"The Home Office estimates that there are between 6,000 and 18,000 trafficked women and girls being forced to work as prostitutes in the UK."

That was the news in the United Kingdom as of July, 2008 (Telegraph, 7/2/08).  Every single police force in the country plus those of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish Government, the Crown Prosecution Service and "various NGOs," had just completed "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking."

That was how the government and the media described Operation Pentameter Two.  Home Secretary Jacqui Smith,

hailed it as "a great success". Its operational head, Tim Brain, said it had seriously disrupted organised crime networks responsible for human trafficking. "The figures show how successful we have been in achieving our goals," he said.

So, by July of 2008, human trafficking for the sex trade had been dealt a serious blow by the combined efforts of law enforcement throughout the British Isles.

Except there wasn't any sex trafficking, or so little as to be unnoticeable.  It turns out that all the self-congratulation was based on next to nothing.  Here's the altogether different news today (The Guardian, 10/20/09).

The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

And it's not like the British Government coughed up this information voluntarily.  It took many months for The Guardian to obtain documents that finally revealed the dirty little secret behind sex trafficking in Britain - there's not any.  Or at least if there is, this massive effort failed to uncover it.

And various interested parties were happy for that to remain a secret because it didn't fit the narrative of the sexual exploitation of women and girls that so many have so patiently constructed over many years.  As the article says,

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

Here are the figures from Operation Pentameter Two:

• Government and media outlets reported 528 arrests, but actually there were only 422;
• Of those 422, 153 were released almost immediately, 106 with no charge at all and 47 with only cautions for minor offenses;
• Of the remaining 253, only 67 were ever charged with trafficking and only 22 of those were tried.  Seven were acquitted outright, leaving a grand total of 15 who were actually convicted of something;

But even that overstates the "human sex trafficking" situation in the U.K.  That's because the law under which they were arrested and charged doesn't require for conviction a finding that a person have been compelled or coerced to work as a prostitute against her will.

In the end, a total of five people were found to have actually compelled or coerced a woman into prostitution.  And those five weren't arrested by Operation Pentameter Two.

Needless to say, five is five too many.  But let's be clear about the extent of the problem of sex trafficking in the British Isles when such a massive law enforcement operation nets a grand total of zero sex traffickers.

In summary, government, media, NGOs, etc. built up the problem of human trafficking for sex into an enormous problem.  That was fairly easy to do, given that their effort came against a backdrop of decades of routinely inflated figures on rape and other violence against women.  The fictional narrative held (and holds) that women are in constant danger from men and that, as likely as not, it is men's sex drive that is responsible.  Male sexuality, so the story goes, is unhealthy and perilous for women and girls.

Therefore, the "distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all" were just another chapter in a lurid novel of male sexual predation of women.  And who wanted to interrupt a juicy story with quibbles about what is and isn't true.  So who could argue with it?  Who would even think to question it?  It was all so obvious, all so neat.

And all so wrong.

Thanks to John for the heads-up.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Crime/Criminal Justice System/Police, Men and the Media. You can trackback from your own site.