The Sound of Freedom movie made a splash in Hollywood and continues to enjoy success around the world for its depiction of the dark underworld of human trafficking. Interestingly, the reactions to the movie are a spectrum and have become divisive.

For Dark Bali, we always want to go back to those who have the most insight and are the most tied to the issue: survivors themselves. We also deeply believe in the importance of learning and working in a community, so we were honored to participate with many other anti-trafficking professionals this past July to formulate a collective response.

Please read through this brilliant, insightful response written by human trafficking survivors who are also professionals in the field.

For a longer conversation, check out this podcast in which our Executive Director spoke with the Beached White Male Podcast. They spoke about the difficulties of accurate media, the harm of perpetuating trafficking myths, and the many ways that non-professionals can be involved in anti-trafficking efforts. If you’ve been wondering about the movie (particularly how survivors and anti-trafficking professionals feel about it), this is a great episode for you.

The post Sound of Freedom: A Response from the Frontlines appeared first on Dark Bali.

How long does this take? As a caregiver, it is hard to not want to rush the healing process for the children in our care. They often enter aftercare an absolute wreck. Some are angry and rebellious having run away from home and want to return to their lives on the street every day. Others are deeply fearful and distrustful having never experienced a single loving relationship with anyone. Very nearly all of them come to us with STDs and significant health issues like eating disorders, reproductive damage, and malnutrition. How does a caregiver even begin to help them pick up the pieces?

The thing about childhood trauma is that it has a deep and lasting impact. What caregivers have noted for years is now being proven by science. It is not just the mind and spirit that is affected; the body is literally changed as well. Recent research is showing unquestionable links between childhood trauma and things like asthma and lung cancer. Just in terms of brain development, we know that ongoing trauma actually changes the way a child develops, often leaving them with inhibited ability to think and speak clearly and a decreased ability to understand cause and effect. This alone makes recovery a hard process. How do you help a child learn to make autonomous choices when she can’t articulate her own thoughts and she struggles to understand the implications of her own decisions?

To care for a child leaving the commercial sex industry, a caregiver absolutely must think in terms of holistic care. We have to realize that brain development has been compromised and slowed. We have to realize that basic things like autonomy, self-awareness, and personal boundaries have sometimes never been learned. We have to realize that in addition to the literal and figurative demons that child survivors face, they are fighting with their own bodies for basic health. So with these realizations, we are back to our first question: how long does it take to see a child survivor heal?

The answer is… a really, really, really long time. The unfortunate reality is that trauma has changed them forever. They will never be who they would have been without their experiences. The hopeful thing is that most of them CAN overcome developmental delays, bad habits, and fear. They can learn to care for themselves and to affirm their own value. They can begin forming healthy relationships and learn to cope with the health costs of their trauma. But it’s a long road.

What good aftercare does is not heal a child. That simply isn’t possible in a year or two recovery program. A good recovery program equips a child to find healing. It lays a foundation of worthiness, teaches them how to develop safe boundaries and good relationships, and how to navigate real life safely. Good aftercare gives a child the tools that she needs to continue walking toward healing long after she has left the program. What this means is that aftercare center staff have an enormous responsibility, but in many ways even more responsibility rests on the shoulders of the community that receives a recovering survivor. Recovery comes from the combined efforts of professionals, loving neighbors, friends, safe families, and guardians as well as the child herself. As a community, we must be committed to seeing our children restored even if it takes a long time.

(As an organization primarily focused on equipping those on the frontlines, Dark Bali honors caregivers who experience these kinds of stories over and over and yet continue to love and serve victims and survivors with their whole hearts. While they care for survivors, we care for them by providing training on important topics like trauma, therapeutic techniques, and secondary trauma. To partner with Dark Bali in order to serve all of our coalition partners, contact us or become a financial partner.)

The post The Truth About Recovering From Child Sexual Exploitation appeared first on Dark Bali.

Last year, the world’s attention has turned toward human trafficking in new numbers. Particularly in the United States, #savethechildren made headlines as supporters took to the streets seemingly in support of victims of child trafficking. On social media, story after story was shared about people who believed they or their children had narrowly escaped being trafficked in a grocery store parking lot. While I am grateful for the attention that these stories have brought to the human trafficking movement, I want to be honest about the impact because intentions and impact are two different things. The truth is that these stories cause damage to the anti-trafficking movement and silence the voices of real survivors.

