Sex, Lies & Statistics: The truth about sex work the mainstream press, politicians, and Julie Bindel don't want you to read by Brooke Magnanti & Belle de Jour

Author:Brooke Magnanti & Belle de Jour [Magnanti, Brooke]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

As far as these groups are concerned, the thin research they push and damaging results they obtain is good enough for them.

‘There is no “other side”’ of the argument,’ sneers Hunt. In spite of evidence that 60 per cent people think prostitution should be the choice of the person doing it, not the government. ‘They have no credible supporters,’ claims Hunt. Who’s calling whom not credible? When HAF admits in its own reports to promoting minimal research standards and celebrity endorsement over intellectually honest evidence.

Charities and other groups which purport to ‘attack’ the problem of sex work and ‘save’ the victims of trafficking are little different. For all the good work they purport to do, there is also a network of high-profile campaigns, conferences, and media-friendly PR that eats up rather a lot of the money donated – including money given by the government.

£100,000 was given by the British government to the Poppy Project for victims identified by Pentameter Two – on top of the over £2 million it received in funding and the £5.8 million overall given to its parent project, Eaves. At the time of the operation, their facilities in London included fewer than twenty beds. Twenty seems a low number if they expected the police to find thousands of trafficked women. Of course, the operation only identified two victims, so it was not a problem.

A detailed report in Truthout[cvii] revealed that the fifty largest anti-trafficking organizations in the United States have an estimated income of about $700 million per year, as of 2015. If they were a country this would give them the world’s 184th largest GDP just above Samoa. It could be more, given that a third of them do not release public financial records. Add in the top 40 groups funded by the US State Department not already on that list, and the combined budgets top $1.2 billion. This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as funding is concerned.

Groups receiving funds are not made to collect data, nor prove the existence of a local trafficking problem before securing grants. It was January 2008 before task forces were required to report any activity to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, and it is still incomplete (and in many cases, current only to the 2012 financial year).

When it comes to victims saved, we know a bit more. Federal trafficking investigations in 2012 totaled 2,398 cases.[cviii] The Department of Justice charged against 200 defendants and convicted 138 traffickers: that’s $8.6 million, minimum, per conviction.

How is it possible for so much money to result in so few convictions? These groups have few restrictions on how their funds can be used. For instance, it would be acceptable for a group to, say, purchase 'designated vehicles' and fund 'deputy' positions even without a single reported victim in the community. A lot also goes to ‘awareness raising,’ which typically consists of billboards, posters, talks in schools, and sending delegates to international conferences.

If you look on Twitter, for example you’ll

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.