The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (23 page)

The public uproar generated by the articles was enormous. The bookseller WH Smith initially refused to carry the papers because of the lascivious content. But the public demanded to know every
last salacious detail. The stories were sold on the streets by the Salvation Army and used copies were re-sold at over ten times their cover price.

Stead revelled in his role, part Agenda Setter, part Constellation Maker, and without doubt a one-man Evangelising band. His campaign to end the Mills & Boon-esque drama he had whipped up
culminated with hundreds of girls dressed in white marching on Parliament, encouraged by the
Gazette,
to demand a change in the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Because, for some
reason, that was supposed to be all that was needed to stop the outrage. It seems charmingly naïve now to think something like changing age of consent laws could possibly have an effect if the
dark and twisted underworld of London Stead painted in his paper week after week really had existed, but it was a hugely popular campaign, anyway.

As with so many supposedly black-and-white issues that people claim have simple answers, the truth of what Stead wrote about – and his involvement in the campaign – proved far
murkier. While the trafficking stories he published were, on the face of it, successful, their very success backfired on him later.

Part of the problem with countering over-the-top claims like Denis MacShane’s (and WT Stead’s) is the lack of widely agreed statistics. Whatever number is
presented, it’s only an estimate. Illegal workers entering the country, whether forced or unforced labour, aren’t exactly going to queue up at the border volunteering to be counted, are
they? The question is, can we tell whether the numbers are an informed estimate or an uniformed guess?

Making estimates with limited information is called a ‘Fermi
problem’. Enrico Fermi, one of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, was reputedly
able to make accurate guesses at numbers others considered unknowable. The classic example was his estimate of how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. He was able to come up with an answer
– 150 – that if not exact, was within a reasonable error margin.

Here’s an example of a Fermi problem in action. I was at a pub quiz one week, and our team was tied for the lead. The tiebreaker was the question ‘How many performances did Yul
Brynner have as the King of Siam in
The King and I
on Broadway?’ As the only former drama geek in our team, it came down to me. I calculated that Brynner probably did eight
performances a week (once a day and twice on Sundays, as the saying goes). It’s a full-time job, so minus a two-week holiday, Brynner was probably performing fifty weeks a year. I
wasn’t sure how many years the show ran for but knew he had been in at least one revival of the popular musical, so let’s say ten years of being the king in total. That makes an
estimate of:

Sounds pretty high, right? The other team probably thought so too, because they guessed 300. We won the tiebreak (and the quiz) because, as it turned out, the real answer is
4525. Picking a number out of thin air, as the other team did, is fraught with error. It’s hard to make good guesses with no information. Apply some basic knowledge and your accuracy goes up
rapidly.

Fermi problems are great for pub quizzes, but common-or-garden wild guesses are not always the stuff on which good research is built. At the very least, estimating a number should fulfil two
major criteria:

In forced sex trafficking estimates, most numbers have gone the other way: they’ve overcounted, rather than undercounted. The numbers of supposed
sex slaves quoted by MacShane are so unrealistic that, if true, they would account for the vast majority of prostitution in Britain. Regardless of how you feel about sex work, there are self-evidently many non-immigrants in it. For instance, it is well known that the majority of street-based prostitutes in the UK are British, and almost all the rest are EU nationals. So his numbers are
immediately suspect.

There are some decent estimates of the extent of sex work in the UK. As part of the European Network for HIV/STD Prevention in Prostitution (EUROPAP), Hilary Kinnell contacted projects providing services for sex workers. She had seventeen responses. The average number of prostitutes per project was 665. She then multiplied that figure by 120, the total number of projects on her mailing
list, to get an estimate of 79,800. This total includes women, men, and transgender women and men.
¹⁰³

Hilary Kinnell is the first to point out the problems with her method: the centres responding might be larger than most, some sex workers might use more than one centre. She finds it strange
that the number – ten years old, a huge estimate, and taken out of context – is still quoted. ‘The figure was picked up by all kinds of people and quoted with great confidence but
I was never myself at all confident about it. I felt it could be higher, but it also could have been lower.’

Meanwhile, data from the UK Network of Sex Work Projects (UKNSWP) records an estimate of 17,081 sex workers in some kind of contact with centres. Of these, 4178 – about 24 per cent –
work on the street. A larger total for all sex workers was 48,393. More recent, and rather lower, than the 1999 estimate.
¹⁰⁴
So, if the hype was real,
that would mean anywhere from one in twelve to one in two sex workers was the victim of trafficking. However, a close examination of where those estimates came from shows this can’t be
true.

It all started with a study by Liz Kelly and Linda Regan of the University of North London. They attempted to estimate the number of women brought into the UK for sex in 1998 by surveying
reports
filed with police forces. The number they came up with was seventy-one.

Now, a note about that number: it included not only women who were trafficked against their will, but also women who was willingly arrived – perhaps illegally – to the UK for sex
work. In other words, Kelly and Regan’s total included both willing and unwilling sex migrants.

Part of the problem is how different groups define ‘trafficked’. To many, the assumption was that if someone was not British and was working in the sex trade, she must be trafficked.
That’s quite a leap in logic! Hold on a sec – I was born abroad. And I worked in the sex trade. Does that mean they count me as ‘trafficked’?

