The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told is Wrong by Dr Brooke Magnanti

Author:Dr Brooke Magnanti [Magnanti, Dr Brooke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780297866404
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2012-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

7

MYTH: Tens of thousands of women are trafficked into Britain as sex slaves.

In the years after the Berlin Wall fell, Eastern European gangs set up operations to smuggle highly profitable items, like drugs, guns, cigarettes. And women. They usually transported young women from their hometowns in the Eastern Bloc south to Greece. Once successfully inside Greece, the women could be transported within the EU without being stopped at the borders.

As stories of sex trafficking in mainland Europe emerged, people became concerned about Eastern European women coming to Britain. Were they the usual economic migrants, working as call girls for ready cash? Or were they part of a more sinister trend, being controlled by gangs of thugs? It was hard to tell who was coming to the UK on their own for the money . . . and who was being forced into working as a prostitute.

In the absence of any sensible figures, people assumed the worst in all cases. The conventional wisdom was that the women were being trafficked. Government agencies, police forces, and charities joined forces – and obtained funding – to deal with what they claimed was a widespread, insidious criminal trend. Numbers that were inflated, misreported, or in some cases completely made up and wrong started to circulate as if they were fact.

Now, no one supports kidnap or rape in any circumstances. Where forced sex trafficking occurs, and it does occur, it is a heinous crime against the women (and men) who are its victims.

At the same time, there are people who have manipulated the facts to suit various agendas. By presenting the issues as strictly black and white, they have laid claim to the moral high ground. In virtually everything written about trafficking, the victims are by and large women, by and large used for sex. But the majority of real trafficking cases are in fact not like this at all. Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

No one would ever argue about whether or not forced sex work is right, or whether it occurs. It’s very wrong, and it does happen. The point is that the closer we look at the truth about trafficking, the more we find not women and children being saved from terrible fates, but powerful Agenda Setters and misguided Constellation Makers claiming money and attention for themselves. They often focus solely on women and sex workers, and they often have an agenda against sex work and want to outlaw it even for consenting adults.

Meanwhile, Evangelisers step in, spreading fear and panic, yet rarely coming back to correct mistakes or admit to errors later. Open any newspaper or magazine, and the story is the same. ‘Sex Slave in Suburbia’, a May 2010 article in Glamour magazine, claimed there are half a million women trafficked in the EU for sex. Is the number even plausible? As far as figures go, it’s absurdly high. And no source for the number is offered.

The article goes

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.