For years, Washington, Arizona and Texas were the most consistently-outlandish sources of “sex trafficking” nonsense; other states of course produced their share, but whenever one encountered a truly bat-shit crazy pronouncement about numbers, supposed “pimp” methods or the like, it was a safe bet it came from one of those three states. More recently, Florida has striven to win the same reputation in “sex trafficking” lunacy as it already has in individual behavioral lunacy, but in the past year Alabama appears to be trying to make up for lost time with some truly ludicrous claims. Almost exactly a year ago, fetishists at the University of Alabama claimed that in 2017 cops had…
…recovered more than 600 human trafficking victims stuck in the sex industry…more than half of them were minors, and that’s only about 10 percent of the victims actually out there, [sic] Stats show there are thousands more still suffering in Alabama…
These mysterious “stats” appear again in a recent article from Alabama Public Radio, along with a lot of other whoppers and statements that are moronic even by “sex trafficking” standards. Here’s a curated selection:
Selling people for sex or underpaid labor is considered a $150 billion business worldwide.
That figure seems to come from the personal spank-bank of “sex trafficking” profiteer Siddharth Kara, who correctly points out that it’s “more than Nike, Google, and Starbucks combined”. The far lower claim of $13 billion was debunked four years ago by Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post‘s fact-checker, who called it “a fantasy, unconnected to any real data“, but since then we’ve seen Kara’s $150 billion fantasy popping up in tragedy porn, copaganda, rescue industry sales pitches, ambulance-chaser come-ons, politicians’ power grabs, a shockingly-bad Atlantic article, and – as you had probably guessed – previous tall tales from Alabama.
The phrase “what I want from you” is one you hear a lot from survivors of human trafficking. It’s like a code that means you’re about to enter “the life.” That’s code too, for the world of commercial sex.
“Sex trafficking” fetishists often use the word “code”. However, as Inigo Montoya would observe…
Human trafficking isn’t limited just to women. Both men and boys are abused, as well as members of Alabama’s LGBTQ community. “Most of our kids identify as bisexual. And, that’s because they’ve been sold to this person or that person, males and females. So, they don’t know what their gender is,” said Lynn Caffery, Executive Director of the shelter Safe Harbor Youth in Huntsville…
This is so deeply stupid and so incredibly bigoted that I can’t be entirely sure, but it seems to me that Caffery is confusing bisexuality with being transgender, pretending that gender confusion is the result of bisexual experiences, and claiming that bisexuality is caused by “sex trafficking”, all at the same time. Of course, it could be something even stupider and uglier, but I’m going to go with my initial interpretation for now.
Cybercrime analysts in Birmingham study sex traffickers when they advertise on the internet in Alabama. This data can track sex workers who live in Alabama, and those who travel into the state like a caravan.
A gypsy whore caravan, obviously!
“So, if I can find five girls who are in Atlanta on Monday, and Birmingham on Tuesday, and Chattanooga on Wednesday, that’s something we would consider a strong indicator of trafficking,” said Gary Warner…of the UAB Computer Forensics Research Lab in Birmingham…
Because as any good “anti-trafficker” will tell you, women are much too stupid to drive, make other travel arrangements or book hotels, therefore a woman’s visiting multiple cities I could easily drive between in an afternoon is “a strong indicator of trafficking”. But our unbelievably-credulous “journalist” has saved the most shockingly-dumb claims for the end:
Christiam Lim…[of] The University of Alabama’s College of Social Work [seems to have forgotten the number he quoted last year, or at least hopes we will. He now claims]…nearly 1,200 victims [instead of 600, and added]…“Clearly whatever we recovering [sic] is a smaller percentage of what’s happening”…some [sexual fantasies] put the real figure at 10 times higher…closer to 12,000, just in Alabama in 2017…the College of Social Work found another number that could give an even clearer picture of trafficking in Alabama. It’s based on when traffickers come out in the open and advertise on the internet. Two years ago, the college counted those ads and the total was 641,000, just in Alabama, just in 2017…
Obviously, anyone with greater cognitive ability than the average barnyard fowl could understand that because any given business might post hundreds or even thousands of ads across all platforms in a year, the number of ads has no direct correlation with the number of businesses (nor is there any dependable way to derive the latter figure from the former even if it were accurate, and I sincerely doubt it is). However, it’s much more exciting to pretend that roughly 13% of the state’s population consists of “sex slaves”; I only wish such incredible idiocy were confined to Alabama.
