U.S gov’t wipes out sexual slavery epidemic, sort of

Posted by Marc Hodak on June 26, 2008 under Scandal | Be the First to Comment

Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced a round-up 21 children who were being prostituted in the United States. Few things evoke more horror than the idea of children in sexual bondage, and few things worth celebrating more than their release from that horror. It seems rather petty after such a success to ask “at what cost?” But the question is not just about cost in dollars (answer: about a quarter million dollars per child saved), but a question of cost in credibility of our government.

In 2001, the State Department estimated that about 45,000 to 50,000 people were trafficked in the U.S., defined as the use of force or coercion—violent or psychological—to exploit a person for commercial sex or the recruitment, transportation, or provision of a person for any form of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, or slavery. This is horrific stuff, especially in the “land of the free.” This report came out in the midst of one of those “white slavery” panics that has periodically gripped western nations.

By 2003, the State Department estimates had dropped to 18,000 to 20,000, later to be further revised to 14,000 to 17,500. The attorney general later grudgingly admitted that even those estimates were likely too high.

These continual downward revisions, where the government ends up with a new high that was below the prior low, is not because the government has ferreted out tens of thousands of cases. The total number of sexual slavery cases identified by the government since 2000 through the end of last year has been 1,362.

Given the increased incentives since 2000 for government agents, and for the sex workers themselves, to characterize individuals as “sex slaves,” even this 1,362 number is cast into doubt.

The government created a particularly strong incentive for undocumented prostitutes (which is most of them) to call themselves sex slaves by offering them a special visa and housing assistance if they fit that category. For instance, in 2004, of the 520 applicants for that visa, over half of them were denied. Unless one believes that the government, after all its expenditures and crusading around human trafficking, can be so bureaucratically dense as to investigate specific claims of sexual slavery, with the person in front of them, and deny legitimate claims, one can only conclude that this rate of denials is the result of field agents or women dramatically over-reporting the incidence of vanilla prostitution as “sex trafficking.”

Again, the point is not to diminish the horribleness of the a crime that may very well claim thousands of victims, or denigrate the achievement of saving another dozen or two children. The point is that the press is, and remains fascinated with the idea of sexual slavery as an epidemic. It sells stories. It gives the moral crusaders who are most fascinated by the sexuality of young girls the chance to don their shining armor. It gives government agencies their budgets, to the tune of $150 million this decade, so far.

At the end of all that outrage and mobilization for a war against domestic sex slavery, the government can say the numbers have come down from upwards of 50,000 per year to a few thousand, maybe hundreds. Congratulations, feds. And please don’t blame us skeptics the next time you have another crusade to fund from that seemingly bottomless pit of empathy and dollars that you cynically call your “concerned citizens.”