The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1042: Sex Trafficking | Skeptical Sunday

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

Is sex trafficking really a global crisis or just an overblown conspiracy theory? Andrew Gold reveals truths and misconceptions on this Skeptical Sunday. Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by On the Edge host Andrew Gold! On This Week's Skeptical Sunday, We Discuss: Sex trafficking knows no borders, and the United States stands out as a particularly active region for this crime. It victimizes individuals regardless of age — notably, more than a fourth of those trafficked are minors. The scale of sex trafficking is difficult to determine accurately, with estimates varying widely. This uncertainty stems from the underground nature of the crime and challenges in data collection. Sex trafficking victims often suffer severe physical and mental health consequences, including STIs, injuries, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse issues. The average lifespan of women in prostitution is tragically short at around 34 years. The issue of sex trafficking is frequently politicized and weaponized, sometimes exaggerated for political gain. However, it remains a serious problem that ruins thousands of lives through organized crime networks and individual traffickers. Education and awareness are key tools in combating sex trafficking. By learning about the issue, discussing it openly, and spreading accurate information, we can help inform potential victims about the dangers and contribute to prevention efforts. Everyone can play a role in this by staying informed and sharing knowledge with others. Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know! Connect with Andrew Gold on Twitter and Instagram, and check out On the Edge with Andrew Gold here or wherever you enjoy listening to fine podcasts! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider leaving your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1042 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host Andrew Gold. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, though, we do Skeptical Sunday where a rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about, and debunk common misconceptions about that topic. Topics like circumcision, e-commerce scams, chem trails, recycling, hypnosis, internet porn, energy drinks, and more. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, we've got some starter packs that are collections are our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion, negotiations, psychology, disinformation, cyber warfare, China, North Korea, crime cults, and more to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just go to jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get

started. All right, as I mentioned, I'm here with Andrew Gold, a heretic and a, and a skeptic. I guess I'm the skeptic. Is that the idea here? I guess that makes for a mighty team. Today we're going to have to be a mighty team because we're delving into murky waters, namely sex trafficking, which is a loaded topic and kind of a gross topic, actually. Andrew? Yeah, yeah. I was really intrigued to get into this topic, So I'm glad we covered it, although the research hasn't always made for easy reading. It's obviously topical right now after the Epstein client list rolled out or has been rolling out. But it's also a source of great contention with some corners being accused of inventing and exaggerating the prevalence of sex trafficking and pedophilia rings for political gain or just to spread panic and fear, while others are said to be playing down what should be our greatest concern. Right. I feel like this sort of crystallized in that movie Sound of Freedom, which came out midway 2023, summer 2023-ish. And like everything else, it just became a political issue on both sides in kind of a bizarre way. How did this come about?

Yeah, you're spot on that. I don't think there are any topics that are not somehow a politically divisive issue anymore. Fair enough, yeah. Yeah. And with Sound of Freedom, the two extreme political sides went at each other with good reasons, each of them. But to fully understand this, we have to go back further. conspiracy theorists on both sides have often used imagery around the worst things we can imagine in our society. They've sort of weaponized that imagery. And the worst thing in our society is child sexual abuse, predatory rings and sex trafficking. They use those to attack their enemies. The Jews were once the enemy to many such conspiratorial minds.

And the protocols of the elder of Zion was this faked piece of propaganda that many blame for many pogroms and other attacks on Jews over the years. The text was handed out by teachers in Nazi Germany to school children as though factual, and it promulgated the blood libel, which is what claimed Jews, were taking or trafficking Christian children to use their blood for demonic rituals. Now, over the years, black people have often been portrayed as pimps in movies, propagating the idea that black people are after white women to have their way with them. Think back to Birth of a Nation.

the movie originally released in 1915, directed by D.W. Griffith, it's an infamous silent film notorious for its racist portrayal of African Americans and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. In the film, Black Men, many played by white actors in Blackface, are depicted as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women. This portrayal fueled racial stereotypes and was used to justify segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans. I just got to say, man, white men in blackface playing pimps in a movie that glorified the KKK,

that just checks a lot of boxes at once somehow. I mean, that must have been a real feel-good movie, that one. Yikes. That's really, I don't even know how to, it's kind of hard to overstate how gross and awful that is. Yeah, really. Yikes. Absolutely. And look, many years on, the politicization of sex trafficking continues.

QAnon started around 2017 as a conspiracy theory on the internet. It began when someone using the name Q claimed they had secret information about a group of powerful people who were doing bad things, including sex trafficking. Before Q&N, there was another false story called Pizza Gate, which wrongly said that a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. was a place where high-ranking politicians were involved in harming children. When QAnon appeared, it took the idea of Pizza Gate and made it bigger, suggesting that, many famous politicians and celebrities were part of this evil group. This made the story about sex trafficking not just a crime issue, but also a political one, because it falsely accused certain politicians and parties of being involved in these terrible acts.

And this would be the Democrats, right? Meaning it was politicized in the sense that a lot of people who believed in Q or Q&N were sometimes Republicans, or at least far-right conspiracy theorists, to be more fair, because there's a lot of people who believed in that, that we're just, I don't even know if you can credibly call them Republicans or Democrats at that point. They're just like, kooky, far right folks. Is there any truth in Q&on theories in Pizagate? Because often conspiracy theories start off with that little kernel of truth and then just go wildly into different directions.

It appears that they got it wrong, really, but we're talking a bit about how they're not in tight. I mean, there are some aspects which now make it look like they were right for the wrong reasons. But as you say, the Q&on conspiracy theory, particularly in its merging with elements of Pizagate, primarily targeted Democrats. It falsely alleged that high-profile Democrats, along with an endless list of celebrities and other public figures, were involved in a global child sex trafficking ring. This theory was baseless and without evidence, but it gained significant traction among certain groups on the internet and was used to politically discredit and attack members of the Democrats. Well, you would say that, right? Because you're a corporate stooge looking to deflect

blame from the evil Democrats? Naturally, Jordan. But, okay, there might be a political bias in just dismissing these theories as well. Because, I don't know, I mean, there's an elephant in the living room on his own island, if you will. Yeah, that's an important elephant. And I no doubt hold biases myself. I'm not a far-right conspiracy theorist. And this is a show called Skeptical Sunday. And as such, you and I are skeptics. So I would encourage anyone to use this show as one of many arguments and to look into things yourselves. Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out as the famous saying goes. That's it. That's it. I'm also not a lefty. not a Democrat. I'm not even American, as you might have noticed, as you might have noticed. And I

personally think, so it's probably offensive to a lot of people. And I personally think there's just as much magical thinking and conspiracy theories on the left as there are on the right. Humans are going to human. And I believe there are also just as many dastardly pedophiles or pedophiles, as you guys say, and traffickers. I like pedophile. That sounds even worse somehow. Yeah, well, we do that sort of, we add the A-Ber before the E for a lot of, like hemoglobin is another one. Ah, Encyclopedia. Yeah, encyclopedia, yeah, instead of pedia. Aegis.

That's just a thing. Yeah, I don't know how to say that one, but that's just a thing that we, it's a quirky thing we do with the A's and the E's. Is that letter on the keyboard or do you have to like hold A down and it changes? We just do A.E. We're not going to be all German about it or whatever. Got it. That would be too much. That would be too much.

