Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those of you who are sensitive to symbolism may have noticed that my metaphors about trafficking hysteria often involve circles, spirals and other such forms. In “The Widening Gyre” I used Yeats’ image of the falcon who has spiraled too far from the falconer to hear his commands; in my column from this last New Year’s Day I used the image of a runaway carousel. This is because a moral panic, like a living thing, has a life-cycle; but unlike a living thing, it can go through long periods of dormancy and then return again from the dead. The “sex trafficking” hysteria is so similar to the “white slavery” panic that the differences are barely worth noting, except that this time around it went through a period of appearing to be something else (the Satanic Panic) before settling back into its old, colonialist, Victorian anti-sex shape, complete with racist violence disguised as concern for the welfare of “victims”. The panic grew from the same filth which always nourishes such monsters, went through a larval stage in which it was difficult to tell what it might mature into, metamorphosed into its adult form and has now reached its maximum extent. But unlike a living thing, hysteria does not decline into old age; rather, it expands until its structure disintegrates and it implodes upon itself. As recently as the beginning of last year the “trafficking” myth was fairly coherent between the various cults which adhere to it, but now we’re beginning to see wide variation in the narrative; as Yeats wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
To be sure, there are still plenty of paint-by-number “trafficking” articles on the market; this recent one about the New Jersey Super Bowl, for example, has all the typical elements: gypsy whores, denial of women’s agency, cartoon “pimps”, and the obligatory “survivor” witnessing to the congregation (Hallelujah!). While those intended for a general audience usually rely on pompous pronouncements from authority figures with a few magic numbers thrown in for effect, those intended for an audience with pretensions to intellectuality are often dense with bogus statistics (including the impossible “average debut at 13” and “100,000 children enslaved per year” idiocies); this still works because the prohibitionists know they can count on their readers’ mathematical illiteracy and intellectual laziness.
Even some of these cookie-cutter articles have variations which demonstrate the lack of coordination between cultists; one of the most obvious is the absurd “King of the Hill” game in which cities vie for the dubious distinction of being the largest “sex trafficking hub”, citing whatever nonsensical “reasons” they can think of from “FBI reports” to the presence of highways to the number of nearby rivers. The funniest of these in my opinion are those who claim that large rural areas are somehow “attractive” to “sex traffickers” for the exact opposite reason given to rationalize the “gypsy whores” myth: while mega sporting events are supposed to attract “traffickers” because of their high (temporary) population density, some fetishists (notably those in North Carolina) proclaim that their states are attractive because of low population density; even small towns want to get in on the act. But one almost has to admire the chutzpah of officials in Two Harbors, Minnesota (population 3745), who want to have it both ways: they claim that “hunting season…is a key time for traffickers and pimps because it draws…large groups of men into the Northland.”
And that’s only in the articles which are strictly canonical; a growing number of them diverge from the narrative to varying degrees. Some quote old-timey cops who obviously prefer to paint whores as “criminals” and give little more than lip service to the “sex trafficking” catechism; for example, here’s a clown who justifies arresting adult escorts in a “sex trafficking” sting on the grounds that “we don’t know…how many of these young women might have started in that profession when they were minors“. Others seem to be on the verge of seeing the truth, then slap a hasty coat of “trafficking” paint on it: “The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that 60 percent of children likely to be victims of sex trafficking have run away from foster care or group homes. They are easy targets for traffickers because of their lack of a strong family support system…” So, so close; all that’s left is for them to recognize that it’s the kids running away of their own volition, not being “lured” away by imaginary “pimps”. And still other articles openly challenge “trafficking” claims:
