We’re Number One!

Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.  –  Arthur Hugh Clough

One of the most fascinating aspects of “sex trafficking” hysteria is the bizarre competition I’ve dubbed “King of the Hill” after the boys’ game; each city and state boasts that it is one of the “top” or “leading” or “major” destinations, sources or “hubs” of sex trafficking in the United States.  And “boast” is the right word:  while it’s typical for cops to exaggerate crime statistics in order to justify ever-increasing budgets and power, this goes far beyond that; they and many other fabulists seem to take a kind of perverse pleasure in pretending that their territory is the best at providing, receiving or transporting “child sex slaves”.  And a pretense it is:

According to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), no statistics are kept for the number of Human Trafficking cases prosecuted for each individual state. They are also unable to provide the number of individuals indicted in each state or how many victims were involved in each case.

Since there is absolutely no basis for any interstate comparison, intercity comparisons belong strictly to the realm of fantasy.  But virtually every “trafficking” fanatic speaking to every reporter, class or ladies’ club meeting will insist that whatever place he’s speaking in is “a major hotspot”, citing whatever authority sounds good (the FBI, DoJ and Homeland Security are favorites) and “explaining” that the high level of activity is due to the presence of interstate highways, proximity to some “sinful” place like New York or Atlanta, remoteness from other places (yes, really), or even (in a bizarrely 19^th-century touch) the presence of navigable waterways, presumably for the slave-ships to sail in upon.  As of this time I have no explanation for the popularity of this pissing contest, nor why absolutely nobody asks even the most basic questions of these bizarre braggarts.  However, I think it might be interesting to compile all of the claims in one place, to be modified later as new ones come in. Since many of the claims are (unsurprisingly) very vague, I’m going to count all words like “major” or “near the top” as being claims for the top ten.  The first table is for states, the second for cities.  Don’t try to compare rankings of cities with that of the states in which they lie; you’ll hurt your brain.

States

Cities

Of course, no explanation is ever given of how these “trafficked children” are transported; given the sheer volume (especially during mega sporting events), perhaps they’re crammed into secondhand school buses or packed in shipping crates with holes drilled in the sides for air.  Presumably, we’re supposed to take it on faith, just like we’re supposed to accept these mysterious figures from nowhere, the mystic ability of “pimps” to hide hundreds of thousands of captives, and the economic viability of enslaved whores when there are plenty of independent ones to be found in every city in the world.