A friend on Facebook sent me the following message. I’ve edited it to make fragments of sentences into sentences and to correct spelling mistakes.
It relates to my post a few days ago about government officials referring to voluntarily chosen prostitution as “trafficking.”
I saw your EconLog post on sex trafficking. I was going to post this story as a comment but decided it was too long. Still, I thought you’d like to hear it.
Several years ago a female coworker from Raleigh told us over lunch that she had almost been kidnapped by sex traffickers at a Target in Raleigh. Astonished, we asked what happened. She said a man came up to her and made a comment about her t-shirt. That was it. She was young and attractive and our company was known for our witty t-shirts. I suggested that he was just trying to start a conversation. She insisted that she had seen stories about multiple sex trafficking arrests at that Target. So, in her view, he must have been a kidnapper. When I got back to my desk I googled cases of sex trafficking in Raleigh Targets. She was right: there were at least 4 or 5 high profile cases. But when I read through over a dozen paragraphs, I eventually found out that they were all simply regular prostitution. There was no trafficking and there were no kidnappers. The cops dressed it up as trafficking because they got more headlines and more federal dollars fighting non-existent trafficking, and the news media went along with it for the clicks. Because of this, at least one woman in Raleigh was terrified of going to Target for fear of being kidnapped. (italics added)
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