Feminist Law Professors, in a post titled “About 79 percent of human trafficking involves sex slavery while 18 percent covers forced or bonded labor, forced marriages and organ removal,” says
So says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in a new report that is available here. A press release providing an overview of the report can be found here.
There’s a little bit of fudging here. First of all Bartow says the study says
“About 79 percent of human trafficking involves sex slavery…”
That, if true, is absolutely definitive. If true then all other trafficking amounts to wagging the tail of sex slavery.
Reading her post charitably one would assume Bartow got her definitive statistic of 79% from the press release, which says
According to the [actual UNODC] Report, the most common form of human trafficking (79%) is sexual exploitation, although this may be an optical illusion.
That, if true, is… well… not quite definitive because of that weird little “may be an optical illusion” clause… but still pretty conclusive. If true then all other trafficking still amounts to wagging the tail of sex slavery!
That bit about “optical illusions” is a giant, red, sore-looking zit on the nose of credibility though. And unlike Bartow’s title the press-release paragraph says nothing about bonded labor, forced marriage, or organ donation. So she probably didn’t get her 79% statistic there.
So let’s look at the relevant paragraph in the actual (292 page) UN Report. (Emphasis mine.)
Third, sexual exploitation is by far the most commonly identified form of human trafficking (79%), followed by forced labour (18%). This may be the result of statistical bias. By and large the exploitation of women tends to be visible, in city centres, or along highways. Because it is more frequently reported, sexual exploitation has become the most documented type of traf- ficking, in aggregate statistics. In comparison, other forms of exploitation are under-reported: forced or bonded labour; domestic servitude and forced marriage; organ removal; and the exploitation of children in begging, the sex trade, and warfare.
Bartow appears to have glided right over a snippet of text qualifying that the 79% was not the quantity of human trafficking that involves sex slavery but the quantity reported, and then glided past nearly a paragraph of text clarifying those qualifications, before picking up the last little bits about bonded labor, forced marriage, and organ harvesting adding up the remainder of reported cases.
Other citations of the 79% figure in the UNODC report either contain similar qualifications about reporting (pg. 11) or make no mention of forced marriage and organ harvesting (pg. 57.)
A sidebar on page 51 of the report explains why this matters
“Why trafficking for forced labour is less easily detected than trafficking for sexual exploitation”
There is a general concern that trafficking for forced labour is less frequently detected and reported than trafficking for sexual exploitation, and at least three considerations support this concern. The first regards legislation. In 2008, most of the countries considered by this report had a trafficking in persons offence in place that included the criminalization of trafficking for forced labour, but this is a recent development. For instance, about 10 European countries expanded their definition of trafficking to include forced labour during the years 2005-2008. For many years, a large number of East Asian countries only considered trafficking for sexual exploitation, which remains the case in many countries in the region. A similar situation exists in Latin America.
The second issue relates to the first in that law enforcement agencies, as well as the general public, often view trafficking in persons only in the context of sexual exploitation. For many years and in many countries, the two concepts have been almost concomitant. Hence, an episode of trafficking for forced labour, when detected, could still be treated and recorded under another charge even when a specific offence of trafficking for forced labour exists in a country’s criminal code.
Finally, the ‘visibility bias’ is the idea that trafficking for forced prostitution is more likely to be detected than trafficking for forced labour. Prostitution (whether forced or voluntary) involves the general public because it must be visible – taking place in streets, bars or public spaces in urban areas – to attract potential clients. Conversely, most of the victims of forced labour often work in hidden locations, such as agricultural fields in rural areas, mining camps and garment factories or within the closed environment of a house in the case of domestic servitude. As a consequence, the detection of victims of trafficking for forced labour is less probable than the identification of victims of trafficking for forced prostitution.
In other words it’s not that 79% of trafficking is sex-trafficking, it’s that when nobody gives a shit about any other kind (and, especially, when people actively lobby to exclude enforcement of non-sex trafficking as, ahem, some people have) we just have a lousy idea how much trafficking — sex trafficking and, especially, otherwise — there is overall.
Celebrating because lousy data supports your biases at the expense of (in this case literally) uncounted tens or hundreds of thousands of others is a terrible idea.
