Sex Trafficking: Your Questions Answered
What is sex trafficking?
What’s the difference between sex trafficking and people smuggling?
Who are the victims?
Where are victims from?
Why does sex trafficking exist?
What’s it like to be a victim of sex trafficking?
Who trafficks people and how?
What support exists for survivors of sex trafficking?
What’s it got to do with me?
To find the references quoted here, visit our research page
What is sex trafficking?
Sex trafficking is the exploitation of people, usually women and children, within national or across international borders for the purposes of forced prostitution.
The United Nations defines trafficking as:
‘the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.’
There are two distinct types of trafficking – trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation or forced prostitution i.e sex trafficking – and trafficking for the purpose of forced labour.
What’s the difference between sex trafficking and people smuggling?
Human trafficking and people smuggling are often confused, but are quite different phenomena. Smuggling differs in a number of key ways. It involves:
- Travel: involves transportation from one country to another, where legal entry would be denied upon arrival at the international border.
- Choice: People voluntarily request or hire an individual, known as a smuggler, to covertly transport them from one location to another. There may be no deception involved in the (illegal) agreement.
- Freedom: After entry into the country and arrival at their ultimate destination, the smuggled person is usually free to find their own way.
By contrast, human trafficking victims:
- Are not necessarily moved. Human trafficking does not require the physical movement of a person
- Are forced to work or provide services to the trafficker or others
- Are not permitted to leave upon arrival at their destination. They are held against their will through acts of coercion.
Who are the victims?
The overwhelming majority of people trafficked are women and children.
Human trafficking affects virtually every region in the world. Estimates show that between 700,000 and 4 million women and children are trafficked each year worldwide for forced labour, domestic servitude, or sexual exploitation.
Trafficking victims tend to be the poorest and most vulnerable, such as homeless individuals, runaway teens, displaced homemakers, refugees, and drug addicts.
Where are victims from?
The United Kingdom (UK) is a destination country for men, women, and children trafficked from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe (US State Department, 2010).
Victims are also from the UK, particularly children who are trafficked internally for the purpose of prostitution.
Inadequate protection measures for these victims can result in their re-trafficking throughout the UK.
Why does sex trafficking exist?
The ‘push’ factor
While factors such as gender discrimination, organised crime syndicates, conflict and regional natural disasters all contribute greatly to the increase of sex trafficking within a particular area, the single greatest contributing factor to sex trafficking is poverty.
In countries where women cannot work because of a depressed economy and therefore a lack of employment opportunities:
- many are attracted by the lure of fraudulent employment opportunities overseas
- some will turn to prostitution as a means to feed themselves and their families
- families may sell their young daughters to traffickers because they are so desperate for money.
Sometimes girls are aware to some degree they will be expected to work in the sex industry, but are so desperate to lift themselves and their families out of poverty that they are willing to risk the consequences – although they never anticipate the abusive or coercive circumstances they find themselves in from which escape may be both difficult and dangerous.
The ‘pull’ factor
The ‘pull’ factor is the demand for sexual services that create the need for a ‘supply’ of trafficked women and girls. Receiving or destination countries are those with sex industries that create the demand for women to be used in prostitution.
There has been relatively little analysis of the ‘demand’ side of sex trafficking to date, although this gap in research is starting to be addressed.
Governments play a key role in either suppressing or fueling the flow of women and children for commercial sexual exploitation depending on their policies on immigration and/or the sex industry.
Efforts to curb the demand side of sex trafficking may include:
- education and treatment programmes for men who purchase sex
- the criminalisation of those purchasing sex
- community efforts to reduce demand awareness and prevention programmes.
What’s it like to be a victim of sex trafficking?
It is deeply harmful to the women and girls who are victims of trafficking.
Beyond the physical abuse, they often suffer acute depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Many turn to alcohol and drugs to deal with the mental and physical effects of sex trafficking.
Research into the effects of trafficking found nearly eight in every ten women (76%) had been physically assaulted by traffickers, pimps, madams, brothel and club owners, clients, or their boyfriends (London School of Tropical Hygiene, 2006).
Respondents described being:
- kicked while pregnant
- burned with cigarettes
- hit with bats or other objects
- dragged across the room by their hair
- punched in the face
- having their head slammed against floors or walls.
90% had been physically forced or intimidated into sex or doing something sexual.
89% reported receiving threats including threats of death, beatings, increased debt, harm to their children and families or threats of re-trafficking.
Who trafficks people and how?
Traffickers may be members of highly sophisticated networks of organised crime, but they may equally be family members or friends of the trafficked victim.
Trafficked victims may themselves be used later on to traffick other women and children.
Traffickers will typically exploit vulnerabilities and lack of opportunities, while offering promises of marriage, employment, education, and/or an overall better life to women and girls.
They may use deceit, coercion, force, abduction, abuse of powers, threats, or any combination of these to trick or manipulate the trafficking victim into sexual exploitation.
Trafficking is an extremely lucrative industry - the total annual revenue for trafficking in persons is estimated to be between USD$5 billion and $9 billion.
What support exists for survivors of sex trafficking?
In theory, states have a duty of care to survivors of sex trafficking.
In May 2005 the Council of Europe formally adopted the Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, which provides for legal protection and minimum standards of care for individuals who have been victims of human trafficking.
The legal protection and minimum standards of care for victims includes the following:
• A minimum recovery and reflection period
• Temporary residence permits for those who may be in danger if they return to their country of origin
• Temporary residence permits for children if it is in their best interests to remain in the UK
• Access to specialist support, emergency medical care, legal advice and the provision of safe housing
The Convention has been signed by the United Kingdom and measures were put in place to adopt the protection for the victims of human trafficking in 2009.
The UK Human Trafficking Centre has also been created to ensure that the obligations under the Convention are adhered to.
However, these measures are inadequate. In 2010 a group of anti-trafficking organisations, the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, found that:
- The UK’s new anti-trafficking measures are not “fit for purpose”
- The government is breaching its obligations under the European Convention against Trafficking
- The National Referral System to deal with victims of trafficking is flawed.
- Victims are still dealt with by UK Border Agency Staff who reportedly put more emphasis on the immigration status of the presumed trafficked persons than on the alleged crime against them.
What’s it got to do with me?
Sex trafficking is a horrific crime that needs to be stopped.
It persists because it is hidden from view.
It will only end when people act to:
- Expose the sexual exploitation of vulnerable human beings
- Challenge the demand for sexual services that fuels the need for a supply of trafficked women and girls
- Tackle the poverty and inequality that force women and girls into the hands of traffickers
- Prosecute the traffickers.
