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According to Zaz Hollander, reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, police in Wasila, Alaska used funds allocated for fighting child-sex trafficking to… round up adult customers who answered ads where police officers pretended to be… adult prostitutes.

The late October bust resulted in the arrests of 10 men, plus the seizure of more than $2,100 in cash and 10 cell phones, police say. The sting, conducted by Palmer and Wasilla police with help from the FBI and Anchorage’s vice squad, was associated with a larger federal strategy called Operation Cross Country that targets child prostitutes and people who sell children into slavery.

The Mat-Su operation turned up neither, said Palmer police Detective Sgt. Kelly Turney. Instead, Turney said, the arrests represented the beginning of “us being able to work the issue”— arresting low-level johns to find pimps for adult prostitutes who may also be trafficking young girls.

Police knew prostitution happened here, but they didn’t know to what extent. The sting was one way to figure that out.

Police placed ads on Craigslist and other places. Turney wouldn’t describe the ad, but did say it made no reference to child prostitution.

Read all about it here.

Not to seem too petty or anything here but WTF? Whatever you think of sex trafficking, and whatever you think of sexual exploitation of minors, and however seriously you take ‘wingnut allegations that millions of American children are trafficked for sex, you’d sort of expect funds used to fight child-sex trafficking would be used to fight child-sex trafficking!

As one dour-sounding Alaskan “complete energy manipulation” provider (reiki massage, guided meditation, “ancient hot stone body work,” “some [presumably customer] nudity involved”) in Hollander’s article put it “If you advertise in the paper for whatever service and you’ve got grownups coming to see you, you think they’ve got child abductees in their car?”

I think that’s about right: it sounds like, you know, exactly the sort of thing you’d do if you didn’t actually take the problem at all seriously but you saw a way to featherbed your local budget with Federal dollars.

This is one of those things I find really frustrating. Because it relies so heavily on paradigms of sexual scarcity and transactional heterosexuality I don’t have much patience with prostitution. And because I think the transitory benefits to adults don’t merit the sometimes lifelong consequences for children I’m intolerant of sexual exploitation of minors. And don’t even get me started on commerce in coerced or conscripted people. But Zeus on Zanzibar I hate it when people pretend there’s no difference between the three. And so I’ve got nothing but contempt for the boneheads who pulled this stunt in Wasila, or for anyone who thinks it was just a swell idea.

Hollander says the community reaction isn’t going down well for the Wasila’s police chief

“It’s a little disheartening when you actually try to do something good and the majority of people think you’re wasting money, wasting time, why aren’t you out doing something bigger?” said Palmer police Commander Tom Remaley.

“It’s almost like you can’t win.”

See, this is what’s frustrating about it. If he was serious about investigating prostituted children or trafficked adults he wouldn’t be pulling stunts like this. That he did pull this stunt suggests he actually doesn’t take it seriously. He actually could win, you know. He just can’t do it that way.

(Via Google Alert on keyword “sex trafficking”)

Part 1: The setup on the conclusion of a two-year human-trafficking trial

From Joe Ryan at the New Jersey Star-Ledger

“And the girls were not allowed to keep any of the money they earned?” asked Shana W. Chen, an assistant U.S. attorney.

“No,” said Afolabi, a burly man who sat shackled before U.S. District Judge Jose Linares, wearing a dark-green jail uniform.

He said it here.

(Note: I found Joe Ryan’s article after reading the following piece. Read on.)

Part 2: The context

Laura Kenney of AOL’s StyleList fashion site uncovers a straight-up classic case of international trafficking of children as young as 10 into the United States.

The worldwide epidemic of human trafficking has reached the beauty industry.

A West African immigrant has pleaded guilty to running a human trafficking operation that forced women to braid hair for up to 14 hours a day in Newark and East Orange NJ, reports the New Jersey Star Ledger.