If you wade through the fake human trafficking stories, what you find is that there is a common thread of identification. The “victims” of the stories are relatable to the average person. This draws the reader into the story because they can imagine themselves or a child in their lives as the victim. That is why nearly all movies involving human trafficking show middle class girls from loving families getting snatched off the streets. It is a compelling image to most people, but it is rarely reality.

Traffickers are smart. They do not tend to go after children who have parents who will look for them. They go after the runaways and homeless, the kids who have aged out of foster care and are on their own, and the ones in the middle of migration whose parents don’t even know where they are. Real human trafficking stories are always complicated, but they aren’t as approachable for the average person because we are fortunate to have little or no experiences with the typical traumas that often eventually lead to trafficking.

The middle class girl snatched from her neighborhood sidewalk is a much easier sell than the story of the teenage girl who was moved around to different foster homes until she ran off with her boyfriend who pimped her out so they could both get their next opiate fix. The first is a Hollywood movie; the second is reality. In Indonesia, the stories of survivors begin with poverty and/or child marriage, and they end with migration and the complicated choices that a teenage girl should never have to make in order to stay alive.

The truth is that we like the dramatic stories of the children from homes like ours because those problems are easy to solve. If human trafficking looked like Hollywood movies, all we really need is good prevention education, strong law enforcement, and a Liam Neeson in a pinch. In contrast, the stories of actual human trafficking survivors demand that we acknowledge and address issues like poverty, immigration, addiction, and broken systems. This requires more from us than a share on social media, a street sign, or a conversation about stranger danger with our children.

Luckily, the average person can become an ally to survivors and an asset in the anti-trafficking movement. It takes a commitment to listen to survivors to hear the real stories even when they are complicated and have no easy solutions and make us uncomfortable. It takes doing some homework to ensure that the organizations you support are legitimate and the stories that you share are true. These are the kind of allies that anti-trafficking organizations need – ones who can live in the tension of the complexities and honor the reality of the lived experiences of survivors without judgement. We need people who are in it for the long haul, tackling the problems that lead to trafficking in the first place, rather than those who are in it for a few likes.

(For more information about how you can support legitimate anti-trafficking organizations, see our post on 10 Ways You Can Support Anti-Trafficking Without Spending a Dime. You can also check out our ACT page for more ideas.)

The post The Harm of Fake Trafficking Stories appeared first on Dark Bali.

Typically, sex trafficking is presented as a crime primarily affecting women and girls. In data sets as recent as five years ago, researchers asserted that a whopping 97% of all sex trafficking victims are female. It is a narrative that has driven policy as well as justified the disproportionate allocation of funding and resources to programs focused on the prevention, rescue, and recovery of women and girls. While in no way is it appropriate to minimize the violence again females through commercial sexual exploitation, it is important to push back on the accuracy of those numbers. Are males really so rarely exploited as sex trafficking victims… or are we just not paying close enough attention?

As more research has been done, we have found that the 97% female victims statistic is a myth. In fact, boys and men may make up nearly half of the sex trafficking victim population according to a global study by ECPAT on the commercial sex trafficking of children in the tourism industry. Their findings were consistent with what many other organizations were noting: boy victims are a growing population in the demographic data.

As the anti-trafficking sector has worked to unravel why the female-only victim myth developed and how boys had been missed for so long, several possible explanations emerged.

• Boys have been missing from the data because the way they are trafficked is often different from the way that girls are trafficked. The ECPAT study found that while girls and women are often trafficked into formal sex establishments like brothels and bars, boys are more likely to be trafficked in places like parks, bus stops, and on the streets. Boys are also more likely to experience sexual exploitation secondary to another form of exploitation. For example, they may be victims of forced begging or other forms of labor trafficking and be sold for sex alongside these other abuses.

• Because of a greater stigma around being a victim of sexual assault, boys are more unlikely to self-report their exploitation. The reason for this is simply that most cultures around the world have socialized gender norms in which to be male is to be strong while to be female is to be weak. Therefore, the perspective is that females are victims while males are the perpetrators. While obviously flawed (in fact, a full 1/3 of traffickers are female!), it is understandable that boys are far less likely to report their experiences with sexual abuse. In addition to the pain of the abuse itself is the additional shame of emasculation.

