A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. – Plato
The Western mind adores numbers; it finds them impressive and magical, and the less an individual understands about math the more numbers impress him (especially if they’re large numbers). The quickest way to win the typical modern dullard’s respect is to throw some very large figure at him; in most cases he’ll simply accept it without even thinking about what it really means in terms of human experience. In yesterday’s column I mentioned that the trafficking fetishists call their propaganda of “100,000 trafficked girls” in the United States (or “100,000 trafficked children” depending on the writer) a conservative estimate, and claim that 300,000 is closer to the mark. These numbers are repeated endlessly (including in CNN’s “special report” Selling the Girl Next Door which aired last night) despite the fact that they have no basis in fact whatsoever, and nobody ever bothers to think about what 300,000 girls really means.
The only places in which any hard facts about prostitution can be uncovered are those in which our profession is entirely decriminalized, and there aren’t many of those; luckily, New Zealand took the trouble to study prostitution in depth in order to answer fanatics who predicted disaster when decriminalization was implemented there in 2003. In a survey done in 2005, researchers found that there were a total of 5932 prostitutes of all levels in New Zealand, of which 210 were underage. Furthermore, 75% of underage girls were working only on the street, which leaves only about 53 who could be advertising on the internet (but also may not). In other words, 5722 of New Zealand’s prostitutes – 96.46% – are legal adults. And given that this is the ONLY methodologically sound study available for any portion of the English-speaking world, it’s the best estimate we have for the United States or ever will have until and unless prostitution is fully decriminalized here and whores can therefore feel safe in answering such surveys.
According to the 2006 census the population of New Zealand was 4,143,279, of whom approximately 2,082,049 were female; active, declared prostitutes (excluding part-timers, party girls, strippers, gold-diggers etc) were 5932 of those women or 0.285%. Since this jibes very closely with the standard 1% estimate of all women who prostitute themselves to one degree or another it seems very reasonable and we can therefore apply it to the American population as the best estimate we’re likely to get in the lifetime of anyone reading this. According to the most recent estimates (2009) there are about 155,600,000 women in the United States, which after applying the New Zealand estimate gives us a figure of 443,323 active, declared prostitutes in this country – of which trafficking fetishists wish us to believe about two-thirds are involuntary, “trafficked” underage girls. In truth, the number (again, by application of the New Zealand estimate) is 15,694, of which 75% (11,770) are only working on the street. That gives us a rough estimate of 3924 who might be advertised on the internet…a far cry from the “Wal-Mart of sex trafficking” declared by CNN. Furthermore, not all of these girls are involuntarily involved, which makes the number of “internet sex-slave children” still lower even if we allow the equation of “legal minor” with “child” and “pimped hooker” with “slave”.
I’m sure anyone with half a brain can look at these figures and recognize them as far more realistic than the “300,000” figure touted by the fetishists. The reason their wild exaggerations aren’t discarded out of hand is that, as I said in the first paragraph, most Americans are unable to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the claims. Of the 155,600,000 American women I mentioned earlier, 17.4% are older than 4 but younger than 18; that’s a total of roughly 27,074,400 school-age girls in the US, of which the media wants you to believe 300,000 – in other words, 1.11% – are held in sexual bondage. According to trafficking fanatics, the percentage of underage girls in “sex slavery” is almost FOUR TIMES the best estimate we have for the total percentage of women of ALL ages involved in any kind of formal prostitution. And if we only consider the ages most trafficking “authorities” claim as the majority of underage prostitutes (namely 13-17) it’s more like ten times the percentage.
Nobody in his right mind could believe these figures, yet the mainstream media irresponsibly parrots them without question. I wrote this article, research and all, in about ninety minutes; any reporter could have found the same figures I did from the same online sources, but they don’t bother because inflammatory lies are more interesting to the lowest common denominator than mundane truth. Ignorance is one thing and willful misrepresentation another; since Amber Lyon of CNN and her cronies on other networks could find the same information I did, I can only conclude they don’t want to find it. And that places their actions beyond the bounds of mere ratings-seeking hype and into the realm of pure criminal negligence.
Every now and again, I see examples of real investigative reporting, so there are people out there who know how to do it. I sure wish it were more fashionable.
I didn’t do the research on the numbers like you did, but I knew the 300,000 number was BS. That make one in every thousand people in the United States a trafficked sex slave.
A trafficked UNDERAGED sex slave.
