Vice President Kamala Harris is back to making misleading statements about human trafficking. In a speech to the President's Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, Harris—who has a long history of dishonesty about sex trafficking—said that "in 2020 alone, there were 11,000 instances of human trafficking that were reported in the United States."
Where did Harris get that figure? From calls to the Polaris Project's national human trafficking hotline, a source of misleading statistics that I've been warning about for years. Media and politicians routinely cite Polaris' numbers as if they accurately reflect instances of human trafficking (a category that includes forced prostitution and forced labor in other categories), and they use these numbers to push for all sorts of policies. But the large numbers Polaris puts out are not—thank goodness—verified cases of abuse and criminal activity; they're just a tally of contacts to the hotline. That includes pranks, cranks, and people reporting sightings of consensual sex work.