• Caregivers are less likely to report males as sex trafficking survivors. This reality is due in part to the fact that case managers and social workers are subject to the same socialization as anyone else in their cultures. If caregivers do not think of males as victims, they may not ask the appropriate questions, or they may report the boy as a victim of sexual abuse rather than sex trafficking because in their minds only girls are trafficking victims. Additionally, in places like Indonesia where members of the LGBT+ community are not legally protected and are often shunned by society, case managers may worry that acknowledging a boy as a victim of sex trafficking may have the unintended consequence of giving him a homosexual label. While it is completely erroneous that experiencing sodomization causes homosexuality, this common misconception does impact male victims of sexual violence in particular and may keep caregivers from correctly noting the reality of a male’s trafficking background in their files.

Why Does It Matter?

Aside from the simple importance of being truthful in our representations of the experiences of victims, accurate assessments about boys in human trafficking have practical implications. Funding is given when an organization or program can prove to the granting organization that there is a need for the organization or program to exist, and this is done using recent research. If our data does not show the existence of boys as victims, few resources will be dedicated to them. This is why there are vastly more programs and organizations for the prevention and recovery of women and girls in sex trafficking. In fact, one study in the USA showed that for every 150 beds available in aftercare programs for girls across the country, only 1 bed was available to boys.

In Indonesia, the needs for female victims already outweigh the capacity of the anti-trafficking community. There are very few programs at all, and in some places in the country there are essentially no victim services for huge populations. When we look at the needs of boys, this gap between need and available resources is even larger. Yet, we know that the boys exist. We see them in our outreaches in red light districts, and intersecting organizations such as those who work with boys in the juvenile justice system report how frequently they discover trafficking as a part of their beneficiaries’ backgrounds. As the Dark Bali coalition continues to grow, we hope to see more organizations and programs develop within our network to care specifically for these hidden victims.

(Dark Bali is committed to facilitating data collection and research in the anti-trafficking sector of Indonesia. With more accurate data, organizations within Indonesia are equipped to develop helpful resources in the most needed places. We connect researchers with practitioners and bridge the gap between Indonesian providers and the global anti-trafficking community, and we help disseminate good resources throughout the country. You can be a part of equipping those on the frontlines by joining our Monthly Impact Team or by contacting us to donate your own professional skills and services.)

Only recently has it become clear that worldwide, large numbers of boys are subject to sexual exploitation, including by tourists and travelers, and that the patriarchal societies in which they live, often prevents them from reporting incidents or seeking assistance.

“Girls have long been assumed to be the main target of sexual predators, but research for the Global Study reveals that boys are also strongly affected. The context that makes both boys and girls vulnerable is tied to social norms about gender, essentially the age-old stereotypes: girls are weak and passive and should remain in the home, while boys are strong and virile and capable of taking on the world… the gender myth that boys are ‘invulnerable’ and can take care of themselves has meant that they are far less likely to report incidents of sexual exploitation

and seek assistance.”

The post The Female Victim Myth: What About the Boys? appeared first on Dark Bali.

“[O]rganisations meaning to help often do not have the experience or expertise to identify whether people have actually been trafficked, and they rarely have the capacity or expertise required to offer high-quality legal and social services to those who have been trafficked or who were caught in a raid.”

Hollywood is full of movies about captured kids with determined parents and friends breaking down doors to rescue them from human trafficking. Sometimes organizations capitalize on this (mis)conception of anti-trafficking work by creating teams of investigators that enter another country, find people who appear to be trafficked, and perform rescue missions. These raids are often accompanied by videos capturing one of the most traumatic experiences of the survivors’ lives in order to celebrate the mission’s success and raise money for the next mission.

But is this appropriate anti-trafficking intervention?

To determine this accurately, we have to answer two questions:

• Are rescue missions trauma-informed and survivor centered?
• Do they effectively combat human trafficking?

