Trading Women for Profit [View all]

[BainsBane]

Modern slavery or trafficking of persons is the second most profitable, organized and destructive global criminal activity after drugs, and within the next five years is expected to ascend to the number one spot. It is a huge, highly profitable worldwide business that is destroying the lives of millions of vulnerable people. Men and women who have the misfortune to be born into poverty, are poorly educated, desperate and, therefore easily manipulated by “recruitment agents”, who paint a false picture of decent, well paid, legitimate work in one or other of the major cities of the world.

Trafficking is the exploitation of people, day after day, for years on end. . . .
Millions of victims, innocent and vulnerable, are trafficked into a life of extreme exploitation, violent abuse and slavery. At the heart of this 21st century epidemic are women, mainly young: most are under 24, some are as young as six, always poor, desperate and frightened. They make up 80 per cent of an unknown total number of people trafficked every year. Although the US State Department say it is around one million, the figure could just as easily be double that. What is known is that many women are forced into prostitution of some kind or another and sex slavery – constituent parts of the burgeoning global commercial sex industry (CSI). The language of market fundamentalism facilitating a subtle acceptance of the criminal and inhumane; for what is commercial is good and industry must be encouraged at any cost; it feeds the economy, which must be constantly stoked in order to fuel economic growth, which as we know is the source of lasting happiness. So goes the dishonest, corporate political propaganda, rooted as it is in self-interest and thoroughly intoxicated by profit.

The CSI has been given a major boost by the Internet, providing as it (currently) does, an unregulated platform for pornography. The pornographic material freely floating around cyberspace is beyond shocking. The statistics are startling: over 12 per cent of all internet sites deal in pornography of one kind or another – totaling 420 million. Every month there are 72 million worldwide (primarily male) visitors to pornographic websites packed with explicit pornographic images, many showing abusive practices, which feed into and strengthen a conditioned view that defines women in a purely sexual manner and promotes the idea of a woman as a sexual object or commodity to be used for pleasure, exploited and abused fully and totally. The proliferation of online porn is a major factor in the ever-growing commodification and sexualization of women and young girls. While this is not necessarily new, the accessibility is. Extreme sexual behaviour, such as paedophilia, bestiality and rape, that saturates the internet encourages obsessive behaviour and is a crippling, poisonous ingredient in the lives not only of girls and women, but also of men, young and not so young. . . .

Returnees, or “broken-in-girls”, as well as taking on the role of “guardians” or “jailers” in destination countries, are used to persuade young girls to become commercial sex workers. “Sex traffickers often train girls themselves, raping them and teaching them how to behave with “clients”, reports Victor Malerek. The only way some women can escape their own enslavement is to return home and recruit young girls. An Albanian woman told the Guardian how she returned to her home town and told ex-school friends “that there were great opportunities in the UK for them, you know, as waitresses and even as dancers… I felt like I had stuck a knife in my own stomach, knowing what I was taking them to, but I could not stand one more day [in the brothel].”

http://truth-out.org/news/item/20087-trading-women-for-profit