A dozen or so years ago few people had even heard of sex trafficking. Today there are few who haven’t heard of it. While I have written on this topic before new information always springs up with more and more people working to eliminate this epidemic problem
As reported on Equality Now, an online site that works for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women and girls around the world, trafficking women and children for sexual exploitation is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world.1 This, despite the fact that international law and the laws of 134 countries criminalize sex trafficking.
- At least 20.9 million adults and children are bought and sold worldwide into commercial sexual servitude, forced labor and bonded labor.2
- About 2 million children are exploited every year in the global commercial sex trade.3
- Almost 6 in 10 identified trafficking survivors were trafficked for sexual exploitation.4
- Women and girls make up 98% of victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Working with grassroots womens’s and human rights organizations and individual activists since 199, Equality Now documents violence and discrimination against women and mobilizes international action to support efforts to stop these abuses.
Sex trafficking – whether within a country or across national borders – violates basic human rights, including the rights to bodily integrity, equality, dignity, health, security, and freedom from violence and torture. Key international human rights treaties, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women ( CEDAW), consider sex trafficking a form of sex discrimination and a human rights violation.
Elements of Sex Trafficking
Act: Recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons;
Means: Threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or vulnerability, or giving payments or benefits to a person in control of the victim;
Purpose: Prostitution of others, sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, or slavery.
– From the 2000 UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, ratified by 154 countries.
This is a subject that everyone should know about. Please go to the website for Equality Now at http://www.equalitynow.org/about-us for further information.
