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Sex,
Race, and Criminalization
Edited by Jael
Silliman and
Anannya Bhattacharjee
A Project of the
Committee on Women,
Population, and the Environment
Policing the
National Body
2
million women and children internationally trafficked
each year into the sex industry and for labor.2
All estimates, however, are preliminary and do not
include trafficking within countries. The most prevalent
forms of sex trafficking are for prostitution, sex
tourism, and mail‑order bride industries. Women and
children are also trafficked for bonded labor and
domestic work, and much of this trafficking concludes
with their being sexually exploited as well.
Defining the Problem
Currently, there is an
international debate about the definition of trafficking
and whether to separate trafficking from prostitution.
We use the definition of trafficking from the new UN
Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing
the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime
that became open for member nations' signatures in
Palermo in December 2000. Thus far, the protocol has
been signed by at least eighty countries.
(a) "Trafficking in
persons" shall mean 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.
Exploitation shall
include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the
prostitution of others or other forms of sexual
exploitation, forced labour, or services, slavery or
practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal
of organs;
(b) The consent of a
victim of trafficking in persons to the intended
exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this
article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set
forth in subparagraph (a) have been used.3
Exploitation,
rather than
coercion, is the operative concept in this
definition. A definition of trafficking, based on a
human rights framework, should protect all who are
trafficked, drawing no distinctions between deserving
and undeserving victims of trafficking, that is, those
who can prove they were forced and those who cannot. Any
definition based on the victim's consent places the
burden of proof on the victim and offers a loophole for
traffickers to use the alleged consent of the victim in
their own defense.
Other definitions have focused on consent. However, the
1949 United Nations Convention for the Suppression of
Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of
Prostitution of Others, and Article 6 of the United
Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women are representative of a
consensus in international law, that human trafficking
is the recruitment and transport of persons for the
purpose of sexual exploitation, regardless of whether or
not they have "consented" to their trafficking. The new
UN Protocol on the Trafficking in Persons is continuous
with this international consensus.
A
Global Problem
Countries as diverse as
Vietnam, Cuba, and those in Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union‑all beset by acute financial crises
while becoming market economies in varying degrees‑are
witnessing a tremendous increase in trafficking and
prostitution. Mail‑order bride industries capitalize on
the trafficking of Russian and Asian women, particularly
to men in industrialized countries who want foreign
wives they deem to be pliable and exotic.
In the Asian region
alone, 200‑400 Bangladeshi women are illegally
transported into Pakistan monthly and 7,000 to 12,000
Nepali women and girls are sold yearly into the brothels
of India. The trafficking of girls from Nepal to India
is probably the most intensive sexual slave trade
anywhere in the world. In 1992, more than 62.5 percent
of total "entertainers" (a code word for prostitution)
in Japan were Filipino‑92 percent of them undocumented.
In Asia, millions of women and girls have been led into
systems of prostitution such as street prostitution, sex
entertainment clubs, sex tourism, and brothels that may
literally be cages or, conversely, luxury
establishments. Brothels in Bombay and Delhi receive
trafficked women from Bangladesh and Nepal and are often
the transit point for moving women to Europe and North
America.4
International women are
trafficked from economically unstable countries to
economically stable ones; from developing countries to
industrialized countries; from rural to urban centers
within developing countries; from developing countries
to adjacent ones with sex industries; through developed
countries and regions, such as Western Europe and
Canada, to the United States; and within the United
States. Both international and domestic women are
domestically trafficked within their countries of
destination or origin, respectively.
Trafficking Into and
Within the United States
Until recently,
trafficking in the United States was rarely
acknowledged. It was not until Russian and Ukrainian
women began to be trafficked to the United States in the
early 1990s that governmental agencies and many
non‑governmental organizations (NGOs) began to recognize
the problem. As many critics, including ourselves, have
pointed out, Latin American and Asian women were
trafficked into the United States for many years prior
to the influx of Russian traffickers and trafficked
women. The fact that it took blond and blue‑eyed victims
to draw governmental and public attention to trafficking
in the United States gives the appearance, at least, of
racism.
