The lost girls of autism

[Elixir]

I'm saying that when they claim to have busted trafficking it almost always is obvious that it's just ordinary prostitution.

How do you know that????
And more to the point, SO WHAT? Even if true, that in not way makes arresst a proxy for instances of trafficking, for reasons that have been explained to you multiple times, and that you have ignored multiple times.
When the major accounting entities agree on a figure of 800,000 people trafficked per year, you can't make them all disappear by citing arrest records from one of the few places in 'Murka where prostitution is legal and protected. That's more than the entire population of Las Vegas, and you think that the (presumed) fact that they keep arresting LV prostitutes makes trafficking over-reported? That is insanity.

 

[Toni]

I don’t know where else to put this-
Re “trafficking”. @Loren Pechtel asserts:

It's vastly overreported because most "trafficking" busts are just prostitution.

I say:
Trafficking is vastly underreported because the vast majority of instances of trafficking are never reported, and never result in trafficking busts. If they did, there wouldn’t still be trafficking.

We don't have overall numbers, but we can see that the vast majority of "trafficking" arrests are not trafficking. As a percentage it's clearly way overreported.

Unlikely to be true.

Loren states “trafficking is over reported” as if it’s an unarguable fact based on a lot of prostitution arrests that supposedly result in trafficking charges, confidently but namelessly asserting that all trafficking results in arrests, and since most arrests [for trafficking] end up litigated as prostitution charges, there was never any trafficking involved.
That is illogical on the face of it.

No. If it was trafficking why only prostitution busts? It's cop math.

Plus, Loren is in LV where many or most prostitution charges are filed to protect the legal prostitution racket.

Huh? No, it's not about protection, it's a combination of how well organized the outcall places are (a sting will only catch one and then everyone else will stay away) and that by leaving them alone unless there are other problems reduces the other problems.

He has not given a source for his specious trafficking statistic, and even if he did, the point remains that unless he’s a trafficking kingpin of some sort, he has NO IDEA how prevalent trafficking really is, because the vast number of instances do not result in arrests - for prostitution or anything else.

I'm saying that when they claim to have busted trafficking it almost always is obvious that it's just ordinary prostitution. When you keep seeing false claims of X figure that X is at best rare because if they had real examples of X they would use them rather than the false ones.

There are other ‘busts’ or crackdowns than for prostitution.

I agree that ‘ordinary prostitution’ quite often involves trafficking.

 

[Elixir]

I agree that ‘ordinary prostitution’ quite often involves trafficking.

B-b-b-but it's LEGAL (where Loren is).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm saying that when they claim to have busted trafficking it almost always is obvious that it's just ordinary prostitution.

It’s always obvious to you? Are you called in on every case to see the obvious? Are you a Vice cop? Why are you examining every case?
You have not touched cases that don’t get arrested. As I predicted, you infer that they don’t exist but that is both baseless and specious.

NIH says this;
“The two most common purposes for human trafficking are sexual exploitation and forced labor (Figures 2, 3). Victims of sex trafficking are forced into one or more forms of sexual exploitation. It is important to note that sex trafficking and prostitution are not synonymous and that prostitution is simply one type of work performed by victims of sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is an umbrella term that may include commercial sex work such as prostitution, but also pornography, exotic dancing, stripping, live sex shows, mail-order brides, military prostitution, and sexual tourism. Although victims of sex trafficking can be of any age and of either sex, the majority are women and adolescent girls. Although many nations have outlawed the trafficking of females, it is still widely prevalent on a global scale”

Many prostitutes have been trafficked. The incidence is probably lower where Loren is because most of the prostitutes are legal so trafficked ones are taken elsewhere. But with NIH agreeing with international figures of up to 800,000 girls trafficked per year, it’s reasonable to assume that their estimate is ballpark correct. And it’s silly to assert that it almost never happens. It may not happen so much in Sin City, but it happens. A lot.

Note your own data: 80% female. That implies that no more than 60% of that is sexual in nature. And note that your data simply addresses international borders, it doesn't say which borders. There is unquestionably a lot of trafficking in many third world places.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think your view on the subject is hopelessly naive, Loren.

The reality is that the majority of human smuggling is actually rather quite "soft": passports are confiscated by a handler once people are smuggled in, and from there, there's simply no recourse or power, which is now exacerbated by ICE.

Now that they are somewhere where they do not speak the language well and will be persecuted if detected as an illegal immigrant, their options are limited to compliance or horrible suffering at the hands of a third party (ICE).

And yes, the police look the other way, or are bought, or they just don't have the time to deal with quiet sexual slavery when they have higher profile crimes to deal with.

