"It was a while back," he says. "I forget exactly where we got them from."
Parker was equally fuzzy on how the researchers knew the ages of the people pictured in the control group.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Village Voice Media, which owns this newspaper, owns the classified site Backpage.com. In addition to used cars, jobs, and couches, readers can also find adult ads on Backpage; for this reason, Women's Funding Network and their allies have often called attention to the site, sometimes going so far as to call for its closure.
Certainly we have a stake in this discussion. And we do not object to those who suggest an apparent conflict of interest. We sat quietly and did not respond as the WFN held symposiums across America—from Seattle to Miami—denouncing Backpage. Indeed, we were never asked for response.
But then we looked at the "science" and the media's willingness to regurgitate, without question, these incredible statistics. In the interest of a more informed discussion, we decided to write.
"Um...I'm afraid I do not remember," he says.
You might say that this is important information. The Schapiro group has been telling the world that it cracked the alchemical code that transforms dumb guesses into hard statistics, and that the magic number is .38. But the leader of the study can't remember the procedure he followed to get that number.
Neither Schapiro nor Parker had any answers when asked if there was any empirical reason to believe their two critical assumptions: that online photos always represent what the prostitutes actually look like, and that the six handpicked observers conducting the state studies have exactly the same error rate as the initial test batch of 100 random citizens.
Instead, Schapiro beat a hasty retreat, saying the study results shouldn't be read as actual incidents of prostitution.
"We're the first to tell you, this is not a precise count of the number of girls being prostituted," Schapiro said. "We make no bones about that."
Of course, a precise count of the number of girls being prostituted is exactly what the statistics are being presented as in the media, in press releases, and in Schapiro's own study. When this is pointed out, Schapiro reverses herself.
"Well, yes, these are specific numbers," Schapiro backpedals. "And yes, they are hard numbers, and they are numbers that we stand completely behind."
This is the kind of cognitive whiplash you have to endure if you try to follow Schapiro down the rabbit hole. The numbers have the weight of fact and can properly be cited as actual incidents of juvenile prostitution, she insists. But when pressed to justify the broad and unsupported assumptions of her study, she says the study is just a work in progress and the numbers are only approximations.
Schapiro's grasp on empirical rigor is such that when asked point-blank to choose between her two contradictory interpretations—estimates or facts—she opts for "all of the above."
"I would square the circle by saying that you can look at them both ways," she says.
Any reporter who had read the methodology of the Schapiro report would have been left with doubts, and any reporter who followed up would probably have been treated to the same baffling circuit of non-answers. The fact that the study's findings continue to be rebroadcast in news outlets across the country suggests that not one reporter has bothered to read the study about which they are writing.
"You see this kind of thing a lot, unfortunately," says Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute who writes frequently about statistics. "The kind of skepticism that reporters apply to a statement by a politician just doesn't get applied to studies."
David Finkelhor at the Crimes Against Children Research Center says he understands the pressure on reporters to cite figures when they're writing about juvenile prostitution, but it's something they need to resist, because despite what groups like the Women's Funding Network would have you believe, there simply are no good statistics.
"You have to say, 'We don't know. Estimates have been made, but none of them have a real scientific basis to them,'" Finkelhor says. "All you can say is, 'This is the number the police know about, and we think there are more than that, but we don't know how many more.'"
IN HER OWN online photos, the woman who commissioned the Schapiro Group study looks to be in her 50s, with blue eyes, graying hair, and a taste for dangly earrings.
Kaffie McCullough first approached the Schapiro Group about conducting a study of juvenile prostitution in Georgia in 2007 when, as director of A Future Not a Past, she realized that having scientific-sounding numbers makes all the difference in the world.
In early 2007, McCullough approached the Georgia Legislature to ask for money for a regional assessment center to track juvenile prostitution.
"We had no research, no nothing. The legislators didn't even know about it," she recalls. "We got a little bit. We got about 20 percent of what we asked for."
Later that year, the first Schapiro Group counts were made, and when McCullough returned to the Legislature the following session, she had the study's statistics in hand.
"When we went to the Legislature with those counts, it gave us traction—night and day," she says. "That year, we got all the rest of that money, plus we got a study commission."
McCullough touts the fundraising benefits of the study whenever she can. Since the Schapiro study was picked up for replication nationwide by the Women's Funding Network, McCullough has acted as a sort of technical consultant for state groups as they debate whether to invest money in the project. Whenever she's asked, McCullough tells the local groups that the money they spend will come back to them with hefty dividends.
"I would say, 'The research costs money, but we've been able to broker—I don't know what it is now, I think it's over $1.3, $1.6 million in funding that we never would have gotten,'" McCullough says.
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I find it amazing that the same publication that has pages and pages among "sex for sell" ads, is running a story about sex trafficking.
"Certainly we have a stake in this discussion. ..."
at that point - this media outlet, who also runs a sex for sale website, this media outlet's credibility dropped off the charts.
You don't need statistics to rate you, Village Voice, there is no chart for credibility on which you would even show up.
i guess if you are fucked up enough to deny the sex trade to help your cause, you are fucked up enough to not be able to afford use of a film title.
This is the problem with Mainstream media: they claim to be sober and responsible, but they really uncritically trumpet press releases from their favored positions. In this particular "men are scum and women are victims" area, they are clueless: remember the breathless story that domestic violence spikes on Superbowl day? Widely repeated but totally false. Not that it stopped our own DA, Garcetti from repeating it. Or that huge percentages of college women were sexually assaulted? Again trumpeted wihtout anyone reading the supporting "study" that defined even an unwanted glance or single remark or even "fear of" unwanted attention as an assault.
