40,000 women to be trafficked to the World Cup to sexually service supporters? Bullshit.

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.’ I have a new theory about how these mad, bad and hysterical scare-numbers are arrived at. In recent years, every time there has been a major international sporting event, a motley crew of government officials, campaigning feminists, pliant journalists and NGOs have claimed that the movement of thousands of men to strange foreign countries where there will be lots of alcohol and horniness will result in the enslavement of women for the purposes of sexual pleasure. Obviously. And every time they have simply doubled the made-up scare figures from the last international sporting event, to make it look like this problem of sport/sex/slavery gets worse year on year. Full article at Spiked Online

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