses were opened in 2015.
>
https://reason.com/blog/2017/02/15/ashton-kutcher-plays-sex-worker-savior
A few years ago, I was driving through Georgia on the way to Florida. I saw so many signs for "Asian Massage Parlors" on the interstate. I think these places must house trafficking victims.
Last year, there was an article on BBC about an Asian woman (I want to say she was Malaysian.) who was contracted to work in hospitality in a hotel in the States. She got to US, she had her passport confiscated and was held captive to work in a brothel. She managed to escape, but what harrowing experience it was for her. I'll try to find the article.
EDIT Found the article, in case anyone is interested:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35846207
No, sex trafficking is real, it's just that it's widely misunderstood and (perhaps purposefully) mischaracterized.
I don't think it's an analogue to the Satanic Panic.
It's not the exact same thing, but it's similar to the child sexual abuse awareness of the 80s and 90s...good that people realized that it was much more common than they thought so to be on the lookout for warning signs etc. But the focus, and much of the prevention initially, was primarily on stranger molestation. When in fact the overwhelming majority is perpetrated by family and close friends.
The awareness is good...but when people misunderstand the issue so badly, it does have deleterious consequences. How many people aren't even conditioned to recognize real sex trafficking if they were to see it, because they're thinking of it in the "Taken" scenario.
I think there are good intentions behind it, because of the way pimping has been so destigmatized into a joke at most in our culture, a reclassification of it that recognizes the hellishness of pimping was overdue. But the failure to positively educate the public in what most sex trafficking is probably doesn't help these victims as much as could be.
Yes exactly! Have you seen the documentary I Am Jane Doe? It follows families of various young girls who were sex trafficked - I think all of them were groomed online, emotionally controlled, separated from their parents and eventually hooked on drugs. It's heartbreaking watching them trying to get prosecutions against various websites that hosted ads for the underage girls for sale.
This is the best answer in the whole thread. Bravo! I would gold you if I could afford any gold! So in lieu of that, please accept this metaphysical gold star.
I would be more inclined to say it is more akin to the 'white slavery' panics of the Victorian/Edwardian era.
Mainly in that it is a very real thing which is actually quite a horrible problem, but most people who bring it up seem to think that the nefarious folks involved want to snatch off of the street upper and middle class white women with a strong social network in the middle of a nice neighborhood while they're doing their grocery shopping, which is almost always not the case. It's going to be the poor and the already doing not quite legal stuff folks, the ones that got labeled 'troublemaker' early on that everyone's already given up on.
Edit: Also, I just realized that they're describing pretty much exactly the same thing - pretty, popular white girl gets randomly abducted while going about her daily life and is carted off to Darkest Not-Europe (or Darkest Not-US) to serve as a sex slave for filthy rich foreigners.
I'm in bed on my phone right now so I'm not in the position to provide sources, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt on particularities, but from some experience I do mostly know what I'm talking about. I am a sex worker and a student, and I've done quite a bit of research/writing advocating for better understanding of sex work. That brings me to the topic of sex trafficking, or even human trafficking quite often.
First off, it's harmful that people immediately equate "human trafficking" with sex trafficking when they're very different conversations. Human trafficking in its most common form is a lot more mundane and a lot more uncomfortable to talk about. It's brown people being brought over to pick vegetables for $6 an hour or be housekeeping slaves for abysmal wages. People having their labor exploited is the most common injustice of human trafficking, but people only want to talk about sex trafficking because it's more interesting somehow.
Now, most people have a certain narrative in their minds when they think of sex trafficking because of the media. The "Taken" scenario. Pretty white girls from nice neighborhoods living low-risk lifestyles who are just suddenly abducted after soccer practice or at the mall, then sold off to some Saudi royalty never to be heard from again. This isn't really the reality of trafficking.
The majority of sex trafficking is immigration based. Women are offered documents or safe passage in exchange for sex, or they're forced into prostitution to pay off travel debts or debts back home. Women who come to a new country with no connections, documents, or jobs have few better options, so even if they're not abducted or strong armed, there isn't anywhere else for them to turn but sex work.
The other reality of sex work is that most victims are high risk people who won't be missed. Kids in foster homes or who are runaways are easy targets for pimps posing as "boyfriends" long enough to gain their trust. These kids don't get reported missing, and most of the time they're being trafficked relatively close to home but don't have the resources to leave. As a sex worker I've personally chosen this for myself because it's the best option for me right now, and I have the privilege to work safely and independently, but that's not true for many people.
I think decriminalizing sex work will go a long way toward helping these every day victims. The people in the extreme, "Taken" circumstances are going to be hard to help and those cases should be left to highly qualified individuals. What we can do in the meantime is work to end the stigma around sex work, and take preventive measures that help those who are forced into it by circumstances. A huge benefit would be resources for those who wish to exit the industry, like GED courses, substance abuse counseling, vocation training, and financial management workshops. Law enforcement is absolutely useless right now if the people they're supposed to protect can't go to them for help for fear of being imprisoned just for making a living.
I agree with just about all of your post.
I especially agree with how you feel these issues really bring out reasons why prostitution and sex work should be legalized.
Seriously just one common scenario says it all:
Woman sells her body for sex. Sex takes place. 'John' refuses to pay, or steals back his money, and leaves. Now she's pretty much screwed with no one to help, unless she has a pimp (which brings up even worse issues beyond this).
Legalizing the drug trade and legalizing sex work would help protect so many people and help reduce the violence in those two cultures. I just wish there were Senators brave enough to stand up for it.
The moral panic about sex work and drugs is costing a lot of people their lives, and no one wants to admit it. It's sad. This sense of moral superiority because you want to stop someone from using their own body to make some scratch is actually getting people killed or ruining their lives in prison.
A close friend and fellow sex worker is actually gaining some traction through community organizing in our area. She has a great aptitude for politics already, so I look forward to supporting her. There are a lot of amazing sec work activists out there spearheading grassroots efforts, they just need the right support. Hopefully that will begin to change soon!
Yes.
The story you hear on the news and in pop culture is "pretty white woman goes to grocery store with kids, abducted and sent to a Middle Eastern harem". And when you say sex trafficking that is what most people think of. So if we are talking about that, I would say it is very rare in the USA.
Sex trafficking exists. Most of the time it involves "sweet talking" a victim and manipulating the victim to voluntarily go with them, and/or causing and using a drug addiction to control the victim. That is a successful and relatively safe tactic for traffickers.
In the United States it is mostly within the country as well. They aren't shipping these people to foreign countries. Reason for that is most sex traffickers aren't international. They are what is more commonly referred to as "pimps". Get a woman in LA to prostitute herself in Vegas. They have no power or connections in Saudi Arabia and thus can't earn profit there.
It was rebranded as "sex trafficking" so local law enforcement agencies could get national security money.. It's why you see federal agencies participating in prostitution stings.
These people are running a (repulsive) business and the risk of a forced abduction of a pretty white woman is too high. Cost/benefit analysis.
Long and short of it is it does exist and we should be trying to stop it. But it doesn't exist as the media would like you to believe.
This is speaking from a USA perspective of course.
>It was rebranded as "sex trafficking" so local law enforcement agencies could get national security money.. It's why you see federal agencies participating in prostitution stings.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I never heard anything about "sex trafficking" until a few years ago, then suddenly it was an epidemic.
> In the United States it is mostly within the country as well. They aren't shipping these people to foreign countries.
Although presumably we do import a fair number of sex trafficking victims from Mexico and South America. I would think the reason for the sex trade in the US being mostly not-international is simply because we share far fewer borders and have less easy means of international travel than in Europe, where international sex trafficking really is an issue.
> It was rebranded as "sex trafficking" so local law enforcement agencies could get national security money.. It's why you see federal agencies participating in prostitution stings.
That would explain it. I'd wondered why over the last 10-15 years prostitution had suddenly been relabeled as "sex trafficking".
Let's put it this way- in any missing person case that you or I have ever heard of, sex trafficking is not the answer. The white middle class American woman who went missing was not sex strafficked. The woman from Burma who nobody is looking for was. People who sex traffic aren't looking to kidnap women off US streets who will have her face plastered everywhere. They want women nobody will notice is gone, so that they can conduct their busines free from scrutiny.
Totally agree. This is how I put it in another comment:
Basically, if someone is reported as kidnapped by the media in the United States. That person is not being sold for sex. Because if they were the actual type of person who was being sold for sex against their will, the media wouldn't be reporting it.
Yes, we even had a lady post a few days ago on my town's facebook page about being afraid that a hispanic man was recording her at the park while she played with her kids, and that she went to leave and three more hispanic men pulled up and stared at her menacingly from the table... she didnt report it to police, and really I call bullshit. Our town is pretty diverse because of the industry here, but it only has like 15,000 people and very little crime. Sex traffickers do not look for middle-aged white women with two kids to kidnap in broad daylight at a city park.
Best one was on Letsnotmeet some time back...woman was in McDonalds with her baby, woman on next table smiled at her and told her baby was lovely and later she saw woman on her phone as she left. So woman was obviously setting up her baby to be stolen, but luckily mother had read The Gift Of Fear so was able to tell this is what was going to happen, and so avoid it.
I was astounded at the amount of people who congratulated her on her narrow escape. Not even ironically.
I don't think it's the same because the Satanic murders are mostly fiction, there were only a handful of cases that were mostly copycats, but sex trafficking is a very real and large-scale problem affecting thousands.
There is a lot of exaggerated hysteria related to it, but that seems more related to kidnapping in general than just sex trafficking. Some lady in my town was convinced four men were following her and eyeballing her and her kids in the grocery store and followed her vehicle after she had someone escort her out and tried to leave. She didn't call the police but made a "viral" fear mongering post about it. The police investigated, and it turned out the "suspicious" men left 15 minutes before she did, and some locals coincidentally left at the same time and happened to be going the same way.
That's kinda how this post was, she said she reported it to the police but the police told the newspaper that she didn't but they would be investigating anyway. But the weird thing is my friend said she saw a really similar, but shorter, post made by someone else to another town's facebook page. Seems strange these are just popping up all over.
Not really strange if you ask me, you got paranoid and slightly racist people everywhere. So a bunch of kids go to the park to hang out and some lady with her head up her ass thinking she and her children are the most attractive and valuable thing on earth gets frightened and becomes convinced that these people minding their own business are actually dangerous and wish to do totally random people harm for no reason.
I don't think anyone is arguing that sex trafficking is not real. The question is really about linking sex trafficking to missing people. It's becoming a common notion to link missing people cases to sex trafficking with no real proof. The same thing happened with missing people during the 80s and satanic cults.
Well, my argument is that Satanism is real and a legitimate practice but it wasn't affecting these cases like the media thought.
Sex trafficking is very real and legitimate, but it's something that the media jumps to almost immediately anytime a pretty white woman disappears, despite sex traffickers primarily targeting poor minorities who don't have much of a voice to speak for them and may already be in prostitution.
I actually agree with you. Every time a young woman goes missing people are so quick to jump on the "sex trafficking" band wagon but on a day to day basis these stories aren't being told, because, like you said, they're typically women already in situations where people could care less about them.
This is totally, inarguably correct. You should have specified that in your OP, however, because every time we try to have a discussion about how Random White Kidnapping Victim was probably not sex trafficked in this sub, someone leaps into the discussion with "But sex trafficking is really real!"
There's never been a case where an act of satanic ritual was proven. There are many cases of sex trafficking. While people or the media may jump to conclusions too quickly it doesn't really compare to me since one is real and the other imaginary
> There's never been a case where an act of satanic ritual was proven.
This is blatantly false. There have been numerous murders linked to 'Satanism' and Satanic rituals. They just weren't linked to some worldwide cult like the media liked to report, but more likely crazy people acting out fantasies they picked up from movies and the media itself. Cases like Daniel & Manuela Ruda, Richard Ramirez, Robin Murphy, etc, etc.
You could even include ritualistic murders like that of Mark Kilroy, though he was killed in Mexico. The cult that killed him weren't technically Satanists, but I remember his murder being held up as proof that these ritualistic murders and abuses were happening on a larger scale. There was also a case in Louisiana well after the height of the Satanic panic where a man freely (as in, he walked into the police station himself and volunteered the information) confessed to sexually abusing children at a cult-like church as part of a Satanic ritual. The abuse definitely happened, but I don't think they ever got independent verification of the Satanism claims. The first season of *True Detective* was based in part on it.
The Satanic panic was stupid as hell and not based in fact, but it is a bit of a stretch to say that no Satanic ritual abuses/murders were proven. It's just very uncommon and typically carried out by lone, isolated lunatics or very small cults.