But yeah, as I was saying, just as many pedophiles and traffickers who hold left. Speaking to pedophiles, don't be all German about this. Or speaking to Germans, go back to, we were talking about pedophiles. Yeah. The joke works either way. Yeah. God. Continue.

Well, we're going to get into some horrible German stuff in a bit. Anyway, the issue with Q&N in particular is there is just no evidence. It seems to all come from wild claims by an anonymous person who goes by Q. It's just not enough. As for PizzaGate, that came from a leaked email from Clinton campaigner John Podesta, which conspiracy theorists believed contained secret codes about Democrats abusing kids in a pizzeria basement in D.C. Right.

And there was a satanic element too, right? That was kind of the whole most ridiculous thing. Like, child trafficking, I was kind of like, hey, I mean, I'm sure there are pedophiles and people using political cover. And then it was like, and then they're ripping their faces off and drinking their blood. And I was like, oh, never mind. Yeah. I mean, I've seen documentaries where Bill Gates is like, I think I might have told you about this before. I saw this documentary.

He, like, dried people's poo. He, like, drunk the water from their poo. Did you see that? No, but that's weird. Yeah, it's weird. But I just thought, like, this guy's not like. doing weird stuff to kids. Like, he's a geeky guy who just wants to find ways to get water to Africa.

Maybe I'm wrong, you know, I don't know, but I just don't, I don't see it with Bill Gates. No, I think the reason is that they throw, like, Tom Hanks in there, is they're trying to sort of slaughter or sacred cows by being like, everybody you thought was a good person is bad. So don't believe anything that you see with your own eyes because this thing could be wrong. And you can't just be like, they're doing it because they're sociopaths and bad people. that works for politicians you don't like because then you can justify your beliefs as moral and righteous.

But then you have to have, oh, they're not doing it just because they're sociopaths, they're satanic and it keeps, like what was the adrenochrome thing? It keeps you young forever. Oh my God. So of course you're going to point to Hollywood people where their livelihood depends on them

looking young, feeling young, being able to defy aging, which is something rich people who get put with a lot of makeup and CGI can do quite well on film. visibly for the whole world. Yeah. Right?

And so these are like, when you think about it that way, it's just these are the most obvious targets. And it also is sort of a point in the this is probably bullshit column for me anyway. Yeah. Yeah. The names I keep hearing, as you say, are Tom Hanks, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. Right. And the first thing I think when I hear that is like, as a Jewish person, like, thank

God they're not Jewish. Because it's usually always just the Jewish ones are the first ones everyone says. It almost makes me like feel like some kind of kinship with the conspiracy theory right-wing guys, even though I'm sure they wouldn't like me very much. Or you, for that matter. Nope. Or many of the listeners this podcast. I'm just sort of like, hey, thanks for not choosing the Jewish guys.

But then I see tweets of people listing Jews they suspect of stuff. Yes. And they do include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Tom Hanks in those. So they just sort of assume Elon Musk, they assume they're all Jewish and they're not. Yeah, which is kind of ironic. But also being accused of being Jewish is also something that seems very Nazi-ish. Like, oh, secret Jews, right? Making lists.

Yeah, and putting them on lists, exactly. The adrenochrome harvesting thing, that was for youth, right? Do you know anything about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's the belief that, yeah, adrenochrome harvesting or the harvesting of adrenaline from children's blood was being used by these demonic Democrats, business tycoons, and Hollywood actors.

And it is, yeah, to stay young, to get a thrill out of it and those kinds of things. As I was saying before, many of the accused of Jewish. Of course, there are many Jewish Republicans as well, but there's like a legacy of Jewish lefties and Jewish communists that remains particularly in America. So this is, of course, remarkably similar to the blood libel from the protocols of the Elder Zion, the conspiracy hoax about Jews taking the blood of babies and things that we discussed earlier. It's just like an updated version of that involving adrenaline.

Yeah, Jews being communist back in the day didn't help. And what's ironic is I think the Bolshevik revolution, which helped form the Soviet Union, it was like, Trotsky was Jewish and stuff. was like, yeah, Jews, communism. And then they turned around and they were like, yeah, we still don't like Jews, though. Let's treat all these people terribly anyway, even though they ran this. We can't win. Yeah, no, we can't win.

People really do want to, like I said, believe that their political enemies are evil and satanic because I guess it's probably a lot easier to be like, hey, my side is not only the side I agree with, we're the only side that is good. And not only are we good, we're the godly side and the other side is ungodly. That's a dangerous set of beliefs, right? And on the other hand, there are some evil people in the world. So I understand the impulse to go that route. But it sure sounds like what you do before you gear up for war or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. Well, those of us who said this was all total nonsense were somewhat tripped up by the appearance of Bill Clinton on the flight logs of business tycoon Jeffrey Epstein's jet, which is that big elephant on the island, as you mentioned before. Right. As predicted of Pizza Gate, it emerged that many big names had been visiting the island of horrors. and many had been involved in the sex trafficking of teenage girls who were underage and made to massage and give sexual duties to the guests of Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, it's funny because sexual favors sounds consensual somehow. I don't even know if that's proper. And it's not consensual, so it's not really a sexual favor.

It's a sexual obligation, which is gross. Yeah. Even when they describe it, I've seen a lot of news articles describing as the girls were made to have sex with. And it's like, well, I suppose, you know, in a very biological sense, that's what's happening, isn't it? But we don't tend to call sex anything that's non-consensual. I think it brings about, it's really difficult. I suppose, you know, words like rape and abuse is what was happening. It's hard to do that.

But then also when you say rape, it also kind of, you think like this person is beating up this other person and forcing themselves on them, not just, hey, you're away from your parents and you're underage and I'm giving you alcohol and I'm going to make you do something that you think you kind of want to do or you feel like you have to do. but you're not like crying the whole time in this sort of violent encounter, but it's still the same thing. I mean, the law treats it the same way. So I think we almost need to get more, if this is the right word, comfortable with the idea that that's what this is,

if we're going to call it what it is, because otherwise we're just using euphemisms for the abuse of children, which is kind of also gross, in my opinion. But anyway, I'm going off the rails here. I guess for conspiracy theories to be a thing, sometimes we have to have actual conspiracies that aren't just theories. I mean, look at Watergate, right? That was true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I'm often asked

by skeptics about conspiracies that turned out to be either true or potentially true. The idea of COVID being leaked in a Chinese lab was considered not only racist and wrong, but so conspiratorial that it forced social media to ban users or different platforms would ban users who even suggested it. And that's now one of the leading theories in the mainstream. The idea that high and powerful politicians and actors were abusing children was debunked as politically motivated and absurd, but Epstein's island was quite close to that. The youngest victims recruited by Galane Maxwell for this harem of horror was just 14 years old. That said, there are some key differences. These were, you know, differences to Q&ON. These were not all Democrats, for example. In fact, there are allegations in the newly unsealed documents that Donald

