Over the past three decades the world has witnessed four distinct waves of trafficking
for sexual exploitation.the first wave of trafficked women came from Southeast Asia
in the 1970s and was composed mostly of Thai and Filipino women. The second wave
arrived in the early 1980s and was made up of women from Africa, mainly Ghana and
Nigeria. The third wave, from Latin America, followed right behind and was comprised of
women mostly from Colombia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. The newest wave is
from Eastern and Central Europe. Just a decade ago these women did not even register in
the sex trafficking radar screen. Today they represent more than 25 percent of the trade.
There is a wall of complacency, complicity, and corruption that has allowed this
trade to explode recently. Sex trafficking runs by the laws of supply and demand.
Demand is generated by thousands of men. Economic, social, cultural, and gender factors
make women and girls vulnerable to being exploited as an endless supply.2
The international political economy of sex not only includes the supply side—the
women of the third world, the poor states, or exotic Asian women—but it cannot
maintain itself without the demand from the organizers of the trade—the men from
industrialized and developing countries. The patriarchal world system hungers for and
sustains the international subculture of docile women from underdeveloped countries.
These women are forced or lured into the trade of providing international sexual
services. Men accept this world order as well, regardless of their background. The world
that is so satisfying to too many men is the same world that is utterly devastating to too
many women and girls.
How Are Women Procured?
The Trafficking in Person Report is an annual report that serves as the primary
diplomatic tool through which the U.S. Government encourages partnership and
increased determination in the fight against forced labor, sexual exploitation, and
modern-day slavery. In the 2008 report, these true stories were documented:
Lila, a 19-year-old Romanian girl who had already endured physical and sexual
abuse from her alcoholic father, was introduced by an “acquaintance” to a man who
offered her a job as a housekeeper/salesperson in the U.K. When she arrived in the
U.K., the man sold her to a pimp and Lila was forced into prostitution. She was
threatened that she would be sent home in pieces if she did not follow every order.
After an attempted escape, her papers were confiscated and the beatings became
more frequent and brutal. Months later, after being re-trafficked several times,
Lila was freed in a police raid. She was eventually repatriated back to Romania
where, after two months, she "fled from a shelter where she had been staying. Her
whereabouts are unknown.
Nineteen-year-old So-Young stands at less than five feet tall after being chronically
malnourished in North Korea. A refugee, she crossed illegally into China with
hopes of a better life, but found instead a nightmare of sexual exploitation. An
“employer” offered her approximately $1.40 per day in exchange for work—money
that So-Young planned on sending back to her family. Deceived by this empty
promise, So-Young spent the next several months being passed between handlers.
Just days before she was to be purchased by a forty-year-old Chinese man, So-Young
managed to escape with the help of a local pastor. Three years later, she was forcibly
repatriated to North Korea where she was imprisoned for six months before escaping
once more to China. Traffickers kidnapped her once again, repeatedly raping her
prior to her sale. Her new “husband” also raped her multiple times before she was
able to escape. So-Young remains in hiding today: “There are many people coming
out of North Korea, but they don’t have anywhere to go and no other choice but to
go that route [into China].”
Samya lived with her mother, step-father and three brothers in a small Cairo
apartment. When her step-father raped her, she ran away from home and started
living on the streets at the age of 14. She met a group of street kids who, like
her, had "fled abuse at home. After two months on the streets begging for food
and avoiding harassment from police, she met Shouq, an older lady who allowed
some of the street girls to stay with her. The first night Samya stayed at Shouq’s
apartment, Shouq told her she would have to earn her keep by having sex with
male clients for the equivalent of $16. Samya, afraid to live on the streets and
fearful of returning home, had sex with several men a day for nearly one year;
Shouq kept all of the money.
Kunthy and Chanda were trafficked into prostitution at ages 13 and 14. Held
captive in a dilapidated structure in Phnom Penh that locals called the “Anarchy
Building,” the girls were raped nightly and routinely beaten, drugged, and
threatened by the brothel-keeper and pimps. The girls were released thanks to
police intervention and placed in safe aftercare homes. The brothel owner and pimp
were prosecuted, tried, and sentenced to 15 and 10 years in prison, respectively,
for trafficking and pimping children. Today, Chanda lives in a local aftercare home
where she receives excellent care; she wants to become an English translator.
Kunthy’s dream is to own an Internet café and design Web sites for businesses. Right
now, she works at a local NGO, attends a computer training school, and lives in a
transitional housing facility that allows her both freedom and security.
Mary, a young Kenyan woman, met a German tourist in his late sixties at a beach
resort and he impressed her with presents and pampering. After departing Kenya,
he convinced her to visit him in Germany, but immediately upon her arrival he
confiscated her passport and forced her into prostitution. “He raped me, as did the
men I was forced to pick at the bar.” Lucy’s health then deteriorated. “I knew it
was time to escape—or risk death trying.” Fortunately, Lucy was able to gain access
to a telephone and seek help from German police who then rescued her from her
trafficker.
