Sex Trafficking

Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

Siddharth Kara

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542630
• Sujet: Ciencias sociales
• Sous-sujet: Sociología

" The best book ever written on human trafficking for sexual exploitation "—the basis for the feature film, Trafficked, starring Ashley Judd ( Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves ). Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such "processing, " and can be repeatedly "consumed." In this book, Kara provides a riveting account of his four-continent journey into this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He draws on his background in finance, economics, and law to provide the first ever business analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form: sex trafficking. Kara describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to this and other forms of modern slavery over the past two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each industry. Finally, he identifies the sectors of the sex trafficking industry that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and recommends the specific legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help to abolish this form of slavery, once and for all. The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of this book to the anti-slavery organization, Free the Slaves. "Sex trafficking is more of a problem than most people realize. Read this well-written book and find out."—Kirk Douglas

1 Sex Trafficking

An Overview

Men can co-exist on condition that they recognize each other as being all equally, though differently, human, but they can also co-exist by denying each other a comparable degree of humanity, and thus establishing a system of subordination.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Untamed Desire

My father once told me the story of how the world was created. In between each cycle of time, he said, there is emptiness. The god Brahma slumbers and another god, Shiva, meditates over why the world of man invariably degrades from a realm of “generosity, self-restraint, gentleness, and truth” into a miasma of “greed, lust, violence, and deceit.” Because Shiva must swallow this poisonous cosmos at the end of time, he meditates on a way to prevent man’s degradation. At the cusp of the answer, he is disturbed by Brahma, who grows restless and prematurely seeks to initiate creation by taking the form of a bull and mounting his own daughter. Furious, Shiva hurls his trident at the god-bull, who pulls out of his daughter in an effort to dodge the weapon. In doing so, Brahma’s seed spills across the heavens, and Shiva’s trident strikes the seed where it lands, thereby igniting creation. At that moment, Shiva drops his head in sorrow. He recognizes that once again, the world of man will be suffused with greed, suffering, and pain, for it has been initiated upon the seed of untamed desire. The sequence is undeniable—desire leads to suffering, suffering leads to anger, anger leads to violence, and violence destroys the world.¹

I never truly understood this story until I first laid my eyes on Maya. Gaunt and distressed, she was nineteen when I interviewed her, after almost four years as a sex slave in each of Mumbai’s two main red-light districts, Kamathipura and Falkland Road. She was born in the Sindhupalchok region of Nepal, one of the poorest stretches of land on the planet, with an annual per capita income of $180, or fifty cents per day. Desperate to make ends meet, her parents sold her to a local agent for $55 on the promise that she would have a good job at a carpet factory, from which she could send home up to $10 per month. The night Maya left home, the agent resold her to a dalal (trafficker), who took her to Butwal, a border town with India, where they spent the night with another girl. The next day, Maya, the other girl, and the dalal crossed the border into India by foot. A few days later, they were in Mumbai.

This is what Maya told me happened next:

Once I came to Mumbai, the dalal sold me to a malik [brothel boss] in Kamathipura. The malik told me I owed him thirty-five thousand rupees [$780], and I must have sex with any man who chooses me until this debt is repaid. I refused, and his men raped me and did not feed me. When I agreed to do sex, they gave me medicines because I had a urine infection. I was in that bungalow two years and made sex to twenty men each day. There were hundreds of girls in this bungalow, many from Nepal. One time I tried to escape. I complained to the police, but they did nothing. A few days later the malik’s men found me on the streets and took me back to the brothel. The malik put chili paste on a broomstick and pushed it inside me. Then he broke my ribs with his fist. The gharwali [house manager, madam] tended my wounds for a short time, and after this time I went with clients again, even though my ribs pained very badly. The gharwali gave me opium to make the pain less. After two years, the malik sold me to another malik on Falkland Road. During this time I lived in a pinjara [cage] with one other woman. It was very small and it was on the street, so it was very noisy at night. I was pregnant two times, and the gharwali gave me pills to kill the baby. The second time I became very ill. When I was strong I ran away. I went to a shelter near Falkland Road. They told me I have HIV. They helped me contact my father, but he told me not to come home. He said I can never be married and because I have HIV, I can only bring shame.

Maya’s story is emblematic of the hundreds of thousands of women and children trafficked and forced into prostitution each year. As with each victim in this book, I have not used Maya’s real name, and in a few instances in which discussing precise geographic locations might result in danger to the individual, I have provided an alternate setting. Like most sex trafficking victims, Maya and her family were vulnerable to deceit due to economic desperation. Once Maya arrived at the brothel, she was swiftly broken down through physical and psychological torture. While her journey to Mumbai was direct, other victims endure multiple stops in several countries, where they are exploited, resold, and tortured. At each destination, victims are told they must work off the “debt” of trafficking them by having sex with up to twenty men per day. The accounting of these debts is invariably exploitive, involving deductions for food, clothing, rent, alcohol, and exorbitant interest rates. The false promise of attaining freedom is a powerful tool that brothel owners utilize to control their victims. As time passes, some slaves accept their fates, and in a Stockholm Syndrome–like transformation, they might be “freed” to serve as working prostitutes who mentor new slaves upon arrival. In Maya’s case, when her brothel owner decided she had worked off her debt, she was resold and given a new debt. If she had not escaped, the cycle of slavery might never have ended.

