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The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter
Sept/Oct and Nov/Dec, 1999, Vol. 6, Number 5 & 6. NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SEXUAL TRAFFICKING
Guest Speaker: Andrea Bertone
Andrea Bertone
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A ccording to a published report by the UN in 1997, it was established that more than four million people are smuggled into foreign countries a year. It's very difficult to obtain exact numbers, as two previous speakers have indicated, but it's probably reaching close to 5 million people in this year. Obviously, there is no guarantee for people who have given their life savings to a trafficker that they will actually arrive at their destination without being caught, or without perhaps even losing their lives. Sex tourism, mail-order brides, prostitution and brothels, pornography, and militarized sexual service are examples of an international sex trade. Trafficking in women is a large subset of the business, in which women are coerced, enslaved, kidnapped, tortured, raped. in order to sexually service men for the profit of others. Trafficking women for purposes of sexual employment can involve situations where the woman is aware of the situation that she will go into. However, it also involves situations in which the girl and/or woman is kidnapped for purposes of trafficking, or sold into prostitution or forced marriage. And therefore, obviously, this is not considered voluntary.
The international organization for migration, or IOM, the Geneva-based international, intergovernmental organization, has tentatively defined trafficking in women as "any illicit transporting of migrant woman and/or trade in them for economic or personal gain. This may include the following elements: facilitating the illegal movement of migrant women to other countries with or without their consent or knowledge; deceiving migrant women about the purpose of the migration, legal or illegal; physically or sexually abusing migrant women for the purpose of trafficking them: selling women into or trading in women for the purpose of employment, marriage, prostitution and other forms of profit-making abuse." It also includes those cases where the woman is aware of the nature of the work at the point of leaving, but on arrival, finds herself in a situation where her fundamental rights are being violated, and so she cannot get out of the situation.
Perhaps the laws are the underlying cause of the international sex trade in the international political economy. One of the major reasons why women and men would choose or would be persuaded to leave their country of origin and migrate is economic. The majority of people who make unsafe trips across the Mediterranean or across the Pacific are in search of a better life for themselves and for their families. and are usually considered economic migrants. Disparities in the wealth of countries and the growing trend of globalization throughout the world is part of the explanation for people's desires to work in a country where they might be able to make more than ten times what they could in their country of origin.
But one of the most insidious and exploitative aspects of the trafficking of humans is the trafficking and buying of women in order to work in sexualized employment. Trafficked women are also considered labor migrants, and are caught up in a largely deregulated business of labor migration. It has not been until very recently that agents at the international level have taken measures to combat the general acceptance of the trading in women's bodies.
Rapid economic industrialization in former undeveloped countries and regions, coupled with the historic structures at the societal level which supports the demoralization of women, are the primary facilitators of the sex trade in southeast Asia, especially in Thailand and Malaysia, as well as in south Asia and India, Burma, and Bangladesh. The newest manifestation of economic despair is in the former Soviet Union where thousands of women are trafficked into western Europe and Asia every year.
It is widely agreed that the contemporary international sex trade has its roots in the international political economy of the capitalist world market. The international political economy of sex not only includes the supply side, the women of the third world, poor states, or exotic Asian women, but it cannot maintain itself without the demand and the organizers of this trade, the men from industrialized and developing countries.
I believe that it is the international capital system which is the underlying motivation for the sustenance of the criminal networks as well. In the last ten years. in the wake of communist collapse and the variety of paths to democracy, it has been empirically shown by the Freedom House that an unofficial economy or criminal networks make up almost 75 percent of the Russian economy. Rampant economic abuses under the guise of capitalist reforms have created a spiral effect where people are desperate for any kind of work. Women's bodies are mere commodities, and in essence, trafficking of women is supported by simple supply and demand.