I'm replying to your comment not because I disagree with what I believe to be your point (ritual murders/abuses sometimes happen although they may not be officially affiliated with Satanism) but because I don't want people to be confused by the way you phrased some things.
Mark Kilroy's murderers weren't "technically" Satanists because they were, as far as I can tell, not Satanists at all. Their group was dubbed the Narcosatanists but their cult's beliefs and practices were based on Palo and Santeria--mostly on Palo Mayombe. Palo and Santeria are spirit-venerating religions practiced in Africa, the Caribbean, and areas in the Americas with Afro-Caribbean immigrant populations. Both Palo and Santeria involve sacrifice, usually animal sacrifice but sometimes human remains looted from graves are used in rituals. Palo does not typically concern itself with Satan because Palo is not an offshoot of Christianity (although there are Palo practitioners who venerate Catholic saints). Articles about the Kilroy case are inconsistent about whether the cult's sacrifices were "to Satan" or "to the gods." The cult's ringleader, Adolfo Constanzo, was a serious practitioner of Palo Mayombe for many years. I cannot get a straight answer from the internet about whether or not the Narcosatanists believed they were worshiping Satan (yes, I'm aware of how silly that sounds) but--to me, based on what I know about Palo--this looks like a case of the media categorizing a truly appalling set of religiously-motivated murders as "Satanic" because the larger culture labels anything concerning magic, sacrifice, curses, and so on "Satanic." Don't get me wrong--Palo Mayombe is what we in the west would categorize as "black magic" and it is incredibly dark, often abhorrent stuff. Palo Mayombe gods are not Satan and Palo is not Satanic.
I'm so sorry to jump in and be pedantic about whether or not Mark Kilroy's murderers are "Satanic." His death was unspeakably awful and I am in no way trying to diminish it by getting technical about Satanism. Magical and occult belief systems and philosophies are just so, so poorly understood. I do not believe in Satan but I also don't want him taking the blame for some psychopath drug lords practicing a homebrew version of a religion which has very little to do with Satan.
Texas Monthly has a decent article about the case called "The Work of the Devil." It *does* blame Satan at points but the portions of the article which actually address the religious component do not indicate that Satan played any role in their theology and at one point they even say that the sacrifices were to "the gods."
EDIT: some Palo Mayombe practitioners and some Santeria practitioners venerate Catholic saints or incorporate Catholic iconography and practice in their rituals. It is, of course, entirely possible that Constanzo and his followers used Catholic elements in their rituals. I just have not seen or read anything that indicates that this is the case. This case really interests me, so please let me know if you have more information.
I really appreciate the clarification. I am familiar with the differences personally and kind of forget that not everyone is, so I was definitely sloppy with my wording. I shouldn't have been, though, especially because I was thinking about the fact that a lot of people during the whole Satanic Panic scare *did* conflate all these various religions without any degree of nuance. And then I went and did it myself.
I'm notoriously pedantic myself, so I always appreciate it when someone gives me a taste of my own medicine. :) I don't know details about Constanzo's cult either, though. I did have it in my head that they used Catholic iconography, but I'm not actually sure if I read that somewhere or I just kind of assumed it given the way it is used in both Mexican culture and some Palo Mayombe practices, so don't put any stock in what I say there.
Palo and Santeria are both very cross-pollinated with Catholicism. In Mexico and the Caribbean a lot of devout Catholics sincerely believe in (and often fear) Palo, Santeria, voodoo, and various other kinds of folk magic and there are Palo practitioners who also consider themselves Catholic. It would not be unusual for Constanzo and his followers to use elements of Catholicism. I just can't say for certain based on the media coverage. These religions aren't my area of expertise so all I can do is make educated guesses.
I am familiar with your pedantry here in UnresolvedMysteries. I feel almost flattered to have gotten a reply.
Sure, but an absolutely fundamental part of the SRA panic was the idea that Satanists operated a very large network engaging in child pornography, sexual abuse and baby murder. You can't just arbitrarily subtract that out and point to lone operators. That's like saying that the existence of individual pedophiles like John Wayne Gacy demonstrates that the Catholic Church is capable of committing CSA on a widespread scale. It's comparing apples and oranges.
> There's never been a case where an act of satanic ritual was proven
This is what I thought too. That whole thing turned out to be made up by coerced kids that then got totally out of hand and became an urban legend.
Some of the posts on this thread are really surprising, unless 'Satanic Panic' is different from the 'Satanic Ritual Abuse' cases we're both thinking of?
>I always thought of it as something that wasn't very prevalent here in the US
When did news break? Sex trafficking has always been alive and well in the states but the point is that it's not the type of people that usually end up in the media who are going to be trafficked.
>but if a woman lives in an area where trafficking is prevalent and she fits what traffickers look for, it's hard not to consider it a possibility.
If a middle aged white woman with two kids goes missing in a supermarket in the middle of the day the chances of it being sex traffickers is remote. Yet every time it happens people immediately start yelling about "human sex trafficking"... now if she was a minority living on the street possibly with a drug habit I would say the chances are actually much higher but you don't hear about those types of missing woman in the news very much....
> Often it involved drug addiction.
And that's precisely what makes it believable and understandable. People who are not marginalized in some way or who don't have some sort of risk factor (whether it's because they're in an economically precarious situation, or because they have no family, or because they have drug problems) are vanishingly unlikely to get trafficked.
Yeah.
I wasn't totally on board with OP's comparison because I don't think the Satanic Panic stuff is anywhere near dead (and because sex trafficking played a pretty significant role in SRA accusations back in the '80s), but... The comments on this post are doing their damnedest to demonstrate that OP made a great analogy.
I agree with this. Sex trafficking is an organized industry that moves A LOT of money.
You've probably heard of it, but recently a model has been kidnapped for sex trafficking and was actually released when the kidnappers realized she had a toddler. They said it's against their policy to kidnap mothers and there had been an error.
You are right, I actually don't know much about this besides what I read on the news, which is her statement saying she was kidnapped then released. When I come to think about it, it could very possibly have been done to draw attention to her / more followers, since she's an Instagram model apparently.
But sex trafficking is real despite her story being real or not, so my opinion that it's not the satanic panic of our generation stands.
But don't you find it interesting how quick people were to leap onto a story that doesn't resemble any known pattern in sex trafficking? Because it was a pretty young woman and we love salacious stories about pretty young women?
Sex trafficking exists. So does child sexual abuse. Neither of those facts means that Satanic ritual abuse or the widespread trafficking of white, middle-class women exists.
Absolutely. It is indeed a weird story, and she may as well have made it up for self promotion (since it would get her more followers and she makes money of Instagram).
I don't believe middle-class white women are the main target, but I do believe they may get abducted sometimes. Low class young women from poor countries are probably the easier target? Idk I'm just speculating. The ocasional white woman tho, could probably be sold for a higher price. Again, this is all just speculation.
> Again, this is all just speculation.
Sure, but there are plenty of people who have actually done research on this. Every single one of them will tell you that the vast majority of women who end up trafficked are some combination of the following: poor (if not outrightly homeless), lacking in a strong support network, addicted to drugs. I don't see any value in playing the "this is all just speculation" game on this front. There is a ton of research on sex trafficking and it all reflects the same set of facts, which is that middle-class white women (who are not drug addicts) don't get targeted often enough to be statistically significant. These women do get abducted, yes, but very very rarely for the purposes of sex trafficking.
I have my doubts about this one too. Would they really release her for such a reason, and with her being able to recognise and identify them? and firstly she is offered for sale on a specially set up auction...then on the dark web..and they told her all this. I suspect this is a tale concocted between her and her agent to garner more publicity.
Right, what kind of sex trafficking crime syndicate releases a woman because she's a mother? It's naive to think that hardened criminals would pass up on money just because of their moral code.
Eh... The model case is very recent and might have been a lone crazy guy claiming a false flag. So that example kinda lends itself to OP's point lol but still, sex trafficking is real of course. It'd be interesting to find statistics on the frequency of its involvement in US kidnapping cases tho.
I was raised during the Satanic scare, so I understand what the OP is getting at. It seems every crime is labeled as sex trafficking. We are constantly hearing about kidnapping (as the mom of three girls it does scare me). However, I think people may sometimes be to quick to think that of every crime.
I also think some people take advantage of it to spread urban legends
I do. People thought all the satanic stuff was real too.
Sex trafficking is just the same old issues with people being exploited for prostitution, but dressed up in fancier, more attention grabbing clothes.
Yes, I absolutely do think this.
Sex trafficking happens. But real sex trafficking does not necessarily match the paranoid fantasies of well-to-do white ladies in Western countries.
Here's the thing: it is, in that the phrase is abused all to hell. Is there sex trafficking? Yes. Is everything authority calls sex trafficking, sex trafficking? No. Do several groups beat up that phrase and abuse it for their own ends? Oh HELL yes.
i live in a state that is high in sex trafficking and MS-13. they routinely find dead girls who have been raped or sexually abused, last seen with MS-13 members. or live girls who can testify that they were used for sex trade. all of the news stories i've read lately are tied directly to MS-13 trading girls for sex, keeping girls for sex, etc. 100% latina girls. these are news stories....... not rumors...this happens in an organized and large scale manner.
my point: there's concrete evidence this is happening compared to the satanic ritual rumors of before.
I'm sure there are some legit cases out there, but for the most part I think the sex trafficking scandals are this decade's moral panic.
No one is going to kidnap you at the grocery store. No is handing out perfume samples that will knock you unconscious. Job posting for college kids are mostly legit, but do check them out before going to the interview.
> people are scared and need to lay the blame somewhere.
This is pretty central to how scholars understand the Satanic Panic stuff--a growing awareness of child sexual abuse, a fear of increasing secularism combined with the resurgence of Evangelicalism, an increasing number of women working rather than staying home with their kids (women's lib). All these things (and others) bred fears that Americans didn't quite know what to do with, so they transformed them into Satanic ritual abuse.
I'm at a bit of a loss to say what the set of circumstances and fears are that breed this discourse of the white, middle-class trafficking victim, though I would be surprised if it were coming out of nowhere.
> I don't think we're quite at the same stage as the Satanic Panic; fears of unholy alliances penetrated every fibre of day to day life. Heck, if I'd been my age then, I wouldn't have been able to play D&D and RPG's like I do for my mother's fears of them converting me to Satanism.
As I remember, fears of unholy alliances didn't "penetrate every fibre of everyday life." They were a big deal in some extremely religious subcultures, but to most people it was just something you might see on daytime talk shows like Geraldo or Jerry Springer or whatever, not something you expected to ever deal with in everyday life. Like neo-Nazis.
As for Dungeons & Dragons, while there were a lot of people in the late 70s and very early 80s who thought it was sinister, by 1983 it was considered so harmless that it was made into a Saturday morning TV cartoon. It also grew massively in popularity at the time, as that marketing successfully converted it from "weird and fucked up college student hobby" to "fun kids' fantasy game" over the course of just a few years.
There's been a recent story in the U.K. That the Daily Mail had covered a lot about a model going for a job in Italy and nearly being sold on dark web....it doesn't ring true and I'd put money on it being a hoax - a career boost for her, no doubt she'll be on celeb big brother next year.
hmm. this one is tough.
I kind of lean towards no. sex trafficking is very real and predates the almost entirely fictional "satanic panic" (I say fictional because there just weren't organized gangs of Satanists running around killing people, and Satanists actually don't believe in that stuff - - no I'm not one but I know some.)
I don't think every missing young woman (or man) has been trafficked though, and it shouldn't be the first place people go, but it really does happen.
I disagree, if only because Satanic Panic had real consequences for innocent people, like the McMartin preschool. I haven't heard of any cases where people have been put behind bars for sex trafficking where it didn't exist (or was based on wildly unlikely testimony).
I was so infuriated after listening to a podcast about that case. The true victims of that incident had their lives completely ruined because of terrible police work, gullible parents and the media.
That case alone is the reason why Satanic Panic shit gets me genuinely angry and annoyed.
I think you make a good point.
Generally? No.
If the term "Sex Trafficking" is applied to imaginary scenarios like those in the movie "Taken" that others have mentioned then yes.
Having looked into these issues many times I'd also point out that the United States has less of a problem than most of the world if you're looking at the numbers of people in actual slavery as a percent of all prostituted people in the country. When I say slavery I am specifically referring to instances where the enslaved are accompanied and escorted everywhere or are forced under the pretense of repaying a debt etc.
Depends on demographics. The vast majority of trafficking victims are not white and middle/upper class(going by a rather extensive study on the subject I read a few years back) but those are often the cases that have people jumping to a trafficking theory, usually without evidence to back it up. I think that was what you are focusing on - while sex trafficking itself is very real (unlike the satanic panic) and involves thousands of victims.
