Is All this Sex Trafficking emotional issue overblown vs. the facts?
Good show on Canadian SexTV:
The situation of migrant sex workers in the West may be much debated, but it is little researched. While generalizations about human trafficking and sex slaves abound in the media, the situations of many of the women who emigrate and end up doing sex work are much more complicated than is usually assumed. Many of the women choose to migrate in order to seek out a better life, more money or even adventure. SexTV speaks to both scholars and activists about the complexities surrounding migrant sex work at http://www.qtonline.com/archives/episodeArchivesDisplay.asp?episodeID=90&segmentID=226&seasonID=6

The show interviews many activists in Europe etc who say the majority of these sex slave trafficked women are very much choosing their profession and know what they are doing.  Yes, they often pay off big debts to their handlers and work long hours, like the Eastern Europeans in Toronto.

But they are choosing this option and benefit from it in the long term.  The media is over blowing the negativism toward trafficking that is filling the media often from those that think sex is dirty and terrible unless in a monogamous married relationship.     Yes, I am sure there are abuses and real trafficking going on.  That should be a crime if not consenting adults.  But it has nothing to  do with most prostitution.  Trafficking is not what the media has made it out to be with the negative bias against "prostitution" in any form.

On the other hand there does seem to be more and more under aged involvement such as:
Conference at UT focuses on prostitution, sex trade http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050930/NEWS21/509300360/-1/NEWS  all about ""Pimps, predators, pedophiles"
Maybe this is expected since teen age girls more and more don't see sex as such a big terrible thing like they are "supposed to" until the reach age 18.

These programs are not about "prostitution". They are about the brutality of human trafficking when the women do not give fully informed consent and about under aged prostitution, not the consenting adult private sexwork that accounts for probably about 90% of all sexwork at least in the West.

But this is what is what the public hears about prostitution, not the 90% private adult sexworkers that almost no one except the religious right wants to waste police and court resources going after for what they do in private with consenting adults and which is legal with no major secondary effects issues in almost all the world except the U.S.

And in the U.K.:Where is all this "trafficking"?
Real reason for crackdown on prostitution
April 2, 2008 SURPRISE, surprise: not a single case of 'trafficking' was thrown up after raids of all known outlets for off-street prostitution across Sheffield. A previous country-wide trawl, the Home Office claims, netted 88, but even this very small figure is bogus. It includes the 19 'rescued' in Birmingham, all of whom turned out to be immigrants, only six of whom were illegals, and none working against their will.

There is no confirmation that a single one of the 88 were actually 'trafficked' at all.

So what are the police up to? The Government's PC rhetoric - false though it is - is that all women must be being forced into prostitution. To further this propaganda, the cross-border movement of prostitutes is misrepresented as 'trafficking', which research shows to be a minuscule problem.

Now the bogus scare about a renewed 'white slave trade' is exposed as just a ruse to justify criminalising men, the latest ploy is to pick a number out of the air (5,000) for supposed domestic sex slavery of under-age girls. Now, this does indeed go on, but nobody - and certainly not the Government - knows the scale of it.

Home Office misrepresentation of prostitition was behind the crackdown on street 'vice' in Sheffield last week. Street 'vice' is now a tiny fraction of prostitution (which overall is continuing to grow).

So unless it's in residential areas then why bother with it? The Government rejected non-residential 'tolerance zones'. It 'gives out the wrong signal', the Home Office says. What they really mean is that it would admit the reality that women can and do freely choose prostitution.

If the authoriti es were serious about addressing street 'vice' then they wouldn't focus on the clients, but on the far smaller number of girls, who also perpetrate the great majority of any crime. 'Clipping' the clients (asking for and taking money and then not providing the service) is rife.

Prostitution is the exploitation by women of the universal male desire for novel sexual partners. To describe it as exploitation of women by men is a comical Home Office fraud: it has now spawned farcical proposals to criminalise the male buyer yet to regard the female seller as a victim.

Source: http://www.thestar.co.uk/letters/Real-reason-for-crackdown-on.3935043.jp 

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