CORRUPTION

Interview with Ms. Taina Bien-Aimé
International Affairs Forum
undocumented foreign women from the poorest
countries in Eastern Europe and the Global
South.
Simultaneous to the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989 was the crumbling of economies in Eastern
Europe, which prompted a sudden surge in
human trafficking. The rapid increase in the
amount of trafficked Eastern European women
for the sex trade spurred a flurry of national
and international laws in the late ‘90s and early
2000s: The Palermo Protocol in 2000; the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act in the United
States in 2000; the Swedish law in 1999; and
the implementation of legalization of prostitution
in countries like the Netherlands in 2000 and
Germany in 2002. Everyone recognized that the
surge in human trafficking was linked to violence
and organized crime, but different countries
opted to implement different frameworks in
response to this problem. Whereas Sweden
determined that demand needed to be targeted
in order to combat trafficking, the Netherlands
and Germany went another way, believing that
legalization would permit women to register with
the government and could have recourse in
cases of violence. New Zealand is the scariest
example of a country that has embraced the
full decriminalization model, which dissolves
the government’s oversight or regulation of
the sex trade. Mind you, out of the hundreds
of thousands women in German brothels
and in the sex trade, only 40 have actually
registered with the German government. In
New Zealand, essentially, anything goes—and
since they’ve forsaken any type of registration,
nobody even knows the number of prostituted
women. Nevertheless, research shows that a
majority of women in street prostitution are very
young Indigenous women (such as Maori and
Polynesian), and that there are an alarming
number of girls who are sex trafficked.
In the case of South Africa, we are all waiting
to see what kind of framework the country will
ultimately enact. Our colleagues on the ground
don’t think the government will opt for either
full criminalization the way it is now or full
decriminalization of the sex trade, but I think
variations of this model are under consideration.
The South African Law Commission submitted
recommendations to the Minster for Justice. The
South African Parliament will need to go through
hearings and deliberations on the issue, so it will
take some time before the government makes
a decision. This means that CATW will have an
opportunity to work with our partners in South
Africa to make sure that survivors’ voices are
heard. We hope that women’s groups, domestic
violence shelters, and other direct service
providers for women in need will come together
and provide the necessary gender analysis to
this issue. Still, it is important to keep in mind that
South Africa is a country where approximately
40% of women are victims of rape, so the level
of sexual violence tolerated is high and women’s
social status is extremely low.
Considering the different attributes that all
of these countries possess—whether it be
porous borders or multi-ethnic populations—
how can we best measure the effectiveness
of each of these frameworks? Is it through
a public health lens? Is it through the
frameworks’ respective successes in
deterring the growth of the sex trade?
Even though there is still some needed
reconciliation between immigration laws and
prostitution laws in countries that have adopted
the Swedish Model (also called the Equality
Model, or Ubuntu Model in South Africa, or
demand-focused legislation), it is still obviously
clear that the Swedish Model is the right way to
go [relative to all other available frameworks for
combatting prostitution]. We know that in the last
16 years since the prostitution law was adopted
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