Trafficking of women
into the United States by transnational sex industries
is beginning to be increasingly researched, estimated
numerically, and compared with the drug and weapons
smuggling industry by the US Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS). The US government
estimates that 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are
trafficked annually from Southeast Asia, Latin America,
Eastern Europe, and the newly independent states of the
former Soviet Union to the United States for the sex
industry, sweatshops, domestic labor, and agricultural
work.5
However, the documented incidents of sex trafficking in
the United States have, until recently, been published
in isolation and usually in newspaper articles following
an enforcement crackdown and prosecution. These accounts
have generally lacked an analysis of the structures that
account for women being trafficked into prostitution,
namely, the global sex industry, the subordination of
women, the gendered labor market, and the multiple
economic crises and inequalities that underlie women's
lives.
Many factors‑including
death threats to themselves and their families at home;
conditions of isolation and confinement; the high
mobility of the sex industry; fear of deportation; the
lack of acknowledgement within many human rights and
refugee advocacy service organizations who are
struggling with a range of other problems; and the lack
of "safe houses" and shelters‑make it nearly impossible
for trafficked women to seek assistance and to testify
against traffickers and other exploiters.6
Further, the limited
legislation, light penalties, and long, complicated
nature of investigations for trafficking convictions
tend to make trafficking cases unattractive to many US
attorneys, according to a recent government report.7
Additionally, the current immigration and criminal
justice system in the United States is weighted against
trafficked women. The current system hampers
undocumented victims of trafficking from coming forward
for fear of deportation and the lack of INS assurance
that victims will be allowed to remain in the country if
they choose.
This overview and
analysis of the trafficking of women in the United
States for sexual exploitation has had to rely,
therefore, on indirect and secondary sources, including
federal government estimates, as well as a minimal but
growing body of primary sources, chief among which are
interviews with trafficked women conducted by the
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. The authors have
pieced together a composite picture of the scope and
methods by which immigrant women, migrant women with
temporary visas, and women lumped into the INS
categories of "‑undocumented aliens" and "illegal
aliens" end up exploited in prostitution in the United
States.8
As
for delineating the harm suffered by trafficked women,
we draw from three sources: studies of prostituted women
which document the health effects of prostitution
including the harm from violence; the literature on the
health burden of violence against women; and our
interviews conducted recently with trafficked Russian
women. Everything learned in this investigation of sex
trafficking directs us to a policy of prevention of
trafficking through alternatives for women, protection
for trafficked women, and prosecution of traffickers and
other exploiters.
Public health and
environmental protection agencies‑once they have
documented human health and environmental,
threats‑typically respond with intervention and
protection programs for those at risk, coupled with
enforcement mechanisms to punish and deter violators.
Prevention is generally late upon the scene and
inadequate for the need. In documenting the trafficking
of women for sexual exploitation, we have concluded that
three fronts of response to this grievous abuse of human
rights are equally vital: namely, investing in women's
economic development and women's human rights to create
alternatives for women, while exposing the sex industry
and the harm to women; providing services and protection
from deportation for trafficked women; and aggressively
punishing the crime of sex trafficking, not by
criminalizing the women but by punishing the recruiters,
traffickers, pimps, and buyers.
Migration: The Nexus of
Individual Necessity,
Country Policy,
Post‑Colonial Development,
and Industry
Opportunism
In
the mid‑1990s, nearly two percent of the world's
population, or about 125 million people, were
international migrants, that is, people living outside
their country of origin, the highest number in history.
International migration in 1995 was estimated to be up
to 4 million people annually, with about one‑half of
these entering the United States and Canada as permanent
and temporary migrants, refugees, and undocumented
migrants. No one international or national data source
identifies all of the people moving across national
borders, but all data sources tracking refugees and
migrant labor
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