Human trafficking…[statistics] are certainly alarming and appear regularly online, and in newspaper, radio and television reports. They are seldom interrogated by the reporters who quote them. But are they really accurate? Is there research to back them up?…[Chandre Gould of the] Institute for Security Studies…states that…“The numbers of trafficking victims presented in…reports [are] not based on rigorous quantitative research, but on estimates which are almost certainly inflated based largely on anecdotal evidence”…[no research] suggests a figure close to the claims that between 30,000 and 45,000 children are currently or annually being trafficking for sexual exploitation in South Africa…Gould’s research revealed very few children working as prostitutes in Cape Town. Over a 16 month research period, only five children were encountered working as sex workers. None of [them] were victims of human trafficking…there is little tangible evidence available that human trafficking…plays a large part in the sex trade…only 8 of the 164 women [Gould] canvassed said that they had at one time been a victim of human trafficking-like practices. “This finding is likely to cause controversy,” she writes. “An enormous amount of donor money is available specifically for projects that counter trafficking, so organisations working in this area potentially stand to lose funding if trafficking is not in fact as prevalent as assumed”…
The article goes on to debunk the “gypsy whore” myth, and concludes that “The estimated number of human trafficking victims…are exaggerated…and sensational …claims regarding the trafficking of children for prostitution and the increase of human trafficking during sporting events are not supported by research.” And while articles like this are entirely absent from the corporate American media, a few like this one are starting to pop up in the UK:
In recent years a motley crew of government agencies, police forces, human rights activists, feminists, religious groups and celebrities have turned human trafficking into one of the biggest issues of our time. The anti-trafficking lobby claims that millions of people around the world – mostly women and children – are being smuggled across borders by means of threat and coercion and are forced into prostitution, bonded labour and domestic servitude. The UK media – both broadsheet and tabloid – has slavishly accepted this narrative, filling column inches with salacious reports of foreigners trapped in cellars, used for tawdry sex and held under the threat of murder and even voodoo. But this modern-day slavery scare is underpinned, not by hard evidence, but by speculation and prejudice. It is a moral panic which masks a fear of foreigners, of fluid borders and of women who exercise their agency by moving across the world in the pursuit of a better life…time and again the thousands of victims and perpetrators that the anti-trafficking lobby claims are out there fail to materialize…For anti-trafficking activists, migrants are either vicious thugs who must be locked up (the traffickers) or helpless victims who must be rescued (the trafficked)…
Shortly after the collapse of the Satanic Panic, skeptical treatments were common (and now form the dominant, though not yet universal, consensus). And from the safe distance of a century, virtually nobody outside of the Salvation Army hesitates to declare the “white slavery” hysteria a moral panic without any basis in fact. The same will eventually be true for “sex trafficking” hysteria, and then the circle will again be complete…for our lifetimes, at least.
A tragic case is getting a lot of coverage in Australia this week.
A very disturbed Australian woman in her mid-20s who apparently has a history of claiming to be a teenager who has been trafficked for sex was found wandering around Dublin in a distressed state about a month ago.
Ireland has, of course, been going through a particularly intense burst of trafficking hysteria of late, perhaps in response to the Magdalene Laundry Scandal (i.e. church groups trying to distract attention to other alleged child abusers) or perhaps due to the recent surge in immigration from Eastern Europe.
In any case, this unfortunate woman’s delusion meshed very neatly with the delusions of Irish law enforcement authorities and as a result they spent a lot of time and effort trying to identify her on the assumption that she was a 14-15 year old sex slave from either The Netherlands or Eastern Europe.
It was only after a month that they published her photo and members of the public immediately identified her.
I guess people like her are the forgotten victims of moral panics. The disturbed people who get caught up in the fear and paranoia being projected through the media and come to sincerely believe they are victims of sex trafficking, Satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction, etc.
I have a research paper being published in the spring on exactly that topic.
Even in reporting that she’s a mentally ill woman in her mid-twenties with forty aliases who might now be a dirty stinkin’ police-time-wasting criminal (eye roll here), many sensationalist tabloids can’t hep but mention “15- or 16-year-old Eastern European victim of sex trafficking” in their report. Like so:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2490034/Mystery-Australian-Samantha-Azzopardi-charged-wasting-Irish-polices-time.html
Update:
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/woman-found-in-dublin-to-remain-in-state-care-1.1586938
I wish I could be as confident as you about the imminent demise of sex trafficking hysteria Maggie.
