National Forum: Improving Services and Protection for Trafficked Persons

so glad this organization is facilitating this event. maybe finally we will see some clear cut canadian policies in this regard.it seems balanced, inclusive ad representative of more than just people trafficked into the sex industry. i wish i lived ou that way, i would encourage anyone who can, to go.

Trying to find an appropriate place for this link, but I cannot find the original posts on the original article:  Here is the update to the story on the UK raids for trafficked workers:

The head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Grahame Maxwell, who is chief constable of North Yorkshire, acknowledged the importance of the figures: “The facts speak for themselves. I’m not trying to argue with them in any shape or form,” he said.
He said he had commissioned fresh research from regional intelligence units to try to get a clearer picture of the scale of sex trafficking. “What we’re trying to do is to get it gently back to some reality here,” he said.
“It’s not where you go down on every street corner in every street in Britain, and there’s a trafficked individual.
“There are more people trafficked for labour exploitation than there are for sexual exploitation. We need to redress the balance here. People just seem to grab figures from the air.”

http://www.wisdomofwhores.com/2009/10/21/traffic-jam-where-are-all-the-bonded-hookers/

We have argued that the figures are based on questionable methods and that most are unreliable. While Home Office reports use an apologetic tone and many caveats to excuse the "poor" data and high margins of error, ministers, MPs and prohibitionists seized on the figures as indicative of a serious problem. The confusion and misinformation leads to the diverting of resources from other victims, increasing police power to invade ordinary workers' lives, and the further stigmatising of sex workers. The intensive surveillance and repeated raids justified by the exaggerated claims directly threaten the safety of sex workers by forcing them to be more clandestine. They also make it difficult for non-coerced sex workers, and indeed their clients, to collaborate in the exposure of traffickers for fear of arrest and possible deportation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/22/sex-trafficking-crime-bill

Not all feminists support the policing and crime bill. We have been campaigning alongside sex workers against workers being driven into clandestine situations where they face more dangerous and exploitative conditions. The government's trafficking policy, putatively concerned with women's rights, is really about migration. It serves not only to victimise migrant women, but also to criminalise migrant men. Moral panic over trafficking has created a smokescreen behind which the state has intensified its policing of all migrant workers, particularly women. Increasing police powers to raid workplaces and enforce inhumane migration controls can hardly be in the interests of any woman.

Mary Partington & Gwyneth Lonergan

Feminist Fightback

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated

This story basically explains how a real study in 1998 started out with a shakey estimate of 1400 possibly trafficed sex workers became 25,000 by the time it reached the hands of the media and politicians to use as an excuse for raids.  It then goes on to show the apparent backpedaling by the police, etc, when they failed so   

There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein's weapons.

In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.

Fiona Mactaggart, a former Home Office minister, in January 2008 outstripped MacShane's estimates, telling the House of Commons that she regarded all women prostitutes as the victims of trafficking, since their route into sex work "almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers."

There is no known research into UK prostitution which supports this claim.   

In November 2008, Mactaggart repeated a version of the same claim when she told BBC Radio 4's Today in Parliament that "something like 80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker."

Again, there is no known source for this.

Challenged to justify this figure by a different Radio 4 programme, More or Less, in January 2009, Mactaggart claimed that it comes from the Home Office's 2004 report on prostitution, Paying the Price.

But there is no sign of the figure in the report.

more quoted

Last year (2008), Poppy published a report called The Big Brothel, which claimed to be the most comprehensive study ever conducted into brothels in the UK and which claimed to have found "indicators of trafficking in every borough of London".

That report was subsequently condemned in a joint statement from 27 specialist academics who complained that it was "framed by a pre-existing political view of prostitution". The academics said there were "serious flaws" in the way that data had been collected and analysed; that the reliability of the data was "extremely doubtful"; and that the claims about trafficking "cannot be substantiated."

And?

Dealing with this, the document explains: "The number of 'potential victims' has been refined as more informed decisions have been made about whether or not the individual is believed to be a victim of human trafficking for sexual exploitation ... Initial considerations were made on limited information ... When interviewed, the potential victim may make it clear that they are not in fact a victim of trafficking and/or inquiries may make it clear that they are not and/or inquiries may show that initial consideration was based on false or incomplete information."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails

Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution. The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all. 

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been "rescued" as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women. Pentameter used a definition, from the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which makes it an offence to transport a man or woman into prostitution even if this involves assisting a willing sex worker. Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter's 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with.

 

Related reading for more information:

http://www.wisdomofwhores.com/category/the-sex-trade/