Women do not sign up for sexual slavery. Most girls were recruited or coerced into
prostitution. Others were “traditional wives” without job skills who escaped from or
were abandoned by abusive fathers or husbands and went into prostitution to support
themselves and their children.3 There are numerous ways that women are procured for
the sex trade. Below are the most prevalent:4
1. Bogus recruiters offer prospective job seekers a “complete package” for positions
abroad. These offers don’t require prior work experience, and they almost always
seek young, preferably single, women. These arrangements often include training,
travel documents, and airfare, at no cost to the applicant. In 95 percent of these
cases, the promised job does not exist.
2. Ads are placed in seemingly legitimate employment agencies. Some set up “career
day” booths at universities and offer “contracts.” These firms are nothing more
than hunting grounds for criminal networks involved in the sex industry.
3. Relatives, neighbors, or acquaintances can gain trust and approach a young
woman or her family with an offer to help her land a job abroad. These culprits
include teachers, orphanage workers, police officers and their wives, etc.
4. Other trafficked women lure in new women. Sometimes this is the only way for
the old ones to escape. Sometimes pimps give them the option of going home if
they can reel in a certain number of other women.
5. Sometimes family members (parents, siblings, spouses, etc.) sell women or girls
into sex slavery.
6. New boyfriends also lure women by promising a night out and then force them
into waiting vehicles to sell them to pimps or traffickers.
7. Outright abduction is one of the most terrifying. Women and girls are simply
taken while walking home from school or work.
8. The most horrible is the targeting of orphans. Many girls are at risk when they
must leave the orphanage when they graduate at sixteen or seventeen. Most
have no resources or funds for living expenses or any education or training to get
a job. Traffickers often know when these girls are going to be turned out of the
institution and are waiting for them with job offers. Sometimes girls are even
purchased from orphanage workers.
9. Drugs also play a role in procuring and keeping women. Some women are
involved in sexual exploitation because they need money for their addiction. But
many are forced drugs to make them compliant and to incapacitate them.
It is important to note that not every woman is an innocent dupe. In fact, police
and government officials often go to great lengths to stress that some of these women
willingly enter the trade. In their eyes, this so-called willingness justices their apathy and
indifference. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the “willing” women have
no idea of what really awaits. It’s true that many women know full well when they accept
a job offer that they’ll be working in some aspect of the sex industry—massage parlors,
strip clubs, peep shows, and escort agencies. The vast number of women are not aware
of the nature or conditions of the work that awaits them. Women are told they will earn
$5,000 a month, live in luxury, have three days off, and be able to pick their clients.
Also, the “contracts” they sign are for three months, after which time, they are told they
are free to leave.
Most women are put into debt bondage, unable to pay off the high interest rate
their pimp charges them. They are sold in markets, raped, forced to service ten to thirty
men a day, can’t refuse any paying customer, are given no sick days and no days off for
their periods, get pregnant, acquire HIV and other STDs or medical and psychological
problems, and experience constant abuse and frequent gang rapes.
Customers of these women are sex tourists, U.N. peacekeeper and international
humanitarian aid workers, U.S. military men, and local men in the area. The presence
of these “mongers” has provided a valuable, readymade market for local brothel keepers
trading in trafficked women.
“Breaking” the Women
In secret training centers, thugs snap the spirit and will of their terrified hostages.
Women are quickly raped, often a few times. Their travel documents are taken and their
activities are tightly controlled and restricted. They are locked in their rooms where
they “work” and are under constant guard. They are warned that if they attempt escape
they will be severely punished. And they are told that if they do escape their families are
targeted. Often, they are videotaped or photographed in embarrassing sexual encounters,
and warned that if they escape, the pictures will be sent to their families and hometowns.
One woman forced into sex slavery shares her story:
There were many women in this one apartment. Some were crying. Others looked
terrified. We were told not to speak to each other. Not to tell each other our names
or where we were from. All the time, very mean and ugly men came in and dragged
girls into the rooms. Sometimes they would rape girls in front of us. They yelled at
them, ordering them to move certain ways . . . to pretend excitement . . . to moan. .
. . It was sickening. Those who resisted were beaten. If they did not cooperate, they
were locked in dark cellars with rats with no food or water for three days. One girl
refused to submit to anal sex, and that night the owner brought in five men. They
held her on the "floor and every one of them had anal sex on her in front of us all.
