quote:

Originally posted by Zopa:
quote:Originally posted by Rachelmh:
Yeah, I think the idea of engaging a prostitute who is the victim of human trafficking is brilliant.


i am about to go . i think this would make an interesting thread. i think that law about comparisons made to hitler as a thread gets longer may happen sooner rather than later, but i wonder if there is any intelligent discussion to be had on this topic?

if anybody cares to start it, i'll add my two cents, i just wouldnt know where to start.

I'll start it, Zopa, I agree with you that it would make a good thread.

My two cents: This is one of those world-wide issues where the root cause of prostitution as a result of human trafficking has to be addressed, not just the problem itself. The problem in this case - and many related others - is poverty. Those girls and boys end up as prostitutes, in a lot of cases having been sold by their own families as this achieves two things: 1-immediate money in pocket and 2-the longer term financial gain of having one less mouth to feed.
When you have families selling off their own children (and denying said sons and daughters a home if they are lucky enough to be able to escape and return to their villages due to fear of reprisal by the authorities) the you have a MUCH bigger socio-economic issue that needs to be addressed rather than just going after the prostitution ring-leaders themselves.

Besides which, since the operation of these rings is always international in scope, tracking and busting them is almost impossible.

Add that to the fact that until you address the root cause of where these victims come from and why they are in that situation in the first place, and what can really be done that will make any sort of difference at all?

So.....discussion open. What can be done to stop it, and why? What do you think would have the most effect?

I proofread (and hence got to read and talk to the people involved in the making of) a report about trafficking in one country in Eastern Europe. It's a huge topic, but some of the issue which are connected to it, I surmised, are:

-people who get more or less tricked into going to another country by the promise of waitressing or other not-so-skilled work because the job prospects in their own town or country seem dire.

-people feel they can't return home because not just their families but society would "know" and treat them badly (aside from the more practical barriers like having their passports and any money they earn taken away). Could this be construed as a women's issue (women in some cultures are valued less or judged more harshly)? Maybe.

-the presence of corruption - border guards or police who can either easily be paid off to look the other way or who might even be actively involved. Also the infrastructure or whatever for organized crime exists. All of this contributes to the fact that locals who become aware of trafficking may not feel that they can even report it - if the police they go to are being paid to allow the trafficking to continue or are actively profiting from it.

-a "community" or group of people who can afford to pay for prostitutes. In the country this report was from, this community likely consisted of at least some international community members who had much more money than locals...in some countries it is Western travellers, like I'd guess in Thailand.

I think the problems underlying this are so complex that it's hard to just say how to stop it. Access to education is generally a good thing, but if you live in a country where there just aren't any jobs, your education may not get you that far. Teaching people (in villages?) about tactics that traffickers use to lure them might do some good...but if people feel desperate or parents make the decision to sell their children...this can only go so far.

Yikes. Not to be too depressing. I suppose I'm trying to convey that trafficking is a symptom of a much larger problem and there is no easy solution.

quote:

but if people feel desperate or parents make the decision to sell their children...this can only go so far.

...as that was the case sometimes in Poland in the early 90s where 15-16 year old girls were being send to Germany because their parents agreed after talking to some creep they just met. Girls were promised waitressing jobs and loads of money. What kind of fucking lunatick would believe in that and risk health and sometimes life of their own child?
Some of them were locked in brothels for months or years. Clients knew exactly what was going on but none of them would ever report it to the police. How sick is that.I don't know who's the worst psycho - the pimp or the "client".

quote:

Teaching people (in villages?) about tactics that traffickers use to lure them might do some good...but if people feel desperate or parents make the decision to sell their children...this can only go so far.

Our own Conor Grennan of the BNA blog How Conor Is Spending All His Money has chosen to dedicate his life to trafficked children in Nepal. There, a brutal civil war has been raging for the past 10 years. In the mountains, Maoist fighters take the children and enlist them as child soldiers. Desperate parents are being preyed upon by the traffickers who promise food, shelter, safety and education in Katmandu. These parents pay for their kids to be taken to a better life. In reality, the children are dumped on the street or in over-crowded orphanages or with over-whelmed individuals who are just trying to survive.

When Conor was on his RTW back in 2004-2005 he spent three months or so volunteering at the Little Princes Orphanage located outside of Katmandu. The experience changed the course of his life. He returned to the Orphanage again this year and found himself drawn into the lives of a family entangled with child traffickers. The mother of one of the kids at the orphange walked for days from the mountains with her two little ones in tow. She searched for months for her missing child and finally found him at Little Princes. She settled not to far away from the Orphanage. A child trafficker found her and dumped five trafficked children in her home. She barely had enough to feed her and her two children, let alone five more kids. Desperate, she turned to the volunteers at Little Princes for help. Conor and Farid (another volunteer) helped to feed the family and seek medical care for these injured and sick children. But Conor's time in Nepal came to an end and he returned to The States. Two weeks after arriving in New York, he learned that those five trafficked children had been taken away, again.

