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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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