Trump visited Epstein at his home. Some say to get massages from these girls. Others say just to have meals with him. I don't know. Prince Andrew is supposed to be apolitical. He's not a Democrat. He's not even American again. He doesn't strike me as left-leaning or Democrat or Labor in the UK, but he is very much involved in this, probably more than any other name, actually, which is significant. Yeah. And look, he makes his staff cry, by the way, if they haven't lined up his immense teddy bear collection in the correct order. That's not really relevant, but I think it needs to be spoken about more. The teddy bear thing? Yeah, that does need to be spoken about more. That sounds totally psycho. Yeah, shout to people. They have to like come up and open the curtains for him. And if, you know,

he like calls his staff to come up and do things like that for him. He's like, he's just supposed to be awful. It's funny. You mentioned that I, I've got a friend who was grown up in a super wealthy Indian family. And now he's, I don't want to give away his identity, but now he's like, he loves doing crazy things that, that are just like terrible. Like, I'm going to run a 50 mile ultramarathon or whatever. Right. He's like, one of those guys. But he goes home and he's like, I can't even stay at my house at home. in India because it's so uncomfortable. I'll be standing there and my sister will be like getting out of the pool next to like this big cabinet of towels and she'll be like yelling for the house boy or gal to run out from like upstairs in the house to run downstairs, run downstairs, run outside,

open the cabinet and hand her a towel and she'll stand there freaking dripping while she's three feet away from this thing and he's like, are you kidding me? How do you look at yourself in the mirror and do that? And they're like, that's what these people are for. And he's just like, yeah, I hate everything here. He like can't deal it. I couldn't deal with that. I get it. I tell you what, if we grew up in a society where that was just the norm, we would just think that's the norm. You and I, as we are now, would get out of the pool and start screaming at a person to come up because that's just what everyone was, you know, and we know that because humans, and anyone who's listening going, no, no, but I wouldn't. It's like, well, history shows there were some people who

resisted the Nazis. There were some people who resisted like slavery and things like that. But the vast majority were just like jumping. aboard. Yeah, exactly. So my friend being the weirder that he is, you know, doing crazy stuff like running 50 mile ultramarathons, of course he's not into it because he's also like on a different planet from the rest of us in terms of what he's willing to put up with and deal with. So yeah, you're right. I, me being a basic bitch, I'd be like, where's my towel? Why aren't you standing next to why can't you be, you know, hit next to me all the time? What an image. I would be. I love that image of Jordan naked and dripping with water. I didn't say I was skinny dipping. I just said

I was swimming. Come on, man. Get your mind another guy. Oh, sorry. I forgot. I don't know why my mind went there. It's not a shower. He just did. I can't, you know, determinism and things. I can't control where my mind goes. That's right.

Anyway, as predicted by Q, Bill Clinton's name is also all over the flight logs for Epstein's personal plane with many other high-profile politicians. So is this a case of conspiracy theorists being right for the wrong reasons? Well, maybe, right? So, look, I'm not going to, like, go to bat for Bill Clinton on maybe not being a pervert because, you know, Monica Lewinsky. thing. But I also kind of find it hard to believe that every single person who went to that island for any reason over the period of, I don't know, like 20 years or whatever it is, was banging kids. That guy probably had hundreds or even thousands of people on that island for fancy parties,

and it wasn't like the demonic sessions that people are thinking of. That requires a totally different level of proof than your name being on a flight log. But even if a lot of that stuff did happen, which we, look, let's even just look at the stuff we know happened, right? Like the child sexual abuse by a few people on the island. It's a broken clock being right twice a day. There are so many conspiracy theories out there that some of them must accidentally, and I mean accidentally, just by pure coincidence, touch upon theories that could hold some truth in them. And again, we don't know that Clinton or Donald Trump, for that matter, actually engaged in anything with Epstein's traffic victims. Do we? We don't have testimony to that effect.

No, we don't. And it's important that we consider everyone involved innocent until found guilty. Yes. What I would say is that Prince Andrews' excuses about where he was. at the time that he was being accused of abusing these girls, that does not stack up. And he should be able to easily prove where he was at the time and hasn't done. His story about never sweating, that was one of his excuses. He said, I don't sweat. He said, this is one of the things where I never know, you know, how much has this story broken outside of the UK? Because he did this big interview in the UK where he was like, I'm going to go on record and I, without realizing, I mean, the guys, I don't say this about people usually, but the guy is, it seems to be an idiot.

He's a complete idiot. Yeah. And he doesn't realize that other people are not as stupid as him. And so he just comes out with stuff and he'll just say, well, she said I was sweating at the time and, you know, I actually have a condition whereby I don't sweat. There are millions of photos of Andrew walking around looking very, very sweaty. So it's just provably false immediately. Everybody knows he's actually particularly sweaty.

It's just an absurd thing for him to say. There's photographic evidence of this. Yeah. Funnily enough, the place he said he actually was rather than on the island abusing these women, Virginia Jiffrey was the main accuser. He said he was in a pizza place. Okay. Not helping, Andrew. Not helping. Here's a little scoop you all might not be aware of. When you use our promo code, you're not just scoring a discount. You're also giving the show a big boost with our sponsors. We don't earn commissions from sales, so it's not like a direct thing. But when companies see that listeners are engaging with the show, engaging with the ad, using the code, it encourages them to keep supporting us and providing the dollars that keep the show running.

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All right, how does this tie up with the movie, The Sound of Freedom? I interviewed one of the producers because I wanted a better look into the film without hearing from the lead actor, who frankly comes across as a total kook in many ways in a lot of interviews, where he just like wholeheartedly parrots,

Q and on conspiracy theories without any backing whatsoever. That was episode 872 for those who were interested. I had a producer in, and he was on the record and off the record was kind of like, yeah, no, we as an organization, like, never believed any of that. And the movie has that actor in it. And those are his views and it has nothing to do. Like the actor's sort of weird political conspiracy views got blended into the story of the movie.

And it just became a really gross mashup. And this film, this is a film that came out midway through last year, like I said. and was roundly criticized by the left and absolutely adored by the right. And I'm generalizing. But you can see the sentiment pretty clearly, and I'm not sure anybody would really disagree with that assessment. And as is the case with every topic ever, neither side could at all understand the other. And I wonder how we can make sense of this.

Because you have people writing in like, I was crying the whole time, and I immediately bought out a whole theater and invited all my friends to come see this movie so that they could find out about the evil in the world. And I'm just thinking like, what? What? Why? It wasn't moving enough for that, honestly, or I'm just like a bad, maybe that's... I've just not watched it. And it was important for me to watch it because of my job as a podcast, so I should have done. I'm not that interested in action films and like this. It just felt like something I didn't really want to watch and I didn't need to see all the sad stuff. I didn't want to feel sad. But yeah, loads of friends of mine came out, the same thing, like crying their eyes out and you've got to see this film is the best thing I've ever said. That's already I'm suspicious. It already feels religious when people are saying that. It was religious, yeah. Yeah, it is really, and it is actually religious.

I mean, that is a thing, isn't it? It was made by religious people. Jim Cavizal played Jesus before that. There is some religious aspect to it. But we should try and make sense of it because otherwise we're just all talking past each other too much. The Wright loved it because of the suggestion in the film of highly abusive people who were sex trafficking minors.

