The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth, Revisited

In 2011, Pete Kotz revealed how one of America's great urban legends--the notion that thousands of hookers descend annually on the Super Bowl-- is spread by politicians. Despite the fact that these apocalyptic claims have been thoroughly discredited, elected officials hungry for headlines about "sex trafficking" keep repeating them. As Kotz reported, the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis was no exception.

Backpage Takes Heat for Prostitution Ads That Are Everywhere

Forbes

After New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff attacked Village Voice Media and its classified site Backpage.com in a sloppily reported op-ed piece, Forbes writer Daniel Fisher took Kristoff to task. Fisher pointed out that, far from enabling sex trafficking, Backpage serves as a valuable tool to law-enforcement agencies fighting the problem--and employs more than 100 people to monitor and report any improper activity. Had Kristoff done his homework, added Fisher, he also never would have made the absurd and easily disproved claim that Craiglist had "backed out" of the adult-advertising sector.

Fighting Over Online Sex Ads

New York Times

After a group of 36 clergy members demanded that VVM shut down adult advertising on its Backpage.com classifieds site, New York Times media columnist David Carr weighed in. Noting that the mainstream media, including prominent TV cable channels and national websites, are already awash in sexually themed material, Carr questioned the wisdom of singling out Backpage for special scrutiny. The well-known columnist also reminded readers that he'd once worked for an alternative newspaper that turned its back on adult advertising–and wound up going out of business.

New Research Demolishes Sex-Worker Stereotypes

Riverfront Times

While activists and church groups continue to cite exaggerated statistics that overplay the incidence of underage prostitution, scientifically valid studies of the phenomenon are hard to come by. When reporter Kristen Hinman investigated, she found that the most comprehensive study available refuted many commonly held myths about teenager prostitutes--specifically, the notion that most of them are girls who are being controlled by pimps.

Stuck in Trafficking

Village Voice

The misinformation campaign about underage prostitution conducted by celebrity spokespersons like Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore is regrettable--but, perhaps, for a pair of Hollywood actors eager to do good in the world, understandable. Less comprehensible is how the mainstream media has fed into sex-trafficking hysteria by eagerly regurgitating inaccurate information in the name of headlines. And one organization has led the race to the bottom: CNN, which has made trafficking its pet cause, and which seems to have utterly abandoned any notion of balanced coverage when it comes to the issue. The poster girl for the network's jihad is Amber Lyon, a young reporter who has boasted about forcing Craigslist to remove adult ads from its site--but whose own attachment to the cause is far from professional.

Real Men Get Their Facts Straight

Village Voice

It all started when Hollywood power couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore were watching TV in bed. They saw a documentary about sex slavery in a foreign country, and after a quick call to a celebrity charity consultant, they'd found a new cause: human sex trafficking. Today, Kutcher and Moore are routinely trotted out as "experts" on what they and other activists claim is a tidal wave of underage prostitution in this country--"from 100,000 to 300,000 child prostitutes per year." But as VVM has reported, that figure is wildly exaggerated, a figure concocted by far-right religious organizations and and far-left feminists to keep the federal dollars rolling in. As this in-depth investigation by Martin Cizmar, Kristen Hinman and Ellis Conklin reveals, the real number of child prostitutes in this country is closer to about 800 per year. And the real cause isn't ominous international sex-trafficking rings. It's drug addiction and homelessness among teens. Yet while Congress has spent hundreds of millions of dollars hunting for largely non-existent sex traffickers, it hasn't spent a penny to shelter and counsel those boys and girls in America who are, in fact, child prostitutes.

Women's Funding Network sex trafficking study is junk science

Minneapolis City Pages

When members of Congress heard testimony last fall about underage prostitution as it related to adult classifieds on Craigslist, the most alarming words of the day came from Deborah Richardson, the chief program officer of the Women's Funding Network. Citing a study performed by the Atlanta-based Schapiro Group, Richardson told legislators that teen prostitution was exploding; in Minnesota alone, she insisted, the problem had grown by 64.7 percent. Her alarming statistics were then repeated unquestioningly by media organizations across the country. But as City Pages staff writer Nick Pinto discovered, the Schapiro Group's numbers were based on junk science-- mere guesswork that was being presented to Congress and the public as fact.

Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence

The Washington Post

By the year 2007, the Bush administration spent more than $150 million to wage a worldwide war on human trafficking. The government – undoubtedly influenced throughout the ‘90s by the hue-and-cry that emanated from an alliance of evangelicals and human-rights groups – made outlandish claims that some 50,000 sex slaves were pouring into the country each year. Turns out, 42 Justice Department task forces later, that the claim was bogus, based on an unscientific estimate by a CIA analyst. In fact, when the dust settled, the government was able to identify fewer than 1,400 victims of human trafficking brought into the country since 2000. Indeed, lots of smoke, but no real fire, the Washington Post concluded in its investigation. Read on to discover just how far the problem of so-called modern-day slavery has been blown out of proportion.

The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth: 100,000 Hookers Won't Be Showing Up in Dallas.

