Part 4: Talking to an expert in sex trafficking

The final part of the series on human sex trafficking and conspiracy theories.

I hope this will serve as a post that can be used when people spread misinformation about trafficking online. Some might ask why it matters to talk about this, they’ll suggest anyone talking about anything related to trafficking is a good thing. But I don’t believe that’s the case, and more importantly - a lot of people who are experts in this area have said it’s harmful. So that’s why I talked to New Zealand’s expert on this: Dr Natalie Thorburn. Feel free to share this post.

This is the fourth post in my conspiracy theory series. See part one on Pizzagate conspiracies here. And part two here. And part three on abortion here.

The one thing I think is super obvious when you see people yelling “Save The Children” and saying 800,000 children are trafficked every day - is that they don’t know what human trafficking is.

It’s a real thing. And it’s really serious. To use it to funnel people into a Qanon Pro-Trump conspiracy is extremely gross. When I posted about masks when we were in level two you might have seen some people commented and said I was a paedophile and I was encouraging people to put masks on their kids to hide the duct tape over their mouths.

Yes, you heard that right. They believe masks are a ruse to cover child trafficking. They believe that if your child is wearing a mask, members of the public won’t be able to see they have tape over their mouths and it will cover their faces so they won’t be recognised as being victims of kidnapping.

They believe this because they believe the main form of trafficking and kidnapping is children being stolen off the street, having their hair chopped off in public toilets, and then being sold to rich Hollywood Elite types.

This photo is iconic and I could basically just include this photo and it will tell you everything you need to know about the Qanon Pro-Trump “Save Our Children” BS. It’s from this amazing Rolling Stone article.

I talked to New Zealand’s expert on this. Dr Natalie Thorburn is the Principal Policy Advisor at Women’s Refuge and her work on trafficking is incredible. We are so lucky to have her expertise in this industry. Here’s what she told me about trafficking (my comments are in bold - since I’m not an expert, I’ve mainly just left it to her to explain).

“It’s useful to think of exploitation as being on a continuum, just like all other types of violence. Sometimes the coercion is really obvious, sometimes not. In some cases it’s a 15 year-old whose 25 year-old boyfriend seems caring and protective, but is also controlling and gets aggressive. He might say to her that because he cares about her more than anyone in the world and wants to be with her forever, he needs her to do a few ‘rides’ for him so they can get set up for the future. In other cases, it’s a silent delivery of a 14 year old to various men’s houses. Money changes hands between the men, but all she gets is a puff of meth and the promise of some new clothes if she doesn’t screw it up. Some have been part of the youth justice or child protection system. To them, the violence and the forced prostitution by this older ‘boyfriend’ still seem preferable to going back into a loveless, hardened youth residence. Others are avoiding home because the abuse is even worse there, so they join up with older ‘mates’ and run as a pack – and their compulsory contribution is to do some rides, because underage girls are the biggest money-makers on the street. A few have families that are on board with the exploitation, because it’s part of their wider gang context and so the kids are seen as ‘doing their bit’. Some are still attending school, with parents blissfully unaware that they’re spending time with older men, who are collecting the cash but also buying them new gear, alcohol and weed and giving them opportunities to dress up, look sexy, have their photos taken (and sometimes unknowingly posted online) and go to parties, often with a couple of their friends. For adult women, it usually just looks like your regular family violence scenario, but he’s also setting up ‘appointments’ for her to sell sex to men so he can get meth or buy the big-ticket items, and threatening her with violence if she refuses.”

This also isn’t happening only in the shadows.

“Most of these victims are accessing services, but very rarely are they asked the right questions. Health and social service and counselling providers tend to only get a few pieces of a much bigger puzzle – they might talk just about substances, or about mental health or suicidality, or about assault or partner violence, but not about the exploitation itself.”

People seem to hear “there is no sex trafficking happening” if you challenge them on the Clinton Pizza Cabal when it’s not even remotely like that.

“The reassurance about the absence of trafficking can be a tough topic – of course it’s not happening in a Clinton/banana box/truck/plane/giant load of passive victimised unfed people, but we do have plenty of unlabelled trafficking that doesn’t get met with any law enforcement response because it’s messy, disorganised, and difficult to categorise. No one thinks of a trafficking victim as a tough, streetsmart, defiantly hostile teenager who seems well enough able to take care of herself – it doesn’t fit the stereotype, but that’s the most likely presentation.”

This is a serious issue and one we can only understand if we recognise that. Trafficking is happening. We just aren’t calling it trafficking - and we should.

“When I interviewed young women who had been forced by someone else to participate in sex work when they didn’t want to, none had ever really received a decent response from police or other agencies, because it couldn’t be neatly categorised as trafficking. It was technically trafficking – the transnational requirement in the criminal definition was removed in 2015 – we’ve just never really incorporated it into our national understanding of what trafficking is. Helping services will listen to women’s stories of domestic violence, they’ll be (hopefully) accepting of women’s involvement in sex work, but there’s never any acknowledgement of when the former might mean forced participation in the latter, and all of the negative impacts that can come from that. Police’s approach to ‘intervening’ in adolescent prostitution is to do a sweep and take visibly underage girls off the known working streets. They don’t ask questions about whether these 15 year olds are there by choice, or what (and who) might be constraining their choices.”

