Globalization has changed the world. Commodities are bought and sold across national borders and continents with unprecedented frequency. Unfortunately, one of the hottest commodities in this new world order is young women.
The profits gained from trafficking women exceed $8 billion annually. This is comparable to the lucrative trade in guns and drugs. In addition to the considerable financial gains, there are also fewer risks in trafficking women than in trafficking other illegal goods such as arms, drugs, and endangered species of animals and plants. These factors combined draw many people into the business, including well-established crime syndicates such as the Japanese Yakuza and the Hong Kong Triad.
Law enforcement has generally proved inadequate in combating this problem, both nationally and internationally. This is because of a general perception that trafficked women migrate willingly and allow themselves to be sold. According to Lois Chiang, Assistant Dean at U of T’s Faculty of Law, “The impediments [to combating trafficking] are first a lack of understanding of what trafficking is–and this in not purely a legal issue. We need a better understanding of this phenomenon, and this gets intimately tied up with issues around women’s agency and women’s sexuality.”
The causes of trafficking are complex and multifaceted. The intensification of international trade and foreign direct investment was intended to improve the economies of developing countries. Unfortunately, it appears that the opposite has occurred and poverty is rising in many developing countries. Large numbers of women are now leaving their home countries in the hope of finding better wages in developed countries.
In addition, the sexual division of labour has also intensified the vulnerability of young women (aged 15-25) to trafficking rings. Girls are often educated to lower levels than boys and have fewer work opportunities in skilled professions. The jobs available to them are often limited to domestic service and factory work.
The merchandizing of women takes a variety of forms including forced labour, mail-order brides, arranged marriages and slavery-like practices in prostitution. As such, trafficking may be defined as the exploitation of women for their labour, with or without pay and with or without their consent.
Surprisingly, many of the manifestations of trafficking can be found in our own backyard. According to Chiang, “There are many instances of trafficking in women in Canada-both as a domestic issue and a cross-border issue. As a domestic issue, we have seen in the press stories of young girls being deceived or coerced and kept forcibly confined and then raped by either the abductors or others and forced into prostitution. We see similar stories about women being brought over to Canada by traffickers and also forced into prostitution.”
In total, trafficking in people within Canada represents a market of $120 million to $400 million, affecting 8,000 to 16,000 illegal immigrants annually.
Within a historical context, some of the current manifestations of trafficking actually have antecedents in Canada. The filles du Roy were brought to New France in the 17th century as potential brides for the men who were establishing the colony. They served as the forerunners of the 21st century’s mail-order brides. Later, the enslavement of black and aboriginal women in Canada during the 18th century served as a forerunner to the present hiring of immigrant live-in caregivers.
Now, with the emergence of catalogues on the Internet, there has been a disturbing proliferation of trafficking in Canada. This is compounded by the fact that the status of immigrant women in Canada may be precarious. The situation in Asia, however, is much worse. The sale and purchase of young women is perhaps most common in that region. Because, there are large amounts of money to be made from trafficking. The ‘breaking of the hymen’ in India where by men pay to have sex with a virgin can bring in up to $26,000 (U.S.). The girls involved earn nothing for themselves; all the money generally goes to the madam and others involved in the exploitation.
Trafficking has also allowed the terror industry to flourish.
“The Al-Qaeda terrorist organization currently receives a large portion of its funding through the human trafficking industry. Therefore, trafficking is not merely a moral issue. It is also an issue of strategic security,” notes Tommy Calvert of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
With the growth of HIV infection, some foreigners come directly to Thai villages to purchase virgins for sexual purposes. Since the 1990s, both local and foreign traffickers have aggressively recruited young, unmarried women from village communities. Women from ethnic minorities and from the neighbouring countries of Burma, Cambodia and south China are particularly vulnerable.
Predictably, those women who do contract HIV are given no assistance. UNICEF has released reports of Burmese sex workers who were repatriated to Burma because they had contracted HIV, and were subsequently executed with cyanide injections.
Cambodia also presents a typical case study of how intensifying globalization has increased the vulnerability of young women to trafficking. When Cambodia became open to economic liberalization after 20 years of isolation, tourism increased as did the presence of UN troops and foreign workers.
As a result, there was also the simultaneous increase in prostitution and trafficking for this purpose. It is estimated that 35 per cent of the young women involved were 17 years old or younger.
Most surprisingly, family and friends are also involved in the trafficking of young women. Almost half of the prostitutes surveyed by the Cambodian Women’s Development Association (CWDA) reported that they had been sold into prostitution by relatives or friends because of poverty and lack of employment opportunities.
In addition to family members, high-ranking officials are also involved in the trafficking of young women. Immigration officials are paid to ignore the illegal transport of women across borders. NGOs have reported incidences of high-ranking local policemen receiving free sexual services in return for their protection of an illegal operation.
Despite this grim reality, there are several constructive things that can be done to combat this problem. Katherine Chon of the Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking advocacy group, cites one practical method by which the US is combating trafficking in women. “The Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed in the United States in 2000. This provides temporary visas for undocumented immigrant women who have been trafficked into the sex industry.”
According to Chiang, “There are challenging issues around women’s agency in the process of trafficking that need to be addressed and resolved in our legal system. Assuming that we have laws that address this issue, at a practical implementation level, we need to recognize the phenomenon of trafficking in women as both a domestic issue as well as one involving people from other countries. Then, our laws and our support systems should be examined to see how they specifically have affected those captured under our legal system.”