Civilization at a Crossroads

The global magnitude of victimization of young women like Maya is staggering. Every minute of every day, the most vulnerable women and children in the world are raped for profit with impunity, yet efforts to combat sex trafficking remain woefully inadequate and misdirected. There are several reasons for this insufficiency. First, despite increased media attention, sex trafficking remains poorly understood. Second, the organizations dedicated to combating sex trafficking are underfunded and uncoordinated internationally. Third, the laws against sex trafficking are overwhelmingly anemic and poorly enforced. Finally, despite numerous studies and reports, a systematic business and economic analysis of the industry, conducted to identify strategic points of intervention, has not yet been undertaken.

This book is dedicated to the task of addressing each of these key impediments to an effective global response to sex trafficking. The book’s central argument is that the enormity and pervasiveness of sex trafficking is a direct result of the immense profits to be derived from selling inexpensive sex around the world. The structures of Western capitalism, as spread through the process of economic globalization, contribute greatly to the destruction of lives this profitability entails. Sex trafficking is one of the ugliest contemporary actualizations of global capitalism because it was directly produced by the harmful inequalities spread by the process of economic globalization: deepening of rural poverty, increased economic disenfranchisement of the poor, the net extraction of wealth and resources from poor economies into richer ones, and the broad-based erosion of real human freedoms across the developing world.² Ending sex trafficking requires an attack on the industry’s immense profitability and a radical shift in the conduct of economic globalization.

What Is Sex Trafficking?

Many policy makers are still debating what the term “trafficking” means. The 2000 United Nations Trafficking Protocol established a generally accepted definition of trafficking as the following:

the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by means of 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. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

The primary confusion relates to whether the definition of trafficking, as the process of “recruitment, transportation, [and] transfer…for the purpose of exploitation” includes the exploitation itself.³ The wording connotes only the movement portion of the trafficking chain, which explains why so many laws and programs against trafficking focus on movement more than exploitation. However, trafficking is not about movement; it is about slavery. The transatlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries involved the trafficking of eleven million Africans across thousands of miles to work as slaves on plantations.⁴ Why is this historical practice termed a slave trade and the same practice today termed trafficking? This linguistic attenuation scrambles global attention and blunts abolitionist policies. More focus is placed on thwarting movement across borders than on shutting down the modern plantations to which those individuals are being moved. Such tactics have proved overwhelmingly futile because the modes of transport are numerous (by ship, vehicle, plane, train, foot), the costs of transport are miniscule, and the sources of potential slave labor are nearly limitless. Despite the shifts in ease and in-expensiveness of human transportation, current anti-trafficking efforts primarily seek to crack down on modern-day slave traders, resulting in little more than adjustments in routes, larger bribes to border guards, and the procurement of false travel documents. Such minor increases in costs make a very small economic dent in today’s slave trade. A much clearer understanding of sex trafficking is required—wherein the movement and the purpose of the movement are disaggregated as criminal acts—to achieve greater abolitionist effectiveness. To promote this understanding, I offer two definitions that should prove more useful when formulating policies and initiatives intended to abolish acts of sex trafficking:

• Slave trading can be defined as the process of acquiring, recruiting, harboring, receiving, or transporting an individual, through any means and for any distance, into a condition of slavery or slave-like exploitation.

• Slavery can be defined as the process of coercing labor or other services from a captive individual, through any means, including exploitation of bodies or body parts.⁵

These definitions are not meant to replace the long-established, more complex articulations of the crimes, but a disaggregation of the criminal acts constituent to sex trafficking should prove more effective when formulating efforts to combat those crimes.

Anatomy of Sex Trafficking

All sex trafficking crimes have two components: slave trading and slavery. Slave trading represents the supply side of the sex trafficking industry. Slavery represents the demand side. Within these two components, there are three steps: acquisition, movement, and exploitation. The interrelationship among these elements reveals the anatomy of sex trafficking, as figure 1.1 shows.

FIGURE 1.1 Anatomy of Sex Trafficking

Imagine that sex trafficking is a disease infecting human civilization. To eradicate a disease requires an understanding of its molecular anatomy. This molecular understanding, in turn, reveals a broader knowledge of how the disease functions. With this broader understanding, the disease’s vulnerable points are revealed and a treatment can be devised to eradic...