She screamed and screamed, and we all cried. That girl killed herself the next day.5
After women are beaten and threatened, they are sold to brothel and bar owners
that service the huge numbers of foreigners who make up sex tourists, international
peacekeeping forces, and U.S. military men. The level of physical violence and
psychological intimidation used to control these women is deliberate and extreme. It’s
meant to instill fear—to crush them, destroy their will, and force them to comply. Some
women have been mutilated and murdered as punishment for refusing to engage in the
sex trade. Some are killed as examples to other women. In short, women are forced to do
whatever it takes with whoever pays, and they are forced to do it with a smile on their
face, a sparkle in their eye, and a moan on their lips. But all this is done because they
will be killed and discarded if they do not.
Organized Crime and Corruption
In source countries, illegal trafficking is fueled by a desperate need for a better life.
In the destination countries, it is driven by an insatiable, self-indulgent appetite for
purchased sex, much too often by U.S. military men and transnational businessmen.
The force that brings them together is organized crime, notorious for acting swiftly to
attractive market forces.6
It is a booming industry, run with ruthless efficiency by powerful, multinational
criminal networks. These are not casual criminals. Women are bought, sold, and hired
out like any other product. The bottom line is profit. Trade in human beings earns up to
$12 billion worldwide.
The groups are Russian organized crime, Italian mafia, Colombian drug cartels,
Chinese triads, and the Japanese yakuza. These groups are expanding worldwide, and
sometimes join forces when it comes to sex slavery because the profits are too high to
not work together.
When organized crime groups are not trafficking women, corrupt government officials
have their hands out for bribes or pants down for sex. There are numerous examples of
corrupt police officers, judges, civil authorities, and government officials helping brothel
owners continue in their business. There is just too much money to be made.
Traffickers use bribes—money or free sex—to entice police and officials to look
the other way, to gain protection, and to circumvent borders. Complicity not only
guarantees impunity for traffickers; it sends a message to trafficked women that their
traffickers enjoy impunity and that they cannot escape.
U.S. Military and Prostitution
Militarized prostitution develops around foreign U.S. military bases. Militarized
prostitution is seen as providing for the sexual needs of the soldier, rationalized in
different ways as “boys will be boys,” maintaining morale, and rewarding long overseas
service.
At first glance, the rape of women by warring soldiers may seem unconnected to
soldiers’ use of prostitutes for R&R away from combat. But they have much more in
common than one might think. First, war rape and recreational military prostitution
both occur within the context and under the auspices of militaristic structures.
Moreover, both rape and use of prostitutes are thought to be inevitable, if not normal,
behavior of warring soldiers. Military leaders recognize that soldiers will rape women
during warfare. It has happened in every war since the beginning of time. Rape is a
weapon in warfare. The expectation of rape was captured succinctly by General George
Patton during WWII, when he told an aide that in spite of efforts to thwart it, “there
would unquestionably be some raping” by American GIs.7 R&R prostitution is often
condoned under the assumption that providing soldiers access to prostitutes will reduce
wartime raping—when, in reality, the two are complementary.
Militarized prostitution for R&R rewards soldiers away from the battered by giving
them sexual access to and use of others’ women. Because access to women after a battle
has been a traditional reward of war, it is impossible to discuss rape in warfare without
touching also on prostitution, since the two have been linked in history. Not that if
prostitutes are not readily available men will turn to rape “to satisfy their needs,” but
that the two acts—raping an unwilling woman and buying the body and services of a
more or less cooperating women—go hand in hand with a soldier’s concept of his rights
and pleasure.
Militaries have been instrumental in ensuring soldiers access to prostitution across
time and cultures. The extent to which military leadership has been proactive in or
supportive of the organization of prostitution during modern wars has varied. By the time
of WWII, some military leaders had determined that prostitution was too important to
their soldiers to be left to develop on its own. In fact, the U.S. military thought back
on WWI, when prostitution for its troops was available, but not regulated, and STD
infection rates among GIs were high. In WWII and thereafter, the U.S. military took a
more proactive role in organizing and regulating prostitution for its troops.
The organization of prostitution close to military bases and installations has resulted
in the evolution of prostitution economies in towns or areas nearby. During war or war
threat, the demand for prostitutes is met by trafficking women to those areas near U.S.
bases. When troops leave, prostitution towns lose their customer base and move the
women elsewhere.
Demand for prostitution is virtually always high when and where men gather
collectively for war, as well as for peacekeeping and other kinds of work and play. In
the last half of the twentieth century, it has been the buildup of organized military
prostitution for soldiers’ R&R that has set the stage for a country or city’s sex
industrialization. Once a prostitution economy has become firmly rooted in a town or
country (because of the presence of the U.S. military), sex trade entrepreneur’s move in
to either share in or take over the industry. Given the military customer base in poor
countries with poor women, sex industries "flourish. And as demand begins to outstrip
supply, the trafficking of women into prostitution goes global.
Most Prostitution Is Trafficking
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act defines “severe forms of trafficking” as:
a. Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion,
or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of
age; or
b. The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person
for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of
subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
A victim need not be physically transported from one location to another in order
for the crime to fall within these definitions. Sex trafficking means the recruitment,
harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a
commercial sex act. Commercial sex act means any sex act on account of which anything
of value is given to or received by any person.
