Flutterby™! : Sex slavery?

While I'm stealing from Daze Reader, last night on my few minutes in the car on the way home I heard a bit of the Fresh Air bit interviewing Peter Landesman, author of the current New York Times series on sex slavery. As he talked I kept thinking "this isn't reporting, this is story telling". This morning Daze linked to Jack Shafer in Slate discussing the series:

I can't disprove the claim made in the article's subhed that sex slavers hold "perhaps tens of thousands" of women, girls, and boys against their will in the United States, but I seriously doubt its veracity. Landesman's breathless performance, in which he asserts that "hundreds" of "stash houses" inhabited by foreign sex slaves dot America's metropolitan landscape, offers almost nothing in the way of verifiable facts about the incidence and prevalence of this heinous practice.

Now to temper this, on Friday the SF Examiner reported on a bust in San Francisco, noting that:

Officials have not yet determined whether the women knew they would be working as prostitutes, but said none of them tried to escape and none had been injured.

"They are being very cooperative and seem very comfortable, not afraid but quite happy," said one bureau source.

(a short follow-up today) The archives haven't been updated for today yet, but this morning there was an article about sex worker's groups making the case that if we just legalized prostitution, most of this slavery issue would disappear.