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.

Random Thoughts on ITPA

This is part of a reply to a friend who's a Human Rights researcher who'd asked me what I thought of the ITPA amendments.

Prostitution shouldn't exist in an ideal society but the fact is that we don't live in a society which even remotely resembles Utopia, and as such, I believe that prostitution should be legalised since that would at the very least be a mechanism to afford some sort of protection to sex-workers who are, as a group, vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

ITPA (Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, 1986), even as it stands today, has failed in its objective --- it tends to create human rights abuses and does not prevent them. Making prostitution illegal and passing the proposed amendments would be a human rights disaster to my mind.

Today, in this country, prostitution in itself is legal (although trafficking and pimping are illegal) but Commercial Sex Workers are treated like criminals with no rights nonetheless. While ITPA itself does not make prostitution illegal, it might as well have done so since it criminalises the activities required to carry it out and does nothing to help. It makes it illegal to solicit in public places, keep a brothel or allow premises to be used as a brothel, procure a person to work as a prostitute or in immoral trafficking. In addition to this, the law punishes a person for living on the earning of prostitution by saying, "any person over the age of 18 years who knowingly lives, wholly or in part, on the earnings of prostitution shall be punishable with imprisonment. If her partner, parent or adult child is dependent on her income for survival, they are liable to prosecution." Evn though it has been proposed to scrap Section 8 of the Act which deals with the offece of solicitation, God help CSWs if prostitution itself is made illegal because nobody else will.

What I find most scary is that the proposed sections 5A, 5B and 5C not only fail to segregate trafficking from sex work but in fact integrate the two. I think that if at all the law is to be amended to help CSWs, the definition of pimps should be made wider. For example, it should include 'marriage-brokers' who arrange the kind of marriages where women are made wives but treated as unpaid servants by day and sex-slaves by night.

The current amendments remind me of the early Domestic Violence Bills which would have done more harm than good. Domestic violence itself was, for example, not defined --- Under Section 4 (1) of the 2002 Bill, Domestic violence, for the purposes of this Act was defined as, "any conduct of the respondent shall constitute domestic violence if he (a) habitually assaults or makes the life of the aggrieved person miserable by cruelty of conduct even if such conduct does not amount to physical ill-treatment; etc." --- and there was no one to define what 'habitually' meant. Once a day? Once a week? Once a fortnight?

These amendments, like the Domestic Violence proposals, will need to be significantly changed before they can claim to be of any benefit to Commercial Sex Workers. As they stand right now, although they might so a little good, they are far more likely to a lot of harm.