Sex Workers And Trafficking Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Human trafficking involves the recruitment, transportation, and harboring of human beings by means of coercion and abduction, primarily for the purposes of sexual exploitation or prostitution. Human trafficking appears to have the strongest detrimental effect on those who are already marginalized: Women and children from impoverished countries. Like the trafficking of other illicit goods, the trafficking of humans is primarily controlled and operated by organized crime groups working at the transnational level.

While many women and children are trafficked for purposes of prostitution, some also are trafficked to be workers in industries such as construction, farming, textiles, or mining. Because these trafficked individuals usually have illegally entered a given country, they are not provided with the same rights that legal immigrants are. This allows those who purchase their services to avoid paying appropriate wages and to ignore health and safety requirements.

Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking is one of the most common forms of human trafficking. Beyond prostitution, victims of sex trafficking also may be forced into pornography, sex tourism, the strip trade, the mail-order bride trade, escort services, and other forms of sex work. Sex work is, by definition, more than just prostitution; it is any form of work that involves sexual services.

Individuals become victims of sex trafficking through either voluntary or involuntary means. Individuals might voluntarily agree to illegally immigrate to another country in search of a better life for themselves and their families when faced with harsh conditions of war or poverty in their homeland. Once they have been illegally smuggled into a country, the traffickers may exploit the precarious position the illegal immigrants are faced with because they cannot find other sources of income. Or, through forms of coercion such as threats of physical harm or family humiliation, the traffickers might force the illegal immigrants into sex work. In either case, the traffickers draw on the precarious position the illegal immigrants are left in, with little opportunity to make a consistent income and no access to legal services for fear of their own incrimination.

Many women and children also become victims of sex trafficking through involuntary means. In this sense, individuals have not chosen to illegally immigrate, but rather, have been forced to do so. This commonly occurs through debt bondage, whereby an individual or family secures a black market loan through an organized crime group and cannot pay it back at the high rate of interest that is required. To clear the loan, such individuals must offer themselves, spouses, or children in exchange for the repayment of the debt. Through this, individuals become enslaved as property of the traffickers and can then be smuggled into other countries and forced to work as strippers, escorts, or prostitutes.

Geographic Locale

Sex trafficking is known to affect virtually every country in the world. However, the victims of sex trafficking appear to come primarily from impoverished regions of Asia, the former Soviet Union, eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa. The flow of human trafficking appears to be from these impoverished places toward more industrialized regions of the world such as North America, western Europe, and Australia. Once smuggled into these regions, victims of sex trafficking tend to be concentrated in large cities, tourist areas, or near military bases where the demand for sex services appears to be the highest.

It is also common for victims of sex trafficking to be smuggled into regions of the world where the laws surrounding prostitution, or the enforcement of these laws, are not perceived as very harsh, such as Brazil, Thailand, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. These locations, not restricted to the few listed above, become known as sex tourism destinations. Sex tourism involves the deliberate travel to a destination for the purpose procuring sexual services that are likely not available within one’s own country.

Child Sex Tourism

An increasingly common form of sex tour ism is child sex tour ism. As with sex tour ism in general, child sex tour ism thrives in regions of the world where legal restrictions surrounding prostitution are underdeveloped and under enforced. Children often are taken from their families in reparation of debts, as a misguided favor to families in extreme financial struggle, or due to the loss of parents through war or the AIDS epidemic. Once separated from their families, the children are then forced into prostitution and pornography as their only means of survival.

In response to human and sex trafficking, many countries have adopted policies and laws to make it increasingly difficult for women and children to be illegally smuggled into countries, as well as restrictions for people traveling to other countries for the purposes of sex tourism. For instance, it is now illegal in the United States for individuals to travel to other countries to engage in child sex tourism; such individuals can be prosecuted in the United States for their actions outside of the country. It is, however, exceedingly difficult to prove that individuals are traveling for these purposes, and thus, few prosecutions have ever been successful.

Bibliography:

Barry, Kathleen. The Prostitution of Sexuality: The Global Exploitation of Women. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
Beeks, Karen, and Delila Amir, eds. Trafficking and the Global Sex Industry. New York: Lexington, 2006.
Ditmore, Melissa. Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2006.
McGill, Craig. Human Traffic: Sex, Slaves, and Immigration. London: Vision Paperbacks, 2004.
O’Connell, Julia. Children in the Global Sex Trade. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005.
Troubnikoff, Anna., ed. Trafficking in Women and Children. New York: Nova Science, 2003.
Williams, Phil., ed. Illegal Immigration and Commercial Sex:The New Slave Trade. London: Frank Cass, 1999.

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