I wish it were, too, and since I’ve been contacted by three reporters in the past couple of months I’m hoping to light a fire under a few of them to get the word out. 🙂
Good luck with that! The public needs to hear from real prostitutes, not the one-side-only gunk like SGND.
Three reporters? Do you trust them? Is there any chance that this will lead to a more balanced report?
One called too late for his deadline, but the other two made it very clear where they stood. 🙂
Clearly your research is highly accurate, Ms. McNeill 🙂
But we both know that news is no longer a reflection of well thought research and facts, it’s sensationalism as you mentioned – “argumentum ad captandum vulgus”. And they lap it up like my little Emily cat laps up her milk 🙁
Some people just enjoy ignorance. Who here said something about a figurative choice between being repeatedly kicked in the nuts or having no nuts at all? More and more individuals are choosing to sacrifice theirs to the altar of ignorant bliss.
Sigh.
It’s an old expression, “ignorance is bliss”. I just wish it weren’t true. 🙁
The worst thing about this situation is that one ends up not knowing where to get actual information about recent events and related topics when one is not a specialist. If you can’t trust the numbers that sex trafficking activists use and if you don’t want to do the research yourself, where can you find information that you can trust? Where can you find simple coverage of events without so clear a slant towards someone’s agenda? Where are the (relatively) unbiased news sources? (I understand there’s no such thing as completely unbiased news, but it certainly is possible to do a lot better than what is currently done.)
I’ve seen the Department of Justice cited as a source for the 300,000 number.
Although comprehensive research to document the number of children engaged in prostitution in the United States is lacking, it is estimated that about 293,000 American youth are currently at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation.
That same study is where the rescue groups get the “average age of entry” statistic.
The fact that the source is a government agency seems to lend them credibility, but the way they are used bears no similarity to what the study actually says.
The fact that they continue to repeat the same utterly false claims, despite being informed that the claims are wrong, is fraudulent if you ask me. When an organization intentionally misrepresents facts in order to secure funding or contributions (which is what non-profits do), it’s no different than if they picked people’s pockets on the street. And when a news organization (and I use the term loosely) repeats those same false claims simply to boost their audience share, they are no more ethical than the pick pocket.
Amber Lyon is not a “reporter”. She’s a bullshit artist. Most of the people and businesses she denounces operate on a higher moral plane than she does.
“At risk” means exactly what the user wants it to mean and nothing more; it’s a nonsense phrase. And turning “at risk” into “currently involved” is nothing more than a con game.
During the Satanic Panic we kept hearing that a million children go missing every year. Now think of that: a million children, missing, every year, year after year. How long until there would be no children left? But people ate it up, and the media kept repeating it.
Turns out that about a million children had gone missing since they started keeping records, not every year.
And that was from ALL causes, of which the most common one was (and still is) kids willingly sneaking away from a disliked custodial parent to be with the non-custodial one they actually like.
That reminds me of when the loons running the government told us they had “saved or created”–wink, wink–3 million jobs by spending trillions of our tax dollars on their vot-buying projects. No one’s stupid enough to believe these numbers, yet they threw them out like unassailable reality to get people on their side. Sadly both the media and the government are utterly incapable of releasing true numbers because all too often, those numbers conflict with the meme they wish to establish.
“Saved or created” would be hard to prove one way or another, which of course is exactly why it is used. Certainly, if the government hires, say, one thousand people to fix roads, they can legitimately claim to have created one thousand jobs. Or if they hire a few thousand people to repair schools, build park facilities, etc.
But to make the numbers bigger, they throw in the number of jobs “saved,” and really, how can they know? So it’s an estimate. And they’d get more points for accuracy and honesty and just plain caring for the truth if they didn’t include that, but they can’t resist going for the bigger numbers.
Nice job of exposing the statistical fallicy! That’s similar to people focusing on the 3-4 children who die every year in the U.S. in the context of sex crimes, while ignoring with a yawn the 3-4 children who die every day as a result of physical abuse and neglect! And those numbers don’t even include the 9,000 child deaths annually covered up as “accidents,” even though they are actually due to parental neglect.
