DOI: 10.14197/atr.201217810

Playing the Numbers: The spurious promise of global trafficking statistics

David A. Feingold

Response to the ATR Debate Proposition: ‘Global Trafficking Prevalence Data Advances the Fight against Trafficking in Persons’

Please cite this article as: D A Feingold, ‘Playing the Numbers: The spurious promise of global trafficking statistics’, Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 8, 2017, pp. 153—156, www.antitraffickingreview.org

‘Playing the numbers,’ ‘the numbers game,’ ‘the policy racket’: for those unfamiliar with American illegal lotteries and some of the legendary gangsters like Bumpy Johnson and Dutch Schultz that turned them into a major revenue stream for organised crime that still flourishes today, the concept was simple. The odds were disproportionately long, but poor people could bet very small amounts. It was, as they used to say, ‘a mugs game’; the organisers did well, while the poor lived on hope.

The quest for global trafficking prevalence numbers strikes me as a similar triumph of hope over experience. It is all too easy to succumb to what Merry has recently called the ‘seductions of quantification’.¹ Previously, I have analysed how ‘information’ on human trafficking comes to be constructed as ‘data’, and how those data do––or, more often, do not––inform policy.² I said at the time that ‘the trafficking field is best characterised as one of numerical certainty and statistical doubt. Trafficking numbers provide the false precision of quantification, while lacking any of the supports of statistical rigor.’³ In fact, little has changed. While ambitious (and, some might say, pretentious) projects like the Global Slavery Index (GSI) have appeared, claiming to produce a methodologically rigorous estimate of the total number of ‘slaves’ in the world, much of the rigour proves illusory on closer examination.⁴ Anne Gallagher, for example, has provided a detailed critique of the shortcomings of the GSI 2016, both conceptually and methodologically.⁵ She has also highlighted the reluctance of many of our colleagues to express in public the pointed critiques of the GSI that they make in private, questioning whether this might not be related to a reluctance to alienate a potential donor.

There is insufficient room here to address all of my own reservations regarding the anomalous approach to data extrapolation used by the GSI, or to analyse the incongruities in country rankings that result from their approach. I would note, however, that while the conflation of ‘trafficking’ with ‘slavery’ may be rhetorically appealing, it diminishes conceptual clarity, exacerbating one of the key problems in the field.⁶ The term ‘slave’ is certainly emotive, but devalues or elides the experience of numerous victims.⁷ It is part of a flight from complexity that hampers the field through a one-size-fits-all diagnosis. While undoubtedly useful for fundraising, reducing—or inflating—every form of exploitation to ‘slavery’ makes any sort of useful measurement fundamentally unfeasible and useless as a basis for policy.

Frederick Douglass, who knew more about slavery than most, said, ‘No term is more abused, or misapplied, than that of Slavery.’^{8sup> He also noted, ‘It is common in this country to distinguish every bad thing by the name of slavery.’9 I believe that he would recognise the situation today.}