Dallas Observer

Everything’s big in Texas, all right, especially the tall tales Dallas police spun about how many prostitutes were headed to the Super Bowl. Two months before the big game at the Metroplex, Sgt. Louis Felini told the Dallas Morning News that upwards of 100,000 hookers would be on hand for the big game. That’s a mighty big number, even by Texas standards, thought Village Voice Media reporter Pete Kotz, who decided to check in with officials at the two previous Super Bowl host cities. He talked with Phoenix police: Practically nothing, and not a single arrest of an underage girl. How about Tampa? Again, no measurable uptick in the number of prostitutes. Just another day at the beach.

Super Bowl prostitution: 100,000 hookers didn't show, but America's latest political scam did.

Dallas Observer

Maybe Dallas police should have given free tickets to all card-carrying hookers. Then, maybe 100,000 of them would actually have come for the Super Bowl -- including the 38,000 child sex slaves that the Dallas Women's Foundation predicted would arrive to help service the fans. Alas, the massive hooker invasion did not materialize. Detectives from Dallas to Plano, Fort Worth to Irving, reported no increase in sex traffic. Once again, the mass hysteria that unites conservative Christians and social service do-gooders proved to be just that: mass hysteria -- about nothing.

Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution

London Guardian

An investigation by the London Guardian completely discredited impassioned arguments from current and former ministers, who claimed that thousands of women were being imported to the United Kingdom and forced to work as sex slaves. The gross overstatement prompted the largest ever U.K. investigation of sex trafficking. Known as Operation Pentameter Two, the six-month-long probe involved all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Some 528 arrests were made, and 822 brothels, flats and massage parlors were raided throughout the U.K. The end result: Operation Pentameter was unable to find (never mind convict) a single human being who forced another human being into prostitution.

The myth of Britain's foreign sex slaves

Daily Mail

Mind-boggling exaggeration as to the number of women smuggled out of their country and forced into prostitution is not confined to U.S. government authorities. In 2008, the British government breathlessly revealed that some 18,000 trafficked sex workers were operating in Britain – an astonishing five times more than all other previous estimates. Again, the evidence was, at best, questionable. And, after millions of pounds were spent to crack down on the traffickers, guess how many convictions came of it all? Not one.

Spiked

It was widely claimed that 40,000 women would be trafficked into Germany and pressed into prostitution during the 2006 World Cup. European Union reports reviewed by the web site Spiked concluded that nothing of the sort happened. Amid all the sound and fury that summer, German police and border guards ramped up operations to find pimps and their victims, thought to be swarming into Europe to provide sexual services to World Cup football fans. Helplines were set up, flyers posted, and, as public hysteria grew, the media, for the most part, lapped it all up. The EU report found that just 33 cases of “human trafficking” were investigated, and that only five cases were assumed to have links to the World Cup.

Oversexed

The Nation

As early as 2005, the odd fixation that both evangelicals and feminists have on sex drew the attention of The Nation. Five years after Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act at the urging of those two unlikely bedfellows, the magazine decided to evaluate the legislation's effectiveness. Its conclusion: That lawmakers had placed an "undue emphasis on commercial sex work" while "downplaying the plight of victims in other jobs." In fact, noted writer Debbie Nathan, "these figures suggest that the nation harbors more enslaved drywallers and babysitters than it does brothel prisoners."

This 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning series by the Denver Post uncovered the truth about missing children: Overblown statistics play into politicians hands

Denver Post

A 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Denver Post debunked the national paranoia surrounding missing kids and led to significant changes in the way law enforcement approached the issue. The series came out at a time when the country was in the throes of a mini-hysteria, stoked by the faces of missing kids on TV screens, bulletin boards and milk cartons. What the Post found was that estimates of stranger abductions that circulated at the time had glossed over the reality that 95 percent of missing children reported were runaways, most of who returned within three days, and that a very large number of them were living with non-custodial parents – and were not missing at all. Still, the practice then was to put all missing children in the same statistical basket -- making no distinction, as the Post's editorial stated, “between the toddler who disappears from the door step of a happy home, the third-grader who vanishes the night before a custody hearing and the teenager who flees from a family beset by drugs, alcohol and violence.” The series also found that often times, highly questionable data was used to inflate the number of missing children, sometimes by special interest groups looking to justify their mission. Some child-welfare groups, such as Child Find “pulled numbers out of a hat,” when calculating the number of children abducted by strangers. Other groups, in compiling missing-children reports, the Post reported, “have taken a single month’s worth of missing-children’s reports, multiplied that number by 12, and come up with more than 300,000 missing children.” “It’s sad to say, but some organizations are exaggerating the figures to make their cause seem more urgent,” said John Gill, director of Children’s Rights of New York. “Why, our schools would be empty if there were that many missing children.”

Sex Slaves of West 43rd Street: The New York Times Magazine gets carried away in its investigation

Slate

More Mythical Numbers: The GAO debunks the official human-trafficking estimates

Slate

The Oregonian and Village Voice Media help to de-sensationalize a story

Columbia Journalism Review

Village Voice: Highly-Publicized Sex Trafficking Report Is Mostly Made Up

reason.com

Village Voice: Craigslist sex trafficking scandal based on bogus stats

Digital Life on Today

Village Voice Blows Lid Off Child Sex Trafficking Claims

Fathers and Families