We honor our history even while we insist on learning from mistakes and changing our methodology when necessary. The modern anti-slavery movement started with these kinds of international rescue missions, and we can be proud of those days for what they were. They were the beginning of an important movement, and we stand on their shoulders as we move forward. However, what we know now from survivors is that raids and rescue missions cause harm to those “rescued.” It is incredibly traumatic to have a team of armed people swoop in unannounced – especially when you are already living in fear. Adding additional trauma to human trafficking survivors’ experience should be avoided whenever possible. Through research and trial and error, we are finding that there are often more effective ways than a raid to get people out of trafficking situations that do not result in added trauma to survivors.

In addition to ensuring our actions are as safe as possible for victims, we must analyze the efficacy of international rescue missions. Put simply, when these rescue missions are not done under the authority of local law enforcement, they actually lead to MORE trafficking. Human traffickers see their victims as products. If a “product” is stolen, it is easy enough to just get another one to take its place. So, a rescue mission that is not accompanied by arrests and prosecutions of traffickers has essentially made a vacuum for a new victim to take the place of the one rescued.

While rescues or raids may still be necessary in some cases (though current research suggests that they should always be a last resort), they should always be performed under the leadership and authority of local law enforcement. International organizations do not have the right or authority to act as law enforcement in another country, though they may be invited to consult and assist in an investigation. When organizations work outside of their scope of authority, they interrupt that country’s criminal justice system, undermine local leadership, and often cannot ensure effective aftercare because they have no legal authority to refer to victim services. And ultimately, they create the pathway for new victims because the traffickers continue to exploit people with impunity.

We know that one of the most effective strategies for ending human trafficking is increasing the risk of engaging in this criminal activity by arresting and prosecuting traffickers. Rather than undermining criminal justice systems, advocates can help it by supporting police, prosecutors, and judges and lobbying for stricter laws within the country.

In Indonesia, the law enforcement units in charge of investigating human trafficking are very small and underfunded. From the outside, they sometimes look ineffective, but in reality many of them do amazing work with very few resources. Our goal is to strengthen and equip ALL of those on the frontlines of human trafficking which includes those working in Indonesia’s criminal justice system. We facilitate professional workshops for police officers and work to develop healthy collaboration between law enforcement and victim service providers. To help support Indonesian law enforcement, you can join our Impact Team.  

The post When Human Trafficking Rescues Aren’t Ethical appeared first on Dark Bali.

There were two of them. One was probably around 7 and the other younger… maybe 4. They could have been sisters. They were both small and skinny, with tattered clothing and hungry eyes. I saw them as I was walking across the parking lot to the convenience store where I stopped to get a bottle of water on my way home. It was dark, but I could see both of the girls clearly because they were standing next to the door of the store in the light coming from the windows. They both had open palms and watched me intently as I walked toward them. I smiled at both of them, said hello, and went on inside.

The smile on my face didn’t match what I was feeling. I didn’t know these particular kids, but I was familiar with the stories of other street kids around Indonesia. Many of them had no real families or were sent by their families in village far away to beg on the streets in the tourist areas for money. They were not enrolled in school and many of them were physically ill and malnourished. Worst of all, I knew that most of the children involved in begging, selling, and street performing were being exploited by adults.

In line with best practices, I bought the girls milk along with my water and pushed straws into the containers ensuring that they could not be resold. I hoped that they would get something nutritious to fill their bellies for the evening. When I went back outside, I put a milk in each girl’s hand and told her that I hoped she would have a good night. It was not enough, but it there was nothing left to do. In Indonesia, there is no child protective services department to call to scoop these kids off the street and place them in a safe residential care.

Curious what the girls would do with their milk, I sat in my car and watched. Without taking a single sip, both girls walked to an expensive white SUV parked in a dark corner of the parking lot. I saw the driver’s window roll down, and a hand adorned with a fancy watch and jeweled rings took each milk and then point back to the convenience store. Dutifully, the girls went back to their spot by the door, palms up waiting for the next passerby. I sighed. It was as I had suspected.

This is only one small story of a couple of children, but they represent a larger group of children that remain virtually invisible to both tourists and Indonesian citizens on my island. They are runaways or children of exploited parents who are used as commodities. I knew it was very likely that their bodies were for sale as well if an interested buyer could be found.

