“Around the world, an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for labor or sexual exploitation every year, according to the U.S. Department of State. About 80 percent of victims are women and girls.” Harvard School of Public Health researchers, working with organizations like Maiti Nepal and Rescue Foundation of Mumbai, are publicizing the brutal reality of these women’s lives:
In the age of HIV/AIDS, [Harvard School of Public Health Associate Professor Jay Silverman] realized, forced prostitution is often tantamount to murder. Many victims, compelled to service dozens of men per week, were contracting HIV and radiating the infection. Upon rescue or escape, critically ill women and girls were returning to their homelands, bringing the virus with them…
Of [a group of Nepalese] women and girls trafficked between 1997 and 2005, the researchers found that 38 percent had HIV. At greatest risk by far, they discovered, were children—those who fetched the highest prices, perhaps because of their presumed virginity. One in seven study subjects had been sold before her 15th birthday. More than 60 percent of these children were HIV-positive…
Silverman offers possible explanations for the heightened risk faced by young girls. These children are least able to demand that clients use condoms. They may be ignorant of sexually transmitted diseases and their transmission. Their still-developing genital tracts, traumatized again and again, become torn and highly susceptible to infection.
But to the HSPH team, the most compelling reason for their exceptional vulnerability may be the high value placed on these children. From anecdotal reports, the researchers learned that traffickers sell younger girls at higher prices. For children, brothel owners can demand up to twice the usual fee from clients who prefer virgins, who are presumed to be disease-free. These most valuable of human commodities are forced to serve many more men than are mature women…
As shown in The Day My God Died, trafficking victims are so terrorized and traumatized that rescue is exceedingly difficult… “It’s hard for victims to trust anybody. If they try to get out and they’re discovered, the consequences can be dire.”
See also:
Documentary: The Day My God Died
…stories of young girls whose lives have been shattered by the child sex trade…
Girls are gang-raped, beaten and forced to service up to 20 clients a day as they are held in perpetual sexual servitude…
Sexual servitude is a virtual death sentence. In Bombay alone, 90 new cases of HIV are reported every hour and the girls suffer an 80% HIV/AIDS infection rate.
“New York Press No Longer Marketing Arm for Prostitution/Trafficking”
Today, trafficking human beings for sexual exploitation, labor, and domestic servitude is the third fastest growing illegal enterprise. The United States is the second highest destination in the world for trafficked women, with an estimated 17,500 women being smuggled in every year…
Aimed at ending newspapers and magazines’ reliance on advertisement revenue from illegal massage parlors and brothels, NOW-NYC is asking local publications to stop doing business with the organized commercial sex industry by signing an antitrafficking pledge…
“We’re simply asking publishers to do basic due diligence and use common sense,” Ossorio said. “If someone calls wanting to place an ad that reads ‘Russian Girls, Young, 24/7’ what’s there to check out? Take the contact information and call the police.”
Another Victory for NOW-NYC: New York Magazine Drops Sex Ads
One would think that this would be exactly the kind of exploitation the Voice would revel in exposing. But because the Voice is free, it apparently needs the revenue brought in by, this week, 10 pages of these ads.
And so its press release yammers on about how our freedoms are “under attack by the Bush administration,” and makes NOW sound like the Taliban, and finally trots out the same pathetic excuse New York once made: “If there is evidence that any advertiser in our pages engaged in…sex slavery…” Blah blah blah.
It’s hard to be part of the solution, when you’re part of the problem.
Ask the Valley Advocate’s New Owner to Drop the Sex Ads
“Trade – A Film Brings Sex Trafficking Home”
Trade makes it clear that traffickers do not operate in a vacuum. Theirs is a complex and determined industry, enslaving both women and children through coercion, violence, and drugs. It is painfully apparent in the film that there are often moments when everyday people could intervene – but choose not to…
D.A. Clarke: Women Adopting Men’s Bad Habits Is Not the Answer
To accept that the costs borne by strangers in far-off lands make our way of life unaffordable implies that we learn to respect those people and that we become ashamed of living at their expense; to accept that we are responsible for the damage that we do to our soil, water, and air means that we learn to clean up after ourselves; to accept that resources are precious and should not be wasted is to learn that the world is not a consumable, an expendable – and neither are its people…
Grabbing all you can while you can get it is an expensive way to live. It may turn out to be an expensive way to die. A generation which took this lesson to heart would be less likely to use up, despise, abuse and discard women and children as sexual toys…
Sexual Ecology: Porn, Promiscuity, and AIDS (explicit language)
Rotello observes that all infectious diseases are ecological. The human behavioral environment is as important a factor as the biological properties of the virus. Variations in technology and culture explain why the same virus will remain rare in one population but start an epidemic in another. Epidemics depend on the infectivity of the virus, its prevalence in the community, and the rate of contact between the core group of infected people and the general population.