Seems to me there have been plenty of monolithic nonsensical belief systems in the past that have fragmented into bickering, mutually exclusive nonsensical belief systems but are still going strong. Marxism, Christianity, nationalism …
Corporate American media have been publishing a slow but steady drip of skeptical articles about sex trafficking for years (e.g. this one in the Village Voice from 2011) but I’m yet to see any real impact on how the bulk of the media handles it.
The worst sign for me is the way both left and right leaning media outlets are singing from the same songbook on this.
Agreed – this is the age of the internet – and these things can be spun for a millennium now. Just look at Global Warming … it’s now admitted that the earth hasn’t warmed since 1997. Scientific models – not a single one have been able to accurately predict the future – nor have they been able to replicate even the known past. This was the year that ice was supposed to completely disappear from the Arctic … yet there is an ICE BOON up there now. East Anglia was caught red handed covering up the scientific problems and obfuscating investigations by the general public.
The Science has completely unraveled – and yet …
People are MORE rabid about this complete nonsense than ever before.
And lets not forget – this nonsense has gone on for several generations – IF you include the ’70’s when these same scientists predicted an excruciating ICE AGE if carbon emissions weren’t curtailed.
The shit just gets recycled for the sheeple – it doesn’t seem to go away and that is what I fear will happen with Human Trafficking.
No. You can’t just lump all “doomsday” panics together and pretend they’re one thing, and you can’t lump all sex panics together and claim that “sex trafficking” hysteria will never end because people have often panicked about young women’s sexuality.
Sure you can’t – but there’s a whole “anatomy” of these panics that you’ve pretty much diagrammed for all us readers before. I’m saying that I beileve the information age has changed that paradigm.
Zogby did a poll in 2007 and over half of the American public believed that G.W. Bush was behind 9-11. Where did they get this nonsense? Why – the internet.
What you have with the internet is a constant supply of garbage just waiting to fill empty heads … and we didn’t have that for a lot of the other “panics”. I believe – and I hope I’m wrong – but if over half of the American public is just stupid as shit and ready to believe anything – it won’t take much “percolating” in the internet to keep these things spinning for generations.
I don’t agree with krulac in detail but I think the gist of his argument is correct.
Just noting that some other moral panics have run their course over two decades is no reason to imagine it is some sort of historical rule – especially if you lack a coherent theory as to why 20 years represents some kind of natural lifespan for these things.
The Satanic panics of the European middle ages seemed to run for considerably longer than 20 years and as you point out in other posts the white slavery moral panic ran from the mid 19th century to the First World War.
As krulac says, the media is a very different beast now to what it was during the last Satanic panic of the 80s and 90s and there’s no reason to think it will behave the same way.
There are a lot of different factors and factions coming together to give trafficking hysteria legs and I think it will keep running for as long as there are people with a reason to push it who have good access to the media.
As alluded to above, I think a major driver is the shit organised churches have dumped themselves in regarding child abuse. As long as that keeps hitting the media fan there will be people with reason to say “Hey, but look over there! It’s 100,000 underaged sex slaves!”.
There’s the racist aspect too.
“The darkies are here to rape our daughters!” is a perennial moral panic that just keeps giving.
I do, actually; it’s the time it takes a new generation to come to power and the oldest one to die off. Similar mechanism to the one which brought homosexuality from “perversion” to normal in roughly the same time span.
Individual witch-panics only tended to run about 20 years; it’s a mistake to see them as one thing. And the “white slavery” hysteria did NOT start in the mid-19th century, but in the late ’80s; it ended in Europe just after 1910. In the US it started later (just after 1900), peaked in the period 1910-1914, and died out in the early 20s.
I do have a reason for choosing these numbers, you know; I don’t just pick them out of a hat or through a Ouija board.
Huh?
I thought homosexuality was seen as a perversion at least since the time of Oscar Wilde through to Aleister Crowley and Alan Turing right up until it was delisted from the DSM-III in 1973 (Australian courts were still referring convicted homosexuals for forced ECT and psychosurgery through to the early 80s).
