Trafficking (2007)

Cases of trafficked women and children have littered the British press in recent months. These include

A nineteen year old woman from Nigeria who was raped by ten men per day and beaten if she refused (BBC)
A Romanian woman that was raped for eleven hours every day and was not fed often so that she wouldn't become 'fat' (BBC)
A Malaysian mother that was tricked with promises of providing a better life for her children and tricked into taking a 'cleaning job' that turned out to be a massage parlour ( BBC).

Trafficking of women and children is often confused with smuggling. The United States Department of Justice explains the differences:

Unlike smuggling, which is often a criminal commercial transaction between two willing parties who go their separate ways once their business is complete, trafficking specifically targets the trafficked person as an object of criminal exploitation. The purpose from the beginning of the trafficking enterprise is to profit from the exploitation of the victim. It follows that fraud, force or coercion all play a major role in trafficking ( US Department of Justice).

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has estimated that trafficking is worth US$32 billion per year, although this estimate is somewhat conservative given that trafficking is the world's third largest crime after drugs and arms dealing (US Department of State). Trafficking does not only occur across borders. Women and children can be trafficked within their own countries and / or trafficked several times within the same country. Due to the nature of the crime, it is difficult to say how many people are trafficked annually. In 2002, the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) estimated that between 700,000 and 2 million are trafficked internationally annually, with the figure rising to 4 million is domestic trafficking is included. In 2005, the ILO estimated that 2.45 million people are trafficked annually, half of which are children.

Women and children are especially vulnerable to being trafficked. Extreme poverty, unemployment and lack of access to education and resources exacerbates the effects of gender inequalities, including social tolerance to violence against women. Political unrest, civil war and natural disasters all contribute to women and children being displaced or orphaned, making them vulnerable to traffickers.

Traffickers can use coercion, deception, kidnapping and intimidation to gain access to their victims. Once trafficked, victims are threatened with violence to themselves or their families back home if they try to escape. If they are trafficked into foreign countries they are threatened with deportation. If they are from countries where corruption of police and government officials is rife, they may apply the same level of distrust to police officials in the country to which they are trafficked.

In research conducted by the Poppy Project in 2004 with women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation, 62% thought they were either coming to the UK for greater work or educational opportunities or believed that they were coming to work in a domestic capacity or the restaurant industry.

Where women are trafficked for sexual exploitation they may be coerced into or start taking drugs as a coping mechanism. The women also have no control over their health, especially their sexual and reproductive health, putting them at risk of STIs and HIV.

In March 2007, the Home Office launched the UK Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking. In October 2007 a police campaign involving all 55 police forces in UK and Ireland was launched to track gangs that force women and children to become sexually exploited. 200 arrests were made in the preceding four months. In a similar operation last year 88 women and girls were rescued, one as young as 14.

Harriet Harman has urged ministers to prosecute men who pay for sex, suggesting they look to Sweden She suggested the UK look at the case of Sweden 'where they support young women who have drug problems and who are vulnerable for other reasons, but they actually have a criminal offence of buying sex - they make prostitution illegal, by taking on the issue of the punters rather than the young women' (BBC). In Scotland, MPs voted in favour of making kerb-crawling illegal, criminalising purchasers for the first time.

ORGANISATIONS & WEBSITES

Anti-Slavery International

http://www.antislavery.org/

ECPAT UK

http://www.ecpat.org.uk/

Poloris Project

http://www.polarisproject.org/

The Poppy Project

http://www.eaves4women.co.uk/POPPY_Project/POPPY_Project.php

The Truth Isn't Sexy

http://www.thetruthisntsexy.com/

POLICY & RESEARCH