The unnecessary panic over sex ‘trafficking’

WHEN police chargednew England Patriots owner Robert Kraft with soliciting prostitution, the press said the police rescued sex slaves. “They were women who were from China, who were forced into sex slavery,” said Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show.”

We’re told this happens all the time. It’s bunk, reporter Elizabeth Nolan Brown says.

In the Kraft case, prosecutors now acknowledge that there was no trafficking. The women were willing sex workers. “Ninety-nine percent of the headlines are not true,” says Brown in my latest video. “Sex trafficking and prostitution are sort of used interchangeably.”

Politicians tell us that thousands of children are forced into the sex trade. “Three-hundred thousand American children are at risk!” Rep. Ann Wagner said on the floor of Congress.

That number comes from one study, and that study’s lead author, Richard Estes,

has disavowed it.

“The National Crimes Against Children Center says, ‘Do not cite this study’!” Brown says. It’s “total bull.” Widely quoted bull. “If that was the case, cops would be able to find this all the time,” Brown says. “Cops wouldn’t have to go through these elaborate stings.”

Florida police spent months taking down the spa Robert Kraft visited. “They had Homeland Security involved,” Brown recounts. “They were following these women around in the grocery stores, watching them buy condoms.”

I’d think cops would have better things to do with their time. “If this was really a situation where these women were being forced and sexually assaulted multiple times a day, the cops just let it happen for months on end?” Brown asks.

She covered a case in Seattle where the local sheriff, at a news conference, said he’d rescued sex slaves. But when Brown spoke to the sheriff later, “he ended up saying, ‘Well, you know, maybe they weren’t being forced by whatever, but we’re all trafficked by something and there was money involved.’ Then by the end of the investigation they were like, ‘Well, I mean, they were pressured because they didn’t know a lot of people and they wanted to make money’. ”

One former sex worker says the moral panic over prostitution is a “combination of the conservative fetish for going after people for doing ‘sex stuff ’ and the liberal instinct to help a group of people that they can’t be bothered to understand.”

That includes the celebrities who perpetuate the myth that sex slavery is rampant. Actor Ashton Kutcher even promotes an app that he claims rescues victims. He told Congress, “We have identified over 6,000 trafficking victims this year.”

Really? Where are they? Kutcher’s representatives did not respond to emails.

Sex slavery is evil. Authorities should do everything they can to stop it. But there is a big difference between slavery and sex work done by consenting adults. “When we have these exaggerated numbers,” Brown says, “it forces people into this crazy emergency moral panic mode that ends up not helping the actual problem that we have.”

Periodic crackdowns on prostitution don’t help either. ”They want this imaginary world where you take away a safer option for these women,” Brown says, and then “the oldest profession, as they call it, will magically stop. But that’s not going to happen.”

John Stossel is author of “No They Can’t! Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed.”