Old Navy Celebrates Notorious Thailand Prostitution Center on T-Shirt
“Go-Go Pattaya Thailand, Open 24 Hours”, says one of Old Navy’s Summer Destination Tees for Men, now on sale for $8.70. Pattaya, for those who don’t know, is a notorious center for Thailand’s prostitution industry. Many sailors in the US Navy are familiar with it…
Of the estimated 20,000 prostitutes in Pattaya, hundreds are children who are either lured from their villages by the idea of opportunity or by criminal networks. (Mark Baker, “Sin city can’t shake vice’s grip,” Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 1997)…
Victims of trafficking from other nations are easily deceived or lured because they face poverty, unemployment, broken families and unstable governments in their own countries. (Sirinya Wattanasukchai, “Flesh trade shrugs off new risks,” The Nation, 1 May 1997)…
Men who use women in prostitution are the largest cause of the spread of AIDS in Thailand. Young boys often have their first sexual experiences in brothels…
Thailand has the fourth largest number of AIDS cases in the world with nearly 60,000. This is only the number of officially reported cases and health workers say the actual number is sveral times higher. (Sutin Wannabovorn, “Thai Prime Minister vows end prostitution, AIDS victims react,” Reuters, 29 July 1997)…
Realities of Teen Prostitution Mock Notions of ‘Sex Work’, ‘Sex-Positive’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Empowerment’; Media Glamorizes Pimps
Advocates for ‘sex work’ say it is or should be about free choice and the empowerment of women. They claim that if prostitutes have troubled lives, this stems from the fact that many (unenlightened) people find prostitution offensive and the government doesn’t care enough about prostitutes’ working conditions, rather than anything inherent in exchanging sex for money or the common power differences between prostitutes vs. pimps and johns. They ignore the fact that a large proportion of prostitutes begin when they are underage…
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that between 100,000 and 3 million American kids under age 18 are involved in prostitution and they’re often targeted by sexual predators…
“I think in the last couple years we’ve seen a real increase in the glorification of pimp culture,” Lloyd says. “Girls growing up now, and boys too, are beginning to see this as cute and sexy or glamorous and not really understanding the realities of the sex industry…”
“What you see in the movies, what you see on TV — it’s not like that,” Sara says. “They don’t tell you the part about the rapes. They don’t tell you about getting beat up. They don’t tell you that you might die every day…”
Letter to the Gazette: “Addressing prostitution, promiscuity in war on AIDS”
Most sex workers in developing nations are more like slaves than they are like the “D.C. Madam”. Trafficking in women is a human rights violation that self-styled progressives like Garrett should oppose. Moreover, heterosexual women in the Third World, who lack the social power to enforce safe-sex guidelines in their relationships, are being infected with AIDS at an alarming rate by husbands who patronize prostitutes.
Ricky Martin Campaigns Against Child Sex Trafficking
Taking into account the high incidence of sexually transmitted disease, including HIV (human immunodeficiency virus or better known as AIDS) and HPV [human papillomavirus]…clients are willing and spare no expense to have sexual contact with children, since they assume they have a better chance of being virgins and thereby not be infected.
According to that expressed by a specialist and social researcher, fear of AIDS has lead men to seek younger and younger girls and boys, a situation which worsens this social problem even more…
…an investigator states: “The thing that scares them the most and makes them helpless is that the majority of them were molested in their own houses.”
…this “industry of rape for profit” is not only found oceans away, it might be right under your nose.
