[gargamel]

If you lump any form of economic coercion into the term "human trafficking," then there are a huge number of "victims," but then you'd have to outlaw farming, because economic coercion is even more prevalent among farm laborers. Unless, of course (as so many anti-sex work activists do), you think women are somehow less capable than farm laborers when it comes to making decisions about their bodies and about their best way to earn a living.

If, on the other hand, you limit the discussion to women who aren't engaging in sex work voluntarily, the number of victims is minimal. It's certainly important to try to help those victims and go after the real traffickers with the full force of the law, but the extent of the problem is vastly overstated by people with a moral or anti-feminist reason for objecting to allowing women to voluntarily sell their sexual services.

Here's an interesting article about how the best estimate of the amount of sex trafficking victims in Cambodia puts the number at less than 2% of what anti-activists claim.

http://m.aljazeera.com/story/201468124236117557

The term "trafficking" has become trendy among donors in the Western world for the pure horror it evokes - a horror that Pros embodied for many - but it leaves out a whole spectrum of complex choices and negotiations, and often erases women's agency entirely.

Sebastien Marot, founder of the nongovernmental organisation Friends International, which works with street children and other vulnerable populations, has lived in Cambodia since 1994. In all his years in the country, he said he has encountered only a handful of what he considers clear-cut cases of sex slavery, despite the lavish funding and massive attention from celebrities that the cause attracts.

"There's definitely fashions in the donor world," he said. "The big thing now is trafficking - people say, 'Oh my God, trafficking' - but how do we define that?"

Mam and her foundation have interpreted the term liberally, claiming repeatedly, along with Afesip, that sex slaves in Cambodia number in the tens of thousands.

In 2011, Mam told an interviewer that there were 80,000 to 100,000 prostitutes in Cambodia, 58 percent of whom were trafficked. In a 2010 Somaly Mam Foundation video, Hollywood actress Lucy Liu solemnly intoned in a voiceover that "the low-end estimate for the number of sex slaves in Cambodia alone is over 40,000". Mam has also claimed that it is commonplace for children as young as 3 to be sold into sex slavery in Cambodia.

The source for these numbers is unclear, and according to some, wrong.

A study published in 2011 by the UN Inter-Agency Project on Trafficking based on data collected in 2008 stated that the number of sex trafficking victims in Cambodia is 1,058 at most, including 127 children, six of whom were under the age of 13. The majority of these cases involved women who had fallen into debt to their brothels, or prostitutes under the age of 18. These are both abhorrent and illegal, but they are a far cry from the extreme scenarios Mam often invoked - girls put in cages, tortured with electricity, having their eyes gouged out by pimps.

"We never encountered any such thing, and we certainly looked for it," the study's author, Thomas Steinfatt, said this week. "We couldn't find any instances of that ... In terms of people tortured, I think they've been watching too many movies."

Steinfatt, a professor at the University of Miami, said the figure of 1,058 is still an accurate estimate of the number of sex trafficking victims in the country. Although he has been criticised by some anti-sex-slavery activists for producing such a low figure, he is the only researcher to have systematically canvassed Cambodia seeking out brothels and collecting data on the women and girls inside.

"Sex trafficking is actually one of the smaller portions of trafficking," he said. "Much more [trafficking] goes on in labour or domestic work. It's quite literally the 'sexiest' topic, and it's something that really bothers people - which it should, but it's not the largest."