Let's get this out of the way first: It should go without saying that child prostitution is a Bad Thing, and that it is always a positive development when minors are rescued from a life of turning tricks. Even if you're talking about only one child in each of 16 major cities who is actually in this situation.

That wasn't the headline, of course. The headline was, 345 arrested, kids rescued in prostitution busts. Or, more simply, Hundreds nabbed in US child prostitution sting. Here's the AP lede: "Hundreds of people have been arrested and 21 children rescued in what the FBI is calling a five-day roundup of networks of pimps who force children into prostitution."

Wow, 345 people arrested for pimping out kids. Good work, FBI. Except, that's not exactly what happened. "In all, authorities arrested 345 people — including 290 adult prostitutes — during the operation that ended this week."

Let's see, 345 minus 290 equals 55 pimps. That's the grand total of people at the top of the food chain busted this week. There's a suggestion in the reports that at least some of the adult prostitutes may have been complicit in "luring" underage runaways and "throw-aways" into forced prostitution, but that's hard to verify, and shouldn't be assumed. In fact, it shouldn't be assumed that all those pimps were actually trafficking in children either. Let me explain.

In all, 21 child prostitutes were found in 16 cities. Thats an average of 1.3 children per city. Initial local reports are scarce, but one says that four of these children were recovered in Oakland. Which means at least some of the FBI busts in other cities must have involved no children at all. What did they involve? Here's the report from Miami.

Miami Beach undercover detectives who paid a $40 entry fee and boarded a stretch limousine bus Sunday found women onboard offering oral sex and lap dances for money, authorities said. Authorities arrested Christine Morteh, 29, of Miramar, and the driver, Clyde Scott, along with four other people Sunday. Miami-Dade jail spokeswoman Janell Hall said Morteh faces charges including offering to commit or engage in prostitution, conducting business without a license, directing another to a place of prostitution and deriving support from prostitution.

"The FBI isn’t investigating prostitutes and pimps, we’re investigating [the abuse of] children,” said a spokeswoman. But clearly that is not always how it works out.

Predictably, our old friends at the Center for Missing and Exploited Children are involved in this sweep, and here's what president Ernie Allen said about it: "These kids are victims. This is 21st century slavery."

Victims, yes. Slaves? Some, maybe. But as I've pointed out before, this casual conflation of all sex work with slavery has pernicious social costs. At least this time Allen and the media are acknowledging that these kids are runaways and throw-aways, instead of pretending that they're average middle class girls.

In case this story didn't already have enough of a "BOO!" factor, the AP felt the need to tack on a scary statistic: "A University of Pennsylvania study estimates nearly 300,000 children in the United States are at risk of being sexually exploited for commercial uses."

There's a goldilocks number if I've ever heard one. At least the AP stuck in "at risk." Usually this figure is given as the number of children actually being exploited. That's just wrong. The "at risk" version is correct inasmuch as that is what the study estimated. But it's still a bad number. The raw data for it comes largely from research by Professor David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, and he calls the Pennsylvania study (or at least that aspect of it) "entirely premature and without scientific basis." That's from a must-read article about media scares in Skeptical Inquirer. There's also an interesting fact sheet from the Crimes Against Children Research Center that begins with the all-caps warning, "PLEASE DO NOT CITE THESE NUMBERS." The figure, it concludes, "is essentially a guesstimate and not a scientific estimate."

But wait! Child prostitution! Run for your lives!

12:57 AM :: Comments (3)

You will be shocked to hear that I have some questions and comments about today's front page New York Times story on an agreement by Internet providers to block sites that disseminate kiddie porn. This isn't necessarily an indictment of the agreement or the article, just a reminder that these things have a way of not being discussed as thoroughly as they should be.

First, here's the lede.

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography... Many in the industry have previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely unmonitored nature of the Internet.

Now to the questions.

Continue reading "Blogging about child pornography is a $20 billion industry" »

12:16 PM :: Comments (39)

As an anti-fan of dramatic, totally unverifiable numbers in news stories (e.g., $20B, $10B, $1B, $134,121), I was delighted by this Legal Times article [hat tip: Vance] on Alberto Gonzales's recent claim that "at any given time, 50,000 predators are on the Internet prowling for children.”

