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Sex Trafficking: Trends, Challenges, and the Limitations of International Law

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Abstract

The passage of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children in 2000 marked the first global effort to address human trafficking in 50 years. Since the passage of the UN Protocol international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and individual states have devoted significant resources to eliminating human trafficking. This article critically examines the impact of these efforts with reference to the trends, political, and empirical challenges in data collection and the limitations of international law. I argue that current international law disproportionately addresses the criminal prosecution of traffickers at the expense of trafficking victims’ human rights, and has therefore not yet reached its full potential in the fight against human sex trafficking.

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Notes

  1. See Article 3 of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.

  2. See Quirk (2007) 181–182. Brysk’s contribution to this volume makes significant progress towards incorporating trafficking and slavery into a coherent human rights framework.

  3. I use the term “victim” in a broad sense—not because these individuals are necessarily violently coerced into sex work. In many instances these victims make a rational economic decision to work in the sex industry but this too is a form of economic victimization.

  4. I present the statistics that follow acutely aware that numerical estimates of trafficking victims are notoriously politicized and unreliable. I discuss these methodological weaknesses in later sections of the paper but offer these numbers as a general overview of the scope of human sex trafficking in the world.

  5. The IOM also uses this number on website in 2010: http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/activities/by-theme/regulating-migration/counter-trafficking.

  6. See also Miller and Wasileski this volume.

  7. On the intra-regional movement of sex slaves in Europe, see Kelly (2002). On intraregional movement in Asia, see Lee (2005) and Ali (2005). Kara (2009) estimates that of a total population of 1.2 million sex slaves in the world in 2006, approximately 335,000 are in South Asia and another 315,000 are in East Asia and the Pacific (18).

  8. This percentage comes from a simple calculation using Kara’s data (Kara 2009, 18). These numbers are also consistent with ILO estimates. See ILO (2008), 3.

  9. On the growing number of governments voluntarily offering data to the UNDOC, see: UNODC 2009, 12.

  10. There is growing evidence that local authorities often work in conjunction with traffickers to keep victims enslaved.

  11. Very few recent books on trafficking have chapters on Africa. An exception is Adepoju (2005).

  12. Gallagher’s work in this volume assesses the US State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Reports, so I refrain from discussing them here.

  13. More information can be obtained on the IOM’s counter trafficking page: http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/activities/by-theme/regulating-migration/counter-trafficking.

  14. The report is available online on the UNODC’s webpage: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-report-on-trafficking-in-persons.html.

  15. The database is available online on UNESCO Bangkok’s site: http://www3.unescobkk.org/culture/WebTraffickingV2/Search.aspx.

  16. The new data collection efforts undertaken by IOs are detailed in section II. Anecdotal evidence of increases in the number of shelters can be found in the 2010 US TIP Report.

  17. Articles 6–8 of the treaty are devoted to protecting victims but have been interpreted to be primarily discretionary rather than mandatory (Scarpa 2008, 65).

  18. On this point, see also Dinan (2008), 74.

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  1. Heather M. Smith

    Present address: Lewis & Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd., MSC #36, Portland, OR, 97219, USA

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    Correspondence to Heather M. Smith.

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    I am grateful to my research assistants, Margaret Williams and Jake Owens as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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    Smith, H.M. Sex Trafficking: Trends, Challenges, and the Limitations of International Law. Hum Rights Rev 12, 271–286 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-010-0185-4

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