Usually, street kids experience multiple forms of exploitation. Some children are given the task to sell trinkets or fruit and others perform dances on the streets for tourists for tips, but all of them have a handler controlling them and keeping the money that they’ve earned. Within these little gangs of children there is violence and psychological abuse, and in many cases, there is sexual exploitation. Some children sell themselves in exchange for food or housing (a form of child sex trafficking known as “survival sex”), and others are pimped out by others to pedophiles, both local and foreign, who realize that no one really cares what happens to a street child. These kids are the most powerless and vulnerable in society, and their lives are often snuffed out early through disease and violence. Those who do manage to make it to adulthood are generally trapped in the same exploitative cycles of poverty and violence, and their own children are a significant risk of the same.

I am thankful that there is a growing awareness of these children in Indonesia and that there are organizations opening up that are offering drop-in care, medical assistance, and education for kids like these girls. I am thankful that more and more people are recognizing how much more complex their abuse is than simple poverty that leads to begging. There is more to do so that eventually when we come across kids like this, we will be able to immediately respond and keep them away from that jeweled hand that was controlling them to the point that they were too scared to even drink a sip of milk.

(As an organization primarily focused on equipping those on the frontlines, we honor those who are committed to the groundbreaking work of victim identification. They are in the thick of some of the ugliest ways humans hurt one another. While these work to create new paths to retrieve victims from trafficking situations, we support them by providing training on important topics like trauma, victim identification, victim-centered interviewing, and secondary trauma. To partner with Dark Bali in order to serve all of our coalition partners, contact us or become a financial partner.)

The post Exploited for Profit: A Story of Two Street Kids appeared first on Dark Bali.

The stories published about sex trafficking survivors are mostly about the successes. They are about the ones that manage to leave the sex industry. The ones that find healing. The ones who become heroes themselves. 

These stories certainly exist. They are what abolitionists long for and what keep us trying through all the failures along the way. The reality is, however, that failures dominate our landscape. The damage that slavery does to the soul and body does not always have neat resolution. In fact, sometimes there is no resolution at all. HIV kills, and a mind broken by years of unending trauma might never recover. There is a reason that suicide, drug abuse, and re-entry into the sex industry are so common for survivors.

One of the most precious people that I ever encountered in my work was a young girl, Kitty.* Rather than sending her to school, Kitty’s mother sent her to grown men who would rape her for cash. For years, her mother pimped her, ruining her tiny body and breaking her mind, until finally she sold her one last time to a trafficking ring and walked away forever. Mercifully, Kitty was found by the police and taken to a shelter where people who cared deeply about her worked to restore her mind, physical health, and spirit.

This is where the real work begins for a survivor. When they realize that they are physically safe, every dormant demon begins to surface. When there is no longer a need to find food and shelter and physical safety, they have to wrestle with questions of their own value and the implications of what has been done to them. I cannot begin to describe how difficult this process is for a survivor. It’s daily and it’s deep and it’s characterized by starts and stops, progress and regression. Being totally rewritten does not feel good, and for some survivors it becomes too painful to go any further.

That happened to Kitty. She couldn’t do it anymore. Changes in the shelter’s programs, including the loss of her mentor, were overwhelming. So she ran. Like so many others, she left the uncertainty of the healing process back to the life she had before on the streets. It’s a horrible, degrading, and violent life. But it IS predictable, and for some, that predictability becomes the priority.

We still don’t know where Kitty is. It’s been a long time, and even still, when I am out in the city I find myself scanning the crowds hoping that somehow we will encounter each other and she might be persuaded to return to the difficult journey into her own mind and heart. I realize that the likelihood of this encounter is nearly zero, and the chances of her surviving on the streets decreases statistically every day.

This is the agony of anti-trafficking work that is rarely presented to the public. Kitty’s story is not a success story, but it is not atypical. For every story about a survivor who is restored and goes on to live full joy-filled lives, there is a story about a precious life lost forever. However, the bulk land somewhere in the middle. They are the ones who will always suffer the enormous emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual consequences of their trauma, and every single day will require of them a deep courageous choice to keep pushing forward toward hope.

(As an organization primarily focused on equipping those on the frontlines, Dark Bali honors caregivers who experience these kinds of stories over and over and yet continue to love and serve victims and survivors with their whole hearts. While they care for people like Kitty, we care for them by providing training on important topics like trauma, therapeutic techniques, and caregiver burnout. To partner with Dark Bali in order to serve all of our coalition partners, contact us or join our Impact Team.)

