Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies. – Dorothy Allison
Lying can be benign. Yesterday was of course April Fools’ Day, when we employ good-natured lies to amuse each other; people actually pay stage magicians, actors and call girls to lie to them for entertainment purposes. And of course, without social lies such as, “Pleased to meet you”, “I’m doing fine”, “No, boss, I don’t mind” and “What a cute baby!” our interaction with others would generate considerably more friction than it does. But lies employed to harm, control, steal and keep others in ignorance are not at all benign and I am totally opposed to them, especially when they are used by the Powers That Be to excuse invasions of the privacy and rights of individuals. One year ago today I showed how several major elements of trafficking mythology grew from misquoting, distorting and exaggerating the already-flawed conclusions of the Estes and Weiner study, and today I’ll look at another source of highly dubious guesses masquerading as statistics: the so-called “Bales Algorithm”.
When I decided to make the day after April Fools’ Day an annual occasion for major trafficking myth debunking, I immediately contacted Dr. Laura Agustín, with whom regular readers are already familiar. Dr. Agustín is an expert on sex work and migration who is highly critical of the misogynistic, racist, anti-sex “trafficking” paradigm which characterizes most or all sex work and a large fraction of other migrant labor as “exploitation” or “slavery”, and whenever I write on the subject you will usually find a link to her work somewhere in the essay. So as you might expect, she is my “go-to girl” for all things “trafficking” related, especially information on the ridiculous claims made by “trafficking” fetishists. This time she directed me to her December 2nd, 2010 column, which in turn led me to a series of articles in which Jack Shafer of Slate debunked the ridiculous claims of New York Times writer Peter Landesman, whose January 25th, 2004 article “The Girls Next Door” may have been the critical event which really got “sex trafficking” hysteria going (and shaped the Times’ anti-whore campaign and Nick Kristof’s entire career for the next decade).
Landesman, like most who promote hysteria, is mighty short on facts; as Shafer stated in “Enslaved By His Sources”,
Landesman’s 8,500-word breathless hodgepodge of anecdotes, bait-and-switches, non sequiturs, pseudonymous testimonials, and over-the-top hysteria comes nowhere near to proving its thesis: Although the crime of sex-slavery exists, Landesman cites just two criminal cases involving 10 females. I continue to harp on Landesman’s unsubstantiated numbers precisely because without their sensationalistic wallop, his months-long Times Magazine investigation collapses upon itself. Landesman’s notion that every third block in the country harbors a sex-slave brothel can be traced to his reliance on well-meaning sources in government, activist circles, the religious community, and academia whose moral fervor causes them to stretch the truth to make their points about the abomination of sex slavery. Landesman appears to have fallen captive to these sources, internalized their views, and channeled their agenda into the pages of the Times Magazine.
One of the most important of those sources was Kevin Bales, the founder of a fetishist group named “Free the Slaves”; he claimed to have developed an “algorithm” for estimating the number of “sex slaves” in the US, and Landesman’s popularization of the “estimate” derived therefrom not only influenced future “estimates” by the fanatics, but may have been accepted by the US State Department as part of its method of calculating “sex slave” numbers for its annual “Trafficking in Persons” (TIP) report…we don’t know for sure, because the government refuses to release the methodology (if any) used in preparing the report. But even if the State Department isn’t influenced by it, the True Believers certainly are; you know that “27 million slaves worldwide” figure we started hearing early last year? Bales derived it with his so-called “algorithm” in December of 2010. And that’s highly problematic because…well, see for yourself; this is how Bales explained it to Shafer via email in June of 2005 (emphasis mine):
…The estimate of 30,000 to 50,000 people being held in forced labor in the United States for purposes of sexual exploitation was arrived at in this way: firstly, we used the State Department’s estimate of 18,000 to 20,000 people being trafficked into the US each year. (Admittedly, the State Department has not explained the methodology by which they arrived at this estimate, so we use it in the hope that they will soon make their research methods clear.) Secondly, we adjusted this estimate according to two surveys we have recently conducted. The first survey was of all media reports of trafficking cases in the US over the past four years. These reports covered 136 separate cases of forced labor, 109 of which noted the number trafficked totaling 5,455 individuals. As with most crimes, the number of known and reported cases is a fraction of the actual number of cases occurring. To the best of our understanding the proportion of known to actual cases for human trafficking is low. In this survey 44.2% of cases involved forced labor in prostitution and 5.4% involved the sexual abuse of children, totaling 49.6%. As this is a rough estimate I rounded this up to 50%. In a second survey of forty-nine service provider agencies in the United States that had worked with trafficked persons, we asked how long each trafficked person they had worked with had been held in forced labor. The minimum reported time was one month, the maximum was 30 years. The majority of cases clustered between three years and five years.