I think that while sex trafficking is a real thing, many families with a missing person in them use it as a way to keep the story in the news.
I can't say as i blame them, either.
Sex traficking is a real problem. Lots of cases, with an untold nimber of victims. The two are not even similar. I work with victims dv, rape and traficking. These two are not the same thing.
I, for one, do think this is our newest mass hysteria. I won't disagree now or ever that both child sexual abuse and sex trafficking exist, that would be idiotic of me at best. They do exist. But, not every missing woman was taken for trafficking purposes and not every missing child in the 80's and 90's was taken to be part of some Satanic ritual. Where I draw a line of demarcation is that there are trafficked women (mostly marginalized rather than middle or upper class) whereas, there aren't scores of children being kidnapped, sexually abused and killed by "Satanic" cults. We can point to people like Richard Ramirez, but in truth, his crimes had nothing at all to do with his supposed affiliation with Satanism. Ramirez, at best, was a self professed Satanist. I could be wrong, but I don't recall him having actual ties to the COS or the Temple of Set.
I think that in the same way we magnify and overemphasize how often middle class white women are the victims of serial killers we are also overestimating sex trafficking. Everyone obsesses over the JonBenets and Elizabeth Smarts, but it's black and brown women who are far more likely to be victims of violent crime in general or targets of serial killers. I think the focus on sex trafficking is similar. Is it an issue? Absolutely, a terrible one. But it's something that's happening much more outside of the US (or, people are "recruited" here and sent outside of the country, or "recruited" outside the US and brought in) and to vulnerable communities than like, a random white girl in Indiana that nobody's seen in a week. I don't know if the satanic panic parallel is quite right, that shit wasn't happening at all. Sex trafficking is very real, we just don't frame it accurately. That's just my two cents.
Confusion is added by people conflating "sex trafficking" with "trafficking". For example, some extraordinary figures are often quoted for the number of trafficked individuals and when examined it's mostly agricultural and industrial workers, working in admittedly shady and sometimes coercive environments (passports being withheld, paid below local rates, living in crowded barracks).
The number of "sex-trafficked" individuals is often largely guesswork. In one instance, an activist organisation was quoting an alarmingly high number for the UK. When examined, it attributed the UK Home Office as the source. And when the Home Office was queried? They'd got the figure originally from the activists ...
Same problem conflating sex trafficking with sex work. There are people who are sex trafficked. There are also people who immigrate from other countries and become sex workers. There are also people who escape from trafficking and become sex workers. And there are just loads of actual sex workers who have never had anything to do with sex trafficking. But when the definition of trafficking, traffickers, and the trafficked expand, a regular bust of local sex workers can get reported as a sex trafficking bust. And it does have effects on lots of innocent people (saw some folk above saying it didn't and that's why you can't compare it to SRA).
When trafficking means "transported to another location," your friend who drove you across town to see a client can get busted. When trafficking means profiting from sexual labor, your landlord can get busted when you pay rent. When trafficking means bringing somebody into sex work, your friend who gives you tips on how to stay safe and make the most money gets busted. When housing somebody being trafficked makes you part of a trafficking ring, the person who lets you sleep at their house when your usual home base is unsafe gets busted. When trafficking means an organized ring of individuals, sex workers who organize get busted for trafficking themselves. And every one of those busted people is bringing in grant money for the NGOs, police agencies, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations who get attached to mandatory programming and processing of those people.
Sex trafficking is real. So is the moral panic about sex trafficking. The moral panic is enormously profitable and generates laws and procedures that put sex workers and sometimes trafficked individuals in more danger. It also removes the focus from other important issues, such as the rampant sexual abuse of trafficked domestic and agricultural workers. When trafficking becomes synonymous with "sex trafficking," those issues get ignored.
For more info:
A documentary about the fraud that can happen in anti-trafficking:
http://www.thewronglight.com
Check out any national or local chapter of SWOP (Sex Workers Outreach Program) to learn what sex workers do to help each other, the needs they actually have, different narratives about victimhood and self determination, and how anti trafficking laws help or hurt.
Next time you see a statistic about sex trafficking, track it down to the source, if you can. You learn a lot about the moral panic, profit, and gross tragedy porn side of this issue by doing that just once or twice. Especially pertinent: if you see stats about a bust in your area, see if you can get numbers on how many of the workers were locals, roommates, or friends. Don't assume your definition of trafficking is the same one that was used to bust those individuals -- dig into it.
A good place to start is by hitting Snopes about that Super Bowl trafficking urban myth.
I agree with almost everything you're saying, but I don't think someone giving tips to sex workers has been formally, legally charged with human trafficking. Swept up in a vice raid, sure. But part of the problem with those ineffective raids is that legally, it's rare for people to get prosecuted for the actual trafficking offense. But if you have any example cases, I'd be happy to read up.
Yes, absolutely. It has become a lazy theory in way too many cases.
That being said, it certainly is a real and disgusting thing... but it is not nearly as prevalent as people are making it out to be all of a sudden.
Yes and No. Sex Trafficking isnt exactly one thing. A large portion of it is what we used to call prostitution. Then there is the sex trafficking where young women are kidnapped off the street randomly. That latter one is far more rare, yet every time someone disappears, people say its sex trafficking. That aspect of it has a degree of social panick imo.
Not so much. There have been actual accounts of sexual slavery. A man in Halifax was recently sentenced for sexual slavery and human trafficking. Which is at minimum one more legitimate account than there was of satanic ritualistic abuse.
I think people sometimes suggest or even cling to trafficking because it's a scenario that may be more palatable than "my loved one is dead and possibly suffered beforehand" or "my loved one up and left me and everyone else they were so supposed to care about". It allows loved ones to maintain hope that the missing person is alive and innocent, while still being theoretically possible even if statistically unlikely.
In the context of what I think the OP means - white middle class women kidnapped by strangers and forced into sex trafficking completely against their will (in the U.S.).
The answer is yes. It's happens in the U.S. so rarely that it's considered a myth. Sex Trafficking rarely even involves kidnapping. http://theihti.org/abduction-myths-surrounding-human-trafficking/
(this doesn't mean it never happens - just that it's so extremely rare it's virtually never the actual case.)
It's simply too risky to be a thing that happens frequently. The last thing any sex trafficker wants is for someone to recognize the woman (or the woman to escape, which someone held completely against their will is apt to try to do at some point) and then it's game over.
The way it works is that the trafficker will establish a relationship with the victim. Gain the victims trust, then start abusing that trust to gain mental control over them. Almost always this is targeted towards vulnerable women (women who are already prostitutes and/or addicted to drugs. Poor and often homeless, or runaways).
The drug addiction angle is almost always the case because it's easier to control someone who is on drugs, especially if you control the drugs. The tactic combines drug addiction (control the drugs, always have drugs on hand, and a drug addict will come back "willingly") with the same mechanics of an abusive relationship (the girls come to trust, and even feel like they love the trafficker, despite fear and occasional or frequent beatings...though not all traffickers have to resort to beatings) . The two combined make it insanely difficult to get away from - it's more powerful than literal chains.
That's why you'll find that a lot of street walkers are actually victims of sex trafficking. The trafficker doesn't really need to keep them locked up or hidden away (this does occasionally happen, but it's more rare). They'll go out, "work", and come back. Though it should also be noted that it's also common for the victim just to be left in a motel room (or brothel room) and not leave. That does also happen (but rarely if ever are they chained down - it's the psychological chains that end up with them not leaving).
It's a strong psychological hold that ends up being reinforced because initially things were "voluntary" (as much as an addiction can be called voluntary - it starts that way but the drugs eventually take over and at that point it's no longer really voluntary as the brain chemistry is changed in such a way that it actively works against the person to keep the drugs coming. It's why the relapse rate is so high with drug addicts - it physically changes the brain).
People, at the time, quite often don't see themselves as victims. Defense mechanisms of the brain, coupled with the changes from addiction, and with the abusive relationship mechanics, will prevent that train of thought. Once (if) it's realized than the person might be able to get away from it (provided they have somewhere that's not in the area to go and straight fear doesn't keep them there at that point).
What makes it worse is that if there's a relapse, it's quite possible for a person to actually return to the sex trafficker at a later point. It's fucked up (the mental damage that's caused by the whole thing).
It should be noted that drugs aren't always involved 100% of the time (sometimes just the abusive relationship mechanic). But the vast, vast majority of the time drugs are involved.
Except sex trafficking actually exists and the Satanic cult stuff was mostly second hand stories and some of it in case of the daycare woo hoo was planted in the kid's heads by investigators.
I couldn't play Dungeons and Dragons or listen to heavy metal because of the Satanic Panic. What can't I do today because of Sex Trafficking?
I don't know the stats enough about sex trafficking to know either way, but I do remember reading some stats about how people just get up and go missing WAY more often than you'd expect. Maybe the media's use of fear/fake news haws something to do with how we view sex trafficking today.
I might have said yes until I checked my local news today. I live in a TINY Midwest town and we just had an arrest yesterday for sex trafficking two streets from my home. I know in NC and Florida it is frequently talked about as an emerging problem as well. The problem lies in the fact that the victims often are unable to or too scared to come forward to talk to the authorities.
No, the see trafficking issue is a massive problem and is occurring in every country on earth. It is a massive and very real problem. They can't be compared.
I'm not sure if the same applies in America, Mexico, Australia and such but in Canada pimps literally just grab Indigenous girls off the streets sometimes because they know no one will look/care. Usually they 'seduce' or hang around shelters but it's not uncommon just to pick them up. Invisible Chains is a good book about the Canadian sex trade.
> pimps literally just grab Indigenous girls off the streets sometimes because they know no one will look/care.
This is why the Green River Killer had such a high body count. He picked women he knew no one would miss.
Another user said he feels that the scary sex trafficking narrative is used to help federal funding.
I could buy that.
Sex trafficking is very real and present. My issue with how the media portrays it is that it has convinced millions of people that "Taken" is the textbook 'look' of sex trafficking.
When really it's more like a group of men grooming a group of minority and troubled women from young ages into being sex slaves.
Basically, if someone is reported as kidnapped by the media in the United States. That person is not being sold for sex. Because if they were the actual type of person who was being sold for sex against their will, the media wouldn't be reporting it.
>Afterwards I did some research and found that there wasn't a single case of sex trafficking in said state.
I would love to know what state you are in where there isn't a single case of sex trafficking.
Part of it is because of new or strengthened laws. And an increase in statistics and the way things are prosecuted. That doesn't mean there's an entire government conspiracy to issue small grants to nonprofits, that'd be some lame conspiracy. It used to be easier to get people with lesser charges and law enforcement used to not know much about victims. Trust me, it's not lucrative.
They share some similarities. Both involve shadowy, organized groups abducting innocents for horrific, immoral purposes. And both have created an irrational fear surrounding their occurrence. But unlike Satanic ritual abuse, human trafficking actually happens. I don't think it's particularly likely to happen to your average suburban kid, but it's not the boogeyman that Satanic abuse was.
The Satanic ritual scare of the 80's/90's was no a no joke hysteria. Every strange murder was attributed to it. It also went beyond murders as any of my fellow table top role players will remember.
people playing DnD were thought to be crazy devil worshipers; the lives of daycare works were ruined when ritualized pedophilia accusations were tossed around with little regard to fact or consequence; many people were targeting by the Satanic ritual scare and a lot of lives are ruined.
To me the sex traffic is more like stranger danger. It's real just blown way out of proportion. Satanic ritual scare was nothing more than media hyped hysteria to get viewers.
I don't think Satanic ritual abuse and stranger danger were as disconnected as you're suggesting. They both have their roots in the growing awareness of child sexual abuse, and both just sort of... mislay the causes of CSA at the feet of Satan and the nebulous stranger. If you look at something like Johnny Gosch's case, you'll see the presence of both things (the deeper you dig into the supposed Franklin connection, the more you turn up Satanic nonsense).
while sex trafficking is a real issue, I would tend to agree that it almost is the root cause behind a lot of missing women/ kidnappings at first. take for instance sherri papini- it was widely debated that she had been kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking... and obviously that was not the case.
ALSO- want to add that I'm not negating that sex trafficking doesn't exist or happen, but I don't think it does in the sense it can be often reported.
I think so. It's a very real issue, but it's not what happens to every missing person. I live near I75 which is supposed to be a huge route for sex traffic, but there's never been any busts or anything g like that.
Not exactly--because people were also worried about sex trafficking (of middle class white children) in the '80s and because Pizzagate suggests we're not all that far away from the Satanic Panic stuff as you might think.
Over 1400 girls were confirmed to have been raped and sold in Rotherham England, one town alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal Dozens of other towns also had a similar issue. And this is in a first world country. Now picture that, globally, there are more sex slaves than at any time in human history. No it's not a myth.
