International Sex Industry Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In recent years, there have been a number of significant shifts in the organization of the commercial sex industry, each relevant to women’s experience of violence within prostitution. Internationally, the last decades of the 20th century witnessed a tremendous growth in what is known as “sex tourism”—the development and expansion of industries providing sexual services, catering primarily to Western and Japanese men who travel to economically undeveloped countries for business or leisure activities. In conjunction with the development and expansion of sex tourism has been a rise in trafficking of individuals for prostitution and the widespread involvement of children in the sex tourism industry.

A common thread in the organization and control of the global sex industry is that it emerges from and is sustained by gender, race, and class inequalities, as well as power imbalances resulting from colonial and imperialist relations across nations. The current scope and nature of the global sex industry is unprecedented. It is also associated with widespread exploitation, human rights abuses, and violence.

International organizations define trafficking as all acts and attempted acts involved in the recruitment, transportation within or across borders, purchase, sale, transfer, receipt, or harboring of a person (a) involving the use of deception, coercion, or debt bondage or (b) for the purpose of placing or holding such person, whether for pay or not, in involuntary servitude, in forced or bonded labor, or in slavery-like conditions, in a community other than the one in which such person lived at the time of the original deception, coercion, or debt bondage. According to the U.S. government, between 50,000 and 100,000 women are trafficked into the United States annually, and more than half a million women are trafficked worldwide every year. However, given the illicit nature of the industry, many suspect the numbers are probably much higher.

Several factors are responsible for the growth of this phenomenon. In addition to the evolution of sex tourism, broader global economic patterns in the late 20th century have encouraged women from developing countries to migrate abroad in search of economic opportunities to better themselves and their families. There are currently an estimated 60 million female migrants around the globe, and they constitute fully half of the world’s migrant population. While migration itself is distinct from trafficking, and trafficking from prostitution, they are interconnected in that the growth in women’s migration has made trafficking, including sexual trafficking, particularly easy to achieve. This is largely because the trafficking of girls and women often follows the same routes as legitimate migration, increasing traffickers’ ability to deceive women, and to transport and control them without detection.

Trafficking is a global activity, and nearly every country in the world serves as a source, transit, and/or receiving country. Trafficking is found in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Africa, and to and from North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Australia. However, it is believed to be highest in two regions of the world: within Asia and from Asia to other parts of the world, and from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to Western Europe and other destination countries. The intersections of race, class, and gender inequalities often dictate these routes: ethnic minority women and women from poor countries are routed to meet the desires of more privileged men.

Traffickers generate gross earnings of an estimated US$7 billion annually. Trafficking today is well organized and is often controlled by organized crime groups. Recruiting agents can include employment agencies, brokers, “marriage” agents, and acquaintances, as well as family friends or relatives. Often ads are placed in newspapers that describe well-paying job opportunities overseas in the service industries, including domestic work, dancing, and work as waitresses and hostesses. Researcher Donna Hughes estimates that about 20% of women are recruited for trafficking through false advertising. Recruitment methods usually involve deceit or debt bondage, but can also involve violence.

Women often are deceived about the nature or conditions of the work for which they are migrating. Regardless of whether they know they are migrating for sex work, women are often unprepared for the working conditions they discover. For example, often trafficking generates a system of debt bondage. With transnational prostitution, this occurs when women borrow money for the cost of travel, visas, false documents, and employment location. They are then charged exorbitant interest and required to work off the debt before accumulating their own earnings. It is not uncommon for women’s debt to be sold from one employer to another, and for the new employer to then add the women’s purchase price to their debt. Women’s passports are routinely confiscated as security on the “loan,” and this gives the women’s debtors further control over their movement.

Women’s status as illegal immigrants makes them vulnerable to exploitation and coercion in these markets; this is exacerbated when women are trafficked or migrate to foreign nations in which they do not speak the language and thus cannot communicate their experiences or easily seek assistance. Evidence consistently shows that the organization of the sex industry, including the transnational sex industry, results in widespread patterns of violence, coercion, and exploitation, as well as discriminatory law enforcement. Women who are trafficked, as well as women who voluntarily migrate for sex work, often find themselves working in slavery-like conditions in which their mobility is restricted and they are not given the right to control the conditions of their work. As a consequence of illegal confinement and forced labor, women are subject to a range of abuses, including physical and sexual assault, as well as exposure to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Health care is minimal, and women who contract diseases are often simply discarded.

Advocates argue that strict migration laws, in conjunction with legal statutes governing the sex industry, allow this system to flourish and increase sex workers’ dependence on outside agents. Despite the United Nations convention prohibiting trafficking for prostitution, the countries into which women are trafficked routinely give precedence to their status as illegal aliens engaged in illicit work, rather than to their status as victims of trafficking or forced prostitution. Brokers, managers, traffickers, recruiters, and middlemen, as well as legitimate businesses such as hotels and travel agencies, continue to profit from the industry, while sex workers face distinct disadvantages that undermine their ability to control their labor, and make them dependent on the individuals and organizations who exploit them. In addition, these women are victims of police corruption, bribery schemes, and government collusion, all of which are well documented. Around the world, sex workers are detained and imprisoned and subjected to cruel and degrading treatment and suffer violence by the state or by private individuals with the state’s support, but there are no international conventions or ant trafficking organizations that explicitly support sex workers’ human rights.

Bibliography:

Coomaraswamy, R. (2001). Integration of the human rights of women and the gender perspective: Addendum mission to Bangladesh, Nepal and India on the issue of trafficking of women and girls. Geneva: United Nations Economic and Social Council.
Doezema, J. (1998). Forced to choose: Beyond the voluntary v. forced prostitution dichotomy. In K. Kempadoo & J. Doezema (Eds.), Global sex workers: Rights, resistance, and redefinition (pp. 34–50). New York: Routledge.
Farr, K. (2004). Sex trafficking: The global market in women and children. New York: Worth.
Hughes, D. M. (2001, January). The “Natasha” trade: Transnational sex trafficking. National Institute of Justice Journal, pp. 8–15.
Kempadoo, K., & Doezema, J. (Eds.). (1998). Global sex workers: Rights, resistance, and redefinition. New York: Routledge.
Lim, L. L. (Ed.). (1998). The sex sector: The economic and social bases of prostitution in Southeast Asia. Geneva: International Labor Organization.
Miller, J. (2002). Violence and coercion in Sri Lanka’s commercial sex industry: Intersections of gender, sexuality, culture and the law. Violence Against Women, 8, 1045–1074.
Truong, T. (1990). Sex, money and morality: Prostitution and tourism in Southeast Asia. London: Zed Books.

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