Why are we so obsessed with numbers? What do numbers really tell us? While reading, Sally Engle Merry's book, The Seductions of Quantifications, I found myself stressed reading the high numbers of victims of sex trafficking. Having a child, especially a female, stresses me out thinking about the potential of sex trafficking. However, the more I read the book and what the overarching theme of our obsessions of quantities and statistics, the more I was annoyed with the process of how these numbers come to be.

If you look at how a statistic or quantification is told to be truth and trace it back, you'll usually find an institution or organization that has the money to do such research and base the research on what they decide is a definition of what they're looking for. In the case of this book, there are varying definitions for "violence against women" that different frameworks decide upon as truth. Is there such thing as an objective truth? I don't think so. The more I am exposed to about everything and anything, the more I realize that what we know to be truth or facts usually can be traced back to some colonial project constructing something as "truth" in order to control people's lives. 

In the case of this book, what resonated with me is that we're so focused on numbers. How many? How often?  In this case, the focus is on the act of violence against women without ever actually hearing about the experiences of victims. Isn't violence against ONE women enough to show there's a problem? When we loosely define violence against women and tack on a bunch of numbers, we're not actually humanizing and learning about how this violence is truly being experienced by women. We're so far removed. That's where quantification isn't seductive, but problematic.

So, here's a real life experience. A sample size of one, because one is too many.