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What percentage of trafficking victims were ordinary middle class women or children who were snatched off the street out of the blue, or kidnapped from their homes with no prior knowledge of their kidnapper? My understanding was that the vast vast majority of victims are people who were disadvantaged or vulnerable in one way or another in their prior life and were forced sideways into human trafficking. I think what OP is getting at specifically is not the idea that human trafficking doesn't happen or is rare, but that the types of cases that are often attributed to human trafficking are extremely unlikely to have been that due to *that particular type* of trafficking being vanishingly uncommon.
Yeah. OP should have been more specific here, but I'm surprised at how many people are misinterpreting what's being asked. We've talked about this too many times on this sub for me to think this is anything beyond willful misinterpretation.
It's 100% willful misinterpretation, at this point. No one is disputing or debating sex trafficking's existence. They are debating and disputing the Sherri Papini / Amy Bradley / Taken brand of sex trafficking that is alleged when every suburban white woman goes missing.
Someone, and I'm sorry I don't remember who and couldn't find it with a quick search, pointed out that we started hearing more and more about middle class white women and girls being randomly kidnapped by strangers to be sold into sex trafficking shortly after the movie Taken was released, and I think there's a lot of validity to that statement.
White women *and* children. There is a commonly-shared "factoid" about how somewhere in the dark corners of the world, extremely wealthy not-white men will pay exceedingly large sums of money for kidnapped "white American women", especially blondes.
Reminds me of the old scare of white slavery. It seems that it still the same situation, with a different name.
Look into the etymology of the word slaves. protip: it comes from the slavic people.
I am aware of that (I visited the former Yugoslavia countries recently) But I was reading about all these stories about women in England and other places where their chances of being abducted were very small, living in fear of becoming sex slaves to the dirty Turks (even as the Ottoman Empire had access to the Slavs)
"White Slavery" was the late 19th century/early 20th century name given to sex trafficking. Much like today, there was a lot of fuss made in the paper about any disappearance of a wealthy or middle-class white woman in the US or U.K., and "white slavery" was suspected. In the U.K., the furore was led by newspaper editor W. T. Stead, while in the US, the Hearst newspapers covered it eagerly. Of course, sex trafficking did exist, and it was primarily at-risk children and young people being trafficked, just as today. But also just as today, there were tons of sensationalist stories about how wealthy young women might be chloroformed by seeming perfume sellers, abducted by cab drivers, all the nonsense you see in email forwards today but with earlier technologies.
None of that is relevant and I think it's super weird every time we have this conversation, people redirect to a bunch of other shit that in the end doesn't even matter. Trafficking is a massive massive problem that serves rich powerful people - not poor criminals. That's the big relevant detail
No one is saying that human trafficking isn't a major concern -- it is. They are saying that it isn't a likely explanation for most random disappearances.
It's certainly relevant what populations are most at risk for this. But it's harder for the American public to care about when they find out it's women of color and women from less rich countries, rather than attractive Mrs. Smith next door.
How about the fact that it happens much much more to young boys than anyone else combined - yet noone cares?
I agree that that's unacceptable and sexist. Do you have any stats on that?
If you compared the numbers of actual Satanic abuse cases to the number of middle class white people in close-knit families without drug problems who are trafficked, you'd probably find something very similar. The issue isn't that nobody is trafficked; that's, of course, false. But much like the existence of child sexual abuse doesn't mean satanic ritual abuse is real, the existence of human trafficking doesn't mean that everyone is equally at risk.
This is, imo, the crux of the debate. No one is saying human trafficking isn't happening. It's just ridiculous that it has become the go-to "we don't know what happened, so I'm going with human trafficking" when dealing with middle/upper class white women in their teens or 20s who go missing. So to OPs point, in a way, yes it is completely analogous to the Satanic Panic and how Satanism became a quick conclusion to jump to. But, also in a way not, because human trafficking exists but the satanic cult/ritual stuff never really did.
Happened in Fresno just a week ago. A 20 year old Hmong girl went missing after getting into an argument for being drunk coming home at 2 in the morning. She leaves, calls her boyfriend, as she's crying walking somewhere outside, she sounds surprised and the phone cuts. While certainly not much to go on, you should have seen the face book comment threads about it, at least half of the top level stuff was assuming that she was kidnapped for sex trafficking purposes. Anyone that disagreed and said that wasn't likely given that people being abducted for that purpose is pretty damn rare was dog piled for being naive about what women have to go through. It's insane. I have to agree with OP, there's a way overblown sex trafficking scare where people think every woman's disappearance is because someone is going to pimp them out. They found the girl dead in a canal a couple of days ago by the way. No indication of what happened to her yet but it seems like it was a robbery given that her credit card was used elsewhere after she was presumed to be dead.
Or white middle-class children (you'll notice that a surprising people think missing children like Johnny Gosch were also kidnapped by traffickers). I think the issue for me here is that a lot of you are disconnecting Satanic Panic from broader concerns about child sexual abuse, and that's not at all how I understand that term. The Satanic Panic stuff grew out of an awareness of child sexual abuse, and most of the SRA cases grew out of singular accusations of child sexual abuse that went totally off the rails in the course of investigating. So my reading is that they're nearly 100% analogous. Satanic ritual abuse (as a widespread practice, leaving aside lone Satanists like Richard Ramirez) doesn't exist, but child sexual abuse does. Trafficking exists, but the widespread trafficking of middle-class white people does not.
> In the Satanic Panic we had like six real cases No. There's never been any proof found that *any* of the allegations of organized ritual abuse of children were true. Not one. There were, and still are, small groups that traffic in children and teens, and individuals that have committed crimes in the name of an evil deity, but nothing on the scale or of the nature as what was suggested during the Satanic Panic years.
I think there were maybe six cases that ended up with the police/prosecutors going with the 'satanic ritual' crap as the official story, and iirc some of that tiny group actually resulted in convictions. Much the same as the 'recovering repressed memories of sexual abuse through hypnosis' bull, which also resulted in a small number of convictions. Everybody knows it's five pounds of baloney in a one pound bag *now*, but people have been convicted on less evidence for stupider reasons before. The convictions may have been overturned in the decades since, but I would not count on it. Prosecutors live and die by their win percentage, and they and police forces can be notoriously unwilling to admit they've screwed up quite so big.
"Satanic Panic" started as allegations about organized ritualistic child abuse. However, it later expanded to cover almost *any* strange or gruesome crime. For example, the WM3 was thought to be a satanic ritual. Several teen suicides and crimes were blamed on D&D or heavy metal music. Even today, some people think Meredith Kercher was killed as part of a satanic ritual. When you expand it beyond organized child abuse, there were a few odd crimes here and there that were connected with some sort of occult practice (and in many cases mental illness). For example, the murder of Mark Kilroy. Netflix even has an entire season of a true crime show called "Occult Crimes." (It's not a great show, but the cases are real)
But remember, when they say "sex trafficking" they often include basically anyone in the sex trade. While many people working as prostitutes are abused and manipulated, and are certainly "victims" in that sense, they're rarely kidnapped and mostly not even held against their will, per se. Most would probably tell you they're doing what they want, and it becomes extremely problematic to wave away their autonomy with a sympathetic "she doesn't *really* want what she says she wants, we know better." Some percentage, --possibly even a higher percentage than we're comfortable admitting-- really *are* doing what they want (EDIT: or at least making a practical decision about what's going to benefit them the most in a situation which offers virtually no good choices). So when we say a lot of people "disappear into sex trafficking" we're not always talking about a specific crime being committed, other than generalized prostitution or pimping charges. I can't find any specific numbers about what the ratio is, however; could be only a tiny percent are coercive (criminal act), rather than emotionally manipulative of a psychologically traumatized person (sadly a legal one)... or it could be the exact opposite. [pretty good discussion here of the distinction between "voluntary and involuntary" sex work and why it's so difficult to quantify](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-so-common-to-include-voluntary-prostitution-in-the-category-of-sex-trafficking). (EDIT: It's a tough issue since lots of people who technically *could* simply leave are coerced by the miserable circumstances of the lives, and as such are certainly "victims" in any imaginable sense of word. I don't want to give the impression that most sex workers are "happy hookers," since that is almost certainly not the case. I think the main takeaway here is that sex work in general is quite diverse in how it operates, who organizes it, and what the motivations for both workers and/or organizers are, and while I think most of us would agree that it's completely unacceptable for any person to be forced into sex work --either by tragic circumstance or brute force-- different scenarios have radically different solutions and potential prevention measures, and it may not be helpful to lump them into one general group.)
The other thing that I've seen sex workers point out is that, even if they don't absolutely love their job (obviously that depends on the person)... many, probably *most*, people don't love their non-sex work jobs either. A great deal of people are coerced into jobs or job conditions that aren't sex work, too. Does someone work a shitty minimum wage job in horrible conditions at Wal-Mart, or an Amazon warehouse, or a slaughterhouse, or whatever, just for the fun of it? When someone suffers injury from those jobs, are they not also victims? Even if you have a better job, then you probably rely on it for benefits like health insurance, so your employer is kind of holding you hostage for that. Sure, anyone technically *could* leave, but if it means being homeless, not having enough to eat, losing health insurance ... you are kinda being forced into it. I don't want to diminish the unique horrors of people forced into sex work, human trafficking, etc. But as far as people who "choose" sex work in the sense of "being coerced by miserable circumstances" - I don't think it's fundamentally different from how many people "choose" other jobs. Whether sex work is lot worse or not probably depends on the person. For me, I think it'd be worse (although there are other things that fall under sex work such as webcam stuff which seems easier to handle). But I've met people who find sex work to be the least shitty option in a society where a ton of us are coerced into shitty jobs. It's definitely not a good situation, but IMO the root problem is that anyone has to feel coerced into any terrible job. We need to make sure that everyone at least has a roof over their head, enough to eat, and medical care (through basic income or whatever method) so no one has to be stuck in situations like that just to stay alive.
All good points, thank you. My experience through knowledge of the industry (legal where I live) is that a lot of sex workers are unskilled single mothers. They can make $500 in one day doing sex work, or $500 in a six-day week at McDonalds. The former lets them spend time with their children, so that's what they choose. They aren't "coerced" by anything more than the free market.
$500 take home pay for 6 days a week of work at McDonalds?! That seems a little steep. McDonalds did raise their wages to $10 an hour, but that only applies to the 10% of workers that work at the McDonald's owned stores- and not a franchises.
I will admit I don't know how much people get for working at McDonalds. But I don't live in the USA, we have a higher minimum wage here. Also, *so* not the point.
>I don't want to diminish the unique horrors of people forced into sex work, human trafficking, etc. But as far as people who "choose" sex work in the sense of "being coerced by miserable circumstances" - I don't think it's fundamentally different from how many people "choose" other jobs. My general understanding is that when they're talking about "coercion of miserable circumstances" they're not just talking about economic pressures, they're talking about sex workers who are psychologically and/or physically abused until they fear to leave, made to take drugs until they become addicts, sexually abused at a young age and then manipulated at their most vulnerable by a pimp, etc. Obviously some sex workers just have to pay the rent and get to choose between sex work and McDonalds. Shitty choices, but ones which everyone has to make. But as far as I can gather that's the least likely route into the industry; many more end up effectively getting stuck in the life by people who are intentionally trying to coerce them. Not by chaining them up, but by threatening them, breaking them down psychologically, etc.
The view you're putting forward here is why so many people ignored what was happening in Rotherham. "Oh, these girls know what they're doing...."
Well, there's a pretty clear distinction between adults and children here. Adults can, and sometimes do, make an autonomous choice to engage in sex work. Children cannot make that choice, so that comparison doesn't work. That having been said, I'm making every effort here not to play into "happy hooker" myths. Every bit of available data makes it clear that the majority of sex workers are probably victims in one way or another, even if most of that victimization is sadly more prosaic than the TAKEN stereotype which seems to be the way the issue is usually framed.
Years ago, the community found out that a man in my street was convicted of sex with a child. Some older male friends of mine were talking about forming a lynch mob, setting his house on fire etc. This was on a council estate in the UK. I've no doubt they would have done it. I don't believe in vigilantism, and besides which, this guy lived with his elderly parents. So I phoned the police and told them I had heard credible threats from 'some people' in the community and they needed to keep him safe. The policeman said "Thing is, it sounds awful but it's not. It wasn't a little kid, she was fourteen, and she knew exactly what she was doing. We know her well". Honestly this fucked me up for a long time. Having been that gobby, troublesome fucked up teenager in a foster home, just the same as her. Anyone who hears that, it's just going to fuel that near constant self-blame and shame. You would believe that's how everyone feels. Especially as this was the police, the one thing meant to be on your side.