That looks a little longer than 20 years to me.
Apples & oranges. I’m not talking about the way the term was used among professionals in either subject; I’m talking about a public perception. In most of the US in the early ’90s, gay people were still being hounded by cops, had no legal rights and were regarded as “weirdos” by the average person. 20 years later, completely different.
Similarly, the term “trafficking” and the idea of coerced sex being a problem was being thrown about in academic circles in the ’80s; that doesn’t change the fact that it didn’t turn into a moral panic until about 2004. It’s not how governments and professionals use an idea that drives a moral panic; note that they really can’t whip up a frenzy about “drugs” any more despite considerable effort to do so. The panic has died, and though the bad laws it engendered still exist (just as the Mann Act and “avails” laws survived the demise of the “white slavery” panic which spawned them), it is no longer something the average person believes or supports.
Now I’m really confused.
You’re saying that the fact that the attitude to gays has changed over the past 20 years is the same as saying moral panics tend to last 20 years?
Surely that public and law enforcement attitude towards gays didn’t start in the US in the 70s.
In Australia it went for a lot longer than that.
No. I’m saying it takes roughly 20 years for popular delusions to shift. Moral panics are not based in long-standing prejudices, so they come and go in that time, but even old prejudices can die within that window with the proper stimulus.
That’s not how the shift in public homophobia occurred in Australia.
At the end of the 60s it was still going strong and rumours of homosexuality were social and career death.
By the early 70s the public was pretty much over it, though it took law enforcement anything from a decade to thirty years to catch up, depending on the state.
By 1975 we had homosexual characters sympathetically portrayed in prime time soaps (every Australian prime time soap actually), glam bands camping it up to great popular effect (see this 1974 youtube clip for what I mean. The Paul Hogan Show was about the most popular family viewing program of it’s day with most of the country tuned in at 7:30pm when it came on) and a gay Premier of South Australia who used to appear at official functions in pink hotpants.
About the only vaguely sympathetic US mainstream media portrayal of gays I remember from the time was Billy Crystal’s character in “Soap” and he was mostly played for laughs in a way that would be offensive to many gays today. The gay characters from Australian soaps like “Number 96”, “The Box” and “Prisoner” have not dated at all and would still work on contemporary television.
Oh yeah, I should probably add that the Australian hard rock band AC/DC started in the early 1970s as a very camp glam band.
“AC/DC” is, of course, a reference to bisexuality and the school uniform thing was originally a double act with Angus Young dressed as a schoolboy and Bon Scott as a schoolgirl, complete with pigtails.
See here for an example.
The panic lasts as long as it makes money. That’s what I’m saying … trafficking is different because it has the potential to become the biggest self-licking ice cream cone of all history. The internet magnifies it.
Except that you’re wrong. That’s not how moral panics work. See my comments about the drug war above.
Except that people said similar things about the printing press, newspapers, radio and television.
I tend to think things like the Internet break the backs of moral panics more often than they support them. It’s the old media, with its intact filters and gatekeepers that try to sustain them for as long as possible. (Old media is still very powerful, and intends to remain that way for as long as it can.)
As an example, I’d love to read your daily column in the New York Times or watch you host a show on one of the cable news channels…. but how likely would that be?
Apples and Oranges. Print, Radio and Television all required a monetary investment that acted as it’s own “regulator”. Not just any “Tom, Dick, or Harry” could get on it and start spewing propaganda.
Internet – totally different. ANYONE can create a blog and reach millions of viewers.
Think of yourself – 30 years ago – you think your opinions would have been allowed on RT&F or Print? Nope.
And yet here you stand today.
Cite the prediction that this year was when ice was supposed to be gone from the arctic. I do not believe your claim that a consensus ever believed this. Now, Al Gore? Sure. He’s a politician.