But where did that figure come from? Spokespersons for the FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire say it’s not based on any research they’re aware of. The AG’s press secretary has the answer, though: "That number is actually pulled from [NBC newsmagazine] Dateline and other media outlets."

LT the points out that Dateline sources the figure only as a "number that was widely used in law enforcement circles." And now that the attorney general himself has used it, that's even more true!

But the best part of this takedown are the terms of art employed by Ken Lanning, a former FBI agent who advised Dateline, or at least tried to. Lanning calls the stat possibly, "a WAG — wild-assed guess," and "a Goldilocks number": not too small and not too large.

PS: There's one final Update today at the end of the original kiddie porn industry post.

11:55 AM :: Comments (0)

Recently, I documented my futile quest to track down the origin and veracity of a widespread claim that child pornography is a $20 billion a year business.

Today, The Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy joins the hunt. "It turns out it can be easier to enter a big number into the Congressional record, and national press coverage, than to locate its origin," writes Carl Bialik. Like me, Bialik hits a dead-end, but he does get a promise out of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: "If it is determined that this ends up not being a reliable statistic, NCMEC will...stop citing a specific number."

Even if there is a correction, of course, don't expect it to be picked up as widely as the original false claim. Still, score one for accuracy in journalism today.

10:42 AM :: Comments (2)

The New York Times report on yesterday's Internet kid sex hearings dropped a big, round number in its first sentence: "The sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad, overwhelming attempts by the authorities to curb its growth, witnesses said at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday."

$20 billion? Really?

The full transcript of the session isn't online yet, so I don't know if it was really witnesses, plural, who made that claim, or just the one witness identified in this Louisville Courier-Journal article: "Online child pornography is a $20 billion annual business, said Ernie Allen, president and chief executive officer of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, based in Alexandria, Va."

In any case, both the Times and the L/C-J weren't listening closely. Unless Allen departed from his prepared remarks, what he actually said was that "commercial child pornography" overall "is a $20 billion industry worldwide, fueled by the Internet." Bad enough, but not quite the same thing — and what does "fueled by the Internet" mean in quantitative terms anyway?

But even with the clarification... $20 billion? Really?

Allen attributes the the figure to "a recent report by McKinsey Worldwide" — a report and organization unknown to either Google or Nexis (unless The Firm is branching out). I'm trying to track it down to see how that number was generated, because... $20 billion? Really? I can't disprove it yet, and, yes, I'm sure a lot of money goes into kiddie porn around the world, but the vibe is suspiciously similar to the common claim that America spends $10 billion on legal porn each year, a claim I've griped about before. Keep in mind that Allen was a source for the dubious Primetime Live story on American sex slaves.

Update: Apparently, the $20 billion figure has been out there for some time. It's frequently said to be the amount spent just on the Internet, and it's sometimes inflated to "$20-$30 billion." I have yet to find a verifiable attribution.

Update: A lead, perhaps. This summary of a 2004 report that I can't yet find says the report "refers to studies putting the annual market in child pornography on the Internet at almost 20 billion dollars, adding that paedophile images make up almost a quarter of the images downloaded from the Internet."

A quarter? Really?

Update: No, not really. Still haven't found the report, but here's a direct quote regarding that last figure: "Surveys in 2003 suggest that child pornography accounts for 24 percent of image searches in peer-to-peer applications." Note: P2P is not the entire Internet. "Image searches" isn't even close to the same thing as "images downloaded." It's entirely possible that people search more frequently for something that is harder to find. After all, you can find common files with one try, but you'd have to repeat your search over and over again for files that fewer people are sharing.

Update: Finally got a call back from NCMEC. The flack didn't have the actual report on hand, but she did tell me that it was put together by McKinsey Worldwide ("an Asian company") at the behest of an NCMEC board member. And the figures ($20B now rising to $30-$35B by 2009 -- think about that for a second) in it are based on information from the FBI and the Council of Europe. The CoE report is the 2004 one I referenced above, and as I noted they got the figure from someone else, so NCMEC is using third-hand information and attributing it to the second-hand source. Why? The flack had no idea. Who the CoE source is I don't know since the CoE web site only has a summary; the link to the actual report is dead. I did a quick search of the FBI site with no luck, but I'll try again. Oh by the way, the FBI lists NCMEC as a "partner"; According to Wikipedia (I know, I know) NCMEC gets $30 million a year from the Justice Dept. This is all looking a little, pardon the expression, incestuous.