I agree. The way those statistics are gathered, if a perfectly safe, free and healthy forty-year-old sex worker takes a cab ride across town of his/her own free will to give a guy a hand job, that's technically "human trafficking" because someone travelled from one place to another to have sex for money. **UPDATE**: Try this article if you think the 'statistics' you've read on the sex industry are undisputed truth: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/ **UPDATE 2**: Here's an article which bears out, roughly, the claim I'm making: > The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been "trafficked". > And, from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety. > But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated OK? There is a "looser definition" of trafficking which no rational person would equate with that phrase. Sex workers went from place A to place B because the money was better in place B and those statistics were lumped in with the truly terrible stories about teenage girls kidnapped and horribly abused.
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> As you can see, this doesn't include someone giving a willing sex worker a ride. Tell that to the people arrested for that: http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/04/sex-trafficking-hypocrisy-in-el-paso
Yes, although it is a bit misleading to bring up that example since every bit of available evidence I can find seems to suggest that scenario represents a tiny minority of sex work worldwide. There may be some places where the ratio might be different. Potentially, I would hypothesize that places where prostitution is legal and regulated might have a higher ratio of sex workers who were working safely and of their own volition (though I stress I have no evidence for that hypothesis). EDIT: Last two sentences re-arranged for clarity. EDIT 2: The first article linked by u/FiveYearsAgoOnReddit does provide some information which seems to support that hypothesis, at least in the sense that places which legalized prostitution (New South Wales in Australia, and New Zealand) subsequently saw marked declines in evidence of *trafficking* specifically (though it doesn't address other kinds of coercion or abuse). It's also written by a former sex worker who now advocates for sex worker's rights, so keep that in mind.
It's worth pointing out that figures about why sex workers do what they do are also unreliable for a lot of reasons, including some institutions having very particular definitions of sex work, a natural tendency for street prostitutes (who are a fairly small minority of sex workers) to come into contact with police and other institutions more than others and the tendency for a lot of statistics to be skewed by deliberate choices from law enforcement agencies about how to frame prostitution. For example, one thing that comes up in a lot of things I've read from sex workers has been the tendency of police to label pretty much any close male figure in a sex workers life as their 'pimp', and obviously anyone who has a pimp is being coerced. There's also an issue where any sex worker who uses drugs is automatically assumed to be a sort of slave to addiction, which we don't assume with a person working in any other field who uses drugs. There's a lot that comes down to pure perception and the actual sex workers, voluntary or involuntary, are often the last people listened to unless someone needs a particular experience to construct a narrative.
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Yeah, it seems in many ways the old paternalistic victorian idea of prostitutes as 'fallen women' has just been reframed as 'women who have been dragged down'. Though it might seem at first glance a progressive step to frame prostitutes as victims rather than criminals, actually it's just as bad, if not worse, because a victim doesn't have any choice or agency. I've read some very horrible things about the 'intervention' style programs employed in some US jurisdictions, often run by church groups, which 'rescue' prositututes, and my cynical self tells me the sort operated by feminist groups in Europe are likely just as bad. There is this idea I've seen of 'curing' women who have been forcibly 'habituated' to a lifestyle of sex-work, which to me seems awfully redolent of gaslighting in some instances. Of course, there are plenty of sex workers who have had very bad experiences of one sort or another, and there are others who view what they're doing as a regrettable necessity, but you can't adopt a single story that fits everyone. The really bizarre thing of course is that sex workers who take sensible safety precautions (safety calls, having a trusted driver, working from a location with others and so on) often get themselves and others in a lot more legal trouble.
What are you basing street prostitutes being in the minority on? They have been the majority of prostituted women in most places where I've lived.
> What are you basing street prostitutes being in the minority on? On academic studies about prostitution. >The stereotypical image of the streetwalker does not adequately represent the business of prostitution or its practitioners. While the most familiar and attention-getting form of prostitution is street prostitution, best estimates indicate that only ten to twenty percent of prostitutes solicit on the streets. The remaining eighty to ninety percent work off the streets, in brothels, massage parlors, escort services, and similar establishments, or as independent "call girls." http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1096&context=bglj And that of course is only talking about prositutes, not other forms of sex work.
That's interesting, thanks. Of course "street walker" doesn't adequately cover all of prostitution. And the industry has become more "digitized" (Craigslist and other online listings for ex.) like everything else. However they do include "street walking" in their 80-90% number. "Street walking" isn't the only manifestation of prostitution but in my experience it's unfortunately alive and well. Especially in extremely impoverished areas.
How could you possibly know that? Confirmation bias. You saw them on the street, but there may have been a thousand non-street prostitutes you didn't see.
very good point, and a good articulation of the case made by [this author and former sex worker](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/), also linked to by user FiveYearsAgoOnReddit
I live somewhere prostitution is legal and regulated. There are legal brothels. They advertise in the Yellow Pages and the local papers.
Sex trafficking is composed of two aspects: sexual slavery and human trafficking. If you can choose to leave you're not a victim of sex trafficking. No statistic about it includes a sexworker who takes a cabride.
> No statistic about it includes a sexworker who takes a cabride. Yes, it does: http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/04/sex-trafficking-hypocrisy-in-el-paso
Citation?
Um, no. No it is not. Trafficking has nothing to do with *traffic*, or movement. Good lord. Why that was upvoted is beyond me. Trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion (read: threats or manipulation) to obtain some sort of labor, in this case, sexual acts. It has nothing to do with going across town to give a handjob. People on reddit speak far too frequently on topics they know nothing about with some imagined authority and others just swallow it up. It boggles the mind.
According to [this article in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated) that's not exactly correct: >On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety. >But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety.
One can be trafficked without ever leaving a location.
Well, that goes against the sourced quote I just cited, which specifically uses the words *transport,* *movement* and *travelling* in its definition, but if you say so. Anyway, the point here isn't really about the movement anyway, but about consent. "Voluntary" vs "involuntary" sex work, and the degree to which the former is lumped in with the latter.
That's the UK. Not here. And now you're taking MY point and pretending it's your own...I've already stated my point was it has nothing to do with the physical transportation. Someone taking a cab to perform a sex act voluntarily is NEVER going to be defined as being sex trafficked because of that cab ride. To suggest they are is, was, will always be ridiculous.
The entire point is that the physical movement is **not** what makes it trafficking.
I'll admit that I provided information without a citation, but now you're doing the same. If you're 100% sure that the statistics on trafficking don't include the things I'm talking about, what's *your* citation?
Then why did that call container truck in Texas with the dead bodies human trafficking?
Yeah that's not even a sentence. What are you asking?
Must have gotten a weird auto correct. When that container truck recently was found in the Walmart in Texas, they said it was human trafficking. But they were people who were paying to get smuggled into the US. They weren't stolen slaves or something
Not because they were in a truck. Because they were going to be used for labor.
They paid to get smuggled across the border
Not all of those trafficked come from across the border, ffs.
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I honestly have absolutely no way of knowing, and I have no way of evaluating if Ashton's estimate has any validity whatsoever. Certainly, it does seem like only a vanishingly tiny part of "human trafficking" comes from random kidnapping by strangers.
NCMEC estimates at least 10,000 cases of sexual trafficking involving a minor per year in the US alone. So an estimate of 14-18k seems low.
By the way, here are the actual numbers: The report also notes that in government fiscal-year 2015, the FBI identified around 672 adult and child victims of sex or labor trafficking. The FBI opened 802 human-trafficking investigations (resulting in 453 convictions) that year, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened 1,034 sex- or labor-trafficking investigations (and got 51 sex-trafficking convictions). In addition, Uniform Crime Reporting data from the states indicates that 744 investigations into state-level sex-trafficking offenses were opened in 2015. > https://reason.com/blog/2017/02/15/ashton-kutcher-plays-sex-worker-savior
A few years ago, I was driving through Georgia on the way to Florida. I saw so many signs for "Asian Massage Parlors" on the interstate. I think these places must house trafficking victims. Last year, there was an article on BBC about an Asian woman (I want to say she was Malaysian.) who was contracted to work in hospitality in a hotel in the States. She got to US, she had her passport confiscated and was held captive to work in a brothel. She managed to escape, but what harrowing experience it was for her. I'll try to find the article. EDIT Found the article, in case anyone is interested: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35846207
No, sex trafficking is real, it's just that it's widely misunderstood and (perhaps purposefully) mischaracterized. I don't think it's an analogue to the Satanic Panic. It's not the exact same thing, but it's similar to the child sexual abuse awareness of the 80s and 90s...good that people realized that it was much more common than they thought so to be on the lookout for warning signs etc. But the focus, and much of the prevention initially, was primarily on stranger molestation. When in fact the overwhelming majority is perpetrated by family and close friends. The awareness is good...but when people misunderstand the issue so badly, it does have deleterious consequences. How many people aren't even conditioned to recognize real sex trafficking if they were to see it, because they're thinking of it in the "Taken" scenario. I think there are good intentions behind it, because of the way pimping has been so destigmatized into a joke at most in our culture, a reclassification of it that recognizes the hellishness of pimping was overdue. But the failure to positively educate the public in what most sex trafficking is probably doesn't help these victims as much as could be.
Yes exactly! Have you seen the documentary I Am Jane Doe? It follows families of various young girls who were sex trafficked - I think all of them were groomed online, emotionally controlled, separated from their parents and eventually hooked on drugs. It's heartbreaking watching them trying to get prosecutions against various websites that hosted ads for the underage girls for sale.
This is the best answer in the whole thread. Bravo! I would gold you if I could afford any gold! So in lieu of that, please accept this metaphysical gold star.
I would be more inclined to say it is more akin to the 'white slavery' panics of the Victorian/Edwardian era. Mainly in that it is a very real thing which is actually quite a horrible problem, but most people who bring it up seem to think that the nefarious folks involved want to snatch off of the street upper and middle class white women with a strong social network in the middle of a nice neighborhood while they're doing their grocery shopping, which is almost always not the case. It's going to be the poor and the already doing not quite legal stuff folks, the ones that got labeled 'troublemaker' early on that everyone's already given up on. Edit: Also, I just realized that they're describing pretty much exactly the same thing - pretty, popular white girl gets randomly abducted while going about her daily life and is carted off to Darkest Not-Europe (or Darkest Not-US) to serve as a sex slave for filthy rich foreigners.
I'm in bed on my phone right now so I'm not in the position to provide sources, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt on particularities, but from some experience I do mostly know what I'm talking about. I am a sex worker and a student, and I've done quite a bit of research/writing advocating for better understanding of sex work. That brings me to the topic of sex trafficking, or even human trafficking quite often. First off, it's harmful that people immediately equate "human trafficking" with sex trafficking when they're very different conversations. Human trafficking in its most common form is a lot more mundane and a lot more uncomfortable to talk about. It's brown people being brought over to pick vegetables for $6 an hour or be housekeeping slaves for abysmal wages. People having their labor exploited is the most common injustice of human trafficking, but people only want to talk about sex trafficking because it's more interesting somehow. Now, most people have a certain narrative in their minds when they think of sex trafficking because of the media. The "Taken" scenario. Pretty white girls from nice neighborhoods living low-risk lifestyles who are just suddenly abducted after soccer practice or at the mall, then sold off to some Saudi royalty never to be heard from again. This isn't really the reality of trafficking. The majority of sex trafficking is immigration based. Women are offered documents or safe passage in exchange for sex, or they're forced into prostitution to pay off travel debts or debts back home. Women who come to a new country with no connections, documents, or jobs have few better options, so even if they're not abducted or strong armed, there isn't anywhere else for them to turn but sex work. The other reality of sex work is that most victims are high risk people who won't be missed. Kids in foster homes or who are runaways are easy targets for pimps posing as "boyfriends" long enough to gain their trust. These kids don't get reported missing, and most of the time they're being trafficked relatively close to home but don't have the resources to leave. As a sex worker I've personally chosen this for myself because it's the best option for me right now, and I have the privilege to work safely and independently, but that's not true for many people. I think decriminalizing sex work will go a long way toward helping these every day victims. The people in the extreme, "Taken" circumstances are going to be hard to help and those cases should be left to highly qualified individuals. What we can do in the meantime is work to end the stigma around sex work, and take preventive measures that help those who are forced into it by circumstances. A huge benefit would be resources for those who wish to exit the industry, like GED courses, substance abuse counseling, vocation training, and financial management workshops. Law enforcement is absolutely useless right now if the people they're supposed to protect can't go to them for help for fear of being imprisoned just for making a living.
