On June 29th, 2011, The Village Voice joined the war against human trafficking. But unfortunately, they picked up arms and stepped onto the field fighting for the wrong side.
I have been a long-time fan of The Village Voice. I can clearly remember leaving the theater where I saw RENT for the first time, screaming “To Absolut, to choice, to the Village Voice” at the top of my lungs, relishing in the progressive ideals they represented. But sadly, a decade later, I’ve lost my faith in The Village Voice because of the choices they have recently made: the choice to disparage and villainize a movement of advocates working to end modern-day slavery, the choice to fight fuzzy methodology with fuzzy methodology, and the choice to put their bottom line above basic human rights.
The Village Voice recently published an article which challenged a statistic often bandied about in human trafficking discussions: 100,000 to 300,000 children in the U.S. are victims of child sex trafficking. Those are gut-wrenching, soul-crushing numbers. And The Village Voice claims they might not be 100% accurate.
Let me upfront about one thing: there are a lot of studies of human trafficking that are utter crap. There are others that are useful, but not as scientifically rigorous as they should be, and there are some that are quite good. There are careful, measured estimations of the scope of trafficking, and there are wild, ridiculous guesses. That The Village Voice questioned the authenticity of a study about human trafficking isn’t problematic; on the contrary, it is exactly what a fact-hungry media outlet should do. The problem is that they used a flaw in a scientific study to demonize people they disagree with, not to ask the most critical question in the fight against modern-day slavery: “How can we make this better?”
After spending some serious space blasting Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher for contributing their fame and resources to a series of PSAs aimed at changing a culture that allows grown men to buy sex from young girls with impunity, they slammed several publications for printing the statistic they dispute. Then, The Village Voice offered an alternative “study” they conducted for readers’ consideration.
Here’s the scientific rigor of the methodology for The Village Voice study: staff reviewing the juvenile prostitution arrest records for America’s 37 largest cities, applying the “common sense” idea that most child sex trafficking takes place in urban areas, and coming up with the determination that a mere 827 children are trafficked for sex in the U.S. each year.
Now, as a social scientist myself, I could poke holes in the Village Voices’ study like they pokes holes in the one that is used to cite 100,000 to 300,000 trafficked children each year. I could point out that juvenile arrest records don’t include child trafficking victims who are never arrested, or who, instead of being arrested, are treated as victims of a crime and served by social services – a feat the anti-trafficking movement has been trying to accomplish for a decade. I could question the “common sense” that trafficking occurs mostly in urban areas by reminding them that one of the largest child sex trafficking rings identified in recent years took place in smaller cities, including Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Toledo, Ohio. But the little bit of poking that I’ve just indulged in has done far more for my own ego than for any child sex trafficking victim.
The Village Voice was right to question the voracity of human trafficking statistics, but after they uncovered a movement-wide need for improvement, their next step should have been to ask: What should change? What needs to happen in order to effectively combat child sex trafficking as it actually exists in America? What should we do in order to become better educated and informed about this critical human rights issue?
But Village Voice chose a different route. The article spends a page or so ripping on University of Pennsylvania professors Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner, the authors of the study which estimates 100,000 to 300,000 children are at risk for sex trafficking (not actually trafficked) in the U.S., another page or so mocking Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s earnest public awareness efforts, and a solid page demonizing Shared Hope International’s Executive Director Linda Smith (who, for full disclosure, is a former colleague) and other organizations fighting human trafficking. By the time they’re done taking a steamy, verbal dump on all these groups, they have just enough space left for one more accusation: the anti-trafficking industry is all about the money.
They claim a “tidal wave of cash” is going to nonprofits and law-enforcement agencies fighting human trafficking. Here are some examples of that tidal wave. In 2010, the annual budget of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons was around $20 million. That’s out of roughly $52 billion for the whole State Department in FY2010, or less than one tenth of one percent of the whole State Department’s budget. It’s also less than one percent of the amount of money the federal government spent on the war on drugs and less than half of what was spent on marching bands for the Marine Corps last year. Anti-trafficking organization Polaris Project, which according to The Village Voice has an annual operating budget of $800,000, is one of the largest anti-trafficking organizations. Compare that to large nonprofits in other fields like the Humane Society of the United States ($205 million) or Greenpeace’s U.S. regional office (around $12 million in 2009), and you can bet Polaris Project staff aren’t exactly driving Ferraris. The truth is anti-trafficking funding is table scraps. And the only thing more insulting than having to beg for table scraps is having someone tell you you’re eating like a king as you grovel.
But I’m glad the Village Voice brought up the issue of money, because they are right about it being a driving force. Village Voice Media is the parent company of Backpage.com, which earns income, in part, off commercial sex ads, and has been widely criticized by law enforcement, anti-trafficking organizations, and even states attorneys general as a facilitator of child sex trafficking. So Village Voice Media has a financial interest in discrediting and minimizing the anti-trafficking movement in order to prevent the same public pressure which pushed Craigslist to shut down their adult services section from hurting their own bottom line.
But regardless of their motivations, The Village Voice says human trafficking statistics need improvement. So here’s my response to them: help us make them better. Use some of the vast earnings you get from selling commercial sex ads on Backpage.com to commission a study on the scope of child sex trafficking in America. Hire social scientists who understand human trafficking to make it rigorous. Work with anti-trafficking groups to make it fair and comprehensive. Or, if you can’t manage that, help anti-trafficking advocates petition the government for the scraps to do more research, to create more sound statistics, to understand this problem in a more nuanced way. In other words: do something productive.
Sure, you can paint the anti-trafficking movement as a bunch of clueless celebrities, right-wing moralists, radical lefty feminists, and junk scientists – that sort of portrayal sells newspapers. Or you show us as we are: passionate people from all walks of life, working to fight an insidious industry, making some magnificent strides, and like all movements, also making a few mistakes along the way. We’re not perfect, and we’ve never claimed to be. And when it comes to resources, we’ll take all the help we can get.
I, for one, want to return to the time when I sang out the name of The Village Voice as a symbol of social justice. I don’t want to fight against you. I would much rather fight against human trafficking with you. Because it’s only then we might do something so unexpected, it blows all the science – junky and legitimate – out of the water. We might win.
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