Beware round numbers. Especially numbers as round and shapely as 40,000.

That’s the number of prostitutes said to be heading for the World Cup in South Africa this summer, according to the Daily Telegraph and the New York Daily News. 
 
Now 40,000 is a big number: almost one hooker for every ten spectators. And it’s also a familiar number. In the run-up to the last World Cup in Germany in 2006, exactly the same number of prostitutes were said to be heading there. Drink-addled football fans would have sex with them in specially-built wooden “performance boxes” resembling toilets, according to a piece in The Guardian.
 
Subsequent investigations found just five cases of trafficking for sexual purposes, the web-site Spiked reported. So how in the world has this same prediction emerged again four years later?
 
Blame the South African Central Drug Authority, which dredged the figure up, crediting their colleagues in KwaZula Natal. It probably consulted the press cuttings, and decided that if 40,000 hookers had been expected in Germany, it would be demeaning to expect any fewer in South Africa. There appears to be no other basis for the claim.
 
Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, has tracked this story right back to the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 (10,000 sex slaves expected, none actually imported) and the 2004 Games in Athens, when 20,000 were expected and, again, none were found. A total of 181 people were trafficked into Greece in the whole of 2004, none of them for sexual purposes.
 
Moral to journalists: check the evidence, and don’t check in your common sense.