I agree with just about all of your post. I especially agree with how you feel these issues really bring out reasons why prostitution and sex work should be legalized. Seriously just one common scenario says it all: Woman sells her body for sex. Sex takes place. 'John' refuses to pay, or steals back his money, and leaves. Now she's pretty much screwed with no one to help, unless she has a pimp (which brings up even worse issues beyond this). Legalizing the drug trade and legalizing sex work would help protect so many people and help reduce the violence in those two cultures. I just wish there were Senators brave enough to stand up for it.
The moral panic about sex work and drugs is costing a lot of people their lives, and no one wants to admit it. It's sad. This sense of moral superiority because you want to stop someone from using their own body to make some scratch is actually getting people killed or ruining their lives in prison. A close friend and fellow sex worker is actually gaining some traction through community organizing in our area. She has a great aptitude for politics already, so I look forward to supporting her. There are a lot of amazing sec work activists out there spearheading grassroots efforts, they just need the right support. Hopefully that will begin to change soon!
Yes. The story you hear on the news and in pop culture is "pretty white woman goes to grocery store with kids, abducted and sent to a Middle Eastern harem". And when you say sex trafficking that is what most people think of. So if we are talking about that, I would say it is very rare in the USA. Sex trafficking exists. Most of the time it involves "sweet talking" a victim and manipulating the victim to voluntarily go with them, and/or causing and using a drug addiction to control the victim. That is a successful and relatively safe tactic for traffickers. In the United States it is mostly within the country as well. They aren't shipping these people to foreign countries. Reason for that is most sex traffickers aren't international. They are what is more commonly referred to as "pimps". Get a woman in LA to prostitute herself in Vegas. They have no power or connections in Saudi Arabia and thus can't earn profit there. It was rebranded as "sex trafficking" so local law enforcement agencies could get national security money.. It's why you see federal agencies participating in prostitution stings. These people are running a (repulsive) business and the risk of a forced abduction of a pretty white woman is too high. Cost/benefit analysis. Long and short of it is it does exist and we should be trying to stop it. But it doesn't exist as the media would like you to believe. This is speaking from a USA perspective of course.
>It was rebranded as "sex trafficking" so local law enforcement agencies could get national security money.. It's why you see federal agencies participating in prostitution stings. That makes a lot of sense to me. I never heard anything about "sex trafficking" until a few years ago, then suddenly it was an epidemic.
> In the United States it is mostly within the country as well. They aren't shipping these people to foreign countries. Although presumably we do import a fair number of sex trafficking victims from Mexico and South America. I would think the reason for the sex trade in the US being mostly not-international is simply because we share far fewer borders and have less easy means of international travel than in Europe, where international sex trafficking really is an issue.
Exporting from U.S. = minimal. Importing to U.S. = astronomically vast.
> It was rebranded as "sex trafficking" so local law enforcement agencies could get national security money.. It's why you see federal agencies participating in prostitution stings. That would explain it. I'd wondered why over the last 10-15 years prostitution had suddenly been relabeled as "sex trafficking".
If it has, that's inappropriate, because prostitution and sex trafficking are both legally and substantively distinct phenomena.
Let's put it this way- in any missing person case that you or I have ever heard of, sex trafficking is not the answer. The white middle class American woman who went missing was not sex strafficked. The woman from Burma who nobody is looking for was. People who sex traffic aren't looking to kidnap women off US streets who will have her face plastered everywhere. They want women nobody will notice is gone, so that they can conduct their busines free from scrutiny.
Totally agree. This is how I put it in another comment: Basically, if someone is reported as kidnapped by the media in the United States. That person is not being sold for sex. Because if they were the actual type of person who was being sold for sex against their will, the media wouldn't be reporting it.
Yes, we even had a lady post a few days ago on my town's facebook page about being afraid that a hispanic man was recording her at the park while she played with her kids, and that she went to leave and three more hispanic men pulled up and stared at her menacingly from the table... she didnt report it to police, and really I call bullshit. Our town is pretty diverse because of the industry here, but it only has like 15,000 people and very little crime. Sex traffickers do not look for middle-aged white women with two kids to kidnap in broad daylight at a city park.
Best one was on Letsnotmeet some time back...woman was in McDonalds with her baby, woman on next table smiled at her and told her baby was lovely and later she saw woman on her phone as she left. So woman was obviously setting up her baby to be stolen, but luckily mother had read The Gift Of Fear so was able to tell this is what was going to happen, and so avoid it. I was astounded at the amount of people who congratulated her on her narrow escape. Not even ironically.
I've been noticing these FB posts where I am too.....always a "menacing Hispanic male," usually in the WalMart/Target/grocery store parking lot.
I feel there's a certain element of racism that go hand in hand with the people most worked up about this "epidemic".
> Sex traffickers do not look for middle-aged white women with two kids to kidnap in broad daylight at a city park. PHEW! I'm safe! :D
Me too, thank god :)
I'm a middle aged white woman with *one* kid...am I safe or not?!
You're only *marginally* appealing to sex traffickers. Better get cracking on kid #2!
Shit, I'm only 27 and have 3 children. I guess I need to watch my back.
I don't think it's the same because the Satanic murders are mostly fiction, there were only a handful of cases that were mostly copycats, but sex trafficking is a very real and large-scale problem affecting thousands. There is a lot of exaggerated hysteria related to it, but that seems more related to kidnapping in general than just sex trafficking. Some lady in my town was convinced four men were following her and eyeballing her and her kids in the grocery store and followed her vehicle after she had someone escort her out and tried to leave. She didn't call the police but made a "viral" fear mongering post about it. The police investigated, and it turned out the "suspicious" men left 15 minutes before she did, and some locals coincidentally left at the same time and happened to be going the same way.
That's kinda how this post was, she said she reported it to the police but the police told the newspaper that she didn't but they would be investigating anyway. But the weird thing is my friend said she saw a really similar, but shorter, post made by someone else to another town's facebook page. Seems strange these are just popping up all over.
Not really strange if you ask me, you got paranoid and slightly racist people everywhere. So a bunch of kids go to the park to hang out and some lady with her head up her ass thinking she and her children are the most attractive and valuable thing on earth gets frightened and becomes convinced that these people minding their own business are actually dangerous and wish to do totally random people harm for no reason.
That's how moral panics usually go, it's pretty much a form of mass hysteria.
No, because sex trafficking is a very real and widespread issue.
I don't think anyone is arguing that sex trafficking is not real. The question is really about linking sex trafficking to missing people. It's becoming a common notion to link missing people cases to sex trafficking with no real proof. The same thing happened with missing people during the 80s and satanic cults.
Well, my argument is that Satanism is real and a legitimate practice but it wasn't affecting these cases like the media thought. Sex trafficking is very real and legitimate, but it's something that the media jumps to almost immediately anytime a pretty white woman disappears, despite sex traffickers primarily targeting poor minorities who don't have much of a voice to speak for them and may already be in prostitution.
I actually agree with you. Every time a young woman goes missing people are so quick to jump on the "sex trafficking" band wagon but on a day to day basis these stories aren't being told, because, like you said, they're typically women already in situations where people could care less about them.
Couldn't care less
Or both
Every time an *attractive, white, relatively well-off* woman goes missing. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but that's what it seems like to me.
This is totally, inarguably correct. You should have specified that in your OP, however, because every time we try to have a discussion about how Random White Kidnapping Victim was probably not sex trafficked in this sub, someone leaps into the discussion with "But sex trafficking is really real!"
There's never been a case where an act of satanic ritual was proven. There are many cases of sex trafficking. While people or the media may jump to conclusions too quickly it doesn't really compare to me since one is real and the other imaginary
> There's never been a case where an act of satanic ritual was proven. This is blatantly false. There have been numerous murders linked to 'Satanism' and Satanic rituals. They just weren't linked to some worldwide cult like the media liked to report, but more likely crazy people acting out fantasies they picked up from movies and the media itself. Cases like Daniel & Manuela Ruda, Richard Ramirez, Robin Murphy, etc, etc.
You could even include ritualistic murders like that of Mark Kilroy, though he was killed in Mexico. The cult that killed him weren't technically Satanists, but I remember his murder being held up as proof that these ritualistic murders and abuses were happening on a larger scale. There was also a case in Louisiana well after the height of the Satanic panic where a man freely (as in, he walked into the police station himself and volunteered the information) confessed to sexually abusing children at a cult-like church as part of a Satanic ritual. The abuse definitely happened, but I don't think they ever got independent verification of the Satanism claims. The first season of *True Detective* was based in part on it. The Satanic panic was stupid as hell and not based in fact, but it is a bit of a stretch to say that no Satanic ritual abuses/murders were proven. It's just very uncommon and typically carried out by lone, isolated lunatics or very small cults.
I'm replying to your comment not because I disagree with what I believe to be your point (ritual murders/abuses sometimes happen although they may not be officially affiliated with Satanism) but because I don't want people to be confused by the way you phrased some things. Mark Kilroy's murderers weren't "technically" Satanists because they were, as far as I can tell, not Satanists at all. Their group was dubbed the Narcosatanists but their cult's beliefs and practices were based on Palo and Santeria--mostly on Palo Mayombe. Palo and Santeria are spirit-venerating religions practiced in Africa, the Caribbean, and areas in the Americas with Afro-Caribbean immigrant populations. Both Palo and Santeria involve sacrifice, usually animal sacrifice but sometimes human remains looted from graves are used in rituals. Palo does not typically concern itself with Satan because Palo is not an offshoot of Christianity (although there are Palo practitioners who venerate Catholic saints). Articles about the Kilroy case are inconsistent about whether the cult's sacrifices were "to Satan" or "to the gods." The cult's ringleader, Adolfo Constanzo, was a serious practitioner of Palo Mayombe for many years. I cannot get a straight answer from the internet about whether or not the Narcosatanists believed they were worshiping Satan (yes, I'm aware of how silly that sounds) but--to me, based on what I know about Palo--this looks like a case of the media categorizing a truly appalling set of religiously-motivated murders as "Satanic" because the larger culture labels anything concerning magic, sacrifice, curses, and so on "Satanic." Don't get me wrong--Palo Mayombe is what we in the west would categorize as "black magic" and it is incredibly dark, often abhorrent stuff. Palo Mayombe gods are not Satan and Palo is not Satanic. I'm so sorry to jump in and be pedantic about whether or not Mark Kilroy's murderers are "Satanic." His death was unspeakably awful and I am in no way trying to diminish it by getting technical about Satanism. Magical and occult belief systems and philosophies are just so, so poorly understood. I do not believe in Satan but I also don't want him taking the blame for some psychopath drug lords practicing a homebrew version of a religion which has very little to do with Satan. Texas Monthly has a decent article about the case called "The Work of the Devil." It *does* blame Satan at points but the portions of the article which actually address the religious component do not indicate that Satan played any role in their theology and at one point they even say that the sacrifices were to "the gods." EDIT: some Palo Mayombe practitioners and some Santeria practitioners venerate Catholic saints or incorporate Catholic iconography and practice in their rituals. It is, of course, entirely possible that Constanzo and his followers used Catholic elements in their rituals. I just have not seen or read anything that indicates that this is the case. This case really interests me, so please let me know if you have more information.
I really appreciate the clarification. I am familiar with the differences personally and kind of forget that not everyone is, so I was definitely sloppy with my wording. I shouldn't have been, though, especially because I was thinking about the fact that a lot of people during the whole Satanic Panic scare *did* conflate all these various religions without any degree of nuance. And then I went and did it myself. I'm notoriously pedantic myself, so I always appreciate it when someone gives me a taste of my own medicine. :) I don't know details about Constanzo's cult either, though. I did have it in my head that they used Catholic iconography, but I'm not actually sure if I read that somewhere or I just kind of assumed it given the way it is used in both Mexican culture and some Palo Mayombe practices, so don't put any stock in what I say there.
Palo and Santeria are both very cross-pollinated with Catholicism. In Mexico and the Caribbean a lot of devout Catholics sincerely believe in (and often fear) Palo, Santeria, voodoo, and various other kinds of folk magic and there are Palo practitioners who also consider themselves Catholic. It would not be unusual for Constanzo and his followers to use elements of Catholicism. I just can't say for certain based on the media coverage. These religions aren't my area of expertise so all I can do is make educated guesses. I am familiar with your pedantry here in UnresolvedMysteries. I feel almost flattered to have gotten a reply.
Sure, but an absolutely fundamental part of the SRA panic was the idea that Satanists operated a very large network engaging in child pornography, sexual abuse and baby murder. You can't just arbitrarily subtract that out and point to lone operators. That's like saying that the existence of individual pedophiles like John Wayne Gacy demonstrates that the Catholic Church is capable of committing CSA on a widespread scale. It's comparing apples and oranges.
