Let me tell you about a little girl my wife is treating.

[caseymoz]

185. Some questions are rhetorical.

Last edited Sun Apr 8, 2012, 02:48 AM - Edit history (1)

And I mixed your post with answering the OP, because, though you don't say so explicitly, you seem to agree with him.

The reason why some on the left disagree is that a lot of what's being written about the sex industry, including Hedges work, is totally made up. This is a public hysteria, a witch hunt getting off the ground, in the same vein as the Satanic Ritual Cult of the '80s and '90s, and in the end, it's going to be just as destructive to innocent people.

Example: the figure of 100-150 thousand children being trafficked in this country is found everywhere. Do you know how many child prostitutes law enforcement actually finds, on average, per year? For the last 10 years? 80. This is after Congress has put $800 million dollars into fighting child trafficking. Bureaus and task forces set up to fight trafficking domestically are not busy. Not from laziness, they honestly can't find any.

The only scientifically valid, rigorous study ever done on child prostitutes agree with this. It also reveals a number of surprises about it. For one, the average age a juvenile starts prostitution if 15. Another: ninety percent have no pimps. That's right. No pimps. They work independently, and their friends got them into it, 45 percent of the time. Most had contacted social aid organizations in the last year. The total census of underage prostitutes in New York City came to about 3,900. That's in all of New York. The largest metro area in the US.

There's enough scientific evidence that shows people lie about the sex they have. Nobody has thought to ask the question of how much they lie about other people's sex, but a scientific studies on this topic would be very valuable.

That's just one example of figures pulled out of people's asses that are passed on as though they are true. If you think I'm being biased: when figures are being exaggerated by factors of a thousand and the fantastical numbers aren't being questioned, something is going on besides just pure error. How about strong perception bias?

Recently, I heard the UN cite the number of trafficked children worldwide to be 2.4 million, over 80 percent into prostitution. Nowhere in the articles does it say how they reached that figure. What census does it depend on?

How do you Hedges isn't another, better known, Mike Daisey? And if anyone from the sex industry is found and says his story isn't true, would you give him or her any credibility? No, because they're either "too damaged from being molested" as children or too dirty to be believed. That would be a typical response of the general public, and of the "left," men or women, despite Hedges puzzlement, that's completely true.

What this means is any journalist can lie their heads off about the sex industry and never face a fact check. Never. And the more sensational the story, the more it sells. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

No, I don't think what Hedges describes is typical of the sex industry. Either he was lucky, that is, found something unrepresentative; or he deliberately found something atypical and said otherwise; or he lied from beginning to end.

Now there are terrible cases of abuse, and those are always heart wrenching. But somehow the emotional pain of it is being translated into inflated numbers. And people who question them are treated with suspicion or moral outrage, as you probably do now.