Coercion means (a) threats of serious harm to or physical restraint against any
person; (b) any scheme, plan or pattern intended to cause a person to believe that failure
to perform an act would result in serious harm to or physical restraint against any person;
or, (c) the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process.
Involuntary servitude includes a condition of servitude induced by means of (a) any
scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause a person to believe that, if that person did
not enter into or continue in such condition, that person or another person would
suffer serious harm or physical restraint; or (b) the abuse or threatened abuse of 18 the
legal process.
Debt-Bondage—A common scenario in labor trafficking cases is for traffickers to
promise people a good job, even benefits, in order to lure them to a new workplace.
Then, the traffickers add arbitrary debt as a tool of coercion. A similar debt scheme is
increasingly used to enslave women and girls in prostitution throughout the world.
Many women trafficked into prostitution report a never-ending cycle of debt—first
they are charged exorbitant fees for the cost of transportation, then daily expenses are
frequently added and mount up exponentially. Many women trafficked into prostitution
receive no money from pimps or brothel owners. This becomes a cycle of entrapment.
In the United Kingdom, according to a leading NGO, brothel keepers and traffickers
force some victims to pay debts that could range as high as $39,000 to $78,000.
Commenting on patterns of abuse in prostitution of East European women in London,
Detective Inspector Dick Powell from Scotland Yard told the Guardian, “Some women
have sex with as many as 40 men a day. It’s very rare for her to get to keep any of the
money she earns. We’ve seen places where 300 pounds ($580) a day goes to the brothel
pimp or ‘madam,’ and that’s even before the woman begins to try and pay off the ‘debt
bondage’ of thousands of pounds charged to bring her here.” Often, the debt can never
be repaid because costs for food, rent, medicines, and condoms are added every day.
Sex trafficking is considered the largest specific subcategory of transnational
modern-day slavery. Sex trafficking would not exist without the demand for commercial
sex "flourishing around the world.
Prostitution and related activities—including pimping and patronizing or
maintaining brothels—encourage the growth of modern-day slavery by providing a
façade behind which traffickers for sexual exploitation operate. Where prostitution is
tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and always an increase
in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are three myths that need to be challenged.
The first myth is that prostitution is a victimless crime. The mongers who buy
prostitutes spew the myths that women choose prostitution, that they get rich, that it’s
glamorous, and that it turns women on. Studies show that most women in prostitution,
including those working for escort services, have been sexually abused as children. Incest
sets young women up for prostitution. Prostitution statistics show that 90 percent of
young women involved in prostitution were sexually abused as children. An estimated
80 to 90 percent of young women in the criminal or juvenile justice system have been
physically or sexually abused. The average age of entry into prostitution is thirteen.
Whether the woman is in a hotel room or on a side street in someone’s car, whether
she’s in New York or Bangladesh, the Philippines or Germany, the experience of being
prostituted causes her immense psychological and physical harm. And it all starts with
the buyer.
The second myth is the myth of “consensual” or “willing” sex. Young women and
children have "fled towards cities in an attempt to escape from the harshest, grinding
poverty. Poverty had forced them into unfavorable unions. There is a non-voluntary
aspect to their sexual activity. Under the weight of devastating poverty, one wonders
what to make of the notion of “consensual sex.” Few women seek out or choose to be in
prostitution, and most are desperate to leave it. A 2003 scientific study in the Journal
of Trauma Practice found that 89 percent of women in prostitution want to escape
prostitution but had no other options for survival.
The third myth is that this is a “women’s problem.” Prostitution and sex trafficking
are not women’s problems or up to them to solve. Men are the perpetrators and women
are the victims. Men are the problem. Sex trafficking is a men’s issue involving men
of all ages and socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Men are not only
perpetrators or possible offenders, but also empowered bystanders who can confront
abusive peers. Don’t remain silent.
In closing, to my Christian brothers in the military, you need to know that you work
for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. His name is Jesus and he sees and knows all. He
has commissioned you to bring his shalom to the world and be an agent of justice and
righteousness. Against you are both visible and invisible enemies and there is a very real
battle raging not just around you, but in you. It is your duty as an ambassador of your
King to be about protection of the weak and liberation of the oppressed. You have no
business working with Satan in furthering the enslavement of women made in God’s
likeness and loved by Jesus. He is ordering you to do nothing to harm them, dishonor
them, or defile them. Jesus does not put such women in your path for you to sin against,
but rather to pray for and possibly even liberate from evil, oppression, and the Serpent
who desperately wants you to join his ranks and participate in his darkness. As Paul told
Timothy, you need to fight a good fight.
