Forty Thousand Hookers And Other BS News Stories
March 25, 2010
David Beckham might not be going to the World Cup in South Africa this year, but 40,000 hookers will be. That is literally what a headline on the NBC sports website claims: ‘40,000 hookers making their way to South Africa for World Cup.’ Other media outlets have been a bit more PC: ‘40,000 prostitutes to enter South Africa’, says the UK Daily Telegraph; ‘40,000 prostitutes bound for South Africa’, says the New York Daily News. Apparently many of these hookers will be trafficked into South Africa against their will, forced into a life of grimy prostitution for the satisfaction of drunken football fans.
It sounds scary. And also eerily familiar. Where have we heard that figure of ‘40,000 hookers/prostitutes/trafficked women’ before? That’s right, during the last World Cup, in Germany in 2006. In May 2006, a month before the World Cup kicked off, the UK Independent warned of ‘40,000 women being imported [to Germany] for the “use” of visiting fans’. It said the ‘combination of sport, booze and sex is a huge problem, encouraging degrading attitudes and sometimes actual violence towards women’. One British columnist said in May 2006 that ‘anything up to 40,000 extra sex workers are likely to be smuggled into [Germany] in the coming weeks’. We were told that inebriated footie fans would have sex with these ‘slave women’ in specially built ‘wooden performance boxes resembling toilets’.
There was only one problem with the alarming claims made in 2006: They were codswallop. Utterly unfounded. A big bag of nonsense. A study carried out by the Council of the European Union (CEU) and published in 2007 found: ‘There was no sign whatsoever of the alleged 40,000 prostitutes/forced prostitues – a figure repeatedly reported – who were to be brought to Germany for the 2006 World Cup.’ Far from 40,000 enslaved women trussed up in ‘sex sheds’, the CEU report said the German authorities, having spent millions of Euros and thousands of hours of police time on the lookout for trafficked women, found only five cases of ‘human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation’ in relation to the 2006 World Cup.
Yet now, four years later and on the other side of the world, we have the exact same headline-grabbing figure being spouted in relation to South Africa. During the 2006 World Cup, the figure of 40,000 seems to have orginiated with the American feminist group, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), though it’s unclear how they arrived at their – let’s be generous here – ‘estimation’. The figure of 40,000 trafficked women for this year’s World Cup seems to have originated, bizarrely, with South Africa’s Central Drug Authority (CDA), though again it’s unclear how they arrived at this super-neat, familiar number. Maybe they were browsing old editions of European newspapers from 2006, including Britain’s Independent and Guardian, and thought: ‘40,000 enslaved whores? If it can happen in Europe, it could definitely happen in Africa.’
