Report: 2006 World Cup Sex Trafficking Overblown

May 8th, 2007 | by: WC Bob |

You remember the stories leading up to the World Cup in Germany. The millions of testosterone-filled men would converge on a country where prostitution is legal and all hell would break lose, including 40,000 foreign women being forced to so sex work. Thankfully that did not turn out to be the case.

A report by the International Organization for Migration concluded that only five people were confirmed as having been trafficked. And that the dire predictions were just that. Now, undoubtedly there were more than five women trafficked, but the fact that the number is so low tells you that it was indeed overhyped. Was that a bad thing? Perhaps, but it did bring attention to the issue and in some cases it might have prevented women from being exploited.

The thing I take away from this is to take everything that is written leading up to South Africa 2010 with a grain of salt. Undoubtedly you will be reading a lot about the country’s crime and various other problems and all of them should be taken seriously. But as we saw in Germany what is a major story leading up to the World Cup can turn out to be not a story at all during it.

By the way, I am still waiting for a report that says that the officiating at the 2006 World Cup wasn’t worse than expected and that the quality of play was not as dire as what we saw.

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thalia

I have another idea for why much fewer trafficking victims were found: because a world’s worth of cameras were crawling all over Germany looking for footage of men using prostitutes and that made men wary of using prostitutes lest they wind up as stock footage to be brought out again for stories such as yours.

Most men who use prostituted women are married; some put the number at 60% in the USA. Men demand not only whores but anonymity when (ab)using them. There were so many international reporters covering this salacious story that the mayor of Cologne declared videotaping legal acts of prostitution a punishable offense for the duration of the WOrld Cup, but I doubt his attempt at censorship went over well with journalists.

South Africa has the higest rate of rape of any country in the world and not coincidentally a huge prostitution problem. You can read the results of a study done on prostitutes in South Africa at this website http://www.prostitutionresearch.com

Thanks for reading,
Thalia
Claude

Any man stupid enough to use a prostitute deserves what he gets in the way of STDs or AIDS. Doesn’t matter if it’s in South Africa, Germany etc. You would have a higher likely hood to get AIDS in South Africa then Germany, but is that the kind of gamble you want to take?