Sport of Trafficking Hype

Prostitutes in one of Brazil's biggest cities are signing up for free English classes ahead of this year's Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup.

Cida Vieira, president of the Association of Prostitutes in the city of Belo Horizonte, has said 20 women have already signed up for the courses. Classes are expected to begin in March and last up to eight months. Vieira explained:

It will be important for the girls who will be able to use English to let their clients know what they are charging and learn about what turns them on.

And for the same reasons we are also thinking of offering free French and Italian classes

Prostitution is legal in Brazil.

The report Harm Was Done: prostitution, politics and power in the run up to the 2012 London Olympics , was produced by the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) to mark International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. The IUSW write:

Despite all the hype about trafficking and prostitution in the run up to the Olympics, no service interviewed saw more people selling sex or more potential victims of trafficking -- just as well, since none received substantial increased funds and two had substantial cuts to the service they could offer. One interviewee for our report (see Notes) commented "All this panic and hype, but no money for services!"

Sex Worker Support services say:

• "The Games were used as an opportunity to perpetuate the myths around prostitution and major sporting events by organisations and individuals who take an ideological view of prostitution, rather than one informed by the evidence base."
• "[Many of the attendees at the GLA meetings] didn't seem to know anything about the ordinary reality of the sex industry in London, and when you talked about that it was like being the kid pointing out the emperor's new clothes, nobody wanted to know."
• "Policy was based on the ideology -- the belief that prostitution is a form of exploitation -- of a few projects who were driving the agenda and using trafficking to get support for their work, both financial and political."

And the harm continues -- one service provider said "It's not just the Olympics -- they're still shutting places down and they don't think of the consequences for the women, it's driving it underground and we don't get any access to deliver services at all. Women still have families living in poverty, they still have to make a living, and they're less safe doing it."

An IUSW report for International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (17 December) reveals that concerns raised by frontline services for people in the sex industry were ignored by the GLA's "Sexual Exploitation" group. Services say:

• "[Sex workers are] less likely to report crimes because they don't trust the police as much as they used to"
• "It was just horrendous. Women being thrown out [of brothels] with no regard for their safety" "Places you'd been going to for ages would close, and you'd lose touch with all the people you'd been supporting there"
• "If [policy makers] listened to us, they wouldn't have done what they did."

London 2012: Will the Olympics bring more prostitutes?

As previously mentioned the BBC have done a good in depth piece rubbishing the claim that major sports events attract hoards of trafficked sex workers.

See  article from  bbc.co.uk

The real exploiters of sex work

See article from janefae.wordpress.com by Jane Fae

Jane Fae comments on the BBC piece and follows up with a few interesting thoughts on the origins of the myth of the 40,000 trafficked sex workers, and who was set to gain from it.

Ukraine's prostitutes hope to cash in on Euro 2012

See  article from  indianexpress.com

Meanwhile the international press sort of recognise that the mass trafficking concept is nonsense, but this minor setback doesn't stop them using a sporting event as an excuse for gathering an assortment of oddments about sex workers.

x:talk is a sex worker led co-operative based in London. The group and its supporters are calling for a moratorium on arrests of sex workers in London with immediate effect until the end of the Olympic Games.

Governments, charity organisations and campaign groups have argued that large sporting events lead to an increase in trafficking for prostitution. These claims, often repeated by the media, are usually based on misinformation, poor data and a tendency to sensationalise. There is no evidence that large sporting events cause an increase in trafficking for prostitution.

These claims can lead to anti-trafficking policies and policing practices that target sex workers. In London, anti-trafficking practices have resulted in raids on brothels, closures and arbitrary arrests of people working in the sex industry. This creates a climate of fear among workers, leaving them less likely to report crimes against them and more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. This is an inadequate response to sex work and to trafficking.

x:talk is aware of clean up efforts already underway in London, particularly east London, in the run up to the Olympics. These include multiple raids and closure of premises. We anticipate that until the end of the Olympic games there will be a continued rise in the numbers of raids, arrests and level of harassment of sex workers.

A series of violent robberies on brothels by a gang in December in Barking & Dagenham demonstrates the effect that this climate of fear can have on the safety of sex workers. The effect of raids on brothels and closures in the area had eroded relations between sex workers and the Police with the result that the sex workers targeted by the gang were unwilling to report the attacks for fear of arrest. The gang were able to attack at least three venues in December 2011.

In light of this, x:talk and its supporters are calling on the Mayor of London and London Metropolitan Police to suspend arrests and convictions of sex workers.

