Sport of Trafficking Hype

The Olympics and Trafficking: Myths and Evidence
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT
Wednesday 25 January 2012 5:45pm

Speakers:

• Julie Ham, GAATW

• Marlise Richter, International Centre for Reproductive Health, Ghent University

• Joanna Busza, LSHTM

In the lead up to the 2012 Olympic Games, concerns have been raised about the possibility of an increase in trafficking for sexual exploitation linked to the event. Similar rumours were circulated prior to other international sporting events, including the World Cup in Germany and South Africa, the Olympics in Athens and Vancouver, and the US Super Bowl. Yet once the fans go home, the media loses interest, and little is heard about the consistent lack of evidence for any rise in sex trafficking.

Recent research demonstrates that anti-trafficking measures put into place in a range of countries have proved irrelevant, or harmful in cases where sex workers become increasingly criminalised and unable to access health and social programmes.

As the 2012 Olympics come to London, this seminar will review the international evidence on trafficking, sex work and sports events, consider public health implications, and ask to what extent police and local authorities here in the UK are basing their policies on evidence.

Admission: Free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.

The Super Bowl is one of America's largest sporting events, and it is a time when nutters enjoy making ludicrous claims about thousands of girls, many under-aged that will somehow be trafficked to the event.

The award for this year's most inane nutter campaigner must surely go to Theresa Flores, founder of Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution (S.O.A.P.). She told The Christian Post that major sporting events like the Super Bowl generally have more men in attendance who are visiting from a different city, and often do things they wouldn't normally do at home. This creates a demand that traffickers and pimps are there willing and waiting to supply, she said.

Because of this, about 150 volunteers for S.O.A.P. are heading to Indiana before the event to pass out soap at Indianapolis motels.

Each bar of soap will have a label on it with phrases like Are you being threatened? or Are you witnessing young girls being prostituted? The soap provides the number for a human trafficking hotline so that those at the hotel, or young girls who are being trafficked, will see it and can call for help.

S.O.A.P. volunteers will distribute the bars Feb. 1-2, in conjunction with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship students who will hand out fliers to raise awareness for the trafficking issue with football fans.

Offsite Comment: Superbowl Sex Trafficking Increase? Super Nonsense

5th February 2012. See article from sexualintelligence.wordpress.com

An increasing number of groups are intent on persuading Americans that we have a terrible and growing problem with sex trafficking. Their data is virtually non-existent, elided with words like experts agree, a shameful epidemic, and enormous human suffering. The media reports their conferences and feral estimates, politicians grimly respond with vows of stricter laws, and the occasional wildly unusual victim is trotted out as proof of some enormous underground industry.

The favorite ploy of anti-trafficking groups is to grimly remind us that major sporting events are a central focus of this evil. Every year, the NFL has to deny that they're the center of an odious international sex slavery ring. NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy says the super bowl sex slave story is a simply an urban legend.

But that doesn't stop those who are feeding---and feeding off of---America's latest Sex Panic.

..Read the full article

The forthcoming London Olympics have sent the media into a feeding frenzy of scare mongering. Warning us that tens of thousands of sex slaves are under starter's orders in outlying foreign counties, ready to sprint headlong, handcuffed in readiness, to England for the start of the games.

As a global anti-trafficking organisation, GAATW is concerned that international sporting events are being linked with increases in trafficking for prostitution, without supporting evidence.

How likely is this?

Trafficked sex workers are as hard to get your hands on in London as face value stadium tickets.

The police have spent years and 5 million quid with their specialist task force Operation Pentameter hunting for sex slaves and found hardly any. How do they expect a non-English speaking tourist with a dog-eared A to Z or an IPhone app to find them?

So who's telling fibs and why?

This unsporting bout of statistical fakery has been created by the media and the abolitionists, including the Poppy Project and the Salvation Army. These groups would like to see an end to the commercial sex industry. By saying sex workers are all victims of abuse or trafficking they get an outraged public onto their side of the argument to criminalise prostitutes and punters. If a story, or myth is repeated often enough and loud enough it seeps into the public psyche. People accept it as fact and act accordingly.

...Read the full article

x:talk is a sex worker led co-operative based in London. The group and its supporters are calling for a moratorium on arrests of sex workers in London with immediate effect until the end of the Olympic Games.

Governments, charity organisations and campaign groups have argued that large sporting events lead to an increase in trafficking for prostitution. These claims, often repeated by the media, are usually based on misinformation, poor data and a tendency to sensationalise. There is no evidence that large sporting events cause an increase in trafficking for prostitution.

These claims can lead to anti-trafficking policies and policing practices that target sex workers. In London, anti-trafficking practices have resulted in raids on brothels, closures and arbitrary arrests of people working in the sex industry. This creates a climate of fear among workers, leaving them less likely to report crimes against them and more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. This is an inadequate response to sex work and to trafficking.

x:talk is aware of clean up efforts already underway in London, particularly east London, in the run up to the Olympics. These include multiple raids and closure of premises. We anticipate that until the end of the Olympic games there will be a continued rise in the numbers of raids, arrests and level of harassment of sex workers.

A series of violent robberies on brothels by a gang in December in Barking & Dagenham demonstrates the effect that this climate of fear can have on the safety of sex workers. The effect of raids on brothels and closures in the area had eroded relations between sex workers and the Police with the result that the sex workers targeted by the gang were unwilling to report the attacks for fear of arrest. The gang were able to attack at least three venues in December 2011.

In light of this, x:talk and its supporters are calling on the Mayor of London and London Metropolitan Police to suspend arrests and convictions of sex workers.

Prostitutes at risk during the Olympics, Vancouver-based study says

See article from news.nationalpost.com

British authorities should develop a public-health plan to protect London's prostitutes during the Olympics, Canadian researchers are urging after finding that stepped-up police action and other disruptions during the Vancouver Games kept sex workers away from their regular haunts, potentially exposing them to more violence and disease.

The survey of about 100 prostitutes before and after the Winter Games also suggested the influx of new sex workers and spike in human trafficking that many observers had predicted never actually materialized.

In fact, the women surveyed by University of British Columbia researchers said there were fewer clients than usual, and they had a harder time connecting with them, perhaps because of the police action and other disruptions.

That meant many of the prostitutes could have been forced to less-visible pick-up spots away from colleagues and health services, said the paper just published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. Not only would that make them more vulnerable to violence, but could increase the risk of HIV and other sexually-transmitted infection, since previous research suggests isolated sex workers are three times as likely to be coerced into unsafe sex, said Dr. Kate Shannon, lead author of the study. She explained:

They don't have support of other workers around, support of someone to call for help, so they have less protection to be able to safely negotiate condom use. Rather than this artificial focus on a massive sex-worker boom and trafficking, evidence suggests what actually happens is adverse effects for sex workers.

Researchers with Dr. Shannon's group surveyed 107 prostitutes during the Games, and about 100 after the event was over, not necessarily the same women and transgendered people, but statistically similar. They reported no particular increase in the pool of sex workers, the number of underage prostitutes or evidence of human trafficking, the study said.

The women did, however, tell the researchers they had been subject to increased harassment by police, which Dr. Shannon said included being detained without charge, fined or told to move along.

Offsite Article: Mean minded nutters oppose police action against women but want them to harass men instead

2nd May 2012.  See article from london24.com