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Human sex trafficking is an international commercial activity in which force, coercion, and fraud are used to transport women and children across international boundaries for economic gain. As a complex organized criminal activity, human trafficking is comparable to the trafficking of drugs and weapons, but it is more profitable and less risky because many forms of the trade appear legitimate. Within the global practice of human trafficking, 70 percent of the victims are women and 50 percent are children under age eighteen. Estimates of the number of women and children trafficked each year range from 700,000 to four million, and annual profits are estimated at $7 billion. Demand for human trafficking is driven by a need for cheap labor in factories, households, agricultural industries, and the sex industry. Globalization has facilitated business between traders in and consumers of trafficked humans.

Trafficked women come from less wealthy countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. In some of those areas, such as the Philippines and Thailand, the sex tourism industry has increased demand for women and thus the amount of trafficking to meet the needs of men who travel from Europe, North America, and Australia. In the United States an estimated 50,000 women are trafficked in each year, coming mostly from the former Soviet Union and southeast Asia. Many women leave the Ukraine because of difficult socioeconomic conditions that predominantly affect women, who constitute 75 percent of the unemployed there. In Asia, Japan is the largest market for trafficked women. In China the one-child rule and a preference for male children have resulted in an imbalanced ratio of males to females. As of 2000 males outnumbered females born between 1980 and 2000 by 8.5 million. Those men create a demand for wives and sex industry workers that often is filled by national and international trafficking of women from nearby countries such as Vietnam.

Women are lured from countries that are impoverished, war-torn, strongly patriarchal, or lacking in adequate police forces. Most are disadvantaged in their home countries, where women face severe social and economic disadvantages. If they can find work in struggling economies, they often are paid much less than are men and are easily lured by promises of high-paying jobs in other countries. For instance, in Russia women's earnings are only 50 percent of men's. Because many societies still value sons more highly than daughters, some families sell their daughters to brothels or traffickers to get quick money and eliminate the need to pay a daughter's marriage dowry. Dowries are especially problematic in India, where campaigns were begun in the 1990s to inform citizens of the many problems, including trafficking, that can result from the tradition of dowry giving.

In light of the desperation many impoverished women feel, they can be swayed easily to leave their home countries with promises of better lives. Some women believe they are hiring an agency to provide them with passports and other paperwork and help them cross international borders in the face of increasingly restrictive immigration policies. Once they are in the new country, all documentation is taken from them and they are put to work, often forced to repay the high costs of transportation in addition to lodging and other expenses. Other women are recruited in bars, cafes, or clubs, where men offer them seemingly legitimate jobs in other countries.

Women who actively seek employment in foreign countries may answer false job advertisements in magazines or newspapers for positions such as nannies or factory workers. They also may visit an agency where recruiters may marry or become engaged to them in a chivalrous gesture of protection in order to transport them out of the country more easily. Some women are sold by friends, family, or acquaintances, and others may be kidnapped. Still others may be refugees and victims of wartime violence and abduction by soldiers. In countries in Africa and in Mexico women recruiters negotiate with lower-class families to provide jobs and education for their daughters, later transporting those these girls for forced labor outside their native country.

The business of mail-order brides moves both willing and unwilling women and girls to foreign countries, where they may be forced into unpaid domestic labor, prostitution, pornography, or other work by their husbands. Many of those brides come from countries such as the Philippines, Africa, China, Russia, the Ukraine, and Latvia. Websites advertising those women emphasize that unlike Western women, they are not difficult to please and will occupy a subservient position in the household. As of 1999 approximately six thousand mail-order brides arrived in the United States each year, coming predominantly from the Philippines and Russia.

Because trafficking of women is an international business, individual countries are challenged to create legislation to deter and punish that trade. In 2000 the United States passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which specified actions to punish traffickers and assist victims within the United States and to urge foreign countries to eliminate trafficking, address the economic conditions that lead to trafficking, and assist victims who are repatriated. The United Nations (UN) has several protocols aimed at halting human trafficking. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child from 1989 focuses particularly on guaranteeing human rights to children, and the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons from 2000 defines trafficking, outlines punishments for traffickers, and requires states that ratify it to protect and assist trafficked persons. In 2002 the United States implemented a special ''T'' visa that allows victims to remain in the country if they testify against their traffickers and face likely danger in their home countries.

Many countries have no laws against trafficking; one is South Africa, a popular source and destination for trafficked persons from at least ten other countries, including Mozambique, Thailand, and China. In addition to legal action some governments and nongovernmental organizations have launched educational campaigns both to inform women from popular source countries about the dangers of trafficking and to encourage citizens of destination countries to be watchful for immigrants who may be victims of that industry.

References:

Hughes, Donna M. 1999. Pimps and Predators on the Internet: Globalizing the Sexual Exploitation of Women and Children. Kingston, RI: Coalition against Trafficking in Women. www. uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes.

King, Gilbert. 2004. Woman, Child for Sale: The New Slave Trade in the 21st Century. New York: Chamberlain Bros.

Martens, Jonathan; Maciej ''Mac'' Pieczkowski; and Bernadette van Vuuren-Smyth. 2003. Seduction, Sale and Slavery: Trafficking in Women and Children for Sexual Exploitation in Southern Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: International Organization for Migration.

Parrot, Andrea, and Nina Cummings. 2006. Forsaken Females: The Global Brutalization of Women. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Troubnikoff, Anna M., ed. 2003. Trafficking in Women and Children: Current Issues and Developments. New York: Nova Science.

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