Jim Caviesel, as I say, who played Jesus, now plays Tim Ballard, an ex-U.S. government official on a mission to rescue children who have been sex traffic to Colombia. friends of mine who have seen the film, as I say, they've never been so moved in their lives, they sat through the movie in floods of tears, and that's understandable because it's a true story

about a truly emotional subject. Right, so I guess what's wrong with that, one might ask? Well, those who criticize the film say that it takes dramatic license in floating some of the Q&on conspiracy theories, including that anti-Semitic blood libel we spoke of. It feels to them too much like a jingoistic, religious attempt to paint the left as pedophiles and the right as saviors. The right pushes back,

saying, well, you may link it to Q&N on, but this is a true story. And it appears to be very much the true story of Operation Underground's Railroad, an anti-sex trafficking organization, who has been accused of exaggerating its feats. And in actual fact, the protagonist of the film, Tim Ballard, has been accused by multiple former staff members of sexual harassment himself, even said to have been coercing women into sexual acts during their sting operations. Yeah, so I had Tim Ballard on my show years ago, years ago, before any of this stuff came out, obviously. And it all seemed like just such an amazing tale until it started to unravel a couple of years later. And that was episode 369, by the way. I think I've left it up there,

even though it's like, well, you know, I mean, my Russell Brand episode is up there too. So all of this leaves us with a left who believe the film is hypocritical and exaggerated and aimed at them and a right who thinks the left are lying to cover up for their pedophile politicians. Well said. Yeah. And both sides have points. I mean, the left with its ideas around liberation, has in extreme moments gone a little bit that way or enabled a scenario. Take Germany in the 80s doctors with close links to the far left Green Party noticed there were too many homeless boys in Berlin and too many pedophiles for whom they could do nothing. And so they killed two birds with one stone. they place the boys into foster care with the pedophiles.

It's one of the worst, yeah, one of the worst abuses of children on a state level of all time and an example of what can be allowed to happen at the very far edges of the left. The French far-left intelligentsia, including Sartre and Foucault, were in favor of legalizing adult child sexual relations. So this is a weakness in the ideologies of the far, far-left, just as there are issues in the far-far-right, but it's been weaponized by the far-right, and understandably so. but also often weaponizing and misleading people. Hungary's right-wing authoritarian leader, Victor Orban, is one such person. He's focused his campaign on hunting down pedophiles and has increased harsher punishments to those who engage in it.

Okay, good. But he snuck in homophobic laws. Of course. Yeah. But back up the truck. Forcing homeless kids into foster care with pedophiles? Yeah. That is really gross.

That has to at least make the top five list of terrible things. Germans have done over the past hundred years. That's sort of only half a joke, I guess. It's really fascinating to get an understanding of where these two sides stand on sex trafficking and pedophilia. And by the way, I used to live in Germany. I've got German family. Like I basically also from Austria, German, my family's German. So I'm not really like, I hope Germans aren't like, wow, I didn't know Jordan hated Germans. I don't. I'm just picking on you guys today. But what about the trafficking itself? Is it still happening in America? I mean, it's got to be where a big country and lots of gross stuff happens here. Yeah, yeah. It goes on.

America, despite a prevailing myth that it only happens in developing countries. In fact, the US is one of the most active places in the world for trafficking across cities and suburban and rural areas. This is a problem that affects every country in the world. 27% of trafficking victims are children, and two out of three of them are girls. But it does happen to boys too, which is often forgotten. Sex trafficking is a kind of human trafficking, the other kinds usually being for labor. Think of the pig-butchering scams whereby people in East Asia are kids.

kidnapped and sent to prison-like casinos where they are made to work nonstop by calling us to try to trick us into giving up our money. If they don't fool enough of us, they're tortured. There's, of course, a fine line between human trafficking for labor and for sex, and it is thought that many of the trafficking victims in the pig-butchering scams are forced into sex as well. Yeah, I've actually done a few episodes on the pig-butchering scams, one to outline the scam, and then another one to outline the trafficking and slavery elements. So the episode 7 37 and 833 by the way. And I actually uncovered, helped uncover a pig-butchering scam in the UAE. And I'm still working with the FBI on this because somebody who worked in a scam center reached out to me and sent

me a bunch of evidence and stuff. It was like, and he's like, yeah, I was sort of tricked into coming here because I speak Chinese. It's like a Pakistani dude. And he's like, they kill people. They torture people with tasers. And he told me all about how it works. And I have these recorded calls and like these telegram chats at this guy. It's absolutely insane. It's like a true crime podcast, but I'm living it. Nuts. That's crazy. That's the life of Jordan Harbinger, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, he's currently sort of off the grid, and I'm like, okay, is he dead? So, I don't know, TBD. I hope he's all right. Yeah, me too. Sex trafficking is, of course, associated with organized crime, huge mafias who round up children and adults, two-thirds of whom in the U.S. are U.S. citizens.

In terms of America's history, we can go back to the arrival of early colonists to the Americas who would take and trade Native American women to be their wives. The same happened to African American slaves. Much later on in 1910, they brought in the Man Act as M-A-Double-N. This was named for Congressman James Robert Mann from Illinois. The Man Act made it a felony to traffic any woman or girl for the purposes of prostitution or debauchery. However, it became unofficially known as the white slavery. law. It was designed ostensibly to prevent sex trafficking, but was really used to punish consensual

interracial relationships. So those are the horrible racist foundations of sex trafficking in the U.S. Wow, that is an inauspicious start. And sex trafficking went on to become a huge mafia industry, like you said. So what sort of mafia stuff? Because when I think of, I don't know, Italian mafia, I think of like extortion of a construction site or the stuff Sammy the Bull talked about when he was on the show. Can you tell me a little bit about that kind of stuff? So it does. It depends on where that sort of mafia is from. I see. So you get this sort of the caninas.

That would be the sort of Latino mafia gangs. They've got these big sort of canina places where that would go on. Apparently with sort of Asian gangs, I'm talking East Asian, it would be the massage parlors and things like that. Yeah, I can go into more of that. I've got that sort of lined up to talk about in a bit. Okay. At your own pace here.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Let's keep talking about the sex trafficking. Can't get enough. Yeah. No, it's a whole. It's a whole.

It is a horrible situation. The thing is, yet again, we're faced with a politicized problem and guessing games. This is the kind of thing that governments and colleges can only really estimate because so much of this is underground and unknowable. So you get these figures from official sources that vary wildly. The US State Department, for example, estimated in 2001 that 50,000 to 100,000 women and girls were trafficked into the US. By 2003, that estimate seemed to have been reduced to 18,000 to 20,000.

By 2005, we were at 14,500 to 17,500. Okay, so that's for sex trafficking, or that's just like people coming into the U.S. illegally, period? It's not people coming to U.S. illegally, but it is all trafficking, so it will include labor trafficking. Okay, that's what I meant, yeah. Yeah, it's estimated that about half of that estimation, if you're following these estimations of estimations, is for sweatshops and other kinds of hard labor. Got it. In any case, in the seven years following, the first estimate of 50 to 100,000 women and girls per year, the U.S. was only actually able to identify just over 1,000 victims, so far, far fewer.

However, other studies have figures that show that girls and women are being sex trafficked at a way higher rate. I found one study by Deliver Fund, claiming 15,000 to 50,000 women and girls are sold into sex trafficking in the U.S. each year, but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that hundreds of thousands were being sex trafficked. Let me pause this because I want to highlight a little bit. Normally when I see like one estimate that's super high and another one that's much lower, I always look at the source, right? Because if the super high one is like, this private company that sells this device that prevents this, estimates a million people need it.

And then it's like the government says that 1,000 people need it. It's like, okay, look at the incentives. But this is kind of like deliver fund is a, you know, it's a fund. They're estimating 15,000 to 50,000. But the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is not really like under any sort of pressure to inflate stats here, most likely, estimates that it's hundreds of thousands just for sex trafficking. That seems a lot more likely, actually. So that's scary. Quite possibly, but then like you say, why wouldn't deliver fund go with those same claims? Yeah, I don't know.