That loss inspired Conor to set up Next Generation Nepal, an anti-child trafficking institute and orphanage. After spending the summer setting up the non-profit, Conor returned to Nepal this fall and has been diligently working to save trafficked children. Part of the plan is based in education in the villages, part is directly rescuing children and part is reuniting parents with their trafficked children.

Of course he can't save every child, but he can make it harder for child traffickers to trick desperate parents and he can make life for traffick children just a little easier.

And by the way, here is an article about conor that apppeared in the Daily Progress newspaper in Charlottesville VA.

My two cents.

Jet

Jet,
thank you for sharing the info on nepal. i have 6 nepalese students and i would love to talk to them about this project. maybe there is a way to raise financial support here or something.
-z

my 2 cents:
when my brother was in the coast guard, they reguarly intercepted crappy old boats tooling across the pacific full of chinese guys who had paid a ton of money to get to the us. they were sold a bill of goods, of course, and put on nice boats for the first few miles off shore, then they were crammed into these dangerous things and the chinese mafia who skippered them were bringing them to sweat shops to work off their "debt". sounds a hell of a lot like slavery to me.

this topic is sickening to me. especially the situations where kids and women are sold into sexual slavery. god, i could really see myself inflicting violence on participants in that.

quote:

I think the problems underlying this are so complex that it's hard to just say how to stop it. Access to education is generally a good thing, but if you live in a country where there just aren't any jobs, your education may not get you that far. Teaching people (in villages?) about tactics that traffickers use to lure them might do some good...but if people feel desperate or parents make the decision to sell their children...this can only go so far.

Yep, it's a cruel cruel world we live in and should be more thankful than we'll probably ever know to have been born into a better part of it as freedom goes despite all the politicking and warmongering we may criticise.
Access to education is generally a good thing, If you can even get that in the first place.
The conditions that some people survive in, in some of the eastern Europe/former Soviet block countries and the poorer areas of asia/africa/south america, you would just not dream of, perhaps more have nightmares if you had to experience it.
Even seeing some documentaries and visualising it is bad enough.

And also sorry to depress but there have been and no doubt always will be the types of people who have greed, and with many in poverty and desperate, they'll certainly be taken advantage of, and where you do have ccorrupt officials it is not beyond comprehension that people trying to do something about it all will be the ones that get killed, for they are usually acting alone whereas the cruel greedy people will be in organisations of like attitude.

I would think that the best way to tackle something like this is to have a committed organisation, people to form together, just keep up pressure on authorities in your own free countries, form an underground movement in the more affected countries to continually expose the trade and those in and supporting it.
The United Nations may be putting on a face of doing something like that, but you really have to wonder whether it is more than just a face.

But as to poverty, this is also addressed partly in this latest report on global warming and how the wealthier nations need to help develop the poorer ones, but in my mind these beurocrats either do not recognise or do not want to report the impracticality of that in the sense of the ratio of peoples in poorer countries to those living more affluently is quite large, like probably something of the order of 5:1 and forever increasing.
If we think for a minute that we can bring all of those people up to the same standartd of living as we enjoy, well sorry, another pipe-dream!

I read an interesting article in The Washington Post a few weeks back that relates to this topic and illustrates how other countries own self-interest sometimes contributes to the problem.

Moldova is a tiny, poor, landlocked country in Eastern Europe, but just happens to have the perfect environment for growing grapes and making wine. Apparently, they have terrific wine there (I've not had it). Wine could be something they could hang their economy on, except for two big problems.

Russia apparently has an embargo on wine because Moldova has refused to lay down and take some of what Russia has been pushing on them. Therefore, Moldova can't sell its wine to Russia.

The European Union has set extremely high tariffs on Moldovan wine entering the EU in order to protect and appease the interests of countries like France and Italy. Therefore, Moldova essentially can't sell its wine to Europe.

So you know what has become Moldova's chief economic product? Illegally trafficked woman for the labor and sex industries.

This would indeed make an interesting thread IF... we can differentiate between 1) Prostitution, 2) forced/enslaved Prostitution, and 3) Child exploitation of any kind including prostitution. I am confident that the VAST majority of prostitution in the world falls under #1, and the other 2 are sad criminal enterprises.

I agree that there is a difference between adults who willingly enter and willingly remain involved in prostitution and those who are forcibly abducted and kept in rooms with chains...but who are we really to draw the line between people in the middle?

Sure, there are people who make concious decisions about these things and also remain enough in control of their situation to decide if they want to stay in it. These people don't want help and don't want to get out of it. But is someone who is literally chained to beds more "worthy" of compassion than those who stay because they believe, possibly correctly, that their families will starve if they don't, or their children will have to go to prostitution if they don't, or they will be shunned in their hometown, which doesn't have any jobs anyway, if they return? Should some people have to pay for their bad decisions or poorly-informed decisions their whole life?

I personally see the attitude that "most people have the opportunity to have whatever kind of life they'd like to" as one typical of an affluent country, but I don't think it is as widely true in the US as people think it is, not to mention many other countries.

