Numbers hold a fascination that borders on the irrational sometimes. Their simple mention turns hypothetical conversations into fact-based statements, triggering the you-can’t-deny-it effect. The link between the right numbers and the irrefutable reality they allegedly reflect works to bolster viewpoints and functions as the ultimate test of the work of evidence. To mention numbers is to halt conversations mid-sentence and present one with the naked truth: genocides are called by name when the right numbers are attached to killings and a humanitarian crisis is not a crisis unless numerically proven to be so.
It is no wonder, then, that human rights organizations rely on numbers to bring evidence and tell stories of human rights violations. Yet numbers, like stories, function affectively to represent reality. They do not merely reflect a sociopolitical phenomenon. They also produce the very phenomenon they represent, creating new realities and ways of understanding the world. Like stories numbers work emotionally, they are “what moves us” and “what makes us feel”; they “circulate and generate effects,” bringing people together and against one another.
The politics of numbers is at the center of the alleged humanitarian crisis of the traffic in women. The simple mention of high numbers of trafficked victims or survivors breathes new life into the anti-trafficking activist cause. To be clear, I am not arguing here that the traffic in women does not qualify for the name of “humanitarian crisis” or that activists make dishonest use of numbers. I am rather interested in the ways in which numbers are given, contested, and take on a life of their own in activist circles. My argument is that numbers are too easily mobilized with little understanding of what they mean and the effects they have for feminist politics.
Governmental and non-governmental anti-trafficking organizations cite the high numbers of sex trafficked women to justify rescue campaigns worldwide and to justify the large amounts of anti-trafficking governmental funding. The Polaris Project in Washington DC, a group that works closely with the U.S. Department of State, estimates that 100,000 children enter the sex industry in the United States each year, while the U.S. State Department places the global number of trafficked persons at 27 million. USAID estimates that there are between 12 and 27 million trafficked persons worldwide. The 2013 Traffic in Persons Report, issued annually by the U.S. Department of State, puts the number of survivors at 46, 000 out of the 27 million trafficked persons believed to exist worldwide.
Responding to these numbers and drawing attention to the illicit character of the phenomenon, many international organizations, including the United Nation, have declared such accounts unreliable. According to the UNESCO Bangkok office Trafficking Statistics Project, trafficking statistics circulated in media and scholarship are “false” and “spurious”:
“When it comes to statistics, trafficking of girls and women is one of several highly emotive issues, which seem to overwhelm critical faculties. Numbers take on a life of their own, gaining acceptance through repetition, often with little inquiry into their derivations. Journalists, bowing to the pressures of editors, demand numbers, any number. Organizations feel compelled to supply them, lending false precisions and spurious authority to many reports.”
Numbers circulated liberally in mass media and governmental press releases have enabled the mobilization of a strong anti-prostitution coalition made up of anti-prostitution feminists (the so-called neo-abolitionists), evangelical Christians, and anti-trafficking activists. Under John Ashcroft, the Department of Justice spent approximately 100 million dollars a year to fight trafficking both inside and outside the United States. Between 2001 and 2008, the United States has channeled about $528 million into anti-trafficking assistance overseas. USAID alone has provided $123.1 million in assistance to more than 70 countries in the time period mentioned above. In 2011, the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat the Trafficking in Persons allotted $16 million in foreign assistance. In 2012, the sum rose to $64 million in assistance for 70 countries.
Fueled by this wealth of resources, numerous nongovernmental organizations have mushroomed throughout the U.S., embarking on humanitarian campaigns to stop the traffic in women. During the Bush administration, evangelical Christian groups received large sums of anti-trafficking funding. Citing the high numbers of trafficking victims, such groups spread their missionary work throughout the world finding yet another opportunity to disseminate their version of Christianity, this time under the guise of the struggle against trafficking and for women’s rights.
It is impossible to know the exact numbers of trafficked victims and survivors because of the complexity and illicit character of the trade. What is called human trafficking is, in effect, an amalgamation of distinct but related phenomena: migration, work, the globalization of capital, the emergence of the virtual space and its subsequent incorporation into the capitalist means of production, and the expansion and overall transformation of the sex industry. To talk about millions of trafficked persons is to simplify and misread the socioeconomic conditions that enable the forward movement of the capitalist machine. The impressionistic mention of numbers merely sustains the rhetoric of abolition, naturalizing what would appear otherwise to be the coercive actions of brothel raids and imprisonment of sex workers.
(Image Credit: UN SDG Action Campaign)