Looking Back Ate the New York Times Magazine Piece 16 Months Later

United States

Sex Slaves, Revisited Looking Back ate the New York Times Magazine piece 16 months later www.slate.msn.com

Left unchallenged, even the wildest guesses take on the certitude of fact," reporter Christopher S. Wren wrote in 1997. www.slate.msn.com/id/2120331/ http://www.childtrafficking.org/cgi-bin/ct/main.sql?ID=1627&file=view_document.sql

Left unchallenged, even the wildest guesses take on the certitude of fact," reporter Christopher S. Wren wrote in 1997. Wren's subject was the size and scope of the drug problem, but he could have been writing about the number of sex slaves working in American brothels, a subject about which I burned many pixels in this space 16 months ago.

What provoked me was Peter Landesman's cover story in the Jan. 25, 2004, New York Times Magazine, "The Girls Next Door." In language that glowed both purple and yellow, Landesman conjured a vision of an international "sex-trafficking epidemic" and the nightmare of tens of thousands of women and girls smuggled annually into the United States, held prisoner, and forced to service johns for the benefit of their pimps.

To be sure, sex slavery in the United States is real and horrific, but the body count remains anybody's guess, and that includes the U.S. government. Since releasing its first "Trafficking in Persons Report" in 2001, the State Department's estimate of the total number "trafficked" annually across international borders has stayed pretty constant, varying between 600,000 and 900,000. (The U.S. Code defines trafficking in part as the use of force or coercion—violent or psychological—to exploit a person for commercial sex or the recruitment, transportation, or provision of a person for any form of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, or slavery.) In 2001, the State Department estimated that between 45,000 and 50,000 people were annually trafficked to the U.S. The 2002 report was silent on the total trafficked but confidently cited a 1997 estimate stating that 50,000 women and children were trafficked here annually "for sexual exploitation." In 2003, the State Department report estimated that 18,000 to 20,000 individuals were trafficked here for forced labor and sexual exploitation. The June 2004 report, published after Landesman's article appeared, set the total trafficked annually at between 14,500 and 17,500.