David Perlmutter
Gazette,MontrealJuly 10, 2001
A friend of mine was walking back to his hotel in Budapest, Hungary, when he entered what locals call "the prostitutes' UN."
It was a street where young women from most of eastern Europe and parts of Asia plied the sex trade. Models of international diplomacy, they proffered services in many languages. All they had in common was, as my friend put it, looks of combined "misery and cruelty."
The triumph of global capitalism has increased the demand for young women (and sometimes young men) as sex workers. They come from all over. But the term "sex workers" is misleading. The sex industry has little patience for fair wages, voluntary service and safe working conditions. Many Third World prostitutes are slaves or indentured servants.
A report on forced labour and slavery just issued by the International Labour Organization focuses much of its attention on the global sex trade. As many as 50,000 women and children are smuggled into the United States, most to be inducted into the sex trade or domestic work, the report says.
Sex trafficking is a global epidemic. Approximately 2,000 women from Kazakhstan work in South Korea's sex industry, Kazakh commercial television reported recently. Asian women have their own neighbourhood in the red-light district of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Roughly 200,000 girls in Thailand - the world capital of the underage sex industry - are pressed to cater to professional sex tours that operate openly for Americans, Europeans and Japanese, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Young girls are coerced into or sold for sex work from Nepal and Bangladesh to India, from Bangladesh and Burma to Pakistan and from Pakistan and India to the Middle East. Japan's Social Security Research Foundation estimates that 120,000 Asian, eastern European and Latin American women are imported each year for sex work. (Spending on prostitution in Japan is about equal to the nation's defence budget.) From China and the Philippines, girls are delivered to prison-like brothels in the United States and Europe.
The organizers of the trade are varied, as well: it's a strange alliance of the Japanese Yakuza, Chinese Triad, Russian and Italian Mafia, eastern European gangsters, Albanian kingpins, Latin American cartels, Nigerian warlords, Asian businessmen and American financiers and subcontractors.
Embarrassing to the idea of human moral progress, the present global sex trade is reminiscent of the first global trade in flesh - that for African slaves.
Today, we need another abolitionist movement, this one against sex slavery. The ILO report calls for a co-ordinated global response to tackle the worldwide sex trade and other forms of forced labour.
International conventions - such as the 1949 UN convention against the trafficking of women and children - exist, but they lack enforcement powers. The same is the case for the UN's optional protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, which was approved last year and has been signed by almost every country in the world. We need a globally responsive institution - a combined Interpol and High Court - with the power to fight this scourge.
And we need to redefine recruiting for, managing or using international sexual slavery as an international offence.
The previous scourge of global slavery was suppressed only through laws enforced by gunboats and bayonets. Solutions to the greatest modern outrage of the global economy cannot be found locally.
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