*Not her real name.

The post The Truth About Survivor Success Stories appeared first on Dark Bali.

Combating modern day slavery is no easy task. The complexity of the needs is staggering and is often complicated by broken law enforcement, corrupt governments, cultural apathy, and lack of resources. Anti-trafficking efforts must always be shaped by each unique context because, quite simply, what works well in one location will not necessarily be effective at all in another.

While strategies are certainly nuanced, we can generalize the categories of responses needed to effectively address human trafficking. A helpful way of thinking about anti-trafficking work is breaking it down into its 4 major categories: advocacy, prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation.

Advocacy is a critical overarching part of anti-trafficking work. The goal of advocacy is to raise awareness of a problem and lobby for better systems to address it, whether at a local, national, or international level. Advocates sometimes speak for the population that they seek to help, but more advanced (and usually better) advocacy works with the target population or is even driven by that population itself. Dark Bali is an example of an advocacy response with the goal to facilitate the growth of a local coalition of anti-trafficking organizations and to raise awareness about human trafficking in Indonesia.

Prevention is a huge need that gets far less attention than it deserves. It is not perceived as exciting as rescue or rehabilitation work. However, helping people avoid victimization in the first place is one of the best ways to care for them. Prevention work is a wide field that encompasses many kinds of development work.

Intervention is the section of anti-trafficking that gets the most attention because it is an intense, short amount of time relative to the other areas. The goal of intervention is simply to remove the victim from danger. Effective intervention absolutely must involve local law enforcement and legal prosecution. Extraction outside of these channels is both illegal and dangerous for the victim and the rescue team.

Rehabilitation is an enormous and costly field in anti-trafficking. Survivors come with a range of needs – physical, mental, emotional, social, and legal. The best rehabilitation is done through multiple, specialized caregivers in both private and government sectors collaborating together to provide comprehensive services to each survivor according to his or her specific needs.

Thinking of anti-trafficking efforts in terms of the categories within each bigger category is incredibly helpful in identifying what the greatest needs are in a given area. As Dark Bali’s anti-trafficking coalition continues filling in each of these four main categories, our impact becomes stronger and more effective. Thinking strategically keeps us from duplicating services and makes the necessary next steps clearer in our work to end human trafficking throughout Indonesia.

The post How Anti-Human Trafficking Efforts Work appeared first on Dark Bali.

Part 1 discussed the connection between sex trafficking and neo-liberal capitalism. Because capitalism is inherently amoral, the capitalistic mechanisms of sex trafficking cannot be fought by appealing to moralisms or justice. Rather, capitalistic principles themselves must be used to reduce sex trafficking. “For criminals – whether individual and simply opportunist, or organized and highly coercive – it is a rational economic decision to enter and stay in this market. The aim, therefore, must be to change this calculation – both to create serious risks and to distribute them in such a way that the safe havens for the traffickers are removed” (Newman and Cameron 2008:153). Risk increase and profit reduction motivate different economic decisions by capitalists, and this is true in the sex industry as well.

If making the global sex trade less profitable is the cornerstone to the dismantling of the industry itself, it is important to know where the best place is to focus those efforts. As noted in part 1, the supply chain of the sex industry has four parts: the product, the wholesalers, the retailers, and the buyers. In the sex trafficking supply chain, the first two parts are the most resistant to intervention.

The supply of women and children is enormous, and while there should be work done to reduce the risk factors for entry, the sheer numbers of vulnerable people worldwide make it difficult to reduce the supply in any significant way. Likewise, traffickers involved in wholesale are difficult targets. The recruitment and transfer of victims is done largely underground and largely by sophisticated networks and organized crime rings (ibid:139). “[Criminal n]etworks are highly flexible and adaptable: they can disperse and reassemble with speed and ease and thereby avoid offering a static and easy target for law enforcement; they can exhibit significant levels of redundancy so that even when attacked and degraded they can regenerate themselves; and they can extend and truncate as needed” (ibid:139). Combating trafficking at this point in the supply chain requires the same expensive and complex operations as any other law enforcement initiative to infiltrate and dismantle organized crime (ibid:154). It also requires extensive intra-governmental cooperation, so it can be painstakingly slow and difficult work.