I think the belief that most prostitutes enjoy what they are doing and have chosen to do it is yet another obstacle to overcoming this problem. (and I don't mean to push all these beliefs off on the last poster, who makes a valid point, but this opinion definitely exists)

Certainly, plenty of people get involved in prostitution without falling into the category of being trafficked, but that hardly means it is just fine because "they chose it" or something.

I've written a lot here, which probably comes across as weird. But don't worry, I'm not a prostitute or anything (and I like to think I'm fortunate to be able to take quite an active role in determining where my own life goes...but I still think it is a whole host of things beyond one's own control that affect people's decisions).

[QUOTE]Originally posted by braslvr:
1) ProstitutionQUOTE]


i guess this is where the contrversy could start up cuz someone like me could posit that...

in 99% of cases, a person does not freely choose to be a prostitute. it is something which someone turns to when they have no other apparent choices. therefore, all prostitutes are enslaved.

zopa

quote:

I think the belief that most prostitutes enjoy what they are doing and have chosen to do it is yet another obstacle to overcoming this problem.

See, this is what makes the topic interesting.

I certainly can't say what percentage of prostitutes enjoy what they're doing, but I firmly believe the vast majority >90% have chosen to do it. I think that there will be many different opinions as to whether it is always free choice, desperation, peer/family pressure, etc.

Can we clarify what "problem" we are trying to overcome?

quote:

Originally posted by braslvr:

quote:

I think the belief that most prostitutes enjoy what they are doing and have chosen to do it is yet another obstacle to overcoming this problem.

See, this is what makes the topic interesting.

I certainly can't say what percentage of prostitutes enjoy what they're doing, but I firmly believe the vast majority >90% have chosen to do it. I think that there will be many different opinions as to whether it is always free choice, desperation, peer/family pressure, etc.

Can we clarify what "problem" we are trying to overcome?

Yes, I was confused. Which problem were you talking about, prostitution or human trafficking? Those are two different issues.

I don't think this was really meant to be a thread about whether or not those women who are prostitutes enjoy it, although if that's where it wants to go, by all means!

The point was more that one of the common commodities in poorer countries is innocents, who, by simple bribery, threats, trickery or outright payment to their parents for their 'services', end up enslaved and forced to work in the sex trade. They rarely if ever have any idea of what's going to happen to them, only that they think they're going somewhere 'better' to get a good education and make a living. Then they end up in another country with their passports taken away, or in the same country but with no ability to escape. I don't call that a free choice.

Braslvr, you do make a good point that it is necessary to make the distinction; some are doing it because they want to. What I don't agree with is your estimate that 90% or more have 'chosen' to do it. I've seen too many human rights groups' stats to think that.

And Kate:

quote:

But is someone who is literally chained to beds more "worthy" of compassion than those who stay because they believe, possibly correctly, that their families will starve if they don't, or their children will have to go to prostitution if they don't, or they will be shunned in their hometown, which doesn't have any jobs anyway, if they return? Should some people have to pay for their bad decisions or poorly-informed decisions their whole life?

You make a good point, to which I would add this: If someone only has the freedom to make only one decision in life whatever they choose isn't a bad decision. It's called survival.

quote:

it is something which someone turns to when they have no other apparent choices. therefore, all prostitutes are enslaved.

Hmmm. OK, but seems that could be said about farm laborers, ditch diggers, or any undesirable job, except the prostitute will probably make more money.

Prostitutes expose themselves to diseases that kill (like AIDS) and violence by the very nature of their profession. They are usually social outcasts, even in the most sex-tolerant places like the Netherlands. Being social outcasts means you are often blocked from basics like having bank accounts or "switching careers", should anyone find out what it is you did before. The fact that it is illegal most places makes it more dangerous, as there is inevitably a criminal element, even for those who "willingly" sign up. Madams/pimps will make it very difficult for a prostitute to leave, and, like illegal laborers digging a ditch, they cannot call on any legal help from the police or the courts if anyone threatens or hurts them because they are illegal. In other words, the profession is a trap.

Not to mention the very act of having sex when one doesn't physically want to is often painful for women, as well as for men having anal (penetrative) sex. One's sexuality is part of one's mental health. I don't know the measurable effects on a person's psyche who regularly shuts down when they have sex, but safe to say it's damaging.

Altogether, very few prostitutes "choose" to be prostitutes. If you're starving to death, of course there is an element of choice in stealing someone else's food, or perhaps catching and eating rats/rotting garbage. I think that is the type of choice we are talking about when we are talking about 90% of prostitutes.

I'd say only 10% or less of prostitutes/sex workers are successful enough that it starts to become a real choice. A porn star who eventually owns her own film empire, for instance, or a highly successful professional dominatrix. These women are the exceptions. It's not honest to use the exceptions as a yardstick for the whole.

I'd also add that most of the "exceptions" live in (for lack of a better term) 1st world countries, where they would perhaps not be as socially ostracized as in say, India or Thailand, and where they are more likely to have had some schooling/other possibilities open to them.