So, if 9,000 to 10,000 of the people trafficked into the US each year will be enslaved for sexual exploitation (50% of 18-20,000), and they are likely to remain in that situation for three to five years, then the number of people enslaved for sexual exploitation at any one time in the US could be between 27,000 and 50,000 people. Since a number of people working in the area of human trafficking have stated that they believe the State Department’s estimate is low, I chose to make our estimate based on the upper end of the State Department figure, thus giving an estimate of 30,000 to 50,000.
Savor the number-crunchy goodness for a moment and let it sink in. Bales starts with an “estimate” of unknown derivation, “adjusts” it by a factor based on media reports (which often repeat each other and obviously increase dramatically during a moral panic), presumes without evidence that the proportion of reports to actual incidents is low, multiplies the result by guesses from prohibitionists with an anti-whore agenda, then rounds up. When I made my own estimate of the number of US prostitutes I used solid data from a methodologically-sound survey, and cross-checked it via another widely accepted study; the results are both credible and jibe with figures extrapolated from historical data. Bales’ results, on the other hand, bear as much resemblance to the source data as the end product of the digestive process bears to the food which goes in the other end…and that was already nasty to begin with. Worst of all, Bales’ method is specifically designed to produce ever-increasing results: wildly-exaggerated “estimates” fuel the hysteria, which in turn generates more media reports, which dramatically increases the “adjustment factor”, thus generating ever-higher “estimates” which ratchet up the hysteria…and so on and on, ad nauseam. The current claim surpasses the population of Australia by a comfortable margin; by the time the hysteria collapses it will probably exceed that of the United Kingdom.
In any moral panic, the yellow press and those who stand to profit from the hysteria (politicians, government and groups selling a “solution” to the nonexistent “crisis”) have a mutually-reinforcing relationship. But not all press is sensationalistic, and even in the midst of hysteria there are always a few reporters like Shafer and Jerry Markon of the Washington Post who are willing to tell the truth. That number inevitably grows larger with time; like any other fad a moral panic is unsustainable because its unchecked growth eventually exhausts the credulity of even the most gullible, at which point the politicians switch to a new hobby-horse, the employees of dozens of NGOs have to get real jobs and the public has to find some new lie to believe in.
The problem is that they actually believe this.
Were it true, then the moral position would be to interfere with this traffic.
That’s the problem. There’s nothing wrong with many of these prohibitionist types. They think there’s a real problem when there isn’t.
That they’re manipulated by a few sexual prudes and those with an agenda is the real crime.
True. I seen so many blogs and forums where the moment any kind of prostitution is mentioned, men start posting things like “It’s so sad”, “Once they’ve been forced into sex work they are broken and can’t escape” and “All their pimps are bastards”, even though it quickly becomes evident that they have never been with a prostitute in their lives from the stupid questions they ask.
I have played with professional women all over the world, and not one has ever expressed unhappiness or lacked the willingness to tell me to “f*** off” if they didn’t like my requests.
That was the one good thing about the communist countries; they didn’t buy into the pimp mythology, and they did not consider prostitutes as victims (but rather as “petit bourgeois”).
Failure to think through the consequences of your actions (to a reasonable degree) is immoral. The more indirect your experience, the better the justification must be.
So yet, there is something wrong. Even if you don’t grant my claim above, it’s still a cognitive failure.