They've used, you know, various different ways to get their surveys. And, you know, could there be a reason for, and I don't want to get into conspiracy theories on skeptical Sundays? There's a reason the U.S. government might want to cause more fear than is necessary. Maybe they get funding, too, for sex trafficking if they over as it. Who knows? It's hard, man. You really need like an exhaustive evaluation of everybody's incentives who are making these estimates in order to find out where the BS is, which is why this stuff is so hard, especially when it's a black market, which it is. Yeah, it's impossible. This is the skeptical Sunday part of sex trafficking. You know, to what extent is all of this exaggerated and overblown? To what extent is it going on

at great levels, but simply untrackable off the radar, the black market, like you say. One of the most conservative estimates I could find came in 2019 by the University of Cincinnati, who found 1,032 victims between 2014 and 2016 and 4,000 people during that time who had been deemed at risk of being trafficked. But these are just such unknowables, unfortunately. Yeah, I suppose even if it happens to one person, right, it's a terrible tragedy. So even if the numbers aren't anywhere near as high as initially thought, the fact that hundreds or thousands, single-digit thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands of people,

are being sold into sex trafficking? I mean, it's gross. Who is doing the sex trafficking? You mentioned organized crime, but what are we talking about here? Yeah, it's believed that a lot of this goes on through, as I was saying, some of the massage parlors, canteena bars, and residential brothels.

What's a residential brothel? Is that like someone's house? I suppose it is, or a brothel that's just part of the neighborhood, isn't it? Yeah, I don't know. It makes me think of Buenos Aires, where they've got all these little motels where you pay per hour sort of thing to rent the rooms. You know, they look very residential.

So I'm just thinking of those. Oh, dude, this reminds me. Super short story. I walked into this place that was nearby my old place in Hollywood, and it was like a therapy place. And I checked reviews and they were okay. I didn't realize that they had bought the location of a previous physical therapy place and turned it into what I'm going to assume is kind of shady.

So I walk in there and I'm like, this is a weird environment, but whatever. You know, a lot of like massagie places are. They like have candles and stuff and quiet music. So I was like, all right, it's a little tacky, but whatever. And there was this, like, kind of like big, rough-looking dude in a chair. And I was like, oh, hey, go ahead, you were first. And he was like, no, no, no, go ahead. And I was like, all right, that's weird.

He's just, maybe he's waiting. Later, of course, I realized this is their security guy, right? But I didn't know. And these Asian women, like Chinese women come up and they're like, hey, how can I help you? Very broken English. And I'm like, yeah, I want a massage. And they were like, okay. So I go in and I get the worst, like, crappiest.

And I'm like, these people are totally unqualified for this. That was pretty pissed off. And I was like, yeah, I'll just never come back here. I don't want to complain about it. So I go to pay, and I notice that, like, there's, like, a TV and a little refrigerator, and I see, like, a light on in the back room, and there's a girl just laying down on the mattress, and I ask them in Chinese, do you live here? And she's like, yep.

And then I was like, you live here in the place? Yeah. How long have you been here? Oh, just a few months. And then another woman comes out from, like, back, and she's like, she tells them in Chinese. She's, like, stop talking right now. And, like, this really snippy way. And I was like, all right, bye.

and then I left, and it took a while for everything to sink in, and I was like, I'm pretty sure I just got a crappy massage because this is actually a brothel, and those women live in the back. And she was like, too new and not clued in to be like, maybe I shouldn't tell the customers that we live in this commercial building on mattresses on the floor. It was so creepy. And so I called the police. And I was like, hey, I think people live in here. And they were like, okay, thanks. I told my friend who's a lawyer and he's like, yeah, I wouldn't get too involved in that because the reason you found out about it is because you went in there to, like, get a massage.

So I'm not sure that you want to like go on record all as being like a customer of this place. And here I am talking about it in this podcast, but I was just dumb. I mean, this is like 20 years ago. I really didn't know. Yeah. And remember, that wasn't actually you, was it? It was someone else. Oh, right.

It was a friend. I've told me the story. But that's what I'm thinking of when I think of residential brothel. Like the women live in the brothel, I guess. Yeah, maybe that is what that is then. You know, and I was just imagining a place in a residential area that looks like part of the street. It used to be small-time opportunists, but is now being, the sex trafficking, that is. It's now being run by migrant smuggling operations of Mexican, Eastern European and Asian crime organizations.

The FBI has also reported that infamous street gangs, such as the Bloods, have been involved in sex trafficking, a 2017 analysis of more than a thousand convicted sex traffickers compiled intriguing demographics, around 75% of them were male and 25% female. So it's predominantly male, but 25% is still surprisingly high for women, which goes to show that our instincts can be wrong. I just imagined them being almost entirely dudes. Yeah. And the women get into it younger, which does in my mind raise suspicions about,

you know, how many of them are on that line, that blurred line between perpetrator and victim, themselves, you know, where they sort of pushed into it themselves and they're a bit younger than these men. But they are on average 26 and the men are on average 29. 71% were African-American, 20% Caucasian and 4% Hispanic. That's interesting about the women being a little younger. I'm putting words in your mouth here maybe, but you do wonder to what extent they're also coerced. You wonder how much is just a case of people being trafficked themselves and later becoming traffickers because this is all they know. What do we know? about typical victims here?

Well, regarding the victims, there is a great variety. This affects runaway children and homeless people, but young people are also being targeted through social media. As for foreigners who are imported to the US, what tends to happen is that the victims first find themselves in abject poverty due to their unfortunate circumstances, then they're swayed by the promise of a secure route into the US and false promises of citizenship or a passport.

People who go into industry such as hospitality, opairs, modeling, or bar and club work are particularly at risk. And then there are kids who are groomed by neighborhood pimps. Around half of them have a history of homelessness. These would be American kids. And they come from broken homes generally. They're then prevented from communicating with their families. And they are often coercive techniques used to initiate a kind of Stockholm syndrome whereby the victims identify with their captors. I've got to say a lot of what you've described certainly sounds like cult tactics, the love bombing, isolating victims from their families, trying to trigger that Stockholm syndrome.

What are some of the, are there like different types of sex trafficking? It's interesting you refer to cults because the B-I-T model, B-I-T-E, developed by anti-cult and former cultist himself, academic Stephen Hassan, is often used to try to get victims out of the coercive clutches of pimps and traffickers. The model describes four categories of coercion used on sex trafficking victims, behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control. And it's used as a way of trying to reach victims who feel they've lost their identity in the cult-like setting. Yeah, Stephen's been on the show before as well, episodes 237 and 471. He consults for us a lot on Feedback Friday because we have a lot of people who write in that are like in cults, family members in a cult, they escaped a cult, whatever it is, cults galore. Yeah, he's like the OG. cult expert when it comes to the persuasion techniques used in cults or other coercive situations.

Yeah. We've mentioned gangs, of course, who create this atmosphere, but there are also, of course, street pimps who coercively control victims, and there are organized crime operations. But we also have more subtle kinds of sex trafficking. For example, it's considered sex trafficking if a minor is not necessarily being controlled by a person, but feels as though they have to perform sex acts to survive. That's called survival sex. families force their kids to perform sex acts in exchange for things like drugs and money.

