CORRUPTION

International Affairs Forum Fall 2016
how could you not ask a woman from a small
village in Nigeria or China how she landed on the
streets of Geneva and who is keeping her in debt
bondage? It is the most essential of questions
and not asking it simply enriches and empowers
the sex trade, not the women sold into it.
All of this is to say, I think there are two avenues
that will help us out of this ideological quagmire:
The first is the survivors’ movement, which
is growing and getting stronger as survivors
of prostitution and the sex trade make their
harrowing stories public. Their narratives
are reaching policymakers and government
officials and forcing them to start thinking about
the unspeakable violence women face in the
sex trade. The second avenue is the medical
community, which is critical to furthering our
understanding of the health effects endured
by victims of the sex trade. Currently, we have
extremely limited data on the psychological
and physical effects of serial sexual invasion
and exploitation at the hands of sex buyers and
pimps. It is a very difficult population to target.
Prostituted women and transgender people
do not have regular medical care and often do
not trust the medical system. Moving forward,
research conducted by the medical community
will provide useful tools in evaluating the impact
of the sex trade on people’s health and in
demonstrating that the sex trade’s foundation in
steeped in gender-based violence.
The International Labour Organization (ILO)
estimates that approximately 20.9 million
people are victims of human trafficking at
any given time. And the United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has reported
that human trafficking is the fastest growing
criminal activity in the world. How large a
space does sex trafficking occupy in the
general statistics of human trafficking?
The answer to this question depends on with
whom you speak. First of all, no one knows how
many people are trafficked in actuality, and the
figure of 20.9 million people encompasses both
the labor and sex trafficking fields. The UNODC,
as well as most other related entities, agree that
the majority of people who are trafficked are
women and children, comprising approximately
79% of all human trafficking victims. Of this
percentage, the majority of women and girls
find themselves trafficked in the sex trade or
in domestic servitude, where there is also a
very high risk of sexual exploitation and sexual
violence (men and boys are often victims of
labor trafficking instead, being forced to work
in industries or in agriculture, such as fisheries
or on farms). The important thing to remember
about these figures is that the numbers are
likely underestimated. The ILO’s estimate, for
example, does not factor in prostitution, because
the organization views the sex trade as legitimate
work.
The reality that belies these estimates gives rise
to two questions: How many millions of human
trafficking victims do we need before we address
the situation comprehensively? And why are
human trafficking cases so underreported and
under-prosecuted when various reports have
clearly confirmed sex trafficking businesses
in specific countries and cities? A report just
came out that San Diego—a relatively small
city in the United States—reaps approximately
$800 million from sex trafficking each year.
Likewise, Switzerland—a country with a
population of 8 million people and extremely
stringent immigration laws and work permit
laws—somehow manages to reap $3.5 billion a
year from the sex trade. In May 2014, the ILO
released a report stating that illegal profits from
human trafficking have reached $150 billion, $90
billion of which comes from sex trafficking. Again,
that number is undoubtedly underestimated
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