It’s important that we look at data and try to shed our assumptions about what we expect and actually pay attention to what the data is actually telling us. – Emily Kennedy
It’s been a while since I demolished a bogus anti-whore study, and one of these days I may get around to doing it again. But today I’m going to do the next best thing, which is to demolish a mainstream article about an anti-whore study and mock its utterly ridiculous assumptions…of which it has many, despite today’s epigram being pulled from the very end of the article. But writer Emmanuelle Saliba isn’t shy; she starts with the stupid from the very first line:
It’s long been debated whether the Super Bowl is the biggest single driver of sex trafficking in the U.S…
No, actually it hasn’t; a conflict between actual facts and a myth which flies in the face of such facts, including data collected by the believers themselves, cannot be dignified by the word “debate”. One might as well speak of a “debate” between those who say My Little Pony is a kid’s show and toy franchise, and those who claim it’s a depiction of real beings and events.
…the focus on football’s marquee event may be disguising the extent to which other major public gatherings and events contribute to the problem, according to a first-of-its-kind study…which…examined patterns in more than 32 million online personals ads published around the time of 33 major public events in the U.S. and Canada since October 2011. By identifying “new-to-town” or “first-appearance” ads for female escorts and related services, the researchers sought to determine what percentage of the ads appeared to be linked to sex trafficking…
This not only isn’t “first-of-its-kind”, it’s been done to death. Every clueless economist and opportunistic “sex trafficking” academic in the country imagines they can cull mystical information from escort ads like a gypsy reading tea leaves, and the magical algorithms are all based on the half-witted assumptions that A) the claims made in escort ads are truthful; B) that every escort has only one ad; and C) that “pimps” write and place the ads because whores are much too stupid to advertise or plan tours for ourselves. Since none of those is true except in a minority of cases, any methodology based on them is approximately as valuable as the paper hanging from a roll next to your toilet. And any “study” based on that methodology is approximately as valuable as the matter that paper is intended to remove.
The results found that while there was a considerable increase in the number of such ads surrounding the Super Bowl, other events like a Memorial Day motorcycle rally…and various industry conferences had a bigger impact than expected, suggesting that resources devoted to combating the problem of forced prostitution have been misdirected…
We’ve been telling these idiots that their efforts are misdirected for over a decade now, but never mind that.
“It is possible that lawmakers, researchers, law enforcement and first responders who overcommit to Super Bowl are missing other events or occurrences of large-scale activity related to sex trafficking,” said Emily Kennedy, one of the report’s researchers…Previous research has shown that traffickers and pimps use online classified services like Backpage.com to advertise their victim’s sexual services…
No, “research” has shown no such thing; prohibitionist propaganda has repeatedly claimed it, but the actual evidence is that coerced prostitution is a phenomenon representing a single-digit percentage of sex workers. Of course, cops and other profiteers won’t accept that because it’s much more lucrative to pretend otherwise:
To the untrained eye these ads are nothing more than escorts looking to offer services. But to law enforcement agents, keywords like “young” and “no pimps” can be indicators that the person in the photo is a trafficking victim rather that someone who knowingly entered the illicit trade.
Read that again, slowly. Once a cop is “trained” (i.e. indoctrinated), any word in any ad can be an “indicator”. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every pic in a hooker ad is really the person who placed the ad, and “no pimp” means “pimp”. I’m also reliably informed by “sex trafficking experts” that “mature” means “underage”, “downtown” means “suburbs” and “no drama” means the escort and her “pimp” will entertain you with a performance of the climactic scene of Othello.
One previous study surrounding the 2014 Super Bowl in New Jersey concluded that more than 83.7 percent of the ads screened likely involved sex trafficking victims, including 5 percent who were minors…
That would be this ridiculous farce by Dominique “Body Fluids” Sepowitz, which Saliba claimed didn’t exist back in the first sentence of this fiasco. Sepowitz, like Kennedy, found exactly what she was paid to find: lots and lots of “trafficked sex slaves”, despite the dearth of such creatures in the real world. The way they do it is simple: design a “study” to find whatever it is they want to find, and then ignore all data that tends to disprove the hypothesis:
…one finding from the study was especially puzzling. Data showed that the biggest unexpected increase in ad activity during the study period occurred on May 23, 2015, in Vancouver, British Columbia, when the incidence of “new-to-town” sex ads skyrocketed even though there was no major event occurring in the city. Kennedy said researchers had no explanation for the spike, but “hope to tease out some of these things” in a future study. In the meantime, Kennedy said she hopes the study will open eyes about the extent of sex trafficking in the U.S…
Sure, honey, and I hope the fact that you just blew off a finding that invalidated your methodological assumptions will “open eyes” about the junk science used to invent big, scary numbers about the “extent of sex trafficking in the U.S.” But I’m not holding my breath.