“One group was able to identify 12 brothels within a mile radius of the White House,” he says. “They’re right in our neighborhoods, in our cities. Sometimes they’re hard to find, but they’re part of our community…”
Strip Clubs Are the Next Hot Thing on Wall Street, Fund Manager Tells Barron’s
“…the girls who work there, the dancers, or what the industry calls the “talent,” pay $150 to $200 a shift for the privilege of working…
“I asked one guy in the business, ‘What’s the biggest risk to your business model?’ He said if the government stops immigration from Eastern Europe.”
New York Times: “The Girls Next Door”; Worldwide Sex Trafficking; Role of Porn
Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says: ”The physical path of a person being trafficked includes stages of degradation of a person’s mental state. A victim gets deprived of food, gets hungry, a little dizzy and sleep-deprived. She begins to break down; she can’t think for herself. Then take away her travel documents, and you’ve made her stateless. Then layer on physical violence, and she begins to follow orders. Then add a foreign culture and language, and she’s trapped…”
”There’s a vast misunderstanding of what coercion is, of how little it takes to make someone a slave,” Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission said. ”The destruction of dignity and sense of self, these girls’ sense of resignation…”
If anything, the women I talked to said that the sex in the U.S. is even rougher than what the girls face on Calle Santo Tomas. Rosario, a woman I met in Mexico City, who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years, said: ”In America we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.” She said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand in the U.S. because of an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex. Traffickers need younger and younger girls, she suggested, simply because they are more pliable. In Eastern Europe, too, the typical age of sex-trafficking victims is plummeting; according to Matei of Reaching Out, while most girls used to be in their late teens and 20’s, 13-year-olds are now far from unusual.
Salon: Atlanta’s underage sex trade
The problem isn’t restricted to so-called Hotlanta; Herbert notes, dispiritedly, that “the overall market for sex with kids is booming in many parts of the U.S.” But the city’s role as a convention and travel hub has given it a particular boost. And advocates say that the prevailing preference for ever-younger prostitutes–fueled by “the cultural emphasis on the sexual appeal of very young women and girls” and “the widely held belief among johns that there is less risk of contracting a disease from younger prostitutes”–has pimps and sex traffickers recruiting more at-risk kids than ever before.
Prostitution: Factsheet on Human Rights Violations
The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years (M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, 1982, “Victimization of street prostitutes”, Victimology: An International Journal, 7: 122-133) or 14 years (D. Kelly Weisberg, 1985, “Children of the Night: A Study of Adolescent Prostitution”, Lexington, Mass, Toronto)…
…67% of those in prostitution from five countries met criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD–a rate similar to that of battered women, rape victims, and state-sponsored torture survivors. (Melissa Farley, Isin Baral, Merab Kiremire, Ufuk Sezgin, “Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” (1998) Feminism & Psychology 8 (4): 405-426)…
Gloria Steinem at Smith: Cooperation, Not Domination
Sweden’s Prostitution Solution: Why Hasn’t Anyone Tried This Before?
In the fog of clichés despairing that “prostitution will always be with us”, one country’s success stands out as a beacon lighting the way. In just five years Sweden has dramatically reduced the number of women in prostitution. In the capital city of Stockholm, the number of women in street prostitution has been reduced by two thirds, and the number of “johns” has been reduced by 80%. There are other major Swedish cities where street prostitution has all but disappeared. Gone too, for the most part, are the infamous Swedish bro
thels and massage parlors which proliferated during the last three decades of the twentieth century, when prostitution in Sweden was legal.
In addition, the number of foreign women now being trafficked into Sweden for sex work is almost nil. The Swedish government estimates that in the last few years only 200 to 400 women and girls have been annually sex trafficked into Sweden, a figure that’s negligible compared to the 15,000 to 17,000 females yearly sex trafficked into neighboring Finland. No other country, nor any other social experiment, has come anywhere near Sweden’s promising results…
In 1999, after years of research and study, Sweden passed legislation that a) criminalizes the buying of sex, and b) decriminalizes the selling of sex…
In addition to the two-pronged legal strategy, a third and essential element of Sweden’s prostitution legislation provides for ample and comprehensive social service funds aimed at helping any prostitute who wants to get out, and additional funds to educate the public. As such, Sweden’s unique strategy treats prostitution as a form of violence against women in which the men who exploit by buying sex are criminalized, the mostly female prostitutes are treated as victims who need help, and the public is educated in order to counteract the historical male bias that has long stultified thinking on prostitution.