Prostitutes at risk during the Olympics, Vancouver-based study says

See article from news.nationalpost.com

British authorities should develop a public-health plan to protect London's prostitutes during the Olympics, Canadian researchers are urging after finding that stepped-up police action and other disruptions during the Vancouver Games kept sex workers away from their regular haunts, potentially exposing them to more violence and disease.

The survey of about 100 prostitutes before and after the Winter Games also suggested the influx of new sex workers and spike in human trafficking that many observers had predicted never actually materialized.

In fact, the women surveyed by University of British Columbia researchers said there were fewer clients than usual, and they had a harder time connecting with them, perhaps because of the police action and other disruptions.

That meant many of the prostitutes could have been forced to less-visible pick-up spots away from colleagues and health services, said the paper just published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. Not only would that make them more vulnerable to violence, but could increase the risk of HIV and other sexually-transmitted infection, since previous research suggests isolated sex workers are three times as likely to be coerced into unsafe sex, said Dr. Kate Shannon, lead author of the study. She explained:

They don't have support of other workers around, support of someone to call for help, so they have less protection to be able to safely negotiate condom use. Rather than this artificial focus on a massive sex-worker boom and trafficking, evidence suggests what actually happens is adverse effects for sex workers.

Researchers with Dr. Shannon's group surveyed 107 prostitutes during the Games, and about 100 after the event was over, not necessarily the same women and transgendered people, but statistically similar. They reported no particular increase in the pool of sex workers, the number of underage prostitutes or evidence of human trafficking, the study said.

The women did, however, tell the researchers they had been subject to increased harassment by police, which Dr. Shannon said included being detained without charge, fined or told to move along.

Offsite Article: Mean minded nutters oppose police action against women but want them to harass men instead

2nd May 2012.  See  article from  london24.com

The forthcoming London Olympics have sent the media into a feeding frenzy of scare mongering. Warning us that tens of thousands of sex slaves are under starter's orders in outlying foreign counties, ready to sprint headlong, handcuffed in readiness, to England for the start of the games.

As a global anti-trafficking organisation, GAATW is concerned that international sporting events are being linked with increases in trafficking for prostitution, without supporting evidence.

How likely is this?

Trafficked sex workers are as hard to get your hands on in London as face value stadium tickets.

The police have spent years and 5 million quid with their specialist task force Operation Pentameter hunting for sex slaves and found hardly any. How do they expect a non-English speaking tourist with a dog-eared A to Z or an IPhone app to find them?

So who's telling fibs and why?

This unsporting bout of statistical fakery has been created by the media and the abolitionists, including the Poppy Project and the Salvation Army. These groups would like to see an end to the commercial sex industry. By saying sex workers are all victims of abuse or trafficking they get an outraged public onto their side of the argument to criminalise prostitutes and punters. If a story, or myth is repeated often enough and loud enough it seeps into the public psyche. People accept it as fact and act accordingly.

...Read the full article

The Super Bowl is one of America's largest sporting events, and it is a time when nutters enjoy making ludicrous claims about thousands of girls, many under-aged that will somehow be trafficked to the event.

The award for this year's most inane nutter campaigner must surely go to Theresa Flores, founder of Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution (S.O.A.P.). She told The Christian Post that major sporting events like the Super Bowl generally have more men in attendance who are visiting from a different city, and often do things they wouldn't normally do at home. This creates a demand that traffickers and pimps are there willing and waiting to supply, she said.

Because of this, about 150 volunteers for S.O.A.P. are heading to Indiana before the event to pass out soap at Indianapolis motels.

Each bar of soap will have a label on it with phrases like Are you being threatened? or Are you witnessing young girls being prostituted? The soap provides the number for a human trafficking hotline so that those at the hotel, or young girls who are being trafficked, will see it and can call for help.

S.O.A.P. volunteers will distribute the bars Feb. 1-2, in conjunction with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship students who will hand out fliers to raise awareness for the trafficking issue with football fans.

Offsite Comment: Superbowl Sex Trafficking Increase? Super Nonsense

5th February 2012. See  article from  sexualintelligence.wordpress.com

An increasing number of groups are intent on persuading Americans that we have a terrible and growing problem with sex trafficking. Their data is virtually non-existent, elided with words like experts agree, a shameful epidemic, and enormous human suffering. The media reports their conferences and feral estimates, politicians grimly respond with vows of stricter laws, and the occasional wildly unusual victim is trotted out as proof of some enormous underground industry.

The favorite ploy of anti-trafficking groups is to grimly remind us that major sporting events are a central focus of this evil. Every year, the NFL has to deny that they're the center of an odious international sex slavery ring. NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy says the super bowl sex slave story is a simply an urban legend.

But that doesn't stop those who are feeding---and feeding off of---America's latest Sex Panic.

..Read the full article