With the way the Gestapo is behaving I expect your scenario will become an issue here. What I am saying is that any substantial trafficking requires complacent law enforcement, something we have not had.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When you keep seeing false claims of X figure that X is at best rare because if they had real examples of X they would use them rather than the false ones.

You should probably be aware that this philosophy is a very effective multiplier for confirmation bias.

When you keep seeing claims of X, which you are predisposed to believe are false, you figure that X is at best rare, because if they had real examples of X, you would surely be more inclined to believe the examples they use.

You are elevating your disbelief into a claim of disproof, which is not in fact logically justifiable.

No. I'm saying that if the claims of X are valid there should be some good examples of X to point to. Why keep using flawed arguments if there's a valid one? I'm not going to reject good evidence for X but I am going to treat it with skepticism because why did it only show up now? (Which usually turns out to be because it's actually flawed.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I agree that ‘ordinary prostitution’ quite often involves trafficking.

B-b-b-but it's LEGAL (where Loren is).

No, it's not. State law prohibits it in counties with a population above X (which is periodically updated to ensure that it includes exactly those counties containing Las Vegas and Reno), local choice elsewhere. It's normally a very low priority for law enforcement, though.

And while prostitution is legal trafficking is not.

 

[Thomas II]

It's been a longstanding notion that Autism Spectrum Disorders are significantly more common among males than females, but I'm not clear in whether this is a real sex difference. There were prevalence studies from the 1980s that reported something like a 4/1 m/f ratio in autism/ASD diagnoses. It could be biological, sure. It could also be a sampling bias. More explicitly, I can think of at least these options:

1. Biological, mechanistic explanation: similar to how color blindness is predominantly male, ASD could be partially caused by yet unidentified genetic factors that happened to be recessive and X- chromosome linked.
2. Biological, functional (hyperfunctionalist/hyperadaptionist) explanation: its more common in males because the selective optimum for males but not for females is one that makes it so that a normal distribution around that optimum includes many people with diagnosable conditions on the spectrum.
3. Girls/women are simply better at masking their autistic traits so that they often go unassessed by clinicians without anyone to blame.
4. Autism Spectrum Disorders tend to present differently in male and female patients, and the standard diagnostic criteria are geared towards a typical male presentation.
5. It's become a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts, since it has become general knowledge that autism is a mostly male phenomenon, clinicians are prone to consider different diagnoses first and may never conduct a formal assessment for autism when a girl/woman presents with the exact same symptoms that would immediately trigger the autism bell if it were a male patient.

I have my suspicions, but I genuinely don't know. I think #2 is rather far fetched, but that's more because I generally find hyperadaptationist hypotheses rather farfetched if they don't come with strong evidence, rather than because of having any reason to think this is particularly implausible in this specific case.

Here's some related content (an interview by New Scientist with an experts who appears to lean towards 3 and 5)



Any comments?

Temple Grandin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin_(film)

 

[Elixir]

Note your own data:

Not MY^ data. It's NIH data

80% female. That implies that no more than 60% of that is sexual in nature.

What? Boys aren't trafficked? How well do you actually know the sexual proclivities of trafficking end-users, Loren? (If it's a lot, DON'T ANSWER!)

If the stats are representative of real life, it implies that up to one in five trafficking victims could be male, and has no implications for the (irrelevant) statistic of what is "sexual in nature".

You have once again failed to address the points with which you were presented that support my contention that trafficking is underreported.. Instead, you have gone off into an obfuscatory conjecture about what is sexual and how much of it is female.
Show me how I'm wrong, don't try to stretch definitions and extrapolate irrelevant details.

 

[Elixir]

I agree that ‘ordinary prostitution’ quite often involves trafficking.

B-b-b-but it's LEGAL (where Loren is).

No, it's not. State law prohibits it in counties with a population above X (which is periodically updated to ensure that it includes exactly those counties containing Las Vegas and Reno), local choice elsewhere.

That's why LV and Reno are BOTH surrounded by houses of legally condoned repute. Let's pretend the clientele isn't artificially displaced from the cities (their visitors. In any event it is no surrogate for the rest of the planet in terms of the incidence of trafficking.

It's normally a very low priority for law enforcement, though.
And while prostitution is legal trafficking is not.

How do you know if a 'legal' prostitute is trafficked? Ask them?
What percent of all prostitutes work under a legal umbrella? For the sake of argument, let's exempt the entire State of Nevada, even if half of their prostitutes are trafficked.
That leaves... uh ... lets see... the REST OF THE COUNTRY as far as NIH stats...
I know Nevada is a hotbed of prostitution, but do you think it represents any large fraction of ALL American prostitution?