A friend on Facebook sent me the following message. I edited it to make fragments of sentences into sentences and to correct spelling mistakes.
It relates to my post a few days ago about government officials calling consensual prostitution “human trafficking.”
I saw your EconLog post about sex trafficking. I wanted to post this story as a comment but decided it was too long. Still, I thought you’d like to hear it.
Several years ago, a female colleague from Raleigh told us over lunch that she was almost kidnapped by sex traffickers at a Target in Raleigh. Surprised, we asked what had happened. She said a man came up to her and made a comment about her t-shirt. That’s it. She was young and attractive and our company was known for our funny t-shirts. I suggested he was just trying to start a conversation. She insisted she had seen stories of multiple sex trafficking arrests at that target. According to her, he must have been a kidnapper. Back at my desk, I googled sex trafficking cases at Raleigh Targets. She was right: there were at least four or five high-profile cases. But after reading more than a dozen paragraphs, I finally discovered that it was all just regular prostitution. There was no human trafficking and no kidnappers. The police dismissed it as human trafficking because they got more headlines and more federal dollars to fight non-existent human trafficking, and the news media went along with it for the clicks. This left at least one woman in Raleigh terrified of going to Target for fear of being kidnapped. (italics added)