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Case Study: THE TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN
- The use of women in international prostitution and trafficking
networks has become a major focus of international organised
crime.
- The centre of the trade is Europe and Asia but there is
very little reliable information on the number of women involved
or from where and to where they are trafficked.
Analysis
One of the ways in which slavery is alive in the modern world
is in the form of women trafficked for the sex trade. Living
far from home, without a visa, with little money and unable
to speak the local language, many are at the mercy of a domineering
or violent pimp.
Often their passports are held by their captors
and they have little or no means of redress. They will be told
"if you run off to the police station, you will be arrested
as an illegal immigrant and you will be deported". The
women may then face threats when they return home.
It is difficult to judge numbers: trafficking
is not covered as a category in the crime statistics collected
by the United Nations, but some countries have begun to compile
their own figures.
The Government of Nepal estimated that in
1992 no less than 200,000 Nepalese women and girls were working
in brothels in India. Human Rights Watch believe thousands of
Thai women are trafficked, for a fee, into Japan each year.
There they have to work as bar hostesses and prostitutes until
they have paid back their traffickers.
Since the fall of communism, western Europe
has seen a booming trade in women from the former eastern bloc.
The International Organisation for Migration estimates that
around 500,000 women per year are trafficked into western Europe
alone.
Awareness of the trafficking of women and girls
as a human rights issue has been growing in recent years. Under
the Convention of the Rights of the Child a growing number of
governments are now willing to recognise that sex workers under
the age of 18 are victims of abuse and not criminals.
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