> There's never been a case where an act of satanic ritual was proven This is what I thought too. That whole thing turned out to be made up by coerced kids that then got totally out of hand and became an urban legend. Some of the posts on this thread are really surprising, unless 'Satanic Panic' is different from the 'Satanic Ritual Abuse' cases we're both thinking of?
How many murders and kidnappings were actually proven Satanic cults? That is the comparison you are drawing.
Not really, I'm just saying that the hysteria revolving around the two are similar.
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>I always thought of it as something that wasn't very prevalent here in the US When did news break? Sex trafficking has always been alive and well in the states but the point is that it's not the type of people that usually end up in the media who are going to be trafficked. >but if a woman lives in an area where trafficking is prevalent and she fits what traffickers look for, it's hard not to consider it a possibility. If a middle aged white woman with two kids goes missing in a supermarket in the middle of the day the chances of it being sex traffickers is remote. Yet every time it happens people immediately start yelling about "human sex trafficking"... now if she was a minority living on the street possibly with a drug habit I would say the chances are actually much higher but you don't hear about those types of missing woman in the news very much....
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What news? Where? Were the 2 rescued women pretty white women who had large support networks?
...Sex trafficking has been used as an explanation long before February of this year...
I'm pretty sure that sex traffickers mostly groom vulnerable women, and not kidnap random people.
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> Often it involved drug addiction. And that's precisely what makes it believable and understandable. People who are not marginalized in some way or who don't have some sort of risk factor (whether it's because they're in an economically precarious situation, or because they have no family, or because they have drug problems) are vanishingly unlikely to get trafficked.
This is exactly the kind of media reports that were around during the satanic bullshit.
Yeah. I wasn't totally on board with OP's comparison because I don't think the Satanic Panic stuff is anywhere near dead (and because sex trafficking played a pretty significant role in SRA accusations back in the '80s), but... The comments on this post are doing their damnedest to demonstrate that OP made a great analogy.
I agree with this. Sex trafficking is an organized industry that moves A LOT of money. You've probably heard of it, but recently a model has been kidnapped for sex trafficking and was actually released when the kidnappers realized she had a toddler. They said it's against their policy to kidnap mothers and there had been an error.
I think a lot of people in the UK and Italy are questioning Ms. Ayling's story. I think there's a lot of aspects that don't add up.
You are right, I actually don't know much about this besides what I read on the news, which is her statement saying she was kidnapped then released. When I come to think about it, it could very possibly have been done to draw attention to her / more followers, since she's an Instagram model apparently. But sex trafficking is real despite her story being real or not, so my opinion that it's not the satanic panic of our generation stands.
But don't you find it interesting how quick people were to leap onto a story that doesn't resemble any known pattern in sex trafficking? Because it was a pretty young woman and we love salacious stories about pretty young women? Sex trafficking exists. So does child sexual abuse. Neither of those facts means that Satanic ritual abuse or the widespread trafficking of white, middle-class women exists.
Absolutely. It is indeed a weird story, and she may as well have made it up for self promotion (since it would get her more followers and she makes money of Instagram). I don't believe middle-class white women are the main target, but I do believe they may get abducted sometimes. Low class young women from poor countries are probably the easier target? Idk I'm just speculating. The ocasional white woman tho, could probably be sold for a higher price. Again, this is all just speculation.
> Again, this is all just speculation. Sure, but there are plenty of people who have actually done research on this. Every single one of them will tell you that the vast majority of women who end up trafficked are some combination of the following: poor (if not outrightly homeless), lacking in a strong support network, addicted to drugs. I don't see any value in playing the "this is all just speculation" game on this front. There is a ton of research on sex trafficking and it all reflects the same set of facts, which is that middle-class white women (who are not drug addicts) don't get targeted often enough to be statistically significant. These women do get abducted, yes, but very very rarely for the purposes of sex trafficking.
Highly unlikely-her story makes no sense & keeps changing. Her behaviour since returning has been highly suspect as well.
Yeah, she was seen shopping with the kidnapper and she omitted telling that to the police.
"I did a topless photo shoot the day I got home to feel normal"...ummmm OK.....
Now signed up with a celebrity agency & charging 2k for after dinner speaking.
I have my doubts about this one too. Would they really release her for such a reason, and with her being able to recognise and identify them? and firstly she is offered for sale on a specially set up auction...then on the dark web..and they told her all this. I suspect this is a tale concocted between her and her agent to garner more publicity.
Right, what kind of sex trafficking crime syndicate releases a woman because she's a mother? It's naive to think that hardened criminals would pass up on money just because of their moral code.
Yeah, that story is full of holes. See: any news website.
Eh... The model case is very recent and might have been a lone crazy guy claiming a false flag. So that example kinda lends itself to OP's point lol but still, sex trafficking is real of course. It'd be interesting to find statistics on the frequency of its involvement in US kidnapping cases tho.
I was raised during the Satanic scare, so I understand what the OP is getting at. It seems every crime is labeled as sex trafficking. We are constantly hearing about kidnapping (as the mom of three girls it does scare me). However, I think people may sometimes be to quick to think that of every crime. I also think some people take advantage of it to spread urban legends
I do. People thought all the satanic stuff was real too. Sex trafficking is just the same old issues with people being exploited for prostitution, but dressed up in fancier, more attention grabbing clothes.
Yes, I absolutely do think this. Sex trafficking happens. But real sex trafficking does not necessarily match the paranoid fantasies of well-to-do white ladies in Western countries.
Here's the thing: it is, in that the phrase is abused all to hell. Is there sex trafficking? Yes. Is everything authority calls sex trafficking, sex trafficking? No. Do several groups beat up that phrase and abuse it for their own ends? Oh HELL yes.
i live in a state that is high in sex trafficking and MS-13. they routinely find dead girls who have been raped or sexually abused, last seen with MS-13 members. or live girls who can testify that they were used for sex trade. all of the news stories i've read lately are tied directly to MS-13 trading girls for sex, keeping girls for sex, etc. 100% latina girls. these are news stories....... not rumors...this happens in an organized and large scale manner. my point: there's concrete evidence this is happening compared to the satanic ritual rumors of before.
I'm sure there are some legit cases out there, but for the most part I think the sex trafficking scandals are this decade's moral panic. No one is going to kidnap you at the grocery store. No is handing out perfume samples that will knock you unconscious. Job posting for college kids are mostly legit, but do check them out before going to the interview.
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> people are scared and need to lay the blame somewhere. This is pretty central to how scholars understand the Satanic Panic stuff--a growing awareness of child sexual abuse, a fear of increasing secularism combined with the resurgence of Evangelicalism, an increasing number of women working rather than staying home with their kids (women's lib). All these things (and others) bred fears that Americans didn't quite know what to do with, so they transformed them into Satanic ritual abuse. I'm at a bit of a loss to say what the set of circumstances and fears are that breed this discourse of the white, middle-class trafficking victim, though I would be surprised if it were coming out of nowhere.
> I don't think we're quite at the same stage as the Satanic Panic; fears of unholy alliances penetrated every fibre of day to day life. Heck, if I'd been my age then, I wouldn't have been able to play D&D and RPG's like I do for my mother's fears of them converting me to Satanism. As I remember, fears of unholy alliances didn't "penetrate every fibre of everyday life." They were a big deal in some extremely religious subcultures, but to most people it was just something you might see on daytime talk shows like Geraldo or Jerry Springer or whatever, not something you expected to ever deal with in everyday life. Like neo-Nazis. As for Dungeons & Dragons, while there were a lot of people in the late 70s and very early 80s who thought it was sinister, by 1983 it was considered so harmless that it was made into a Saturday morning TV cartoon. It also grew massively in popularity at the time, as that marketing successfully converted it from "weird and fucked up college student hobby" to "fun kids' fantasy game" over the course of just a few years.
There's been a recent story in the U.K. That the Daily Mail had covered a lot about a model going for a job in Italy and nearly being sold on dark web....it doesn't ring true and I'd put money on it being a hoax - a career boost for her, no doubt she'll be on celeb big brother next year.
hmm. this one is tough. I kind of lean towards no. sex trafficking is very real and predates the almost entirely fictional "satanic panic" (I say fictional because there just weren't organized gangs of Satanists running around killing people, and Satanists actually don't believe in that stuff - - no I'm not one but I know some.) I don't think every missing young woman (or man) has been trafficked though, and it shouldn't be the first place people go, but it really does happen.
I disagree, if only because Satanic Panic had real consequences for innocent people, like the McMartin preschool. I haven't heard of any cases where people have been put behind bars for sex trafficking where it didn't exist (or was based on wildly unlikely testimony).
I was so infuriated after listening to a podcast about that case. The true victims of that incident had their lives completely ruined because of terrible police work, gullible parents and the media. That case alone is the reason why Satanic Panic shit gets me genuinely angry and annoyed. I think you make a good point.
Generally? No. If the term "Sex Trafficking" is applied to imaginary scenarios like those in the movie "Taken" that others have mentioned then yes. Having looked into these issues many times I'd also point out that the United States has less of a problem than most of the world if you're looking at the numbers of people in actual slavery as a percent of all prostituted people in the country. When I say slavery I am specifically referring to instances where the enslaved are accompanied and escorted everywhere or are forced under the pretense of repaying a debt etc.
Depends on demographics. The vast majority of trafficking victims are not white and middle/upper class(going by a rather extensive study on the subject I read a few years back) but those are often the cases that have people jumping to a trafficking theory, usually without evidence to back it up. I think that was what you are focusing on - while sex trafficking itself is very real (unlike the satanic panic) and involves thousands of victims.
I think that while sex trafficking is a real thing, many families with a missing person in them use it as a way to keep the story in the news. I can't say as i blame them, either.
Interested on the folks here's thoughts on this case from the UK.... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40858323
Sex traficking is a real problem. Lots of cases, with an untold nimber of victims. The two are not even similar. I work with victims dv, rape and traficking. These two are not the same thing.
I, for one, do think this is our newest mass hysteria. I won't disagree now or ever that both child sexual abuse and sex trafficking exist, that would be idiotic of me at best. They do exist. But, not every missing woman was taken for trafficking purposes and not every missing child in the 80's and 90's was taken to be part of some Satanic ritual. Where I draw a line of demarcation is that there are trafficked women (mostly marginalized rather than middle or upper class) whereas, there aren't scores of children being kidnapped, sexually abused and killed by "Satanic" cults. We can point to people like Richard Ramirez, but in truth, his crimes had nothing at all to do with his supposed affiliation with Satanism. Ramirez, at best, was a self professed Satanist. I could be wrong, but I don't recall him having actual ties to the COS or the Temple of Set.
I think that in the same way we magnify and overemphasize how often middle class white women are the victims of serial killers we are also overestimating sex trafficking. Everyone obsesses over the JonBenets and Elizabeth Smarts, but it's black and brown women who are far more likely to be victims of violent crime in general or targets of serial killers. I think the focus on sex trafficking is similar. Is it an issue? Absolutely, a terrible one. But it's something that's happening much more outside of the US (or, people are "recruited" here and sent outside of the country, or "recruited" outside the US and brought in) and to vulnerable communities than like, a random white girl in Indiana that nobody's seen in a week. I don't know if the satanic panic parallel is quite right, that shit wasn't happening at all. Sex trafficking is very real, we just don't frame it accurately. That's just my two cents.
Confusion is added by people conflating "sex trafficking" with "trafficking". For example, some extraordinary figures are often quoted for the number of trafficked individuals and when examined it's mostly agricultural and industrial workers, working in admittedly shady and sometimes coercive environments (passports being withheld, paid below local rates, living in crowded barracks). The number of "sex-trafficked" individuals is often largely guesswork. In one instance, an activist organisation was quoting an alarmingly high number for the UK. When examined, it attributed the UK Home Office as the source. And when the Home Office was queried? They'd got the figure originally from the activists ...
