Carl Bialik is no longer at the Wall Street Journal -- for decades, he wrote a column as the WSJ's "numbers guy". Here he tries to get to the bottom of the $20 billion dollar figure often-quoted as a child porn market size.
Measuring the Child-Porn Trade
By Carl Bialik
The Wall Street Journal Online
April 18, 2006 12:01 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000
Unlike, say, the soft-drink or airline industries, the child-pornography industry doesn't report its annual sales to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yet in a press release ahead of a recent House of Representatives hearing aimed at curbing the industry, Texas Republican Joe Barton said, "Child pornography is apparently a multibillion ... my staff analysis says $20 billion-a-year business. Twenty billion dollars." Some press reports said the figure applied only to the industry's online segment. The New York Times reported, "the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad," citing witnesses at the hearing. (The Online Journal's Real Time column also quoted the estimate from the hearing.)
My efforts this week to track down the number's source -- and free-lance journalist Daniel Radosh's similar quest on his blog -- yielded lots of dead ends. It turns out it can be easier to enter a big number into the Congressional record, and national press coverage, than to locate its origin. (Numbers Guy reader Brian Flanagan suggested I look into the estimate.)
What was Rep. Barton's staff analysis? A spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee told me the source of the number was the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a group that advocates for the protection of children. When I first talked with that group's president, Ernie Allen, he told me that Standard Chartered bank, which has worked with the NCMEC to cut off funding to child-porn traffickers, wanted a quantitative analysis of the problem, so it asked for a measurement from consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
Mr. Allen faxed me an NCMEC paper that cites the McKinsey study in placing the child-porn industry at $6 billion in 1999, and $20 billion in 2004.
But a McKinsey spokesman painted a different picture for me: "The number was not calculated or generated by McKinsey," he wrote in an email. Instead, for a pro bono analysis for Standard Chartered, he said, McKinsey used a number that appeared in a report last year by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, an international advocacy group.
But the trail didn't end there: That report, in turn, attributed the number to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as did a report last year from the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg, France-based human-rights watchdog. Both of those reports noted that estimates range widely, from $3 billion to $20 billion.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told me in an email, "The FBI has not stated the $20 billion figure... . I have asked many people who would know for sure if we have attached the $20 billion number to this problem. I have scoured our Web site, too. Nothing!"
I went back to the NCMEC Monday and shared what I found. In an email response, spokeswoman Joann Donnellan said, "If it is determined that this ends up not being a reliable statistic, NCMEC will stop citing McKinsey as the source and will also stop citing a specific number. Rather, NCMEC will revert to what it has said previously ... that commercial child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry."
This isn't the first number from the NCMEC that struck me as questionable. The group provided the estimate that one in five children is sexually solicited online, which appeared in public-service ads distributed by the Ad Council. The stat has received a fresh round of publicity thanks to donated air time from MySpace, a site popular with teens. As I wrote last year, the "one in five" estimate was based on research that was five years old which only covered children who spent time online. The survey also used a broad definition of sexual solicitation. Yet the stat persists. The NCMEC told me last July it hoped to have new research by the end of last year. Now, spokeswoman Tina Schwartz says the group expects new research to be released in the next couple of months.
* * *
As Congress debates whether to pass new laws specifically outlawing online gambling, a recent poll appears to show that the public is strongly against the legislative effort: Almost 80% of Americans oppose a ban, according to the survey.
The poll was conducted by well-known polling firm Zogby International on behalf of an online gambling trade group. As I've written in the past, such sponsored research warrants extra scrutiny from readers, though the fact that the poll was commissioned by a special-interest group isn't by itself a reason to dismiss it.
Still, in this case, it appears that the sponsor of the poll influenced the way it was conducted, particularly in the way the questions were phrased. Here's one question: "Many gambling experts believe that Internet gambling will continue no matter what the government does to try to stop it. Do you agree or disagree that the federal government should allocate government resources and spend taxpayer money trying to stop adult Americans from gambling online?" Some 77% of respondents disagreed.
Here's another question: "More than 80% of Americans believe that gambling is a question of personal choice that should not be interfered with by the government. Do you agree or disagree that the federal government should stop adult Americans from gambling with licensed and regulated online sports books and casinos based in other countries?" You probably won't be surprised to learn that after being told that most Americans don't want the government to interfere, some 71% of the respondents to this question signaled they, too, were against a government ban.
The results of the poll were posted on the gambling trade group's Web site and emailed to journalists.