And the Kelly and Regan paper is not the only place such assumptions crop up. The Poppy Project reported in 2004 that 80 per cent of prostitutes in London flats were foreign-born. But there is
no evidence that those women were trafficked or that this high proportion of foreign sex workers to natives is true of the entire UK. (In fact, evidence puts the UK-wide percentage of foreign-born
sex workers closer to 37 per cent.)

If that still sounds high, keep in mind that ‘foreign-born also includes citizens of other EU countries, who have the automatic right to live and work in the UK. Not that these are always
reported accurately. Eaves, the organisation that includes the Poppy Project, did an interesting nip-and-tuck on reporting the origins of women working in the sex trade in London. In their 2004
report
Sex in the City,
they claimed 25 per cent of women working in London were from Eastern Europe. But look closer – they have classified Italy and Greece as ‘Eastern
European’ countries.
¹⁰⁵

Why? Well, the reason given is ‘because these ethnicities are often used to code women from the Balkan region, advised by pimps and traffickers to lie about their ethnicity to avoid
immigration issues.’ Hey, my dad is Italian . . . if I said this to a researcher, would they assume I’m lying, and am really Eastern European?

So, overall, when people talk about ‘trafficked’ women, what the number they quote more likely represents is ‘foreign-born women who might have come here for other reasons, and
who are probably in sex work by choice’. Rarely, if ever, is the definition of trafficking
explained in the media. This violates the second principle of the realistic
estimate: show your work clearly. It’s the kind of sloppy calculation that throws all subsequent conclusions into question. It’s bad Fermi.

So, if some people who come here voluntarily can be called ‘trafficked’, then what is ‘trafficking’, exactly? The
Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish
Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children,
part of the 2000 UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, defines ‘trafficking’ as:

In other words, illegal migration for purposes of economic advantage, if undertaken willingly and fully informed, is
not
trafficking.
¹⁰⁶

Nevertheless, because we don’t know how many of those women were willing and how many were unwilling, let’s assume the worst for the purpose of this Fermi problem. Let’s assume
every single one of those seventy-one women was brought to the UK (rather than emigrated) unwillingly. Kelly and Regan then grapple with under-reporting. Without any hard information to go with,
they guessed an equal number might have been missed by the police and doubled the seventy-one – so, a total of 142 women. That’s the lower boundary of their estimate.

For the upper boundary, they guessed that trafficking might be undetected by a factor of as much as
twenty times.
So, the upper boundary of the estimate was 1420. The absolute maximum . .
. which, they emphasised, was speculative.

To summarise: the estimate for the absolute very highest number of trafficked women in this country for the year of 1998 was 1420. So, what do we know? That sex trafficking is possibly
under-reported, and no one knows the numbers, really. Still, even if the number is as small as the original number of seventy-one women per year, that is a clear breach of human rights – and
an area
about which the government should be concerned.

HOW THE NUMBERS GREW:

From 71 trafficked women to 25,000+.

But that
highest possible
estimate of 1420 is considerably smaller – only about a third – of the number Vera Baird used. It is smaller than the claims made by MacShane by a
factor of seventeen. How did that happen?

The journey from less than 1500 to 25,000 is an interesting one. At first, the original paper was cited with only a small error in reporting the results. Then the Salvation Army and Churches
Alert to Sex Trafficking Across Europe (Chaste) reported not Regan and Kelly’s range of values, but the estimated maximum value as if it were the number of
actual reports.
They updated
the year as well – ‘An estimated 1420 women were trafficked into the UK in 2000 for the purposes of constrained prostitution.’

Then, in 2003, the Home Office took inaccurate estimates a step further. Assuming
all
foreign-born women in Soho walkups to be trafficked, plus 75 per cent of foreign sex workers
throughout the UK, plus 10 per cent of foreign call girls gave the total of 3812 women in forced sex work in Britain. Yes, this included even EU citizens who can travel and work here freely.

That number, rounded up to 4000 for no reason, is widely quoted without acknowledging that it is an inflation of someone else’s highest possible number. And that is where Vera
Baird’s figure came from.

In 2006, the Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights heard this number entered into the Hansard as if it were a fact. Evangelisers with an antisex agenda now had the handy ‘government
figures showing’ 4000 women being trafficked without the hassle of having to question whether that was actually true. Julie Bindel also claimed, ‘[S]tudies have found that at least 70
per cent of women working in UK brothels are trafficked from places such as Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe,’ but in fact this had to be retracted later by the newspaper as no such study
exists.
¹⁰⁷

The number 4000 also appeared in a US Department of State document on worldwide trafficking (although interestingly as a number representing all trafficking, not just sex
trafficking).
¹⁰⁸
The Christian charity Care picked up on it as well, and the Salvation Army replied by asserting the number was now
at least
4000.

From there to 25,000 is actually only a matter of multiplying it by six and a bit, which was no doubt justified with some accusations of undercounting ... in spite of the
fact that the estimate used as the origin for all of these dodgy calculations was
itself
already an overcount. From what can be pieced together, it appears various groups and individuals
have been happy to inflate the numbers along the way without ever questioning methods or sources.