So keep your pants on, your Bible open, your eyes focused, your hands ready, and
your heart broken, and fight in such a way that when you stand before Jesus in the end,
you can look him in the eye
for sexual exploitation.the first wave of trafficked women came from Southeast Asia
in the 1970s and was composed mostly of Thai and Filipino women. The second wave
arrived in the early 1980s and was made up of women from Africa, mainly Ghana and
Nigeria. The third wave, from Latin America, followed right behind and was comprised of
women mostly from Colombia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. The newest wave is
from Eastern and Central Europe. Just a decade ago these women did not even register in
the sex trafficking radar screen. Today they represent more than 25 percent of the trade.
There is a wall of complacency, complicity, and corruption that has allowed this
trade to explode recently. Sex trafficking runs by the laws of supply and demand.
Demand is generated by thousands of men. Economic, social, cultural, and gender factors
make women and girls vulnerable to being exploited as an endless supply.2
The international political economy of sex not only includes the supply side—the
women of the third world, the poor states, or exotic Asian women—but it cannot
maintain itself without the demand from the organizers of the trade—the men from
industrialized and developing countries. The patriarchal world system hungers for and
sustains the international subculture of docile women from underdeveloped countries.
These women are forced or lured into the trade of providing international sexual
services. Men accept this world order as well, regardless of their background. The world
that is so satisfying to too many men is the same world that is utterly devastating to too
many women and girls.
How Are Women Procured?
The Trafficking in Person Report is an annual report that serves as the primary
diplomatic tool through which the U.S. Government encourages partnership and
increased determination in the fight against forced labor, sexual exploitation, and
modern-day slavery. In the 2008 report, these true stories were documented:
Lila, a 19-year-old Romanian girl who had already endured physical and sexual
abuse from her alcoholic father, was introduced by an “acquaintance” to a man who
offered her a job as a housekeeper/salesperson in the U.K. When she arrived in the
U.K., the man sold her to a pimp and Lila was forced into prostitution. She was
threatened that she would be sent home in pieces if she did not follow every order.
After an attempted escape, her papers were confiscated and the beatings became
more frequent and brutal. Months later, after being re-trafficked several times,
Lila was freed in a police raid. She was eventually repatriated back to Romania
where, after two months, she "fled from a shelter where she had been staying. Her
whereabouts are unknown.
Nineteen-year-old So-Young stands at less than five feet tall after being chronically
malnourished in North Korea. A refugee, she crossed illegally into China with
hopes of a better life, but found instead a nightmare of sexual exploitation. An
“employer” offered her approximately $1.40 per day in exchange for work—money
that So-Young planned on sending back to her family. Deceived by this empty
promise, So-Young spent the next several months being passed between handlers.
Just days before she was to be purchased by a forty-year-old Chinese man, So-Young
managed to escape with the help of a local pastor. Three years later, she was forcibly
repatriated to North Korea where she was imprisoned for six months before escaping
once more to China. Traffickers kidnapped her once again, repeatedly raping her
prior to her sale. Her new “husband” also raped her multiple times before she was
able to escape. So-Young remains in hiding today: “There are many people coming
out of North Korea, but they don’t have anywhere to go and no other choice but to
go that route [into China].”
Samya lived with her mother, step-father and three brothers in a small Cairo
apartment. When her step-father raped her, she ran away from home and started
living on the streets at the age of 14. She met a group of street kids who, like
her, had "fled abuse at home. After two months on the streets begging for food
and avoiding harassment from police, she met Shouq, an older lady who allowed
some of the street girls to stay with her. The first night Samya stayed at Shouq’s
apartment, Shouq told her she would have to earn her keep by having sex with
male clients for the equivalent of $16. Samya, afraid to live on the streets and
fearful of returning home, had sex with several men a day for nearly one year;
Shouq kept all of the money.
Kunthy and Chanda were trafficked into prostitution at ages 13 and 14. Held
captive in a dilapidated structure in Phnom Penh that locals called the “Anarchy
Building,” the girls were raped nightly and routinely beaten, drugged, and
threatened by the brothel-keeper and pimps. The girls were released thanks to
police intervention and placed in safe aftercare homes. The brothel owner and pimp
were prosecuted, tried, and sentenced to 15 and 10 years in prison, respectively,
for trafficking and pimping children. Today, Chanda lives in a local aftercare home
where she receives excellent care; she wants to become an English translator.
Kunthy’s dream is to own an Internet café and design Web sites for businesses. Right
now, she works at a local NGO, attends a computer training school, and lives in a
transitional housing facility that allows her both freedom and security.
Mary, a young Kenyan woman, met a German tourist in his late sixties at a beach
resort and he impressed her with presents and pampering. After departing Kenya,
he convinced her to visit him in Germany, but immediately upon her arrival he
confiscated her passport and forced her into prostitution. “He raped me, as did the
men I was forced to pick at the bar.” Lucy’s health then deteriorated. “I knew it
was time to escape—or risk death trying.” Fortunately, Lucy was able to gain access
to a telephone and seek help from German police who then rescued her from her
trafficker.