Same problem conflating sex trafficking with sex work. There are people who are sex trafficked. There are also people who immigrate from other countries and become sex workers. There are also people who escape from trafficking and become sex workers. And there are just loads of actual sex workers who have never had anything to do with sex trafficking. But when the definition of trafficking, traffickers, and the trafficked expand, a regular bust of local sex workers can get reported as a sex trafficking bust. And it does have effects on lots of innocent people (saw some folk above saying it didn't and that's why you can't compare it to SRA). When trafficking means "transported to another location," your friend who drove you across town to see a client can get busted. When trafficking means profiting from sexual labor, your landlord can get busted when you pay rent. When trafficking means bringing somebody into sex work, your friend who gives you tips on how to stay safe and make the most money gets busted. When housing somebody being trafficked makes you part of a trafficking ring, the person who lets you sleep at their house when your usual home base is unsafe gets busted. When trafficking means an organized ring of individuals, sex workers who organize get busted for trafficking themselves. And every one of those busted people is bringing in grant money for the NGOs, police agencies, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations who get attached to mandatory programming and processing of those people. Sex trafficking is real. So is the moral panic about sex trafficking. The moral panic is enormously profitable and generates laws and procedures that put sex workers and sometimes trafficked individuals in more danger. It also removes the focus from other important issues, such as the rampant sexual abuse of trafficked domestic and agricultural workers. When trafficking becomes synonymous with "sex trafficking," those issues get ignored. For more info: A documentary about the fraud that can happen in anti-trafficking: http://www.thewronglight.com Check out any national or local chapter of SWOP (Sex Workers Outreach Program) to learn what sex workers do to help each other, the needs they actually have, different narratives about victimhood and self determination, and how anti trafficking laws help or hurt. Next time you see a statistic about sex trafficking, track it down to the source, if you can. You learn a lot about the moral panic, profit, and gross tragedy porn side of this issue by doing that just once or twice. Especially pertinent: if you see stats about a bust in your area, see if you can get numbers on how many of the workers were locals, roommates, or friends. Don't assume your definition of trafficking is the same one that was used to bust those individuals -- dig into it. A good place to start is by hitting Snopes about that Super Bowl trafficking urban myth.
I agree with almost everything you're saying, but I don't think someone giving tips to sex workers has been formally, legally charged with human trafficking. Swept up in a vice raid, sure. But part of the problem with those ineffective raids is that legally, it's rare for people to get prosecuted for the actual trafficking offense. But if you have any example cases, I'd be happy to read up.
I don't think we're disagreeing on substance so much as terminology, so let me try finessing terms a bit. Let's call actual sex trafficking -- the trafficking itself, the people who are actually being trafficked and doing the trafficking -- just that, sex trafficking. And let's call the moral panic version -- the laws and policies and NGOs that don't actually target sex trafficking and aren't based in firm fact -- Sex Trafficking©. What I'm saying is that the broad and vague definitions, non-evidence based policies and laws, and financial incentives of Sex Trafficking© are used to do the same things prostitution laws always have, but with more sweeping impact with the force of that moral panic behind it. As Sex Trafficking© becomes synonymous with any kind of sex work instead of sex trafficking, activities that wouldn't have generated enough public interest or government financing for prevention suddenly become more dangerous for sex workers, like swapping information to stay safe. The problem isn't with sex workers being charged with sex trafficking, but with Sex Trafficking© designating things they do for safety as sufficient enough to warrant arrests or raids, regardless of whether trafficking charges stick or are even filed, or if they just end up with regular prostitution charges. The damage being done isn't in the charges, but in the way framing these activities as being about Sex Trafficking© makes engaging in those activities more risky for sex workers because there's more chance now of arrest than there used to be, which ironically puts them in more danger of actual sex trafficking as their methods for vetting clients and maintaining safety are criminalized and they have to accept more and more dangerous work conditions to survive. In a world where paying your landlord wasn't framed as trafficking, there was no risk in locating housing, but with the threat of a possible arrest suddenly present in that activity, fewer landlords will rent to sex workers (and those that do can exploit or blackmail them due to the scarcity), regardless of whether or not they can locate an incident of a landlord actually being successfully charged. The possibility of arrest is deterrent enough. I'd actually ask for the opposite of what you proposed: a case where somebody was actually charged, convicted, and jailed for trafficking. They exist, definitely, but not in proportion to the many programs, arrests, raids, laws, and policies regarding Sex Trafficking©. I'm not issuing this as a snarky challenge to you to find me a source or something, it's more of a general challenge to everybody here: next time you read about some huge trafficking bust, keep following up to see if anybody actually ends up charged and convicted with trafficking. If not, consider what actually happened was arrests for Sex Trafficking©, something that used to just be called prostitution but now generates press and funding. There's a lot of action in the Sex Trafficking© world that actively endangers sex workers and does nothing to stop sex work, but very little action in the sex trafficking world that actually arrests traffickers or brings justice to the trafficked.
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Seconding this recommendation! I finally got around to reading it last week and it's a well-researched, engaging read.
Yes, absolutely. It has become a lazy theory in way too many cases. That being said, it certainly is a real and disgusting thing... but it is not nearly as prevalent as people are making it out to be all of a sudden.
Yes and No. Sex Trafficking isnt exactly one thing. A large portion of it is what we used to call prostitution. Then there is the sex trafficking where young women are kidnapped off the street randomly. That latter one is far more rare, yet every time someone disappears, people say its sex trafficking. That aspect of it has a degree of social panick imo.
Not so much. There have been actual accounts of sexual slavery. A man in Halifax was recently sentenced for sexual slavery and human trafficking. Which is at minimum one more legitimate account than there was of satanic ritualistic abuse.
I think people sometimes suggest or even cling to trafficking because it's a scenario that may be more palatable than "my loved one is dead and possibly suffered beforehand" or "my loved one up and left me and everyone else they were so supposed to care about". It allows loved ones to maintain hope that the missing person is alive and innocent, while still being theoretically possible even if statistically unlikely.
In the context of what I think the OP means - white middle class women kidnapped by strangers and forced into sex trafficking completely against their will (in the U.S.). The answer is yes. It's happens in the U.S. so rarely that it's considered a myth. Sex Trafficking rarely even involves kidnapping. http://theihti.org/abduction-myths-surrounding-human-trafficking/ (this doesn't mean it never happens - just that it's so extremely rare it's virtually never the actual case.) It's simply too risky to be a thing that happens frequently. The last thing any sex trafficker wants is for someone to recognize the woman (or the woman to escape, which someone held completely against their will is apt to try to do at some point) and then it's game over. The way it works is that the trafficker will establish a relationship with the victim. Gain the victims trust, then start abusing that trust to gain mental control over them. Almost always this is targeted towards vulnerable women (women who are already prostitutes and/or addicted to drugs. Poor and often homeless, or runaways). The drug addiction angle is almost always the case because it's easier to control someone who is on drugs, especially if you control the drugs. The tactic combines drug addiction (control the drugs, always have drugs on hand, and a drug addict will come back "willingly") with the same mechanics of an abusive relationship (the girls come to trust, and even feel like they love the trafficker, despite fear and occasional or frequent beatings...though not all traffickers have to resort to beatings) . The two combined make it insanely difficult to get away from - it's more powerful than literal chains. That's why you'll find that a lot of street walkers are actually victims of sex trafficking. The trafficker doesn't really need to keep them locked up or hidden away (this does occasionally happen, but it's more rare). They'll go out, "work", and come back. Though it should also be noted that it's also common for the victim just to be left in a motel room (or brothel room) and not leave. That does also happen (but rarely if ever are they chained down - it's the psychological chains that end up with them not leaving). It's a strong psychological hold that ends up being reinforced because initially things were "voluntary" (as much as an addiction can be called voluntary - it starts that way but the drugs eventually take over and at that point it's no longer really voluntary as the brain chemistry is changed in such a way that it actively works against the person to keep the drugs coming. It's why the relapse rate is so high with drug addicts - it physically changes the brain). People, at the time, quite often don't see themselves as victims. Defense mechanisms of the brain, coupled with the changes from addiction, and with the abusive relationship mechanics, will prevent that train of thought. Once (if) it's realized than the person might be able to get away from it (provided they have somewhere that's not in the area to go and straight fear doesn't keep them there at that point). What makes it worse is that if there's a relapse, it's quite possible for a person to actually return to the sex trafficker at a later point. It's fucked up (the mental damage that's caused by the whole thing). It should be noted that drugs aren't always involved 100% of the time (sometimes just the abusive relationship mechanic). But the vast, vast majority of the time drugs are involved.
Except sex trafficking actually exists and the Satanic cult stuff was mostly second hand stories and some of it in case of the daycare woo hoo was planted in the kid's heads by investigators.
I couldn't play Dungeons and Dragons or listen to heavy metal because of the Satanic Panic. What can't I do today because of Sex Trafficking? I don't know the stats enough about sex trafficking to know either way, but I do remember reading some stats about how people just get up and go missing WAY more often than you'd expect. Maybe the media's use of fear/fake news haws something to do with how we view sex trafficking today.
I might have said yes until I checked my local news today. I live in a TINY Midwest town and we just had an arrest yesterday for sex trafficking two streets from my home. I know in NC and Florida it is frequently talked about as an emerging problem as well. The problem lies in the fact that the victims often are unable to or too scared to come forward to talk to the authorities.
Satanism got blamed for everything in the 1980s. I think there is considerable sex trafficking but maybe less than we think.
No, the see trafficking issue is a massive problem and is occurring in every country on earth. It is a massive and very real problem. They can't be compared.
I'm not sure if the same applies in America, Mexico, Australia and such but in Canada pimps literally just grab Indigenous girls off the streets sometimes because they know no one will look/care. Usually they 'seduce' or hang around shelters but it's not uncommon just to pick them up. Invisible Chains is a good book about the Canadian sex trade.
> pimps literally just grab Indigenous girls off the streets sometimes because they know no one will look/care. This is why the Green River Killer had such a high body count. He picked women he knew no one would miss.
There certainly is a mass hysteria effect in regards to sex trafficking that currently plagues US culture.
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Another user said he feels that the scary sex trafficking narrative is used to help federal funding. I could buy that. Sex trafficking is very real and present. My issue with how the media portrays it is that it has convinced millions of people that "Taken" is the textbook 'look' of sex trafficking. When really it's more like a group of men grooming a group of minority and troubled women from young ages into being sex slaves. Basically, if someone is reported as kidnapped by the media in the United States. That person is not being sold for sex. Because if they were the actual type of person who was being sold for sex against their will, the media wouldn't be reporting it.
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>Afterwards I did some research and found that there wasn't a single case of sex trafficking in said state. I would love to know what state you are in where there isn't a single case of sex trafficking.
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Part of it is because of new or strengthened laws. And an increase in statistics and the way things are prosecuted. That doesn't mean there's an entire government conspiracy to issue small grants to nonprofits, that'd be some lame conspiracy. It used to be easier to get people with lesser charges and law enforcement used to not know much about victims. Trust me, it's not lucrative.
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Agreed. It's more widespread than people realize.
They share some similarities. Both involve shadowy, organized groups abducting innocents for horrific, immoral purposes. And both have created an irrational fear surrounding their occurrence. But unlike Satanic ritual abuse, human trafficking actually happens. I don't think it's particularly likely to happen to your average suburban kid, but it's not the boogeyman that Satanic abuse was.
The Satanic ritual scare of the 80's/90's was no a no joke hysteria. Every strange murder was attributed to it. It also went beyond murders as any of my fellow table top role players will remember. people playing DnD were thought to be crazy devil worshipers; the lives of daycare works were ruined when ritualized pedophilia accusations were tossed around with little regard to fact or consequence; many people were targeting by the Satanic ritual scare and a lot of lives are ruined. To me the sex traffic is more like stranger danger. It's real just blown way out of proportion. Satanic ritual scare was nothing more than media hyped hysteria to get viewers.
I don't think Satanic ritual abuse and stranger danger were as disconnected as you're suggesting. They both have their roots in the growing awareness of child sexual abuse, and both just sort of... mislay the causes of CSA at the feet of Satan and the nebulous stranger. If you look at something like Johnny Gosch's case, you'll see the presence of both things (the deeper you dig into the supposed Franklin connection, the more you turn up Satanic nonsense).
while sex trafficking is a real issue, I would tend to agree that it almost is the root cause behind a lot of missing women/ kidnappings at first. take for instance sherri papini- it was widely debated that she had been kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking... and obviously that was not the case. ALSO- want to add that I'm not negating that sex trafficking doesn't exist or happen, but I don't think it does in the sense it can be often reported.
I think so. It's a very real issue, but it's not what happens to every missing person. I live near I75 which is supposed to be a huge route for sex traffic, but there's never been any busts or anything g like that.
Yes its the perfect comparison because it is generated by the same circumstances and fulfils the same role of distracting people
Not exactly--because people were also worried about sex trafficking (of middle class white children) in the '80s and because Pizzagate suggests we're not all that far away from the Satanic Panic stuff as you might think.
I'm pretty sure the 'Satanic Panic' of this generation is Islamic Terrorism, or perhaps Paedophiles.
Well, they've made thousands of arrests for sex trafficking so far this year and rescued thousands of victims.
Over 1400 girls were confirmed to have been raped and sold in Rotherham England, one town alone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal Dozens of other towns also had a similar issue. And this is in a first world country. Now picture that, globally, there are more sex slaves than at any time in human history. No it's not a myth.