Thanks, Frank! It all goes back to the bizarre notion that sex is somehow intrinsically different from all other human activity. Child being beaten = acceptable, child being photographed “suggestively” = throw the “perpetrator” under the jail. Woman taking a pittance to slave as a maid=”honest work”, woman making good money for an hour of usually-pleasant work=”slavery”. Etc, etc, etc, etc…
[…] journalism. I encourage, no I DEMAND, okay nevermind… I ASK that you kindly read this on Maggie McNeill's blog […]
Or, to make it even worse: a supreme lack of understanding of the rather simple mathematics that underlie such claims. Even if sheer numbers are used–it seems many people would still react to your number of about 3,000 underage trafficked girl as ‘too many’ (‘Whaaat? 3,000? That’s many buses full of girls! That’s horrible! Quick, more laws!’) without realizing what a small fraction of the actual female population it is, and how much smaller this problem is than, say, victims of car accidents.
Innumeracy is rampant, and many a hysterical activist uses it as a tool towards fostering whatever outrage du jour they happen to favor.
Indeed, and this is a shame. Really a shame. With news more and more an entertainment genre, shock value is clearly more important than real journalistic research. This is especially obvious in Fox News, but the other cable news networks are less and less likely to be significantly betterO tempora, o mores…
Speaking of numbers, I just came across this blog post. Apparently the blog belongs to a college student who wants to “gain a comprehensive view of the sex-trafficking problem in the United States”.
Maybe you should pay her blog a visit. She doesn’t get many comments.
I noticed she has a post about Cambodia. Maybe I will send her a link to an article I found that says the population of rescue workers in Cambodia actually exceeds the number of trafficked sex workers.
Disclaimer: I have no idea whether the blogger is male or female. I just made a typical sexist assumption because I, as a male, have a reputation knee-jerk shallowness to maintain (and no male would get caught dead using such a girly wallpaper). 🙂
You should catch me at karaoke sometime. 😉
It really is a tough world for the researcher who actually wants to do honest work in measuring child prostitution, sex trafficking, and related problems. Indeed, with prostitution decriminalized only in New Zealand, one cannot count on prostitutes being helpful; they’ll understandably fear the consequences of participating in any such research.
So the best one can do is apparently apply New Zealand numbers. That is of course not the right way to do it — it is possible that the US and New Zealand have different situations and therefore different real numbers. But without any independent source of information on US numbers, how can we even confirm or disconfirm this? It’s really a shame.
I really wished that all those people who give their money to support whatever outrage-driven projects are fashionable would just stop for a minute and give, at least once, their money to fund more research. Clearly one thing this field needs desperately is more serious research. That people can’t see that, when they are routinely confronted with the kind of obviously wrong numbers that are debunked here, is yet another sad consequence of innumeracy.
New Zealand isn’t the only country with decriminalized prostitution, not by a long shot; it is, however, the only one which took the time too do such nice, clear, methodical studies in conjunction with its decriminalization act in order to shut the idiots up. 🙂
I wonder how they come to the conclusion all prostitutes are forced into it in the U.S….
Cop: Ok, lady, you were arrested for prostitution, one of the most immoral acts in the known universe. Did you take up this profession on your own, in which case you will be prosecuted and otherwise harassed for being one of the most immoral people in the known universe, or were you forced into it by some pimp who threatened to kill your family if you didn’t cooperate, in which case we will forgive you and you will be encouraged to tell your heartrending story to a local rescue organization who will add you to their statistics.
Lady: Ummm…. I was forced. It was terrible.
HA. That was awesome DAVE! Thanks for the giggle even though sadly it’s true.
[…] did I ask you guys to do earlier (as in my previous post to this one)? If you haven't read Maggie's post then get your ass over there. Now that life expectancy thing is new to me. Since of course she […]
I just loved “…anyone including the village idiot and his slow brother can tell up close and personal when someone is NOT an adult in most cases…” because of course a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old looks NOTHING like an eighteen-year-old!* That six months makes all the difference!
* flagged for the sarcasm-impaired
As I’ve said before, I skipped sixth grade and since I have an autumn birthday I was 16 when I moved into the dorm and for over two months afterward. My age was routinely estimated at 25 by both men and women from that time until my early 30s; in fact when I used to tell escort clients I was 28 (though I was actually 33 or 34) I was often told “you don’t look that old”. The idea that a man can infallibly tell a well-developed, mature 14- or 15-year-old from an 18-year-old is evil bullshit, and most people who make that claim know it in their hearts and claim it anyhow. 🙁
Guys, if you’re sure that YOU can tell the difference, then take this little test:
http://www.zipperfish.com/free/quiz/likejailbait.html
And don’t worry, they’re all legal… now.
Dam Sailor… I totally failed many of those myself. I wish that person who said she could tell the difference would take that test…
I wish she would too. And I wish it were updated from time to time. I’m so clueless; I don’t even know who the hot jailbait is these days.
