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October 20, 2009
Data trafficking: problematic numbers on sex work and trafficking in Britain
Sex work in the UK - in various forms - is big business and is problematic in all kinds of ways. However, the issue of trafficked immigrants being coerced into sex work has played a prominent - even dominating - role in debates around sex work in Britain. Much of this has been driven by (horrifyingly) high figures re how many trafficked sex workers are being exploited in the UK: some estimates were as high as 25,000. However, Nick Davies' article in today's Guardian serves both as a powerful caution against relying on the higher figures and a powerful example of the issues which can be caused when data moves from one person or agency to another.
Firstly, Davies notes that definitions can be an issue:
from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety.But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety.
However, more problems subsequently arose. Some figures originated from when
in 2003, a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the "walk-up" flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade.The researchers ringed this figure with warnings. The data, they said, was "very poor" and quantifying the subject was "extremely difficult". Their final estimate was "very approximate", "subject to a very large margin of error" and "should be treated with great caution" and the figure of 3,812 "should be regarded as an upper bound".
These cautions seemed to be rather lost, though:
In June 2006, before the research had even been published, the then Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ignored the speculative nature of the assumptions behind the figure, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and then rounded it up, declaring to an inquiry into sex trafficking by the Commons joint committee on human rights: "There are an estimated 4,000 women victims."The Christian charity Care announced: "In 2003, the Home Office estimated there were 4,000 women and girls in the UK at any one time that had been trafficked into forced prostitution." The Salvation Army went further: "The Home Office estimated that in 2003 ... there were at least 4,000 trafficked women residing in the UK. This figure is believed to be a massive underestimation of the problem." Anti-Slavery International joined them, converting what the Home Office researchers had described as a "very approximate" estimate into "a very conservative estimate".
The Home Office, at least, having commissioned the research, was in a position to remind everybody of its authors' warnings. Except it didn't.
In March 2007, it produced the UK Action Plan on Human Trafficking and casually reproduced the figure of 4,000 without any of the researchers' cautions.
Things rather snowballed, subsequently:
In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, [Labour MP Denis] MacShane announced that "according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain."There is simply no Home Office source for that figure, although it has been reproduced repeatedly in media stories.
Two months later, in another Commons debate, MacShane used the same figure, but this time he attributed it to the Daily Mirror, which had indeed run a story in October 2005 with the headline "25,000 Sex Slaves on the Streets of Britain." However, the newspaper had offered no evidence at all to support the figure. On the contrary, the body of its story used a much lower figure, of between 2,000 and 6,000 brought in each year, and attributed this to unnamed Home Office officials, even though the Home Office has never produced any research which could justify it.
MacShane was not deterred.
"I used to work for the Daily Mirror, so I trust the report," he said.
Extensive use and analysis of various data can - when done without appropriate caution - create serious problems. As Davies argues:
The cacophony of voices has created the illusion of confirmation.Politicians and religious groups still repeat the media story that 40,000 prostitutes were trafficked into Germany for the 2006 world cup – long after leaked police documents revealed there was no truth at all in the tale. The Daily Mirror's baseless claim of 25,000 trafficking victims is still being quoted, recently, for example, by the Salvation Army in written evidence to the home affairs select committee, in which they added : "Other studies done by media have suggested much higher numbers."
Somewhere beneath all this, there is a reality. There have been real traffickers.
All these data and all these analyses will impact on our reality in various ways. If UK policy on sex workers is driven by an (unsubstantiated) belief that 25,000 people are currently being coerced to engage in sex work in the country, policy will be significantly influenced by this belief. Unduly high estimates for the number of trafficked people in the UK doing sex work may also impact on how we deal with those who are trafficked and forced to work in other economic sectors.
These data are important: they can help shape our political reality. Such numbers and estimates are almost never simple: they need to be treated with considerable care, and it is important that politicians, campaigners and journalists should do so.