But you’re attributing this to scientists. Of COURSE you think scientists are liars if you think that everything politicians say, they said! That’s really REALLY sloppy and non-credible, man. I might as well say something that Tom Clancy wrote in a novel, and then say that’s what Submariners think.
A 70’s prediction of ‘ice age’ if ‘carbon emissions’ weren’t curtailed? You might mean SMOKE, which is quite distinct from other carbon emissions and does produce cooling effects, and we did greatly reduce the amount of smoke…
Some are actually proposing to spread specially designed smoke through the upper atmosphere to cool the Earth. So no, that hasn’t changed.
It’s an historian’s perspective. It’s incorrect to compare “sex trafficking” hysteria to Marxism; it’s a moral panic and needs to be compared to other moral panics like the Satanic Panic and “white slavery” hysteria. They only last about 20 years, then die off and are replaced by something more attuned to the current zeitgeist.
I take it you don’t consider the anti-drug movement to be a moral panic, then? Because it is about 140 years old in the US (though it has changed myths three or four times in that span, just as has the anti-whore movement).
When I talk to a drug-prohibitionist about possible reform, s/he *always* responds with the kind of fear-propaganda scenarios that show a moral panic, and none of them is especially new (even if Reefer Madness is now only shown for laughs).
Drug panics, like witch panics, each tend to last a short while; consider the “crack scare”, now essentially history, or the LSD scare of the ’60s. The fact that they’re a popular topic for scares over the past two centuries doesn’t make them a single panic, though they’re connected by that thread just as the “trafficking” hysteria is connected by similar themes to the Satanic Panic and “child predator” hysteria.
Your argument is starting to sound a bit circular now Maggie.
i.e. “Moral panics last 20 years so the ones that last more than 20 years are really multiple contiguous or overlapping moral panics”.
Unless all the acid I took messed with my memory the LSD moral panic lasted less than a decade before it was replaced with the Angel Dust (PCP) moral panic, which in turn lasted less than half that time. The heroin moral panic ran from the 50s to the 90s before being displaced by the ice moral panic (RIP Lou Reed, BTW).
Crack is a different issue. I’m sure there was a moral panic associated with it but there was also a real violent crime wave that correlated very closely with it’s spread from the US southeast and from the big cities to regional centres. Accepted wisdom when I was studying criminology was that it wasn’t the substance itself but rather it’s game changing effect on US drug distribution networks that caused the trouble.
But I don’t think media focus shifting from one substance to another really constitutes separate moral panics. It’s all the same war on drugs being prosecuted by the same groups via the same means for the same reasons.
Would a shift in sex trafficking hysteria from children to SE Asian women to Eastern Europeans constitute three separate moral panics to you?
No, but a shift from persecuting sex workers to persecuting, say, computer hackers sure would.
Slightly off-topic, but those M.C. Escher images which you used to decorate this blog entry are quite beautiful. Thank you for showing them!
Thank you. I used large files, so you can click on them to get much larger views, or download them as you please.
Which I did.
Captives are being transported in for hunting season? Now we’re really getting to bottom of what’s happening to the trafficked women and children.
I just about fell off my chair laughing when I read that! Apparently he doesn’t do much hunting himself – or his hunting excursions are far different than any I have been on.
…Usually a crowded cabin or camper with at least one person sleeping on the floor, 4 guys sharing one tiny bathroom, etc… just the place I would want to hang out with a hooker!! lol
…or maybe the deliver them right to the woods – “I’d like a BJ under the tall pine tree just south of the big rock… just tell her to look for the guy in orange camo!”
BTW Maggie, you have a broken link: “running away of their own volition” in the 4th paragraph tries to take you to TOMORROW!
Clarification: when I said “he” i was referring to whoever on the Two Harbors Task Force” made the comment that the influx in hunters draw in the pimps and traffickers.