“any methodology based on them is approximately as valuable as the paper hanging from a roll next to your toilet”
I strongly disagree with that. Toilet paper serves a useful function, so it has a positive value, while such methodologies have negative value, since they can only be used to produce bogus studies.
Should you be lucky enough to get a goody bag at the Oscars, you will find luxury Swiss toilet paper:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3444277/194-toilet-roll-Swiss-luxury-tissue-gifted-Oscars-good-bags.html
(please forgive me linking to the Daily Fail)
I guess the problem with studies such as this, and the reportage thereon, is how the researchers and journalists have been educated. I suspect that they are ‘Arts’ people, for whom critique is ‘literary’ and ‘qualitative’. What they don’t have is statistics, and I guess again that many are innumerate. Whereas a ‘Scientific’ graduate would understand, to a greater or lesser degree, about numbers etc; their ideas are ‘quantitative’. They would also know that ‘average’ is a wonderfully elastic term; is it the mean, the median or the mode?
“A) the claims made in escort ads are truthful” : Just replace “escort” with some other service or product and you immediately see the level of validity to be expected.
What these wannabe “scientists” suffer from is one of the oldest fallacies in amateur work: Confirmation Bias. As a scientist, the total absence of scientific quality in their work offends me greatly. Alternatively, they _fake_ the scientific approach in order to push some agenda. That would cross the line from “incompetent” into “malicious”.
The article that you critique is–sadly–a good example of the anti-trafficking hysteria, in part because it is published by what should be a reliable news source (NBC).
Common sense tells us that the number of prostitutes is likely higher in times and places where the number of their prospective clients is higher, and large sporting events that attact a lot of men (but not their wives) have lots of prospective clients. Many an enterprising hooker without a full client list will therefore sensibly choose to work the large male events.
However, I don’t see how this is any different from noting that sales of hot dogs also increase during these kinds of events–or that hot dogs vendors sometimes come in from out of town.
Now, if we assume, as we probably can, that some portion of prostitutes are victims of trafficking, we can also assume that sex trafficking increases during these major events, probably in proportion to the overall increase in prostitutes.
But with the same logic, we can also assume that incidents of food poisoning increase during these events. That is, if X percentage of hot dogs are on the average bad, the more hot dogs that are sold the more cases of food poisoning there will be. This could in turn justify headlines like, “Super Bowl a Public Health Menace” with no more factual basis than we see the headlines about sex trafficking.
What nobody to my knowledge has yet shown is that the pimps or kidnappers or whoever they are–the guys who presumably traffic in women–are more likely to bring their girls to these events than are the women who show up voluntarily. Maybe they are. The pimps may want to see the event too, and calculate that they can not only see it but also profit by bringing their victims. On the flip side, moving trafficked victims to another location poses coordination challenges and risks for pimps. If I were such a pimp, I’d probably leave my sex slaves at home rather than deal with the hassles and risks of trafficking them to major events.
So I just don’t see how trafficking would increase at these events, at least other than as a constant proportion of the increase in overall prostitution, and await solid evidence that it does.
The clincher here for the anti-trafficking zealots, though, is their flexibly expansive definition of sex trafficking. Sometimes the definition is so broad that a bus driver taking a fare-paying passenger to her job at a massage parlor is a sex trafficker.
It’s only by means of such a broad definition of sex trafficking that NBC can publish, “One previous study surrounding the 2014 Super Bowl in New Jersey concluded that more than 83.7 percent of the ads screened likely involved sex trafficking victims, including 5 percent who were minors” (without of course referencing the so-called study). No rational person believes the percentage of hookers who are victims of sex trafficking by any reasonable definition in the US is anywhere near this high. Perhaps, as you note elsewhere, the true percentage is around 2 percent, but the more “cases” I read the more I suspect that even 2 percent is inflated. Whatever the correct number, it’s nowhere near 83.7 percent (although you have to hand it to the rhetoricians for using the decimal point to make the percentage appear more scientific).
This whole hysteria is a serious concern. I have no problem with anyone who openly opposes prostitution and wants it outlawed with the criminal participants punished. There is actually an argument to be made for this position, and while I believe that the arguments against it are stronger, at least the issues can be aired and debated.
