Google and Facebook aren’t aiding sex trafficking – nonsense
We’ve another of those claims about sex trafficking which is simply complete nonsense. For, to any level of statistical accuracy, there is no sex trafficking in the UK. But people seem happy enough to accuse Google and Facebook of facilitating what doesn’t happen. The correct response to which is to tell these people to go boil their heads of course:
Internet giants were accused of profiting from sex trafficking in Britain last night as security chiefs warned of a new wave of “pop-up brothels” sweeping the country.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) last night accused firms such as Google and Facebook of “making profits” from the trafficking of vulnerable women, many of whom end up in temporary sex clubs and massage parlours that have sprung up around the country.
The agency’s “modern slavery tsar” said web companies have become the “key enabler for the sexual exploitation of trafficked victims in the UK” and demanded action.
This all boils down to that most unfashionable of things, the definition of words.
Sex trafficking does have a useful meaning. It’s lying, cheating, using force, to move women – it is usually women talked about because of the obvious realities of the sex trade – across borders and then force them into prostitution. This is of course appalling, it’s a continued series of rapes and anyone doing it should be severely punished.
We do indeed have laws against it and people looking for it to stop it too.
We’ve also the meaning which is being used here. There are, must as it will surprise some maiden aunts, those who are, given their other opportunities, quite happy to rent out their bodies for the sexual jollification of others. Some goodly number of these people live in poor countries and would much rather be in a rich one, getting much higher payments for their services and generally living a better life. There are even those who would not prostitute at home but would abroad – the Nobel Laureate Gary Becker explained this rather well in fact.
It’s even true that some of these foreigners come here to screw on fake papers, are smuggled in, lie about visas and so on. But this is very different from that first case.
It’s the difference between those illegally in prostitution, as in being forced into it, and those legally prostituting themselves but illegally in the country. Do remember that prostitution itself is legal in Britain.
Google and Facebook are being accused of facilitating people illegally here doing something legal, offering sex for money. Yet the language being used implies they’re aiding and abetting something very different, the repeated rape of sex slaves. These are not the same thing and we shouldn’t be calling them by the same name.
Which is exactly why the modern slavery tsar is using these same terms. Because we don’t actually have that proper form of sex slavery:
The UK’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.
The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.
Everyone, including all the police forces in the country, went looking for sex trafficking for six months. And found absolutely no one who could be jugged for doing it. That’s about as good proof as we’re going to get that, to any reasonable statistical level, it doesn’t exist. But of course that answer doesn’t provide a budget for the modern slavery tsar which is why they use the different language.
Incentives do matter after all.
Posted: 4th, March 2018 | In: News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
