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MEDIA
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Stories "’Sex slaves’ is a modern media cliché. Over the past few years we have been inundated with press exposés on the experiences and plight of those hapless victims. Journalists have competed over who can write the most pitiful accounts of women and girls being trafficked into Britain, tricked into prostitution and forced to ‘service’ dozens of brothel clients every night. The fact that human trafficking is just one aspect of contemporary slavery is (less) reported. ...the media ‘sex slave’ frenzy has inevitably started drying up, because it has nothing new to say about slaves or slavery. We’ve read the explicit details and seen the pixilated photos; we know these women and girls go through hell. But with regard to confronting the men who pay to abuse them, and strategies to combat the entire spectrum of slavery across Britain today, it seems we are not much the wiser." Louisa Waugh, Selling Olga: Stories of Human Trafficking and Resistance (Phoenix, London, 2006) Spring 2007 saw a number of stories published before the World Cup football match in Germany, based on predicted numbers of ‘new’ sex workers who would be trafficked in to meet the demand from visiting football fans. Some pretty shocking stuff was written in the weeks before the World Cup kicked off. On 14 May 2007, Independent columnist Joan Smith wrote about the "dark side" of the forthcoming tournament. "The combination of sport, booze and sex is a huge problem, encouraging degrading attitudes and sometimes actual violence towards women," she claimed. Smith reported EU officials' concerns about the "prospect" of "40,000 women being imported [to Germany] for the ‘use' of visiting fans".... Some journalists questioned the 40,000 figure that seems to have come from a US feminist group. New EU documents reveal that five women, not 40,000, are believed to have been trafficked into Germany to work as prostitutes during the World Cup. However the reporters who wrote the original story insist statistics are flawed. For Bruno Waterfield, Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, the sex slavery story shows that journalists need to be more careful when reporting shocking numbers: "It can be very hard to step back from a story. But journalists must find out where a figure has come from, and give its provenance, so that people can make up their own minds.” Press Gazette article
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