Erin O’Brien, an Australian researcher, demonstrates the highly politicized nature of the anti-trafficking program, with numbers being made up, exaggerated, and revised as needed. Remind you of anything? Climate research, maybe?

“The magnitude of the problem in Australia still remains largely undefined, with recent reports continuing to rely on the range identified at the 2004 Parliamentary Inquiry. A report prepared for the Australian Parliament identifies the higher estimate of between 300 and 1,000 trafficking victims brought to Australia annually (Phillips 2008, 3). However, it also calls this figure into question, noting that between 1999 and 2005 only 133 cases of suspected trafficking were referred to the Australian Federal Police, with just 10 prosecutions taken forward by the Department of Public Prosecutions (Phillips 2008, 9; 14).
United States estimates
In the initial US Congressional hearings leading to the development of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000, the figure most often cited as the number of trafficking victims brought into the United States each year was 50,000. Theresa Loar, Director of the President’s Inter-Agency Counsel on Women put forward that, ‘It is estimated that there are over 1 million women and children trafficked every year, over
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50,000 into the United States’ (House 14 September 1999, 14)2. This estimate of 50,000 was most likely drawn from research conducted by Amy O’Neill Richard on behalf of the State Department, in which she declared that, ‘government and non-governmental experts in the field estimate that out of the 700,000 to two million women and children who are trafficked globally each year, 45,000 to 50,000 of those women and children are trafficked to the United States’ (O’Neill Richard 1999, 3). Initially the 50,000 figure remained unscrutinised, though the worldwide estimate of 1 million was challenged by Dr Laura Lederer of the Protection Project. She testified that ‘UNICEF is estimating that 1 million children are forced into prostitution in South-East Asia alone and another million worldwide’ (House 14 September 1999, 38).
This disparity was recognised by members of the Committee, with Representative Faleomavaega expressing disbelief that the State Department’s figures differed so greatly from Lederer’s, stating that, ‘If they don’t even have the accurate figures, how can they possibly declare a policy that is accurate and correct’ (House 14 September 1999, 47-48). Despite this questioning, the figure of 50,000 trafficking victims brought into the US each year remained unchallenged, and was repeated by Senator Brownback in a Senate hearing on trafficking in early 2000 (Senate 22 February 2000, 2). Although the estimate initially only referred to women and children trafficked into the US, it became the estimate quoted in the hearings in reference to all victims trafficked into the United States. At the Senate hearing in April of 2000 , Paula Dobriansky, US State Department Under-Secretary retained the 50,000 figure, but relied on a slightly lower figure of 700,000 victims of trafficking worldwide each year. (Senate 4 April 2000, 22).
Over the next few years, however, the 50,000 figure has been progressively downgraded. In 2003 the then-Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (also known as the TIP Office) John Miller declared that, ‘We now estimate that this modern-day slavery also includes 18,000 to 20,000 victims who enter the United States annually’ (House 29 October 2003, 58). By 2004, the figure was downgraded even further, with Senator Russell D. Feingold telling a Senate hearing on trafficking that ‘Estimates of the number of people trafficked in the United States each year range from 14,500 to 17,500’ (Senate 7 July 2004, 5). This lower figure also appeared in a Department of Justice Report produced in early 2006 (Newman 2006, 5), though in that same year US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales reduced the estimate further, suggesting that government estimates of between 15,000 and 20,000 victims each year may have been too high (Washington Post 2007: A1).
Sister Dougherty, testifying on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (who sub-contracted much of the US Government’s funding for support for victims of trafficking) bemoaned the ongoing changes in the estimates of the scope of the trafficking problem:
2 References from United States Congressional hearings will be abbreviated as either House (to indicate a Congressional Hearing in the US House of Representatives) or Senate (to indicate a Congressional Hearing in the US Senate).
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It is interesting to me that in 1999, the study that was put out by the State Department — I think it was commissioned by the CIA of Amy O’Neill Richard as an independent researcher — that study that was behind the passing of the law said 50,000 people. And 2 years later, we drop from 50,000 people to 20,000 people, and now we have dropped from 20,000 people to 17,000 people being trafficked into the United States.
(Senate 7 July 2004, p.30).
While Sister Dougherty believed that the numbers were being underestimated, even these downgraded estimates have been challenged due to the relatively small numbers of victims identified over the last decade. Feingold argues that ‘even with a well-trained law enforcement and prosecutorial system, less than 500 people have been awarded T visas, the special visas given to victims in return for cooperation with federal prosecutors’ (Feingold 2005: 30). This demonstrates that either prosecutions are failing to stop traffickers, or that the scale of the problem is not as large as first estimated. Only 1,362 victims have been identified between 2000 and 2007 (Washington Post 2007: A1). This substantial disparity between the estimated and identified number of victims was so stark that the Bush administration hired a public relations firm, Ketchum, to assist in the effort to ‘find’ victims. (Washington Post 2007: A1).”