The gambling questions "were fair and balanced, and gave the respondent appropriate choices," Fritz Wenzel, spokesman for Zogby International, told me in an email. (Zogby does many political polls separate from interest-group-backed research, including polling on the 2004 presidential race and 2006 gubernatorial and Senate races for the Online Journal.)
Polling experts disagreed when I showed them the poll. Cliff Zukin, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, a professional association of pollsters, told me the questions are "loaded and biased." Prof. Zukin added that if any of his students at Rutgers University wrote such questions, "I would fail them."
Robert Blumenfeld, an El Paso, Texas-based attorney for the Antiguan Offshore Gaming Association, told me the trade group paid "less than $10,000" for the poll. The Antiguan group, which represents more than a dozen online casinos, drafted the questions with guidance from Zogby, Mr. Blumenfeld said. He disagreed with the suggestion that the phrasing of the questions might have influenced the results, but said the group would conduct further polling. "We're willing to put the question in a way that can't be subject to any kind of criticism," Mr. Blumenfeld said.
Mr. Blumenfeld said the group is using the results of the poll in its lobbying efforts to fight an online gambling ban.
It's not unusual for pollsters to conduct polls for hire. Many pollsters make their reputations with political polling, and make their money with sponsored polling. Still, Zogby's poll didn't meet certain standards set by the polling professional association headed by Prof. Zukin, which say, among other things, that pollsters should ask unbiased questions.
Zogby International and its chief executive, John Zogby, are well known in the polling world. Yet Mr. Zogby has at times lent his firm's credibility to polls conducted for sponsors and filled with leading questions, as a New Yorker profile in 2004 noted. One poll funded by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked respondents if they would stop eating meat or dairy products "if you knew that within days of birth, chickens have their beaks seared off with a hot blade to keep them from pecking each other in their overly crowded cages?"
Other Zogby polls addressing gambling have had conflicting results. A poll conducted by Zogby on behalf of the New York Council on Problem Gambling, in 2004, found that 67% of respondents said that expanding gambling by the State of New York will definitely or probably increase the number of people with gambling problems.
The Zogby poll wasn't the only recent survey on online gambling to include what I'd consider leading questions. A Harris Interactive online poll, conducted in February and mentioned in several news outlets (including the Online Journal) found -- among other things -- that 27% of respondents strongly agreed with the statement "since there is no effective way to regulate or control Internet gambling, it should remain illegal," and 27% of respondents somewhat agreed.
The phrasing of that question seems to make an assumption (the impossibility of regulation) that could have influenced responses. Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, told me that the question was deliberately designed to "see how different arguments played." He said he wouldn't use the response to that particular question, which he called "projective," to determine whether people support legalizing online gambling. "In any release we do, we are fair and balanced, but any single projective question may not be," Mr. Taylor said, adding that the poll wasn't sponsored.
* * *
Several readers wrote in about my column last week on the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. Here's an excerpt from one letter:
As a result of my own experience attempting to estimate the number of workers employed in California seasonal agricultural work during my Ph.D. research, I feel qualified to doubt the validity of any estimation method based on the U.S. census of population. While attempting to use census data from rural California counties to estimate the accuracy of two different state employment service reports on agricultural employment, I encountered discrepancies among the three sources of as much as 300%, with the census data always being the lowest. Conversations with friends in the urban Chicano community confirmed my suspicion that illegal residents were effectively avoiding enumeration. Perhaps the data collection has improved, but it's doubtful that people who want to avoid government scrutiny will make themselves available.
Sue Hayes, professor of economics, Sonoma State University
Several readers also wrote in about my comment that scientific notation is likely to be adopted soon after the U.S. adopts the metric system:
We've lost enough dollars and lives because of continuing confusion between our systems of inches vs. millimeters and pints vs. liters, but the idea of mass re-education of the entire American public and mass retooling of manufacturing is frightening.
Pearl Ladenheim
I would like to suggest a column on the status of metric conversion in the U.S. Is there hope or are we going to continue to bury our heads in 10 tons of sand (which is 20,000 pounds or 10,000 kilograms which, in turn, is 22,000 lbs)?
Richard J. Behling
And finally, I got this letter about an Associated Press article on a Malaysian man who received a $218 trillion phone bill.
Of course it's amusing that the man received an absurdly high phone bill. But the really funny part, in my opinion, is the AP journalist's analysis: "It wasn't clear whether the bill was a mistake, or if [the] phone line was used illegally." $218 trillion?!? Hmm... I think it's pretty clear.
Ray Weaver
Write to Carl Bialik at
numbersguy@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
A letter in an earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the number of pounds, or kilograms, in a ton.
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