Hey, maybe some of the girls from Skins? That should work.
I got seven out of ten right; of the ones I got wrong two I guessed too young and one too old. Of course, for a man in real life, all it takes is one wrong guess and his life is over. 🙁
Or to put it another way: ‘legal minor’ ≠ ‘child/infant’.
As the Fonz used to say: exactamundo!
It hasn’t showed it on your comments page, but I put up a reply on this and linked it back here.
Emily, I was confused as to why the link didn’t show, so I checked your blog; you accidentally linked the Schapiro Group’s new report I talk about in today’s column rather than linking to this column we’re commenting in now. 🙂
I’m a dork. Fixing now!
[…] McNeill puts up a very good post on a subject dear to my heart: the Mainstream Media Are Liars, Idiots or Both… Yeah, Probably […]
[…] call girl Maggie McNeil debunks that CNN scare story on underage prostitutes and […]
Good piece.
In terms of overhyped numbers, this reminds me of the homeless hysteria back in the late 1980s. News reports were claiming up to 15,000,000 homeless in the USA. I knew those numbers had to be BS, since you’d be tripping over the homeless everywhere you went if there were that many (but then, I took some advanced math and statistics on the way to my bachelor’s of science degree, so math isn’t magical to me).
Then US News & World Report had an in depth (like, 15 pages) article about the homeless about 1990. One of the things they reported on was how the nonprofit organizations “defined” homeless to hype the problem. One claimed you were homeless if your dwelling didn’t have an internal bathroom. There are apartment complexes in New York (probably other older cities, too) where the bathrooms are accessible through the public areas (12 apartments might share 4 bathrooms). And of course, many college dorms have shared bathrooms, so there’d be a lot of “homeless” college students. Another organization considered you homeless if you had less than 350 sq. ft. of living space per person in your dwelling. At the time this report came out, I was living in a 650 sq. ft. one bedroom luxury apartment (A/C, dishwasher, washer/dryer, cable TV, etc.). But by this definition, all the couples living in similar apartments would have been “homeless”, because the apartment wasn’t > 700 sq. ft.
The report also printed the results of a government funded survey performed by a university to determine the actual number of homeless in the USA. They determined that there were about 400,000 homeless in the USA (defined as sleeping in shelters or on the street; which is the definition most people expect).
After this report came out, the hype about the homeless almost completely disappeared. The public, which may see numbers as “magical”, as you say, can be taught. And once they’re taught that they’ve been lied to in an attempt to sucker them, they tend to get pissed.
So keep trying to get the word out. Yes, the problem of underage prostitution does exist, and perhaps it should be discouraged. But when the “service provider is past puberty, demanding that the customer somehow know that (s)he is < 18 is ridiculous, as stated above. When prostitution is illegal in all but Nevada (except for the counties with Reno and Las Vegas in them – more on this later), it doesn't really matter to the customer what age the "service provider" is; other than younger is less likely to have been in the business as long as someone older, and so less likely to have a disease. But legalize prostitution with 18+, and underage prostitution tends to disappear (why risk jail time for 30 minutes with that 16 year old when 30 minutes with an 18 year old is legal?).
As to why prostitution is illegal in Reno and Vegas; I have a cousin who used to work in a casino in Vegas. He walked in/out to get to his work area through the bar. He said he knew who the hookers were, the bartender knew, the casino knew, and the police knew. The reason it was illegal there was so that the police and city council members could get kickbacks to look the other way.
One final thought. In many jurisdictions where prostitution is legal, making a "adult film" is legal. So it seems to me that instead of a "nude modeling and conversation studio" (one city I used to live in had a well-known business of this type that was a front for prostitution), why not an "adult movie studio"? Come in, pay to "produce" a movie in a set, be given the only copy of the movie, and if the "producer" chooses to not distribute because of "poor production quality", isn't it still legal? (Not looking for an actual answer, but throwing the idea out as "food for thought").
Thank you, MPH! The example I keep thinking of is the ludicrous numbers used during the “Satanic Panic”, when we were told that hundreds of thousands of teenage girls were being used as brood mares to produce millions of babies for sacrifice; the stories share the same lurid components of teenage sex slaves and evil slavers but the religious component is mostly hidden in the “trafficking” version (though see tomorrow’s column).