Update: The plot thickens. After checking with the cybercrime department, FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan refuses to comment on these figures. "That's NCMEC's number. I don't know where that number came from or how it was generated." I asked if that means that the number did not come from the FBI. Her very careful response: "I'm not saying that. I don't know if it came from the FBI. You'll have to talk to them." And I will. Again.

Update: The Wall Street Journal's Carl Bialik takes up the quest with similar lack of results. He does, however, get this (too-little too-late) promise from NCMEC: "If it is determined that this ends up not being a reliable statistic, NCMEC will stop citing McKinsey as the source and will also stop citing a specific number."

Update: The nail in to coffin from Bialik:

In a 2004 report, the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg, France-based human-rights watchdog, attributed the number to Unicef. But Allison Hickling, a spokeswoman for the United Nations child agency, told me in an email, "The number is not attributable to Unicef -- we do not collect data on this issue."

I told Alexander Seger, who worked on the Council of Europe reports, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Unicef, both cited in Council reports, said they weren't the source for the $20 billion figure. He said the Council won't use the number in the future, and added in an email, "I think we have what I would call a case of information laundering: You state a figure on something, somebody else quotes it, and then you and others [quote] it back, and thus it becomes clean and true. ... Perhaps this discussion will help instill more rigor in the future."

Perhaps...

Previously:
What the Times' original story on camwhores got right.

What an earlier report on online child porn got wrong.

How media fixation on sex slaves obscures the true nature of human trafficking.

How the religious right is redefining human trafficking to gut aid programs for consenting sex workers.

Why Peter Landesman is a giant bonehead, even if he does have — sheesh! — Oscar buzz [hat tip: Elon].

10:08 AM :: Comments (28)

Earlier this month, Primetime Live ran a segment on "thousands of young American girls who authorities say have been abducted or lured from their normal lives and made into sex slaves." That turns out to be 100 percent true: Authorities do say that. They say it a lot these days to excitable media outlets. But as investigative reporter Debbie Nathan points out in an important new exposé, "the claim is specious. To make it, you have to play with language and omit facts — or bend them so far that they break."

Nathan, you'll recall, is the woman who led the way in debunking the ritual sex abuse scare of the 1980s and who has been a friend of this site since she demolished a key section of Peter Landesman's notorious comedy of errors. Peter is name-checked in her new article as well, which I love because you just know he's got a Google alert for himself.

The Primetime segment tells two stories about, yep, Girls Next Door, who became sex slaves. Considering that there are supposedly thousands of these cases, you'd think that they could find two that are exactly what they purport to be, to wit: "many victims are no longer just runaways, or kids who've been abandoned. Many of them are from what would be considered 'good' families, who are lured or coerced by clever predators." And yet as Nathan reveals, neither of Primetime's poster girls are quite ready for framing. Here's Primetime on Girl #1:

Debbie's story is particularly chilling. One evening Debbie said she got a call from a casual friend, Bianca, who asked to stop by Debbie's house. Wearing a pair of Sponge Bob pajamas, Debbie went outside to meet Bianca, who drove up in a Cadillac with two older men, Mark and Matthew. After a few minutes of visiting, Bianca said they were going to leave. "So I went and I started to go give her a hug," Debbie told "Primetime." "And that's when she pushed me in the car."...Unbelievably, police say Debbie was kidnapped from her own driveway with her mother, Kersti, right inside. Back home with her other kids, Kersti had no idea Debbie wasn't there.

Unbelievably is right. Here's what Nathan found:

Phoenix Police Department press releases describe Debbie as a runaway. Police spokesman Andy Hill told me earlier this week that she was having problems with her family. She left home willingly with a friend, the girlfriend of a pimp, and a few hours later was herself dragooned into prostitution. Debbie's is a story of gross coercion, but clearly there's some background here. The vast majority of US kids who get involved with prostitution are runaways; this has been so for a very long time. That fact makes for yet another stale story. So it was left out of Primetime's because it didn't fit the boogie-man theme pushed these days when sex trafficking gets discussed -- in the media and lately by the feds as well.

Continue reading "Primetime Lies" »

9:14 AM :: Comments (3)