“When I’m talking to other social workers, they’ll commonly say they never encounter trafficking. If I ask them how often they work with young people or adults who’ve been forced to sell sex to lots of different people without getting any money for it, usually by a ‘boyfriend’ or his friends, they tell me they have cases like that every week.”

It’s hard to find help - when sex trafficking isn’t well understood.

“The majority of young people who are forced to sell sex when they don’t want to are pretty tough and no stranger to judgement from institutions - think negative encounters with police in childhood, early introduction to meth and other substances, and judgement from medical professions. They are, quite understandably, not generally inclined to make formal reports about their boyfriends forcing them to ‘work’ or ‘do rides’, especially if these ‘boyfriends’ (it’s a bitter term when you consider the usual age difference) also represent a powerful and long-desired source of protection and affection. They may not even really conceptualise it as harmful or illegal. If they do come to police attention, they’re regarded as sex workers despite their age, and the most intervention they’re likely to get is a ride home. There’s not even a shared conceptual language about what trafficking is, so police don’t (and can’t) identify it or work with it in any useful way.”

“They deny doing sex work when questioned by police or schools or social workers, and it doesn’t get challenged. If it’s reported by others, it tends to be closed on the basis that they’re not cooperative and it’s logged as simply child abuse or, if they’re of age, as adult sexual assault. There’s no coding of the commercial or exploitative aspect by statutory agencies, no recording of it as an instance of trafficking for government to keep accurate records on, and no provision of specialist services because, of course, it doesn’t happen here.

“I understand they’re in the process of updating this, but it still principally focuses on the labour exploitation of migrants.”

By insisting sex trafficking is only white children with duct tape on their faces, we are putting all trafficking victims at risk. We cannot leave survivors and victims out of the conversation.

“I think we’d really do [survivors] a disservice if we didn’t point out that we should still focus on trafficking, we just need to cut through the stereotypes of these passive victims and start seeing the different types of ways violence is used against women and young people, including for exploitation. They don’t fit neatly into the category of family violence, or sexual violence, or sex work. There’s not anything wrong with the label of sex worker, but several felt it was a moral judgement that didn’t reflect their lack of choice or the violence behind it. It might not be as glamorous as the mental image of wearing a superhero cape to fly in and save the encaged, randomly abducted and elaborately concealed children, but these girls are worthy of help and that means opening our eyes to the messy, complex realities of trafficking.”

There’s no conspiracy, but there is incompentence.

“Incompetent application of the law means men who use violence to make women sell sex while they pocket the cash are almost never held accountable. As we’ve seen in the last year or so, men prostituting 15 year-olds get off with a lesser sentence than men who committed a one-off indecent assault. There’s no specialist help for the woman (or the kid/young person, if the victim’s underage), because we don’t have a single support service in New Zealand that caters for this sort of thing because… well, because it doesn’t happen here, right? 

Almost none of the young women I interviewed had ever been able to get the right support. There’s never any acknowledgement by helpers that basically trafficking looks just like dating violence for teens, and intimate partner violence for adults - just with one extra slice of the wheel that says ‘exploitation’.

It’s the same dynamic. It’s the subtle abuse, the escalating violence, the control over everyday decisions, the entrapment that abusers create by weaponizing victims’ own histories (of abuse, of addiction, of mental health issues, of police involvement, etc).  It’s the denigrating of personal worth and sense of self and hope for the future, and the empty promises of a better life and enduring, genuine affection that has often been so elusive in victims’ lives. If the victim is really young, there might be other signs – the age gap, the nice gear, the easy access to alcohol, cigarettes, and meth, the unexplained distress, fear, or symptoms of trauma, the stories that don’t quite add up, and the defiance to hide the worry or shame or doubt.”

So what can we do?

Keep a lookout. Most of us encounter people at risk at some point, but we don’t ask and they don’t tell us, and we might feel a little weird about it and reassure ourselves later that it was probably nothing. And it might be nothing, or it might be something, and trying to help is never, ever a wasted effort. Challenge bullshit conceptualisations of what trafficking is. Write to your local MP and ask for a taskforce on domestic sexual exploitation, hold police accountable when they treat conflate it with sex work or imply a young woman is a lost cause because she’s working on the street, stop and shame men who are picking them up as though it’s a legitimate transaction with an adult, challenge state departments when they prosecute it under some downgraded nuisance crime. Talk to your kids and their friends (because adults that aren’t your own parents are sometimes even better to talk to). Talk about consent and respect and risk and tell them they can call you anytime to go get them, so questions asked.

Ultimately, people find it easier to claim the pandemic is a cover-up for child trafficking by politicians and celebrities because it’s easy. It’s far easier than looking at what role our country has in addressing violence against women. It’s so much easier than unpacking why you think some people are innocent victims and some aren’t. We know New Zealand has a domestic violence problem. But I guess talking about that is harder than trolling people online acting like you’re saving children by posting pro-Trump memes.

And we often go for the easy option don’t we? Especially in a pandemic. Especially in a time of fear. We want the easy answer, the easy solution. We want Hollywood right and wrong and to feel warm and fuzzy.

But the hardest pill to swallow would surely be that you’ve been duped by the same powerful people who do not give even one shit about the children of the world.

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