However, this isn’t what’s going on now that the rhetoric has become that of sex trafficking. Many, many people who would deny that they oppose prostitution per se and insist that they are cool with whatever “consenting adults” choose to do that doesn’t hurt anyone, nevertheless get sucked into this anti-trafficking hysteria and even become morally passionate about it, without realizing that the crusade against trafficking is erected on almost no facts at all.
And as I keep saying, the real victims here are the perhaps 2 percent who are genuine victims of sex trafficking. I would love it if law enforcement would aggressively investigate and prosecute these cases–and even, yes, “rescue” the “victims.” But when law enforcement like everyone else is led to believe that 83.7 percent of all ads offering sex involve victims of sex trafficking, no way will they ever “rescue” a real victim, unless it’s by statistical accident. Meanwhile, they’ll waste a lot of tax dollars aggravating the lives of (hey, let’s use a decimal point too) 81.7 percent of more or less ordinary people.
Shame on NBC for publishing this nonsense. Not only is it a gross violation of journalistic ethics, it’s also plain evil. People are being hurt and money is being wasted as a result of the dissemination of this misinformation.
Yes. It’s a typical bit of frustratingly bad science, in that parts of it are done with good statistical methods, but one crucial link is very weak. I have no doubt that there were increases in the frequency of ads — I’ll bet those statistics are accurate — but the critical link between the ads and sex trafficking is just something cops are saying, with no empirical backing whatsoever. It’s like studying the rate of extraterrestrial visitation to our planet by gathering detailed statistics about UFO reports in the media, and then saying “UFO experts estimate that 83.7% of UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft.”
“more than 83.7 percent of the ads” — In my experience, spurious significant digits are a common symptom of pseudoscience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_precision
Especially when you squeeze the very precise 83.7 between vague words like ”more than” and ”likely involve”.
But, when all sex work is being redefined as sex trafficking I’m surprised they don’t simply just say 100%.
An important control experiment would be to look at the variations for the ads of different legal businesses, such as restaurants and bars. I’m sure they all remain flat and never spike during any major event.
Maggie,
I found your blog through a post you made back in February 28 of 2012 about sex being way too taboo in modern society. I saw that you mentioned in that article that children used to be considered an asset, whereas today they are considered a liability – no wonder people don’t want to have kids. I was hoping you could write more about that! I’ve thought a lot about the progression of societies and especially how some of the most “advanced” societies such as America, Germany and Japan actually have declining populations. I think it may very well have to do with some unnatural suppression by people who perhaps don’t have the confidence to have kids. I’m very curious to see what you think on the matter and what your community thinks. Thanks!
-Forest
P.S. love your blog.
Forest,
Maggie can of course comment, but the issue of kids becoming financial liabilities as opposed to assets is pretty well understood, and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with suppressing any natural desires or a lack of confidence.
It bursts the romantic fantasy bubble people have about the family, but it’s just generally a fact that family forms respond to economic conditions.
In agrarian societies dominated by family farms, having children is profitable for parents, since over the long run parents get more work out of children than they cost. As societies become more urban places of jobholding, kids start costing parents a lot more money than they contribute to the family. Parents therefore voluntarily restrict fertility in these settings. However, couples who can afford to still have children. They just have fewer children and at later ages.
The exception to this pattern is sometimes the urban poor, especially in poor countries. In these situations, parents are worried about who will care for them in old age or times of sickness. Since there’s not much of a social safety net in place to provide for them, they still have several kids, even though the kids cost them, as a way of playing the odds of ending up with a kid who is successful enough to care for them in old age or sickness.
Meanwhile, even in the cities in poor countries, children can be economic assets. Kids are more sucessful beggars than are adults, for example, and frankly kids can be prostituted or even sold to help out with the family finances. I have seen this parental use of kids in poor countries. Yes, little girls are sometimes dressed up and prostituted by their parents, while others are in effect sold.
Alas, fertility rates tend to be well-explained by looking at the economic circumstances of the parents, and while there are for sure individual exceptions, the overall patterns are pretty predictable by examining the economics.
BTW, you may be ahead of me, but last I looked the US did not yet have fertility rates below the replacement level. That is, unlike many countries in Western Europe, for example, American couples were still having slightly more than two kids each, on the average. However, this average was in part a result of the poor in the US having more kids than the middle-class or rich. The thinking was that the more rudimentary social safety net in the US gives the poor there more of a financial incentive to have children than the more extensive safety nets in the more expansive social welfare states do.
Ken