That's familial trafficking and is particularly difficult to catch. We don't know if familial is more common than other forms of sex trafficking, but we do know that sexual abuse in itself is most commonly committed by a perpetrator known to the victim. In fact, less than 20% of those sex offenses are committed by strangers. And then there are religiously motivated forced marriages, with Pakistan often mentioned as the go-to country. Typically children from these extreme Muslim families are flown out to Pakistan

and forced to marry a cousin or friend of the family. The FLDS, which is the fundamentalist outcrop of Mormonism, has been accused of trafficking people across state borders to be part of polygamous relationships. Then, and this is pretty horrific, there's something called cybersex trafficking, which involves the kidnapping, trafficking, and live streaming of cyber-streaming of,

sexual acts carried out on victims. My gosh. Okay, there's a lot there. So I definitely have heard that a lot of this stuff is caused by familial connections or people you know. And I was going to jump on you for saying, then, and this is pretty horrific as if the rest of it isn't. But then when you told me about cyber sex trafficking, I realized that this is even worse, because I can't even imagine what kind of hell that must be. So you're being abused. You know a bunch of random gross people are getting off on it on the dark web. No one is coming to help you. They're all enjoying your suffering at some level. I've heard that this has surged recently, especially because now you have cryptocurrency. So the users are not tracked. It's much safer

for gross criminals to view this stuff with impunity and never get caught. You've got your VPN, you know, your private network, you get your payment method completely anonymous. Their identities are hidden and they feel safe doing this. And so the kind of restraints are off of a lot of these disgusting people. Yeah. No, absolutely. It's horrific what goes on out there. And it does make you wonder about humanity. Yeah. And then there's, you know, there's a traditional, let's call it, sex trafficking, the traditional sex trafficking, the type we're seeing in movies such as The Sound of Freedom,

but also taken. That was another one, the Liam Neeson vehicle. Yeah. They tend to involve poverty-stricken individuals who are sold a lie of a better life before being forced into slavery, and that could be labor or sexual. You're listening to Skeptical Sunday on the Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting this show.

Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well. Consider supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Going back to the Sound of Freedom, obviously there's this debate over how much it stretched the truth or to what extent the main character Tim Ballard is abusive in real life.

It's based on a true story, right? So, do you know about what went on there? what that whole background is? The specific story depicted in Sound of Freedom centers around the rescue of a young girl from Colombia, but the narrative is actually a composite of multiple real-life operations conducted by Ballad and his team.

In the film, the girl is shown as being kidnapped and sold into a trafficking ring. So I realize this all sounds a little vague and abstract, and I think that's partly a good thing because it reflects the reality. It is murky, underground, difficult to find concrete facts about even a story like a girl

kidnapped, taken to Colombia in the movie, we find out that's an amalgamation of many stories. So what even is real? So I do want to share a couple of stories of real people and exactly what happened to them and how it happened. First, there's the story of Shandra Wauruuntu, who had a promising job in finance in Indonesia before she lost her job due to racial persecution and started looking for something else. She found an advert for a job in the States at a hotel in Chicago. Now, the agent who met her at JFK Airport in New York, took her to a van, confiscated her passport, and put a gun to her head. Jesus. After that, she was trafficked between brothels in New York and Connecticut and forced to perform sexual acts on people almost 24-7.

She eventually escaped by jumping out of a bathroom window in Brooklyn. That is horrible. Imagine how desperate you have to be to jump out of... We're probably not talking about a first-floor bathroom window. that poor woman. It just makes you wonder whether customers are the brothels. You gotta wonder,

who goes in there who's not just a dumb kid who's misled by Yelp reviews? Yeah. Who goes in there to purposely patronize a brothel and like knowing what they're gonna buy

when they get there? Do they have any idea of the situation of the women that are in there? That's, I gotta wonder. Would they have cared either way? I mean, if that's the United States, I assume it's got to happen

in a similar way in most Western countries. Yeah. You know what? That actually reminds me, as we speak, of a big situation that sort of blew up on YouTube a year ago with a guy called Lloyd Evans who is a prominent ex-Jahover's Witness. And he's like, you know, in YouTube there's all these communities. And he's like maybe the biggest or one of the biggest ex-Jahovers' Witness YouTubers YouTubers, who sort of speaks out against the church. And the Church of Jehovah's Witness, like many of the religions and things, has hidden all sorts of sexual violence and things like that. And he's been exposing it, which is great. But he's also taken, you know, a lot of people have given him contributions for his channel. And it was found that he had, and he admitted to this, that he left his wife to go to, I want to say, I think it was Thailand. It's always Thailand. Yeah, he was sleeping with, or patronizing sex workers.

And he admitted all of this. And then a lot of his viewers were like, well, hang on a minute. You know, we give you money to continue your work, which is against all sorts of sex trafficking. which we know goes on in Jehovah's Witness circles. And here you are, going out to Thailand, and you know full well that many of the women, maybe not all of them, that you went to see and were paying money to,

will have been sex trafficked. And he just refused to see that link at all, but it caused an absolute furor online. Jeez, how does he get caught? Did he admit doing this? He suddenly told two or three of the people who were also ex-Jahovas witnesses who worked with him. It was like a confession.

Wow. And there are all sorts of theories as to why he told them that. Some people have said, you know, it's that kind of making them complicit. You know, once you've told people, that's what some people do in those kinds of situations. So those people then were like, look, we've got to talk about this kind of thing. And then he had to like make a video admitting to all of it. Oh my God. That's so embarrassed.

I'll never sort of be able to get my mind around paying for sex. It just, it's, I can't imagine it's enjoyable to do that. Like, isn't the point? You stopped doing it. didn't you? When did you stop beating your wife, Jordan? Oh, God. Isn't that the classic loaded quote?

The whole point of sex is the other person actually likes you. I thought that was the point anyway. You know, like, isn't that the point? I suppose, you know, because I've never done that either, right? But I suppose there's, who was it, Kundera. So Milan Kundera, in the unbearable likeness of being, he wrote about sexuality as uncovering the one millionth or something like that that you can only see.

in the act of sex. He wrote about a protagonist who kept cheating on his wife. And he said, like, his wife's friends were nowhere near as beautiful as her. They were nowhere near as intelligent or interesting or sexy or whatever it might be. But they had one thing she didn't have, which was that they weren't her. And it becomes about, for certain men, I think, an addiction, like a Pokemon kind of thing of trying to collect all those one, one millionth that you don't see of these people until you're in a sexual relationship or sexual situation with them. whether they're entirely fulfilled when they get that one millionth through prostitution, I couldn't say.

I believe that's what they're pursuing. Yeah, that's what the addiction is, right? You never scratched that itch. I don't know. I can't imagine it's that good. That's all. Who knows? Maybe I'm missing out.

I'm content with not ever knowing. Right in to Jordan Harbinger.com or whatever. Write in and tell us your experiences. With prostitutes, yeah. Back to exactly. Back to a very morose topic. There's a variety of ways that sex trafficking is carried out. One example of the kind we see in movies, the kind we have in our minds, is the case of Sarah Forsyth in the UK.