Women do not sign up for sexual slavery. Most girls were recruited or coerced into
prostitution. Others were “traditional wives” without job skills who escaped from or
were abandoned by abusive fathers or husbands and went into prostitution to support
themselves and their children.3 There are numerous ways that women are procured for
the sex trade. Below are the most prevalent:4
1. Bogus recruiters offer prospective job seekers a “complete package” for positions
abroad. These offers don’t require prior work experience, and they almost always
seek young, preferably single, women. These arrangements often include training,
travel documents, and airfare, at no cost to the applicant. In 95 percent of these
cases, the promised job does not exist.
2. Ads are placed in seemingly legitimate employment agencies. Some set up “career
day” booths at universities and offer “contracts.” These firms are nothing more
than hunting grounds for criminal networks involved in the sex industry.
3. Relatives, neighbors, or acquaintances can gain trust and approach a young
woman or her family with an offer to help her land a job abroad. These culprits
include teachers, orphanage workers, police officers and their wives, etc.
4. Other trafficked women lure in new women. Sometimes this is the only way for
the old ones to escape. Sometimes pimps give them the option of going home if
they can reel in a certain number of other women.
5. Sometimes family members (parents, siblings, spouses, etc.) sell women or girls
into sex slavery.
6. New boyfriends also lure women by promising a night out and then force them
into waiting vehicles to sell them to pimps or traffickers.
7. Outright abduction is one of the most terrifying. Women and girls are simply
taken while walking home from school or work.
8. The most horrible is the targeting of orphans. Many girls are at risk when they
must leave the orphanage when they graduate at sixteen or seventeen. Most
have no resources or funds for living expenses or any education or training to get
a job. Traffickers often know when these girls are going to be turned out of the
institution and are waiting for them with job offers. Sometimes girls are even
purchased from orphanage workers.
9. Drugs also play a role in procuring and keeping women. Some women are
involved in sexual exploitation because they need money for their addiction. But
many are forced drugs to make them compliant and to incapacitate them.
It is important to note that not every woman is an innocent dupe. In fact, police
and government officials often go to great lengths to stress that some of these women
willingly enter the trade. In their eyes, this so-called willingness justices their apathy and
indifference. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the “willing” women have
no idea of what really awaits. It’s true that many women know full well when they accept
a job offer that they’ll be working in some aspect of the sex industry—massage parlors,
strip clubs, peep shows, and escort agencies. The vast number of women are not aware
of the nature or conditions of the work that awaits them. Women are told they will earn
$5,000 a month, live in luxury, have three days off, and be able to pick their clients.
Also, the “contracts” they sign are for three months, after which time, they are told they
are free to leave.
Most women are put into debt bondage, unable to pay off the high interest rate
their pimp charges them. They are sold in markets, raped, forced to service ten to thirty
men a day, can’t refuse any paying customer, are given no sick days and no days off for
their periods, get pregnant, acquire HIV and other STDs or medical and psychological
problems, and experience constant abuse and frequent gang rapes.
Customers of these women are sex tourists, U.N. peacekeeper and international
humanitarian aid workers, U.S. military men, and local men in the area. The presence
of these “mongers” has provided a valuable, readymade market for local brothel keepers
trading in trafficked women.
“Breaking” the Women
In secret training centers, thugs snap the spirit and will of their terrified hostages.
Women are quickly raped, often a few times. Their travel documents are taken and their
activities are tightly controlled and restricted. They are locked in their rooms where
they “work” and are under constant guard. They are warned that if they attempt escape
they will be severely punished. And they are told that if they do escape their families are
targeted. Often, they are videotaped or photographed in embarrassing sexual encounters,
and warned that if they escape, the pictures will be sent to their families and hometowns.
One woman forced into sex slavery shares her story:
There were many women in this one apartment. Some were crying. Others looked
terrified. We were told not to speak to each other. Not to tell each other our names
or where we were from. All the time, very mean and ugly men came in and dragged
girls into the rooms. Sometimes they would rape girls in front of us. They yelled at
them, ordering them to move certain ways . . . to pretend excitement . . . to moan. .
. . It was sickening. Those who resisted were beaten. If they did not cooperate, they
were locked in dark cellars with rats with no food or water for three days. One girl
refused to submit to anal sex, and that night the owner brought in five men. They
held her on the "floor and every one of them had anal sex on her in front of us all.
She screamed and screamed, and we all cried. That girl killed herself the next day.5
After women are beaten and threatened, they are sold to brothel and bar owners
that service the huge numbers of foreigners who make up sex tourists, international
peacekeeping forces, and U.S. military men. The level of physical violence and
psychological intimidation used to control these women is deliberate and extreme. It’s
meant to instill fear—to crush them, destroy their will, and force them to comply. Some
women have been mutilated and murdered as punishment for refusing to engage in the
sex trade. Some are killed as examples to other women. In short, women are forced to do
whatever it takes with whoever pays, and they are forced to do it with a smile on their
face, a sparkle in their eye, and a moan on their lips. But all this is done because they
will be killed and discarded if they do not.
