Eat - Pray - Labor: How the Sports Event Sex Trafficking Mythology Differed at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar

East Tower 

The fallacious claim that sex trafficking (often using the figure of 40,000 women and girls per event) corresponds with major sporting events and large gatherings has been used to generate income for police, NGOs, evangelical churches, and consultants while actually harming sex workers during "clean up" efforts of red light areas targeted for development. This presentation is an elaboration and update of a chapter in my book, "Panics without Borders: How Global Sporting Events Drive Myths about Sex Trafficking." It focuses on Qatar's World Cup and examines why many of the usual players in the anti-trafficking industrial complex essentially sat that one out, skipping ahead to focus on the next World Cup (US/Mexico/Canada) and Olympics (LA). It examines how sex worker migrants' movement across borders is facilitated by high end Western hotel chains - the same companies who run "spot the signs" awareness campaigns when not in Qatar. It also compares the surprising hypervisibility of sex workers in Qatar with the deliberate erasure and invisibility of migrant male construction workers imprisoned in camps and not allowed to leave the country or their "employers," thousands of whom died building the stadiums for the Cup as well as other facilities including, ironically, the "Bin-Jelmood House: Museum of Slavery in Qatar." The presentation builds on two stints of fieldwork and participant observation in the run-up to the Cup as well as a look back, retrospectively, at what happened after I wrote the book and the Cup actually occurred. I argue that the media blackouts imposed by the Qataris scared the anti-trafficking industry and also that they see more money and opportunities if they regroup and focus on the next two major events, both of which will happen in the US where they are already established and plugged into funding sources and where the government and media are already aligned with them.