Again, there is this familiar idea of seeking a job abroad. Sarah left Newcastle in England for Amsterdam, in Holland, where she'd applied for a job working in a nursery. Just 19 years old, upon arriving, she was held at gunpoint again, and that's the thing. Yeah, and abducted. Then she was forced to perform sexual acts for 20 men a night in the red light. district of Amsterdam. As you say, you wondered to what extent the clients of the night, you know, these people who go to the red light district, to what extent they know that this is going on, or if that might have even changed things for these men, you know, if they're getting

off on this kind of thing. Sarah says she was shown a video of a young woman from Thailand in a similar situation to her who was murdered by her pimps for not making enough money. Oh my God. She believes her death was used in snuff videos, which are, you know, videos that go out on the dark web of people being killed. So again, things are hazy because some people don't believe in snuff films that they're just hoaxes. But Sarah is convinced that every time a woman disappeared from her window position in the Red Light District, she'd been used in a snuff film and therefore murdered.

God, and this is in Amsterdam. When I think the Netherlands, I usually think, like, Van Gogh, it's relatively safe. There's all these people that are terrible dancers and, you know, smoke marijuana at the coffee shops and run a general, you know, what do they make their semiconductor lithography machine? Like, you don't think, oh, yeah, the mafia or whatever is running this red light district that is just crazy and lawless. Who runs that?

Is it Dutch people or is that like a Russian mafia layer to Amsterdam? That could be a skeptical Sunday in itself, couldn't it? Yeah, I'm so curious. Have you been there? To Amsterdam? Yeah. And the red light district. Of course, you walk through it because it's kind of like near,

if memory serves near the train station, I went there in the 90s when I was an exchange student. And I remember, because people like, you have to check it out. So we, as all a group of students went there with our volunteers to just like walk through during the daytime, there are women in their underwear in these windows. And they're like, hey, what's going on? And I remember chatting with one because we stopped. And she was like, where are you from?

I was like, Detroit. And she's like, I'm from Detroit. And we just riffed about like where she went to school. And she was older than me by quite a bit because I was only 17. And I remember just being like, wow, this is like a normal person. and she's in a window trying to get like random dudes off the street to go make, it just, it was sort of like this surreal sad moment.

It was so bizarre. You should have paid her for the time you took up of her. Now that I think about it, I'm like, oh, we stopped in front of her window, like other people couldn't see her. We definitely cost her like $100 or something. Man. But no, I know what you mean. And it's really, I remember when I was there, a similar thing happened.

And I then happened to see the same woman in a cafe the next day working there because they often have two jobs. And they're often just, you know, trying to get themselves through university. And there is a very different, despite, obviously, the story I've just told, it does appear to be, you know, because it's legal, a much safer, more regulated alternative to what happens in countries where that is illegal. I'm not, you know, pro or against the legalization of prostitution. I haven't really considered it very much. Just in Holland, it just tends to sort of be that way. Gosh. It's a surreal experience, yeah. The commodification of people, you know, it's odd. I agree. That's the thing that doesn't make sense to me. I have to do a deeper. dive on the Sarah Forsyth case because why hijack somebody who's from a Western country with strong diplomatic relations and a strong military? Why kidnap someone like that at gunpoint when you have legal prostitution and possibly a ton of other people that you could get who are not going to like try to escape? That part I'm just like why there's obviously I'm missing some pieces to that puzzle I think. Yeah, I don't know enough and she's written a whole book about it as well.

Yeah, I don't think she's lying about it. I'm just saying I don't know. understand why the people would do that to her. It seems like there's a million easy ways to do that without being a criminal scumbag. But then again, mafia criminal scumbags, going to be scumbags. If you're already a criminal scumbag, you might as well continue down that path. I guess so, yeah. I guess the difference is that the other women you presume, I don't know, again, we'd have to look into the red light district, but I don't know to what extent the women who work there take the full percentage of what they earn. Yeah, I don't know. And they also decide, you know, I'll sleep with four or five men tonight. And I have the right to refuse them.

Whereas when you've got a pimp with a gun in your back, you know, you've just got to take everyone, 20 a night, and give all your money to these people. Yeah, that's disgusting. That's the West. What does sex trafficking look like outside the West? It seems like it's got to be awful. I mean, worse or equally awful, at the very least? It's just all awful, yeah.

I mean, in Ghana, in Africa, you have what are called connection men, and they hang around the borders transporting mostly women with fake visas. From there, they're transported to the states and certain countries in Europe. There's a whole network set up whereby Ghanaian and Nigerian women go to the same parts of Europe. So it's like these real almost railroads, but across the whole sort of world, paths that are set for sex slaves. Ugandans are sold to Sudan as sex slaves. That's just the place Ugandans are sold to. Women are recruited from South Africa and sent to certain parts of Europe and Asia.

Across the Americas, sex trafficking is rife. as well. They all seem to pass through Mexico, whether on their way into or out of the US. And then there's Asia, India, Japan, South Korea and Thailand in particular. For example, in India, many women are trafficked from Bangladesh and Nepal. In India, it's estimated there are 3 million sex workers, 40% of whom were trafficked as children. Oh, wow. There are 40,000 child prostitutes in Sri Lanka. But no country, it seems, is devoid of this. Iran and Israel are enemies, especially at the moment, and their supporters and detractors are engaging in yet more politicisation around the idea of sex trafficking. As it turns out, both countries, just like the US, the UK,

and most other countries are unexceptional, their hotspots for trafficking. Just like the aforementioned blood libel, Israel's critics and anti-Semites, and those are not the same thing, of course, even if there is an overlap, push this idea that Israel is somehow exceptional in its desire to welcome sex traffickers. It's a weird one because when we discuss the problems that the US or Mexico have with sex trafficking, the countries are somehow seen as pawns, bystanders or victims being overrun by nefarious pimps and cartels.

With the criticism of Israel, you get this sense that the people criticizing, imagine Israel inviting, welcoming or reveling in the sex trafficking. And that may seem exaggerated by me, I suppose, but as the late Christopher Hitchens once borrowed from chariots of fire, anti-Semitism is something you catch on the edge of a remark. The truth is, of course, that Israel as a country is at the forefront of the fight against human trafficking in all its forms. That said, it is fallible like any other country, and much of its recent sex trafficking

issues have spawned from an unlikely place, the Russia-Ukraine war. Many Ukrainian women have fled to Israel and other parts of the world with the promise of being high-class prostitutes, and it turns out to be far worse than expected. One place where Israelis and Palestinians seem to work well together, is unfortunately as operators of sex trafficking. While Israel is making efforts to clamp down on sex trafficking, it's fair to say it has lagged behind and has a lot of work to do. In Palestine, we don't even have figures, but trafficking and sex-based crimes are thought to be prevalent. Some blame Israel's occupation. Others blame the prominence of gender-based violence in the country. In the West Bank and Gaza, almost 30% of married women are subjected to

violence by their husbands. 14% of single women are beaten by other members of their households. Oh my God. That's according to a survey. So of course, you know, it could be higher. People are having to sort of grade themselves on that. So if there's a lot of secrecy, it might be higher. Israel, Palestine, the U.S. and Mexico are countries I've zoned in on. But the reality is that this is something that affects every country on earth and is particularly brutal to women. What are some of the lasting consequences to the victims? I mean, this is all super traumatizing and horrific. Well, people who survive sex trafficking go through a lot of tough health issues, similar to what victims of domestic violence or forced labor face. They often catch diseases like

STIs because they don't know much about them or how to prevent them and you can't really prevent them when someone's raping you, of course. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that only one of 23 trafficked women interviewed felt well informed about sexually transmitted infections or HIV before leaving home. They also suffer from physical problems like injuries, hunger and pains in different parts of their body, and these issues usually don't get treated while they are trapped, so it can be long-lasting even after escaping. Mentally, it's really hard for them too. They deal with a lot of anxiety, sadness and PTSD because of the unthinkable trauma. It's a cycle and a downward spiral because these mental health disorders also make them feel alone

and ashamed. Many of these survivors end up using drugs or alcohol to try to handle the pain and stress. Sometimes the traffickers force them to use these substances to keep them under control and they become addicted. Even if they weren't forced, many still use drugs or alcohol to cope with their experiences. Because they're often scared of getting in trouble with the law, especially if they don't have the right papers, they get stuck in this bad cycle. And sadly, women in this situation usually have a much shorter life with studies showing their average lifespan is around 34 years. that's at least according to data in Colorado Springs about women in prostitution in general. Man, dead by 34.

