Human rights sex trafficking and prostitution - perspectives on prostitution

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Alice Leuchtag

   The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons,
   by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of
   abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position
   of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to
   achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the
   purpose of exploitation.

While recognizing that the largest amount of trafficking involves women and children, the wording of the UN protocol clearly is gender and age neutral, inclusive of trafficking in both males and females, adults and children.

In 2000 the UN General Assembly adopted this convention and its supplementary protocol; 121 countries signed the convention and eighty countries signed the protocol for the convention and protocol to become international law, forty countries must ratify them.

Highlights

Some highlights of the new convention and protocol are:

For the first time there is an accepted international definition of trafficking and an agreed-upon set of prosecution, protection, and prevention mechanisms on which countries can base their national legislation.

* The various criminal means by which trafficking takes place, including indirect and subtle forms of coercion, are covered.

* Trafficked persons, especially women in prostitution and child laborers, are no longer viewed as illegal migrants but as victims of a crime.

* The convention doesn't limit its scope to criminal syndicates but defines an organized criminal group as "any structured group of three or more persons which engages in criminal activities such as trafficking and pimping."

* All victims of trafficking in persons are protected, not just those who can prove that force was used against them.

* The consent of a victim of trafficking is meaningless and irrelevant.

* Victims of trafficking won't have to bear the burden of proof.

* Trafficking and sexual exploitation are intrinsically connected and not to be separated.

* Because women trafficked domestically into local sex industries suffer harmful effects similar to those experienced by women trafficked transnationally, these women also come under the protections of the protocol.

* The key element in trafficking is the exploitative purpose rather than the movement across a border.

The protocol is the first UN instrument to address the demand for prostitution sex, a demand that results in the human rights abuses of women and children being trafficked. The protocol recognizes an urgent need for governments to put the buyers of prostitution sex on their policy and legislative agendas, and it calls upon countries to take or strengthen legislative or other measures to discourage demand, which fosters all the forms of sexual exploitation of women and children.

As Raymond says in the Guide to the New UN Trafficking Protocol:

   The least discussed part of the prostitution and trafficking chain has been
   the men who buy women for sexual exploitation in prostitution.... If we are
   to find a permanent path to ending these human rights abuses, then we
   cannot just shrug our shoulders and say, "men are like this," or "boys will
   be boys," or "prostitution has always been around." Or tell women and girls
   in prostitution that they must continue to do what they do because
   prostitution is inevitable. Rather, our responsibility is to make men
   change their behavior, by all means available--educational, cultural and
   legal.