Trafficking and Prostitution

This post focusses on the EU.

1 Direct trafficking

The expansion of the European Union and the opportunity to make money due to an ostensibly insatiable demand are factors which have contributed to up to 120000 women and children being annually trafficked into Western European countries from Central and Eastern European countries.
Most women victims are aged between 18 and 25, and have been abducted or deceived (by being promised ‘normal’ jobs) in Western Europe. They are usually sexually exploited and suffer from severe physical and psychological trauma which may continue long after the exploitation itself has ended. The European Union has been more active in developing penal legislation, law enforcement and judicial co-operation than in the preventing trafficking and protecting victims although it has supported NGOs and health and social services to assist victims to recover and resume a normal life. [1]

2 Indirect trafficking

In 2003, immigration contributed to more than 80% of the total population growth in the EU-15. The effective integration of immigrants, many of whom are financially dependant and therefore particularly vulnerable to abuse, in both the labour market and society has become a channel to reach the Lisbon targets. However, ‘the gender perspective is to a large extent lacking in integration policies, which hampers the possibilities to fully utilise the potential of immigrant women in the labour market’.[2]

3 The links between trafficking and domestic violence

Women who have entered a society alien to them are especially vulnerable to being subjected to exploitation and violence since they often do not know their rights and even if they do, they may not know how to protect themselves.
Mass migrations due to poverty, pauperisation and prejudice ensure that rootlessness, ethnic tensions and violent lawlessness are a feature of nearly every city of the developed democratic world, [3] and one of the manifestations of this phenomenon is that those who are violent at home now have access to a market of both women who are illegally trafficked and women who migrate to Western European countries in search of a husband.
Moreover, women who migrate to marry ‘threaten’ the local women, particularly those who are already married, because their husbands may divorce them in favour of (younger) migrants thus depriving them of their pensions and leaving them in poverty after decades of marriage.
Recommendations have been made to protect local women in such situations by increasing stamp duty to make divorce proceedings prohibitively expensive, ensuring that matrimonial property is divided equally between the husband and his first wife, considering housework as labour in the case of housewives and making provisions to entitle housewives to a salary and pension from the state for their work in the home.

4 Efforts to beat trafficking

In line with the principle of subsidiarity and as signatories of the Beijing Platform for Action, it is Member States’ responsibility to take measures to fight trafficking although the European Commission has undertaken initiatives to help them fulfil their obligations. The Commission was, for example, responsible for implementing STOP (1996-2000) and STOP II (2001-2002) which were conducted to exchange information, and to reinforce networks and practical co-operation between Member States in order to encourage and facilitate action to prevent and combat trade in human beings and the sexual exploitation of children (including child pornography). STOP had a budget of €6.5 million and co-financed 85 projects in its five-year implementation period and STOP II, which was initiated to ensure continued support to the programme, had funds €4 million at its disposal for its two-year implementation period.[4]
Furthermore, both human rights law and (the the majority position in) refugee law now acknowledge state responsibility for human rights violations such as family violence which has become one of the most visible (and prolific) emerging bodies of refugee case law.[5]

References:
[1] Trafficking in Women; The misery behind the fantasy: from poverty to sex slavery
[2] Framework Strategy on Gender Equality 2001-2005
(The European Commission)
[3] Reflections on Violence
(John Keane, Oxford, 1996)
[4] STOP
[5] Refugee Law, Gender, and the Human Rights Paradigm
(Deborah E. Anker, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Volume 15 Spring 2002)

This post is an extract from an essay was written for the POROS Project.