Organized Crime and Corruption
In source countries, illegal trafficking is fueled by a desperate need for a better life.
In the destination countries, it is driven by an insatiable, self-indulgent appetite for
purchased sex, much too often by U.S. military men and transnational businessmen.
The force that brings them together is organized crime, notorious for acting swiftly to
attractive market forces.6
It is a booming industry, run with ruthless efficiency by powerful, multinational
criminal networks. These are not casual criminals. Women are bought, sold, and hired
out like any other product. The bottom line is profit. Trade in human beings earns up to
$12 billion worldwide.
The groups are Russian organized crime, Italian mafia, Colombian drug cartels,
Chinese triads, and the Japanese yakuza. These groups are expanding worldwide, and
sometimes join forces when it comes to sex slavery because the profits are too high to
not work together.
When organized crime groups are not trafficking women, corrupt government officials
have their hands out for bribes or pants down for sex. There are numerous examples of
corrupt police officers, judges, civil authorities, and government officials helping brothel
owners continue in their business. There is just too much money to be made.
Traffickers use bribes—money or free sex—to entice police and officials to look
the other way, to gain protection, and to circumvent borders. Complicity not only
guarantees impunity for traffickers; it sends a message to trafficked women that their
traffickers enjoy impunity and that they cannot escape.
U.S. Military and Prostitution
Militarized prostitution develops around foreign U.S. military bases. Militarized
prostitution is seen as providing for the sexual needs of the soldier, rationalized in
different ways as “boys will be boys,” maintaining morale, and rewarding long overseas
service.
At first glance, the rape of women by warring soldiers may seem unconnected to
soldiers’ use of prostitutes for R&R away from combat. But they have much more in
common than one might think. First, war rape and recreational military prostitution
both occur within the context and under the auspices of militaristic structures.
Moreover, both rape and use of prostitutes are thought to be inevitable, if not normal,
behavior of warring soldiers. Military leaders recognize that soldiers will rape women
during warfare. It has happened in every war since the beginning of time. Rape is a
weapon in warfare. The expectation of rape was captured succinctly by General George
Patton during WWII, when he told an aide that in spite of efforts to thwart it, “there
would unquestionably be some raping” by American GIs.7 R&R prostitution is often
condoned under the assumption that providing soldiers access to prostitutes will reduce
wartime raping—when, in reality, the two are complementary.
Militarized prostitution for R&R rewards soldiers away from the battered by giving
them sexual access to and use of others’ women. Because access to women after a battle
has been a traditional reward of war, it is impossible to discuss rape in warfare without
touching also on prostitution, since the two have been linked in history. Not that if
prostitutes are not readily available men will turn to rape “to satisfy their needs,” but
that the two acts—raping an unwilling woman and buying the body and services of a
more or less cooperating women—go hand in hand with a soldier’s concept of his rights
and pleasure.
Militaries have been instrumental in ensuring soldiers access to prostitution across
time and cultures. The extent to which military leadership has been proactive in or
supportive of the organization of prostitution during modern wars has varied. By the time
of WWII, some military leaders had determined that prostitution was too important to
their soldiers to be left to develop on its own. In fact, the U.S. military thought back
on WWI, when prostitution for its troops was available, but not regulated, and STD
infection rates among GIs were high. In WWII and thereafter, the U.S. military took a
more proactive role in organizing and regulating prostitution for its troops.
The organization of prostitution close to military bases and installations has resulted
in the evolution of prostitution economies in towns or areas nearby. During war or war
threat, the demand for prostitutes is met by trafficking women to those areas near U.S.
bases. When troops leave, prostitution towns lose their customer base and move the
women elsewhere.
Demand for prostitution is virtually always high when and where men gather
collectively for war, as well as for peacekeeping and other kinds of work and play. In
the last half of the twentieth century, it has been the buildup of organized military
prostitution for soldiers’ R&R that has set the stage for a country or city’s sex
industrialization. Once a prostitution economy has become firmly rooted in a town or
country (because of the presence of the U.S. military), sex trade entrepreneur’s move in
to either share in or take over the industry. Given the military customer base in poor
countries with poor women, sex industries "flourish. And as demand begins to outstrip
supply, the trafficking of women into prostitution goes global.
Most Prostitution Is Trafficking
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act defines “severe forms of trafficking” as:
a. Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion,
or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of
age; or
b. The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person
for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of
subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
A victim need not be physically transported from one location to another in order
for the crime to fall within these definitions. Sex trafficking means the recruitment,
harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a
commercial sex act. Commercial sex act means any sex act on account of which anything
of value is given to or received by any person.