I always wondered what went on in those duck blinds…
Pathetic AND delusional. Some of those same officials making this claim are also hunting with those self-same large groups of men on the weekend, paying no attention to anything that doesn’t have antlers. The only women that will be around are ones who hunt. Everybody knows everyone else in that town so any official making a claim like this would be able to point out, to the man, who wants a prostitute to keep them warm after the hunt. A friend of mine was planning a trip home this weekend to said Northland (from a small town) and he canceled because everyone he wanted to see would be out hunting and he doesn’t hunt.
Women hunters. Here’s my favorite … Becka Garris – Wilderness Babe!
No shit … this girl is hunting like 24-7 and I’m convinced she added the “sex appeal” to give her a way to make $$ so she can hunt full time. Hell – I didn’t even know New Jersey had any deer – but she’s cleaning them out buddy – with that bow of hers.
She has a FaceBook page … “LIKE” the shit out of this people!!!
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Beka-Garris-WildernessBabe/506840415997359?refid=17
NJ and surrounding areas are overrun with deer. No natural predators, and evolution has ensured that they’re getting better at not being run over. They issued a special call for more hunters a few years back!
I’ve seen dozens of deer in Northeast Philadelphia. They ate our peach tree down to the nubs, destroyed the tomatoes, and got all the pears within reach of the ground.
She is indeed a hottie, and I hope this makes her enough money that she doesn’t have to “work” for a living. She can work on her skills full time, except when she’s using those skills to help New Jersey with their deer problem. Suggestion: donate venison to a hunger relief project, unless of course she’s doing that already.
Prediction: the NRA will come out against 3-D printed guns.
In The Denver Metro Area, we just had the first confirmed “sex trafficking” case I have heard of. Seems a 14 year-old girl’s foster father was pimping her for money and drugs. No national borders; no trips in cargo containers; no wide ranging criminal conspiracy; the kid ran away from home, was given to foster parents by a judge because “her parents couldn’t control her,” and spent two years in hell because the judge wouldn’t do anything to help the parents because they were poor Mexicans.
http://kwgn.com/2013/11/07/broomfield-man-accused-of-using-foster-child-as-prostitute/
I’m late to this party, and I’m not going to comment on the substance since I clearly agree with it.
I just want to take this opportunity to say that, as a life-long writer, sometimes I am just left sitting in awe at Maggie’s ability to turn a phrase and paint colorful word images, whether circular, straight, oblong, or just plain hilarious.
Maggie, are you writing a book? If not, you need to be. You will be a best-seller, and you’ll no longer have to worry about being trafficked to the North Woods or the cotton fields of North Carolina. I will personally turn out to a book signing, wherever it is. And you can shed your orange vest and slave shackles forever.
I am indeed working on a book; it should be ready in the next few weeks. The artist is done with the cover, and it’s about to be sent to the colorist; I’ll be formatting the pages next week, and then there are just a few legal odds & ends after that.
That’s great news, Maggie. I’m looking forward to seeing it. If I can be of assistance in promoting it, I would be pleased to do so and hope you will take that as an open offer.
I’m hoping all my readers help promote it, not merely so as to increase readership but as a money-maker! If this one does well I’m planning a second to follow soon after, a book of essays distilled down from the first two years of my blog and a few classic essays from the first three years; the idea is to help new readers catch up without having to slog through all that backlog. And also to bring new readers in, and to make money of course.
I can’t wait to see your book, Maggie, and I confess I am not the reader I used to be.
I have a background in marketing and some sound knowledge on book promotion (which I should be directing to the books I should be finishing and getting out there myself, but that is another matter), so if I can put those skills to use for you I would be happy to do so.
Best wishes for your success.
[…] The incidence of sex trafficking and sexual slavery is hugely inflated. Most "victims" are adults who have consented to do sex work and don't want to be […]
I’ve added your book to my Wish List.
[…] the Swedish model, and over 300 academics gave the same advice to Canada. A few reporters are beginning to question “trafficking” mythology, and anti-criminalization articles by activists and allies are getting far more common not only in […]
[…] saturating the entire culture with its noisome effluvia, and is now entering the stage where it is beginning to break down from within. Up to now, most of the people harmed by the hysteria have been sex workers, our clients, our […]