CORRUPTION

Interview with Ms. Taina Bien-Aimé
International Affairs Forum
because the ILO excludes everyone working
in “legal commercial sexual establishments.”
The traffickers themselves are on a wide
spectrum, ranging from small-time pimps (local
brothel owners, for example) to multinational
organized crime networks. Whatever the size
of a trafficker’s business, the payoffs are the
same: very low risk with high profits. While the
sale of illegal drugs runs the risk of many years
in prison, pimping has a very low risk of arrest.
And unlike drugs, which can only be sold once,
sex traffickers can sell their victims over and over
again.
Are these extremely high profits the results of
globalization and free market policies on sex
trafficking?
These high profits are the result of a combination
of things. Certainly, globalization has a large role
in creating the kinds of environmental factors
that contribute to human trafficking. Millions
of people are being displaced from their rural
environments (whether due to the construction of
dams, or natural disasters, or rising sea levels)
and suddenly finding themselves impoverished
in crowded cities. Countries with porous borders,
such as in Europe, also make trafficking
easier. But the other factor that contributes
to the rising business of sex trafficking is the
acceptance of gender-based violence. Women
are not seen as full human beings; rather, they
are seen as commodities. Some mainstream
publications like The Economist, a news
magazine, promote prostitution as legitimate
work; in this view, women are lumped together
with other commodities like coal, fruit, and
refrigerators. There is a foundational problem
with this view, and as a result sex traffickers
facilitate the treatment of women and girls as
commodities that can be sold by sex buyers on
the marketplace with impunity.
You mentioned that there is an ongoing
ideological disagreement on how to
contextualize prostitution, either deeming it
acceptable or unacceptable and framed in
terms like “consent” and “work”. How do
you distinguish between prostitution and the
reproductive and sexual rights of women?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
[adopted by the United Nations General
Assembly in 1948], although not binding, has
served as a blueprint and a platform for many
international conventions. Critically, the principles
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
were founded on the inalienability, universality,
and indivisibility of human rights; this means
that governments the societies they govern
cannot cherry pick fundamental human rights.
Fundamental human rights are given to every
human being by virtue of their birth. They cannot
be given up, or sold, or taken away by any
government, and you cannot consent to their
violation. These fundamental rights include,
among many other rights, the right to live a life of
dignity, and the right to live free of violence. For
many decades, human rights organizations have
based their work on the principles enshrined in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
More recently, however, some human rights
organizations have taken a different approach
to their official stances on certain human rights
issues. Amnesty International is one such
organization. The concept of women’s rights as
human rights was coined in 1993 at a United
Nations conference; before then, practices that
are violative of women were deemed cultural,
traditional, or religious and, therefore, outside
the framework of the international human rights
framework. But as our collective understanding
of these practices as gender-based violence has
developed, topics like female genital mutilation
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