On the movie studio idea, it’s been proposed but must girls don’t want their faces seen even in advertising much less video, the regulations would be daunting and it probably wouldn’t work in most states even then. Dodges never really work because the cops just lie anyhow. 🙁
But if the movie was for the client alone? The client could be required to bring their own camera (smartphone). And if it’s not recording or there’s accidentally a blanket over it the whole time, well, that’s a completely unintentional equipment failure.
Or the studio could record the performance, and then the actress choose to deny the studio and client an artistic release (although hopefully the client does get the other kind).
Or the whole thing could be done as a rehearsal, or even a casting. After the session, the client could be told “Thank you, but we do not require you for this movie we are totally making”, and that’s that. If the client asks why, the director can simply say “I just didn’t believe it.”
Oh, the ideas just suggest themselves!
I’m reminded of the bar that got around the smoking ban by declaring that everyone was an “actor” performing improv.
For that matter, actually distribute the movie, but the girls and clients wear masks.
Does anyone know where the 100,000 estimate comes from? What research it’s based on?
It’s so close to 1% that I suspect it may be as simple as that. We saw a similar thing in the 1980’s when Mitch Snyder claimed (and the media mindlessly repeated) that three million Americans were homeless (5-10 times the estimates from people who’d done their homework). It turned out the entire basis of that claim was that three million was 1% of the population.
This is typical of the media. The most hysterical claim gets the most attention. If ten researchers estimates there are maybe 20,000 underage prostitutes and one big-mouth estimates there are 300,000, guess who gets a guest spot on CNN?
Honestly, I think 100,000 is just a good large number which sounds impressive and is too large for most people to really comprehend as a whole. The 300,000 figure appears to be a modification of a figure from a government report which claimed that something like 287,000 minors were “at risk” from “sexual exploitation” (though neither term was clearly defined and no study was produced to justify the wild-ass guess). It’s like that game “gossip” we played as children; 287,000 becomes 300,000, “at risk” becomes “currently involved” and “sexual exploitation” becomes “sex trafficking”. 🙁
UPDATE: My April 2nd column is about the Estes and Weiner “youth at risk” study and what it actually said.
300,000 means every thousandth PERSON (300,000,000 / 300,000) in the US is a child prostitute. knew it was bullshit the moment i saw it.
Me too, Aaron, but it took me a while to figure out how to demonstrate it. 🙂
[…] and the more likely it is to find prominence in the media. We see similar things in, for example, hysterical claims about teen […]
[…] […]
[…] the most commonly quoted statistics have “never been contested,” they’ve been decried and disproved by many sex workers, advocates, allies, and even the occasional mainstream […]
[…] claims that the most commonly quoted statistics have “never been contested,” they’ve been decried and disproved by many sex workers, advocates, allies, and even the occasional mainstream journalist […]
[…] that 210 of the country’s 5932 prostitutes (in other words, 3.54%) were underage. Assuming that the same percentage of women (0.285%) are prostitutes in both countries (a reasonable enough assumption) we arrive at a figure of 443,323 whores in the U.S., of which […]
[…] trafficking for the purposes of sex are highly questionable as pointed out by Dr. Laura Agustin, Maggie McNeill, and sex worker-run organizations all over the world. Robot or […]
I just had a question about your statistics. It seems to me that .285% is pretty far off of 1%. When you try and do a percent error you get something like 250%. Combine that with the magnitude of the study and I would think that the 1% seems rather high.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the 1%, but I suspect you’re incorrectly comparing 0.285% of women who are prostitutes NOW, and 1% who have worked as prostitutes at SOME POINT in their lives.
I was hesitant about the 300,000 figure as well, but once you clearly look at the definition of trafficking, it is possible. Human trafficking can be someone who lives in their home and is exploited or under the control of someone else for that person’s gain. This gain could be money or it could be the assertion of power. This is a situation that is likely to occur in sex trafficking cases. If you look at the number of runaway or missing children in the US each year, 800,000 (This is according to the US Department of Justice. Some sources suggest up to 1.5 million), it can be possible for the number to be that high. Runaway and missing children are a large supply for sex trafficking. The 300,000 also includes labor trafficking, which is mostly foreigners in large groups.
I wrote an article for my school newspaper, and someone commented with the link to your post. I’m not trying to discredit your figures in any way, but I wanted to share what I have found in my research and personal interviews. It’s great that you put thought into this and took time to research the numbers. Human trafficking is a subject that gets thrown around in the media, in many cases to gain some type of political or social leverage. More people definitely need to take your approach instead of just absorbing the media!
