Image from: www.love146.org an organisation that works to abolish child sex slavery and exploitation.
Last week in London, six men were charged in connection with the trafficking of an Indian woman. Meanwhile, in Iowa, a federal indictment was unsealed alleging that a sex trafficking ring had used violence, coercion - oh yes, and a mainstream website for classified ads, backpage.com - in order to sell women aged between 17 and 21. In Swaziland, a senior politician warned that social media networks helped traffickers find new victims, while the parliament of Malta, a country more usually known for its historic architecture and world class harbour, lamented its place on the OSCE's trafficking watch list.
And elsewhere around the world, about 2.4 million other people were also being trafficked, according to the UN - four in five of them women and girls. Sexual exploitation isn't the only form of trafficking - men, women and children are forced to work as agricultural labourers or domestic servants, for example, too - but it's by far the most commonly identified, accounting for about 80 per cent of cases recorded in countries ranging from Australia to Azerbaijan. (The sex industry may well be over represented, though, the UN warns: for sex workers, the misery of being trafficked is compounded with the indignity of being on public display, often in city centres or along highways.) For the perpetrators, who are usually involved with organised crime, it's relatively easy money: less dangerous, and more lucrative, than trading drugs or weapons.
So far, so unsurprising. More unexpected is the fact that those perpetrators are often women - in some countries in East Asia and Eastern Europe, arrests suggest they outnumber men. And while the trade in unconsenting humans is as globalised as the trade in anything else, most of it happens within national borders rather than across continents, courtesy of traders who tend to be of the same nationality as their victims.
Image from: www.love146.org an organisation that works to abolish child sex slavery and exploitation.
The past decade or so has been a good one in terms of combatting this miserable form of exploitation: convictions have risen globally, in part because the number of countries legislating against trafficking has more than doubled since 2003 to over 100 (Australia got on board in 2005). But over the same period, the growth of the Internet has given pimps a new avenue for peddling their wares.
In the US, backpages.com - a website owned by the same company as the lauded Village Voice newspaper - is estimated to account for about 70 per cent of advertised prostitution. While some women are legitimately advertising their own services, other ads are placed by pimps such as Johnelle Bell, whose trafficking ring was mentioned in Iowa this week and whose pimping tactics included whipping "his" girls with a belt and at one point considering "branding" them with a tattoo of his name.
"The are no simple solutions to end sex trafficking," argues the Ne York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "but it would help to have public pressure on Village Voice Media to stop prostitution advertising." When Craigslist dropped such adverts in 2010, he says, Prostitution advertising across the Internet dropped significantly.
The difficulty is distinguishing between sex workers who are being exploited and those who are working of their own free will (although how far that "free will" goes is a knotty problem for another article).
Village Voice Media, unsurprisingly, argues that backpages.com offers non-exploited sex workers a reputable mainstream space in which to advertise, and can assist authorities in identifying and arresting pimps. And in a recent article for guardian.co.uk, Aziza Ahmed, a human rights academic, argues that activists like Kristof can unwittingly shut prostitutes out of anti HIV programs in places like the US, where participants have to sign an anti prostitution loyalty oath.
The UN has other suggestions though. At the top of the list? Education, particularly for women and children - both about the situations and people that put them at risk of being trafficked, but also about skills which give them more options in life. "Trafficking is a complex phenomenon that is often driven by social, economic, cultural and other factors," the organisation notes - factors which differ enormously from country to country and even from person to person. But certain factors reappear again and again, including poverty, oppression, and a lack of social and economic opportunity. "The devaluation of women and girls in a society makes them disproportionately vulnerable to trafficking."
Exploiting vulnerable people is too easy and too profitable to be going away any time soon. But programs such as the Japanese Girls Be Ambitious initiative in Cambodia - which teaches women subjects such as English and computer skills - and Bulgaria's UNDP funded business support centre, which provides training and jobs, are spreading. They're a long way from matching the spread of trafficking itself, but properly run they're an important step in the right direction.
