ABSTRACT

In the last decade governments all over the world have been recognizing the seriousness of the problem of trafficking for prostitution. Though trafficking for a variety of purposes takes place, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation accounts for 87 per cent of reported victims (UNODC, 2006, p. 33). Women and girls are trafficked into all forms of the sex industry, brothel, street and escort prostitution, strip clubs, pornography, military prostitution and prostitution tourism sites. Trafficking in women and girls into debt bondage is becoming the main method of supply for national and international sex industries. It is worth US$31 billion yearly according to UN estimates (Correspondents in Vienna, 2008). This has created an image problem for the global sex industry. As the scale and brutality of this supply system has become better known in the last decade through the work of women’s NGOs such as Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and media exposure, it has become more difficult to promote prostitution as simply a job like any other and a respectable market sector. The new concern has resulted in the Protocol on Trafficking in Persons of the 2000 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, known as the Palermo Protocol, and in a great amount of work creating national and regional legislation, training programmes, documentation systems and research. Much less money has been put into support services for women who have been trafficked, however (Zimmerman, 2003). Government interest has tended to stem from seeing trafficking as a problem of ‘organized crime’, security and immigration control, whereas feminists have seen it as a problem of violence against women. None of this has led to any reduction in the problem, which is, by all accounts, increasing rapidly (Ribeiro and Sacramento, 2005;

Savona and Stefanizzi, 2007). Research into trafficking and prostitution in Europe suggests that the problem of trafficking segues seamlessly into prostitution, with themajority of prostituted women in Western European cities such as Amsterdam now having been trafficked (Agustin, 2002). Some European governments, such as Bulgaria, the Baltic States and the Czech Republic, are rejecting the legalization of prostitution specifically on the grounds of the new awareness that this promotes trafficking, and Norway has promised to introduce the Swedish model, in which male clients are penalized for ‘buying sexual services’, in 2008 to combat trafficking (Cook, 2007; Aftenposten, 2007).