Coercion means (a) threats of serious harm to or physical restraint against any
person; (b) any scheme, plan or pattern intended to cause a person to believe that failure
to perform an act would result in serious harm to or physical restraint against any person;
or, (c) the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process.
Involuntary servitude includes a condition of servitude induced by means of (a) any
scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause a person to believe that, if that person did
not enter into or continue in such condition, that person or another person would
suffer serious harm or physical restraint; or (b) the abuse or threatened abuse of 18 the
legal process.
Debt-Bondage—A common scenario in labor trafficking cases is for traffickers to
promise people a good job, even benefits, in order to lure them to a new workplace.
Then, the traffickers add arbitrary debt as a tool of coercion. A similar debt scheme is
increasingly used to enslave women and girls in prostitution throughout the world.
Many women trafficked into prostitution report a never-ending cycle of debt—first
they are charged exorbitant fees for the cost of transportation, then daily expenses are
frequently added and mount up exponentially. Many women trafficked into prostitution
receive no money from pimps or brothel owners. This becomes a cycle of entrapment.
In the United Kingdom, according to a leading NGO, brothel keepers and traffickers
force some victims to pay debts that could range as high as $39,000 to $78,000.
Commenting on patterns of abuse in prostitution of East European women in London,
Detective Inspector Dick Powell from Scotland Yard told the Guardian, “Some women
have sex with as many as 40 men a day. It’s very rare for her to get to keep any of the
money she earns. We’ve seen places where 300 pounds ($580) a day goes to the brothel
pimp or ‘madam,’ and that’s even before the woman begins to try and pay off the ‘debt
bondage’ of thousands of pounds charged to bring her here.” Often, the debt can never
be repaid because costs for food, rent, medicines, and condoms are added every day.
Sex trafficking is considered the largest specific subcategory of transnational
modern-day slavery. Sex trafficking would not exist without the demand for commercial
sex "flourishing around the world.
Prostitution and related activities—including pimping and patronizing or
maintaining brothels—encourage the growth of modern-day slavery by providing a
façade behind which traffickers for sexual exploitation operate. Where prostitution is
tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and always an increase
in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are three myths that need to be challenged.
The first myth is that prostitution is a victimless crime. The mongers who buy
prostitutes spew the myths that women choose prostitution, that they get rich, that it’s
glamorous, and that it turns women on. Studies show that most women in prostitution,
including those working for escort services, have been sexually abused as children. Incest
sets young women up for prostitution. Prostitution statistics show that 90 percent of
young women involved in prostitution were sexually abused as children. An estimated
80 to 90 percent of young women in the criminal or juvenile justice system have been
physically or sexually abused. The average age of entry into prostitution is thirteen.
Whether the woman is in a hotel room or on a side street in someone’s car, whether
she’s in New York or Bangladesh, the Philippines or Germany, the experience of being
prostituted causes her immense psychological and physical harm. And it all starts with
the buyer.
The second myth is the myth of “consensual” or “willing” sex. Young women and
children have "fled towards cities in an attempt to escape from the harshest, grinding
poverty. Poverty had forced them into unfavorable unions. There is a non-voluntary
aspect to their sexual activity. Under the weight of devastating poverty, one wonders
what to make of the notion of “consensual sex.” Few women seek out or choose to be in
prostitution, and most are desperate to leave it. A 2003 scientific study in the Journal
of Trauma Practice found that 89 percent of women in prostitution want to escape
prostitution but had no other options for survival.
The third myth is that this is a “women’s problem.” Prostitution and sex trafficking
are not women’s problems or up to them to solve. Men are the perpetrators and women
are the victims. Men are the problem. Sex trafficking is a men’s issue involving men
of all ages and socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Men are not only
perpetrators or possible offenders, but also empowered bystanders who can confront
abusive peers. Don’t remain silent.
In closing, to my Christian brothers in the military, you need to know that you work
for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. His name is Jesus and he sees and knows all. He
has commissioned you to bring his shalom to the world and be an agent of justice and
righteousness. Against you are both visible and invisible enemies and there is a very real
battle raging not just around you, but in you. It is your duty as an ambassador of your
King to be about protection of the weak and liberation of the oppressed. You have no
business working with Satan in furthering the enslavement of women made in God’s
likeness and loved by Jesus. He is ordering you to do nothing to harm them, dishonor
them, or defile them. Jesus does not put such women in your path for you to sin against,
but rather to pray for and possibly even liberate from evil, oppression, and the Serpent
who desperately wants you to join his ranks and participate in his darkness. As Paul told
Timothy, you need to fight a good fight.
So keep your pants on, your Bible open, your eyes focused, your hands ready, and
your heart broken, and fight in such a way that when you stand before Jesus in the end,
you can look him in the eye