In contrast, the two most vulnerable points in the sex trafficking supply chain are the demand areas – the retailers and the buyers (Kara 2010:202). They are vulnerable because they must operate out in the open. Retailers must market their product and make it as easy to access as possible, and buyers must interface with retailers through those access points. Risk increase is key for attacking both of parts of the demand line.

Increasing Retailer Risk

Creating risks for retailers which cause the trafficker’s profits to decrease puts the trafficker in position to make one of two choices, both resulting in a decrease in victims. The first option is to maintain current operation costs which will decrease profitability making it impossible to supply as many “products.” The second option is to increase costs to the consumer which will reduce the customer base (the elasticity of demand), which also decreases the amount of “product” (ibid:204). A significant way to increase risk for an illegal enterprise like human trafficking is by increasing the potential price for being caught and prosecuted. 

Legitimate companies know that they will be sued for one issue or another, and in their financial planning they allocate a certain amount of money each year for attorney fees, negative judgments, and other economic penalties. Slave retailers are no different. They know that slavery is illegal and quantify the costs of running an illegal business (mostly bribes) as part of their overall operations. In doing so, they know that only a miniscule percentage of slave retailers will be prosecuted and convicted in a any given year, and that even if they are convicted, the fines are minor compared to the potential economic benefits of sexual slavery (ibid:205-206).

For most of the world’s countries, this does not mean better laws are needed against those who commercially exploit others for sex – though there is some room for important change, especially in terms of fines[1]. Most countries have laws against human trafficking, but simply do not enforce them (Newman and Cameron 2008:102-103). What is needed is arrest and prosecution under those laws which would lead to sex trafficking retailers running the risks of having their businesses shut down, being sentenced to jail, incurring heavy fines, and having their assets seized (Kara 2010:207).  “Laws are what they are: they mean nothing without strong consistent enforcement. Weak governance, be it the result of an ill equipped public sector, corruption, or conflict, is a major facilitator of human trafficking” (Newman and Cameron 2008:103). Unfortunately, trafficking offenses are still extremely unlikely to be investigated and traffickers are highly unlikely to be brought to justice.

Increasing Consumer Risk

For consumers of sex, what is needed is actual accountability for the sexual exploitation of sex slaves. To put it most simply, sex slaves are not consenting to sex with the consumer because the ability to consent has been taken from them. Therefore every commercial sexual act with a sex trafficking victim, regardless of how it came about or how the victim was acting, is rape. Most laws around the world have yet to recognize that even unintended rape on the part of the consumer is rape from a victim-centered perspective and should be treated as such.

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to distinguish a buyer of sex with a consenting prostitute from a buyer of sex from a slave unless the victim is a child, so there is a necessary relationship between addressing prostitution in general and addressing sex trafficking in regards to holding buyers accountable (Meshkovska et al. 2015:388). As observed, currently most buyers are not subject to any kind of consequences for their part in the sexual exploitation of a sex trafficking victim, and the reasons for this are heavily tied to a cultural perspective on prostitution. While women do not have the right in every country to sell sex, only a few countries have questioned the right of men to purchase sex[2].

Sweden was the first country to question the right of men to purchase sex, and the country took the lead globally when, after extensive research, its government passed a law in 1999 which decriminalized the sale of sex while making pimping and buying sex criminal offenses. Norway, Iceland, Canada, Northern Ireland, and France have since adopted similar laws (Nordic Model). The Nordic Model, as it came to be called, had the goal of protecting exploited women from prosecution, allowing ample government and private services to help them, while at the same time reducing the demand for prostitution by making it riskier for men to purchase sex. The ideological motivation of the Swedes was that human bodies should never be viewed as commodities. So while there was sympathy for the plights of women who felt prostitution was their best alternative, there was little sympathy for the men who preyed on those vulnerabilities.