In a case prosecutors equated to modern day slavery, Lassissi Afolabi, 46, told a judge he headed a ring that smuggled victims from villages in Ghana and Togo. He brought twenty women, age 10 to 19, to New Jersey, where he seized their passports, forbade them to learn English and make friends, and planted them in salons where they were forced to work up to 14 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Though not as horrific as sex-trafficking, this story brings to light the exploitation of innocents who want to find a better life in the US. And this is only one case — we wonder how many more women are being made to work against their will in salons across the country?

She said it here.

Part 3: False Distinctions

Not being a sex-trafficking case this case of trafficking, with coerced sex, hasn’t yet showed up on the standard sites for hand-wringing for sex-trafficker/prostituteders. Because for most of them the real crime isn’t the trafficking or coerced labor it’s sex work. (Why else would so many of them insist that even self-selected sex-workers equals trafficking.)

Which is sort of a shame, as I’ve said fairly regularly. Because it’s not like only trafficked sex-workers have coerced sex. Here’s the Star-Ledger again.

During yesterday’s hearing, Afolabi admitted trying to have sex with one of the girls, who was under 18, during a trip to North Carolina, where he hoped to open a hair-braiding salon.

“And she begged you not to do it — “You are old enough to be my father,’ “ Chen said, quoting the alleged victim.

“Yes,” Afolabi said.

He pleaded guilty today to forced labor, aggravated sexual abuse and traveling with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.

The point being that just as not all sex work is coerced, neither does all non-sex trafficking involve no sexual coercion. Failing to get this has multiple consequences. The two biggest being that resources are spent to “protect” people (those sex-workers who are autonomous) who don’t need it and resources don’t protect other people (a substantially larger number who are trafficked, yes, and like Afolabi’s hair-braiding victim definitely sexually exploited, but who very often not the least bit “sex-trafficked.”)

Part 4, which seems to be growing into its own post, will be about a peculiarity in what I’m going to call, cynically, “benevolent trafficking” that makes prosecution, and even identification more difficult. The two-bit version is that four of Afolabi’s victims dispute that they were exploited and others report that their families at home are scorning and/or shaming them for complaining. The peculiarity being that Afolabi was actually treating his victims fractionally better than they would have been treated at home, with the result that they and their families felt they were getting a pretty good deal while… on the other hand he was treating them appallingly, and illegally, by U.S. standards and pocketing the difference between what they and their families expected them to earn in their home country (nothing) and what he was able to charge for their services (contemporary U.S. beauty-salon prices, which is quite a lot.)

A younger friend of mine has this job. She was recruited into it at a very early age… not even twelve when she started doing it. She was very good at it — wound up making far more as an “amateur” than any of the other kids in her school. When she turned 18 she discovered she could make quite a bit more if she kept doing it than she could with any of the other entry-level jobs that were available to her. So she turned pro. Now, as she approaches her 30s, she’s growing weary of it and wondering if she’s up for it anymore and wondering even harder what she could do instead that would make anything like the same money, in this economy. Especially considering how she’s specialized in her particular skills, how she barely made it through high school, and how her prospects of going to college or even a trade school are pretty dim.

There’s a lot of heartache in her line of work. She develops sometimes intensely personal and intimate relationships with her clients but no matter how close they become the clients always move on, always lose interest. And though she tries to keep tabs on them they often forget about her entirely.

Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex says my friend may soon have a hard time getting a visa to do it in Canada. For her own “protection.”

[Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenny’s] ministry issued a media release stating that the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will “protect vulnerable foreign workers such as exotic dancers and live-in caregivers who could be victims of exploitation”.

...

According to Wong, one measure to evaluate the vulnerability of a person is insufficiency of funds. “If we allow them in, we are actually putting them in great risk,” Wong told the Straight. Wong confirmed that the bill is driven by Conservatives’ aversion to foreign strippers in Canada. “That is one of the major concerns because, legally, according to admissible criteria, these workers can come in but experience has told us that once they come in, they will be exploited,” she said.

Erika Del Carmen Fuchs of the Justicia for Migrant Workers B.C. doesn’t agree with the Conservative approach. Fuchs told the Straight: “If there’s a problem with human trafficking, they should go after traffickers, not the people being trafficked.”

