Sex Trafficking Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Sex trafficking refers to the trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation in forced marriages and forced prostitution. Generally, the trafficking flows from poorer countries to countries where the average person’s living standard is relatively higher. Women are typically tricked and recruited with promises of well-paid legitimate work elsewhere and delivered to the employers through agents and brokers. Upon arrival, they quickly discover that the work they are expected to do is very different from what they had been told. Traffickers deceive, intimidate, threaten, and/or use physical force to control these women and children. It is extremely difficult and dangerous to escape the abusive situation they find themselves in.

Debt bondage is often used to maintain control of women. This entails women being made to work without wages until they have fully reimbursed their employers. This debt typically exceeds their travel costs and routinely increases with arbitrary fines and deceptive accounting. In some cases, it can never be fully repaid. Some indebted women are resold by employers; others are eventually released when their debt is paid, but this can take years. Women and children face constant surveillance, threats of retaliation, confiscation of passports and other documentation, and are often handicapped by their inability to speak the local language, unfamiliarity with the local surroundings, and fear of arrest and mistreatment by police.

The United Nations estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children annually are trafficked across international borders. Approximately 80 percent are women and girls, and up to 50 percent are minors. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that in West and Central Africa, up to 200,000 children are trafficked annually. Estimates by the International Labor Organization indicate that 200,000 to 250,000 women and children are trafficked each year in Southeast Asia alone and more than a million children are affected globally every year.

Many countries facilitate trafficking by issuing false documents to brokers and agents, ignoring immigration violations, and gleaning bribes from employers. Police are often bribed with access to the women in the brothels. Even in the cases where some trafficked women are freed by police raids, women are often mistreated by the authorities and do not have access to services or redress. When confronted with evidence of trafficking and forced labor, officials tend to focus on immigration violations and anti-prostitution laws rather than on the human rights violations committed against trafficked victims. Women are thus punished as illegal migrants and prostitutes, while the traffickers routinely either escape entirely or face only minor penalties.

Controversies Over Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking is a locus of debate between feminists and human rights activists. Some feminists advocate an abolitionist model, arguing that prostitution is tantamount to sexual slavery of women. For instance, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) contends that sex trafficking violates the sexual rights of female victims. Groups such as the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) and the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) observe that trafficking is forced migrant labor that violates women’s human rights. They contend that sex trafficking is exploitative and immoral because it involves commercial sex.

Other feminists feel that intensive anti-trafficking campaigns deprive sex workers of their rights and that many Western feminists use victim discourse to project a patronizing attitude toward non-Western women. To focus on forced prostitution ignores the larger context within which force is used. This also provides a pretext for moralistically inspired campaigns against non-procreative sex. These feminists argue that prostitution is a result of global inequities of capital and labor, where women are robbed of viable options, forcing them into sweatshop labor or lucrative sex work. They argue that the moralistic campaigns against sex trafficking are intended to eradicate all forms of sex work and construe sex workers as sexual victims. This allows campaigners to disregard the issues of economic deprivation, poor nutrition, and low income that can all be considered violence against women.

Some researchers offer examples of women and children who, while reported by news media to be “successfully rescued” from brothels, have in fact escaped the shelters and returned to work in brothels on their own volition. They have refused to be “rescued” from the “captivity” of prostitution into the “freedom” of low-pay employment. Indeed, sex workers’ rights movements vehemently challenge the victim script in the trafficking discourse.

Anti-Trafficking Campaigns

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has embarked on an anti-trafficking cause, distributing more than $100 million to fight trafficking, including major grants to Evangelical groups. The State Department generates an annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which tracks U.S. and foreign reductions in trafficking. Countries are ranked by how much importing and exporting of trafficking victims is believed to occur within their borders. A three-tier classification is used to categorize each country: Tier 3 denotes countries with the poorest track records, Tier 2 refers to countries with borderline records, and Tier 1 is reserved for countries that are in line with the U.S. recommendations.

Some researchers criticize the Bush administration for placing certain countries on Tier 3 status only to fit its own larger foreign policy goals. Many also point out that the United States, as the major donor nation, forces other countries to crack down on brothels and prostitutes and formulate additional criminal laws against not only sex trafficking but against prostitution in general.

U.S. reports and policy documents brand sex trafficking with three characteristics. These include the brothel as prison, the female as victim, and rescuers as heroes. Some U.S. human rights organizations stretch beyond child exploitation and urge legislation criminalizing non-procreative sex and sex work in an attempt to save women. By emphasizing prostitution as a moral issue and emphasizing protection of women, critics claim such actions negate women’s autonomy and the empowerment that comes through their sex work by providing income and labor. Thus these organizations criticize the Bush administration’s seemingly inconsistent attempt to combat worldwide sex trafficking while at the same time refusing to support women’s reproductive rights. For instance, condom use is not promoted as an effective contraceptive or disease-preventing tool. Critics argue that the Bush administration’s endeavors to fight prostitution under the pretext of preventing sexual slavery are, in effect, endeavors to police non-procreative sex on a global level.

Bibliography:

Sanghera, Jyoti. 2005. “Unpacking the Trafficking Discourse.” Pp. 3-24 in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, edited by K. Kempadoo, J. Sanhera, and B. Pattanaik. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
Soderlund, Gretchen. 2005. “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17(Fall):64-87.

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