Garbage in; garbage out. I’m reminded of the great quote from Mark Twain about the length off the MIssissippi River”
I wouldn’t even call this an algorithm. I write algorithms for a living and this isn’t one. This is wild-ass guessing to produce an answer that is high enough to be alarming but not so high that people will proclaim it to be bullshit. It’s only slightly more scientific than estimating the number of sex slaves based on sheep entrails.
Oh, I agree; that’s why I put “algorithm” in scare quotes. Laura Agustin’s column (linked just below her picture) points out that by using the word he pretends to a scientific and mathematical legitimacy he doesn’t remotely have. “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is even part of her title.
Circular Reasoning at it’s finest. And I agree with Gorbachev that they actually believe their own lies and so it becomes self perpetuating until as you noted, that it will eventually burn itself out. And the winner will be…er, right.
I don’t know why men aren’t the ones outraged by these numbers. Stipulating that they are true for a moment – what does it say for American men that their “perversions” are driving a demand for THAT MANY sex slaves – many of whom are underage?
And by the way … how does the Drive-By Media get away with “pumping up” a sex trafficking scare like the one they hawked for this year’s superbowl? Why hasn’t anyone followed up with the police to really find out how many sex traffickers were arrested, charged, convicted? You know, an honest reporter would do a follow up on a story like that. Alas, there are no longer any honest reporters though – they all have an agenda, and the fact that the cops really didn’t arrest any traffickers conflicts with that agenda.
And another note, how many men out there are willing to pay for the services of someone who’s being coerced? I don’t think very many and, I think it’s easier to tell when a woman is being coerced to provide a service than many people think. This is one of the reasons why I only go for the “upper class” independent escorts. Back when I was younger – and had to go with cheaper alternatives – I used to always “interview” every woman I hired to get a feel for her motivation. Only in one instance did I come across a hooker (in Chinhae, South Korea) who seemed to have a story of “coercion”. I paid her barfine for the night and got her out of the bar and took her dancing (only). But in the end, I really don’t even think her story was legit, she just saw a “Dudley Doo-right” she could take advantage of. Whatever, I think the bar fine for her was like $40 bucks or something – so no great loss and I enjoyed dancing with her that night.
I just really don’t believe that most “Johns” out there would even want to hire the services of someone “trafficked” … and I think most of us are on the lookout for that kind of thing.
It’s obvious to anyone honest that most men wouldn’t go for that, but remember who’s driving the “sex trafficking” hysteria: neofeminists (who represent all men as evil), religious fundamentalists (who represent any man who pursues sex outside of marriage as evil), cops (who represent all non-cops as potential criminals), and politicians (who are experts at making anything and everything about “the children”). All these groups have a vested interest in making ordinary men look like perverted malefactors, and the sheeple don’t have the gonads to stand up and denounce them as the filthy liars they are.
The real worry?
The lies don’t have to hold water forever, just for long enough to shear the sheeple and stamp out their freedoms.
Once the second objective is done, no amount of bleating saves the mutton from the stewpot.
What is aggravating are the numbers of people who just accept stupidity like sex-slave brothels ever third block all over the country. Don’t they ever wonder why they haven’t seen one?
You couldn’t hide something like that. Teenagers would be publishing lists and addresses (and probably photos and prices) all over the net within a week.
“Every Third Block” where I live is a church.
Well played Sex Traffickers … Well played!
I wouldn’t want to fuck a woman who was being forced into it. Most men wouldn’t. I could see men wanting to role-play coercive situations: “I’ve just conquered your village and claimed you as my prize. Uh, how rough and barbaric is OK for me to be? Oh, and can you whimper and cry a little? Thanks, WENCH!”
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[…] “That number was developed was developed by a “trafficking” fanatic named Kevin Bales using media reports multiplied by arbitrary numbers of his own devising; the more the hysteria, the higher the number of articles and thus the higher Bales’ number grows. … Bales starts with an “estimate” of unknown derivation, “adjusts” it by a factor based on media reports (which often repeat each other and obviously increase dramatically during a moral panic), presumes without evidence that the proportion of reports to actual incidents is low, multiplies the result by guesses from prohibitionists with an anti-whore agenda, then rounds up.” (Continue reading: Maggie McNeill – Held Together With Lies) […]