In May, two Filipino caregivers alleged mistreatment by Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla’s family. The caregivers claimed that they worked 12 to 16 hours a day and that their passports were confiscated. If the bill becomes law and is applied to cases similar to the Dhalla affair, Kurland said that the only remedy available for caregivers would be to get kicked out of Canada.

She said it here.

My friend is a professional nanny.

This is not to say nannying and, say, stripping are directly equivalent professions. But they evidently are similar enough to be treated the same way by… particularly thumb-fingered and/or heartless lawmakers.

Personally I think if one were trying to make workers safer, especially immigrant workers, it would be a better idea to actually protect the workers instead of outlawing them.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, of whom one can usually expect better, says

Sebastian Flyte, an unusual commentator, wrote:

“A man’s mate value is tied to status – if he emigrates he throws away whatever mate value he built up in his life. A girl’s is tied to youth and beauty. These are carried with her luggage.”

He has a point.  Female migrants should on average be prettier, ceteris paribus, than those who stay in the old country.

He said it here.

Sebastian Flyte, for the record, is some sort of Pick-up Artist. That doesn’t make him wrong. The content of his assertion does. But what do you expect — he also thinks “Girls are pretty boring creatures.” Because, he says, “The amount of time I’ve spent on the internet in my life has given me a depth of knowledge far greater than the average girl I meet. I simply know WAY more about how the world works. Girls spent their teenage years socialising. I was on the internet and reading books. This knowledge-divergence can be both a blessing and a curse.” Because, I say, he thinks women are creatures (mmm, heterosexuality as bestiality!) Because for all his living on the internet he hasn’t yet figured out that single, unattached women, being human beings and therefore having libidos, are rather keen on sex and therefore don’t have to be tricked or confused into it. But I digress…

I’m more surprised by Cowen’s assertion that everything else being equal female migrants should be prettier than those who don’t migrate. (Later in his post he at least leaves open the equally silly but less gender-binding possibility that men who migrate could also be more attractive.)

I think it’s beyond silly. If looks and youth were such strong determinants you’d expect (using the economics version of Mazlow’s hammer) that younger, more attractive women would be more appealing, and thus of higher “value” to establishment men in the location of origin and so ceteris paribus they should also have less reason to migrate than their older or less attractive peers.

Actually, obviously, I’m pretty sure ambition on the one hand and how stagnant or stifling the place of origin is compared to the destination on the other have way more to do with decisions to migrate than either looks, transferrable skills, or other “mate value.”

Another factor would tend to be local connections for the would-be migrant — either opportunities (parents or parents friends fast tracking employment or business prospects, for instance) or obligations (“we need you to run…” or “but who will take care of…?) And so to the extent that women are the traditional parental caregivers, and since younger women tend to have younger parents, one would expect that, again ceteris paribus, younger women (whether attractive or not) would have fewer obligations and therefore fewer binding connections than somewhat older women, even unmarried ones.

And yeah, yeah, you can ride ceteris paribus to the rescue (but “all other things being equal” could mean compared to women who’s parents are all the same age and who’s parents are able to invoke the same obligations on them) but if you ride it too far you’re left with inconclusively small sample sizes.

And for the record Cowen plays (also uncharacteristically) a xenophobia card when he says “From a public choice point of view, the women in the country receiving the immigrants should be more suspicious of liberal immigration policies than should be the men in the receiving country.” All them immigrant dames being statistically prettier and younger and (oh heck, why not play that card too?) exotic and pliant and therefore more desirable to destination-local men than the flinty local women they’d otherwise have to choose from.

(And I bring up this criticism despite Matt Yglesias’s sensible and useful Emerson Hall maxim about jumping on experts for seeming elementary mistakes, articulated here. For one thing Cowen is an expert economist, not an expert on migration. For another, he’s citing someone who, in addition to being a pickup artist, is even less of an expert on migration.