Anorexia was another one: primarily confined to white uppper middle class kids, media made it seem as if the majority of US females teenagers were as clueless as they are (then they run stories on "epidemics of obesity" and a week later the "tyranny of thin" which obviously wouldn't exist if we had an "epidemic of obesity.")
Part of the problem is the MSM's uncritical acceptance of news from favored people like women's groups. The other is that few real "reporters" are left: they are "journalists" who are credentialed but not smart, skeptical only as to whoever is socially on the outs and who therefore function more as a PR arm for whoever seems the most socially acceptable or has the loudest voice.
You & author of this article bit the bait hook line and sinker. More social conservative pandering to male egos keeping them in an infantile state handing them yet another prostitute to parade around in public representing womankind in your minds. Profiteers of strife Mcculough and Palin are chump change. There's always a John, but so long as they keep up the hatred on prostitutes as the root of all evil, the pimp and the john get by on murder. You see, Sir, so long as YOU are fed the illusion it's someone else's doing, your ego stroked by corporate handlers, you're a slave to your own weaknesses. Bash feminists as the root cause of your weakness, when your handlers authoring the narrative keep you stuck on stupid using womankind as collateral damage, war games chaff, and legislative punching bags to infinity and beyond. The last person anyone should aspire to be in America is a white woman. The silent majority who goes to pains to be fair, is denied equal rights constitutionally and religiously, and is abused unmercifully. The conservative right 'movement' is a rally cry for every hateful, predatory, materialist, avaricious moron seeking out a scapegoat to project their own irresponsibility onto. Limbaugh, Falwell, Newt-- all standing on a podium demanding womankind give them her breast or else. This is what's passing for manhood in America. Middle aged Peter pans selling their own Anita Bryant utopia.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/conte... Keep beating on women, it sells more abortions, which you can also blame women only over! Raise your daughters to be feeble minded bots, manipulative shrews trolling for gullible males, and best of all never ever teach them how to defend themselves from psychological or physical violence. Curious how the institution of marriage is perverted by social conservatives demanding socially acceptable roles of prostitution, only to get indignant about the free agents who didn't bother having a pimp.
I can't imagine a greater sales tool than crabs in a barrel politics posing as religious right when it's satanism they've embraced disgracing the name of Christendom 'doing the lords work'. It worked the previous century, and the century before that-- so that merits 'conserving'? Murdoch, Koch, Limbaugh, Palin-- is anyone allowed to earn an honest living without getting sucked up into the drama of the wh*re's of babylon? How long do you think you can get by in life deflecting accountability for yourselves to service your ego's calling that 'manhood'? David Horowitz is a 72 yr old man who made a career out of spitting on his parents and his children. It's all about him, don't you know?
Super Bowl 2011:
According to the media hype There was supposed to be hundreds of thousands of under age child sex slaves kidnapped and forced to have sex with super bowl fans. At the Dallas Super Bowl 2011.
WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL OF THEM?????
WHERE ARE THE THOUSANDS OF SUPER BOWL KIDNAPPED FORCED CHILD SEX SLAVES???????
Politicians, women's groups, police and child advocates were predicting that up to 100,000 hookers would be shipped into Dallas for the Super Bowl.
It was all a big lie told by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, and various anti-prostitution groups: Traffick911, Not for Sale, Change.org, Polaris Project, Salvation Army and the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which are anti-prostitution groups that tell lies in order to get grant money from the government and charities to pay their high salaries, and get huge amounts of money into their organizations. As proved in the links below:
Top FBI agent in Dallas (Robert Casey Jr.) sees no evidence of expected spike in child sex trafficking:
“Among those preparations was an initiative to prevent an expected rise in sex trafficking and child prostitution surrounding the Super Bowl. But Robert Casey Jr., special agent in charge of the FBI’s Dallas office, said he saw no evidence that the increase would happen, nor that it did.“In my opinion, the Super Bowl does not create a spike in those crimes,” he said. “The discussion gets very vague and general. People mixed up child prostitution with the term human trafficking, which are different things, and then there is just plain old prostitution.”
http://www.dallasnews.com/spor...
This myth of thousands or millions of underage sex slaves tries to make every sports fan a sex criminal. No matter what the sport is, or in what country it is in.
Brian McCarthy isn't happy. He's a spokesman for the NFL. Every year he's forced to hear why his customers are adulterers and child molesters. Brian McCarthy says the sport/super bowl sex slave story is a urban legend, with no truth at all.
These anti-prostitution groups lobby the government in a big way, getting Politicians to truly believe their lies.
I would like to see a news organization do a full report on the lies, myths and exaggerated numbers being told about sex trafficking slaves. But they won't do it because they are all sacred of the anti-prostitution groups, so the media continues to tell lies and only report what the anti-prostitution groups and politicians tell them to. The articles about the super bowl and sport sex slaves, has been proved wrong many times, but news organizations still report about it, as if it were fact.
Below are the few brave souls that told the truth in the media:Sex Trafficking in Sports Events links:
http://sextraffickingtruths.bl...
http://bebopper76.wordpress.co...
Dallas TV News show about super bowl sex slave myth:
http://www.wfaa.com/sports/foo...
Dallas Newspaper article:
What makes me sad about this is how much of a setback this study is to become. There are plenty of instances of trafficking, not just in America, and I feel that if the information listed here ends up making its way mainstream (and eventually, it will), then it will be more of a step backward for those trying to fight underage sex trafficking than any lack of awareness could be.
sex trafficking is a global issue watch this documentary by MTV Exit it provides a compelling look into this dark, inhuman, and exploitative world and shows how each one of us can help to prevent modern-day slavery.
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