[Stop-traffic] News/US:Enslaved by His Sources: Reading Peter Landesman's sex-slave story one more time.

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2094896


Enslaved by His Sources
Reading Peter Landesman's sex-slave story one more time.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2004, at 4:36 PM PT


Excerpt:

Not from the beginning of the article:

John Miller, the religious groups' made man, appears very high in Landesman's piece in the "nut graf" discussion about the number of sex slaves in the United States. Landesman cites recent government estimates that 18,000 to 20,000 people are trafficked each year into the country, but acknowledges that no government study estimates how many of these people are trafficked as sex slaves. Engaging in a bit of journalistic sleight-of-hand, Landesman introduces Kevin Bales of the antislavery nonprofit Free the Slaves, who, without citing any source or methodology, purports that "at least 10,000" of the annually trafficked people are sex slaves.

Miller gives sanction to Bales' 10,000 figure by saying it might underestimate the annual trafficking in sex slaves. "That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge," Miller tells Landesman, citing no methodology himself. Finally, Laura Lederer, identified only as a senior State Department adviser on trafficking, explains away the shortfall between the Bales/Miller estimates and the number of sex slaves discovered. "We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them," she says.

Two very chatty Landesman sources from the International Justice Mission—Gary Haugen and Sharon B. Cohn—don't suggest any numbers, but they do pop up frequently in the article to provide emotionally charged but vague comments about the workings of the sex-slave industry.

Who are these experts, and why are they saying the things that they're saying? One would think that Bales, whose book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy bills him as "the world's leading expert on contemporary slavery," would have commented previously on the 10,000 sex slaves entering the country each year. But searching Nexis and Google, I found no mention by Bales about this vigorous trade. Nor does he mention anywhere in Disposable People about swarms of sex slaves arriving in the United States. He tells Landesman that between 30,000 and 50,000 sex slaves are in captivity in the United States at any time, but I can't find an earlier instance of Bales making that allegation. Did he just discover the peril?

Landesman's perfunctory identification of Laura Lederer as "a senior State Department adviser on trafficking" doesn't pay justice to her career. Lederer's bio reveals that she is a lawyer who also made her name as an antipornography, anti-"hate speech" feminist scholar, editing books such as Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (1980) and The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography (1996). Her book Speech, Equality, and Harm: New Legal Paradigms, will be released this spring. Feminist Lederer speaks explicitly about the need to make common cause with religious groups in the battle against the slave trade in this March 25, 2000, article from the World, a Christian newsweekly. (This link-up between religious groups and feminists is not unprecedented. Religious forces united with some feminists during the Reagan-era over the pornography issue.)

So when Lederer says, "We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them," is she speaking from some official knowledge of the importation of tens of thousands of new sex slaves each year that the government is neglecting to observe? Or is she hyping a smaller crisis into a society-wide panic because of her own agenda? I have my suspicions.

Likewise, Landesman does little to identify Gary Haugen and Sharon B. Cohn's organization, International Justice Mission, except to describe it as "an organization based in Arlington, Va., that fights sexual exploitation in South Asia and Southeast Asia." The group's Web site offers this much-needed transparency: IJM is a religious-based organization that "seeks to present … The biblical and devotional imperative to seek justice on behalf of the oppressed." That IJM is a Christian organization does not disqualify its leader and an employee from adding something of substance to the sex-slave story, but Landesman and the Times Magazine editors err in not fully describing the group. (For a nuanced look at IJM's "rescue" work in Thailand, see Maggie Jones' piece in the November/December 2003 Mother Jones.) 

Of course, Miller, Bales, Lederer, Haugen, and Cohn can be reliable sources even if they possess political or social agendas or relevant back stories. But the journalist who simultaneously fails to note the, um, relevant prejudices of his top talking heads, as Landesman does, and declines to locate any moderating views about the panic he's inciting has lost his soul to his sources.