ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why a large proportion of trafficking victims are women, and establishes the issues with making claims that assert women are disproportionately victims of trafficking. Mary Burke speculates on one reason that women might seem to be the primary victims of trafficking: much of the public discourse on trafficking is about the exchange of women for sex. Violence against women, commercialized intimacy, and the feminization of immigration help explain why women are targeted for human trafficking and why they may be more at risk than men. Human trafficking is legally defined as a form of violence against women that is a human rights violation. The commercialization of intimacy reveals the connections between micro-level interactions such as those between traffickers, con sumers, and slaves and macro-level processes such as the relationship between human trafficking and the global economy.