Welcome to the blog, Hayley! As I and many others have argued, the overly-broad definition is most of the problem; many people are classed as “victims” when they actually aren’t by any valid definition. You might find my columns “A False Dichotomy“, “Thought Experiment” and “The Lion and the Ox” explain that more fully, and I would strongly encourage you to read Sex At the Margins by Laura Agustin, an anthropologist who has studied migration, sex work and the laws which interfere with them for about 20 years. There are also a LOT of good papers on my “Resources” page; I think you’ll find the works by Ann Jordan and Elizabeth Bernstein especially enlightening.
[…] since at least Edwardian times). And despite sensationalized claims to the contrary, only about 3.5% of all prostitutes in Western countries are below 18, and the majority of those are 17; the average age at which a so-called “child prostitute” […]
That’s a good estimate, yes, but numbers can’t be exact. There’s always some slight inaccuracy. Yeah, them researchers must have worked hard, but what if there was really not 5931 but 5929 prostitutes in New Zealand at the time? Very probable, such as it being 5731 +- 10 etc. I’m no geek, nerd or whatever like that, i just consider you (Maggie) a wise person and i am kind of sorry to see things like and <a figure of 443,323 active… (conisdering it already an estimate (you got a percentage (not totally accurate) from some survey (accurate, but never 100%) and applied it to the ESTIMATE of women in the USA (thankfully here it is clearly )> instead of or or , whatever sounds best. it’s no good to speak of some estimate’s results like that: . The number should be . Yeah, and i’d be happy if that inaccuracy was measured (though here it’s not possible), like (here relative inacuracy is around 100/15700 – less than 1% – seems OK for an estimate. Please, don’t do these exact numbers, do numbers . I’m no geek, i’m no scientist, what I said is school level thing, that’s basics, that’s elementary – big numbers can’t be exact, actually, no measurement is exact, and the best thing you can do is to say .
I’m some russian guy, and I don’t know english good enough. Please tell me of any mistakes, alienity (i mean speaking like native speakers don’t) , weird stuff etc. in my writing – that’d be very helpful for me.
You’re right, Andrew, and in other columns referring to this one I usually just say “450,000”. I certainly didn’t mean anyone to believe the figure was intended as an exact one.
I agree that there is inaccurate hyping. The peer reviewed report on human trafficking from the UN’s ILO in 2012 makes a critical assumption that for every 1 reported case of trafficking, 27 go unreported. Big assumption, but let’s go with it for now. Based on their numbers we would actually expect to see around 20,000 under-age girls trafficked at any given time in the US. But the problem is that the investigators who dig into this sort of issue keep finding legit victims that never make headlines (because they aren’t white and pretty). Has the size of the issue been overblown? In the US perhaps, but it isn’t miniscule either.
[…] an example. The first time I became aware of the work of my emigo Maggie McNeill was her thorough debunking of the claim that 200,000 underage girls are trafficked for sex in the United States. You should […]
[…] forced into sex work against their will by others? Although the number of these incidents is often greatly exaggerated, this is a real possibility. Quite simply, this should absolutely remain illegal – although […]
[…] Because prostitution is illegal in most of the world, the most reliable data on the proportion of sex workers that are underage will come from places where the industry is legal and it can be studied openly, like New Zealand. And there, estimates put the figure at about 3.5%. […]
[…] 1% of American women have sold sex as a job for at least part of their lives; my own calculations (based on comprehensive figures from New Zealand) indicate that less than a third of that number […]
[…] Because prostitution is illegal in most of the world, the most reliable data on the proportion of sex workers that are underage will come from places where the industry is legal and it can be studied openly, like New Zealand. And there, estimates put the figure at about 3.5%. […]
[…] só pode ser adquirido em países em que a profissão é legal, pois assim há registro. Uma pesquisa na Nova Zelândia – onde é legal – afirma que 3,5% das pessoas que se prostituem […]
[…] underage comes from places where the industry is legal and it can be studied openly it is estimated at about 3.5%. There are many other reasons for tighter controls such as the association of criminality and drug […]
[…] call girl and sex-workers‘ rights activist Maggie McNeill has been pointing out for years, what data there are suggest underage prostitutes are a tiny subset of sex workers. What’s more, only a small […]
[…] Prostitution, roughly 1% of American women have sold sex as a job for at least part of their lives; my own calculations (based on comprehensive figures from New Zealand) indicate that less than a third of that number […]