That is so sad. That is absolutely crazy. Gosh. So what is being done to stop this? I know there's NGOs and stuff, but like, what else? Yeah. And also, I was just thinking with 34, I'm sure a lot of them must live long lives still,

which means if that's the average, it's going to be much lower than 34 for a lot of women or girls. It doesn't even bear thinking. I don't even think about that. But yeah, in terms of what's being done worldwide, getting the word out so that people are a bit more skeptical. Firstly, about the huge numbers, there's not scaremongering and stuff, but also so that people are skeptical as in potential victims. You know, so they know like, hey, this looks like a cool holiday, but let's be really careful here. It's not as simple as that because Sarah Forsyth was actually already a little suspicious when she walked into her Amsterdam nightmare.

But it can only help for people to learn about trafficking from a young age. Some of the ways we're all getting the message out there is through marketing, such as January, being National Human Trafficking Prevention Month. By improving all facets of society, we can curb sex trafficking numbers, not just education, for example, about trafficking itself, but just education, being better able to find other types of work. A lot of these stories are about young people who found themselves out of work, and often with no prospects. It's difficult, though. It's thought that the average age of entry into street prostitution in the US is 21student. 12 to 14 years old. And that's often where malicious people are finding these kids, or a few years on adults to traffic to brothels on the streets. Often it's not a job offer like the above examples, but vulnerable people looking to make money in the sex industry who believe

they're going to retain their freedom while working. And that turns out not to be the case. Pimps and traffickers begin withholding payment, keeping them locked up, forcing them to overwork and so on. So it's no easy task to prevent this from happening. Yeah, I've kind of seen a little bit of this myself. I worked at a security company in Detroit in the 90s. I was 17, 18 years old. I worked there for a few years. And I remember one venue, I was new to this venue. It was a new contract for the company. And it was like this after hours party place. So the bars close a two, can't get alcohol. You go to this like crappy place that has a pool table and an open, you know, a bar with a bartender and you just pay in cash. And it was like a lot of strippers would go there. Exotic dancers, I should say, would go there after the strip clubs closed, and they would work there. And it was, it was gross. I saw a girl there who was maximum 14 years old. And my colleagues and I were like, what the hell? We told our boss and we're like, this is not okay. What the hell? Like after our strip club, yeah, not our favorite venue, but like, consenting adults,

we're breaking liquor, well, they're breaking liquor laws. Like, we've got bigger fish to fry. Who cares? At least these people aren't beating each other up, shooting each other, doing drugs, whatever. But then when we saw that, a bunch of us were like, I'm never working here again. And our boss was like, yeah, we're never working here again. We are not coming back here. And that was just a horrifying wake-up call to the severity of this problem. Because we were like, what is a 14-year-old girl? Like, where are her parents?

What is happening? And she was definitely, like, being paraded around. She wasn't right in the head. So we're like, what drugs is she on right now? This 14-year-old girl. And from what you've told me today, I just, I feel like the state of affairs is as far follows. The idea of sex trafficking is often weaponized and politicized. It's exaggerated. It's a large part of conspiracy theories that seek to expose elite figures like Clinton, Trump, whatever, Bill Gates

gets an honorable mention here or dishonorable mention. But on the other hand, we have to be careful not to dismiss the whole thing because sex trafficking, even if it may have been exaggerated a lot by our own government back in the early 2000s or whatever, it's a massive industry that ruins thousands and thousands of lives. And Epstein was, surprise, surprise, doing horrible things. on that island, and networks run by organized crime organizations are currently trafficking people for sex, many of whom are young girls across countries and continents to satisfy the sick perversions of humans the world over. That's the long and short of it, I think. It's a mess, and not enough is being done or even

can be done about it. That's certainly true in the case of Prince Andrew, who faces several accusations and doesn't seem to be being held accountable. I've done two episodes recently on my podcast Heretics with Insiders, who explain quite how does it. dark Andrew is and how weird he is. So I hope anyone interested will check those out. And although this is a depressing subject, I hope people will take heart from this because we know that, firstly, sex trafficking is not quite as prevalent as the media suggests. And secondly, by learning about it, talking about it, and spreading the word, we're helping to inform more potential victims about the dangers. Thanks, Andrew, for what was a dark and definitely murky episode of Skeptical

Sunday. A lot to think about here, man. Hug your kids, y'all. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Amanda Katarzi, who was raised in a cult, and later sex and labor trafficked. The women were trained to be insanely submissive. Like, you could never say no to any man. And then the men were trained in a very military way. These people are well-armed and well-trained. And it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil, and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the kingdom of God. When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old, being courted by men twice my age, three times my age, to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous.

So I moved to California to go to school, and I start training in MMA. And my trafficker was there. He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, you know, I like you. And so now we're dating. So this is my first adult relationship. He's twice my age at this point. And then he would always take me up to his cabin on the mountain,

which was really far away from everybody else. No phone service, isolation, and it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could. Oops, you accidentally got getting raped. That was very common of going to go train, and then all of a sudden, now that you fought 12 rounds, now you're going to be raped. A girl ran a red light and teabone my truck.

So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, hey, I almost just died a car accident. He said, is your face fucked up? And I'm like, no. And he said, well, you're still fookable then. Something isn't right here. This isn't who I want to be. This isn't what I want.

And it was like I was coming out of water. I had this moment of clarity and I knew something wasn't right. I knew this wasn't what I wanted and I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation because I knew it'd get sucked back in. To hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Special thanks to Andrew Gold. Thank you so much for listening to the show as well. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday over to me.

Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. Show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support. support the show all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Andrew Gold on his podcast, Heretics, anywhere you get your podcast, especially on YouTube. He's got a crushing YouTube right now. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson,

Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millio Campo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on skeptical Sunday. If you think we've really dropped the ball on something, let us know. I know this is a dark episode. We tried to lighten it up here and there with some jokes. Maybe not all of you will be receptive to that, but please keep in mind, it's hard for us to do stuff like this. It is dark. It is a little gross. It's a lot gross. Anyway, y'all know how to reach me, Jordan atjurbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the

episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like Podcast? If you're looking for a new show to add to your rotation, something that'll make you stop mid-dishwashing and go, wait, what that actually happened? You got to subscribe to What Was That Like? It's real people telling the most surreal moments of their lives, and they're not just giving you the highlights. They're walking you through it from the inside as the person who actually lived it, which means you're basically getting a front row seat to the chaos. One episode is about Scott getting

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