Initial indicators were that prostitution declined fairly quickly after the Nordic Model was in place. One police investigation generated a recording of a conversation between traffickers who complained that the new law was interfering with their business as it required them to take their victims into hiding (an expensive reality) and because Swedish men seemed far more disinclined to purchase out of fear of arrest (Jakobsson and Kotsadam 2013:15-16). While there is a pro-prostitution lobby in Sweden that maintains that the 2/3 reduction in prostitution is overstated because prostitution has been driven underground, statistical research has shown that the countries with harsher laws against prostitution (as opposed to legalized prostitution[3] which they advocate) also have less trafficking (Jakobsson and Kotsadam 2013:12). The Nordic Law places the burden of risk on the consumer. As one Swedish police officer stated in 2013, “My job is to arrest as many men buying sex as possible and I think I have arrested about 700 men since 2007. [They] should know that they are taking a huge risk: they are considering going out into the central parts of Stockholm and actually buying another human being. We will go after them” (Thompson 2013). This reduction of demand has decreased the supply of trafficking victims in Sweden exactly as one would expect in any market economy supply chain.

Put most simply, “[t]raffickers will only sell persons for sexual exploitation when market conditions make it profitable” (UNODC 2006). Just as the modern era has brought human societies together for trade, the exchange of technology, and the transfer of knowledge, we can work together for the purpose of eradicating the unintended and unanticipated commercial sex trafficking industry. Kara is right when he notes that “only a global coalition, with sufficient unity, expertise, and influence will be able to pressure the countries of the world into adopting effective measures” (Kara 2010:216). As a global force, society must work with wisdom, creativity, and energy to see sex trafficking lose its profitability in today’s interconnected world.

[1] The disparity between the amount of money, law enforcement effort, and advocacy against drug trafficking as compared to human trafficking in most countries world-wide is telling. This is not to say that we should reduce our efforts to deal with drug trafficking, but to say that we should be trying equally as hard to reduce human trafficking. (Kara 2010:40)

[2] I use “women” and “men” in this section only to  note that this is the general trend of female prostitution and male purchasing. There are male, intersexed, and transgendered prostitutes, and women also make up a small section of consumers of commercial sex.

[3] Legalized prostitution is different from decriminalized prostitution. Decriminalized prostitution views sex workers as victims who need assistance and better options, and thus does not penalize them for engaging in sex work (this is Sweden’s perspective). Legalized prostitution insists that sex work is a legitimate work choice in which sex workers pay taxes, form unions, and are protected under worker’s laws. This was the view of the Netherlands, and according to Jakobsson and Kotsadam, their legalization of prostitution in 2000 has resulted in more prostitution and sex trafficking.

The post Sex Trafficking as a Capitalist System: Part 2 appeared first on Dark Bali.

(All references in text are from Kara unless otherwise noted.)

The topic of human slavery and sexual exploitation is deeply emotional for many people. There is a thread of morality that is nearly impossible to ignore when approaching the issue. The injustice of sexual slavery drives lawmakers, private citizens, and development workers to act, and this is a good thing. However, much understanding of the topic can be gained by divorcing it from emotion and a sense of morality because traffickers and buyers do not look at their activities in the sex trade through the lens of morality. For them, it is simply business, and with a net profit margin of 70%, it is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world (19).

Put in economic terms, sex trafficking is a supply chain with a supply side and a demand side. The two parts of the supply side are the product (sexual services) and wholesalers (traffickers involved in recruitment and transfer). Retailers (traffickers involved in sales such as brothel employees, pimps etc.) and customers (those that pay for sex) make up the demand side (202). The availability of “product” is driven by such forces as migration and is assisted by factors such as gender discrimination, poverty, war, and the breakdown of the state (23). Yet there could be no industry without a demand for the product. Demand, according to Kara, comes from three market forces: the demand for commercial sexual opportunities by male customers, the opportunity for profit by retailers, and elasticity of demand (explained below) (33).

At first glance, it is horrifying that the global population of men can sustain a sex industry of 4 million victims. However, Kara’s research breaks down the data to reveal that only a minuscule portion of the world’s adult men need to access the services of sexual slaves to maximize the profit potential of the industry[1] (33). This demand, though small in terms of the population, is capitalized on by retailers, though it is the elasticity of demand that regulates both.

The elasticity of demand is an important force to understand if one is to make a connection between capitalism and sex trafficking. The term describes what buyers are willing to pay for a product. This is the question of all capitalistic enterprises: “what is the best price to maximize profits in a given industry?” When sex retailers (pimps and brothel owners) market to customers in a higher income bracket, they are able to demand higher prices. However, as the supply of victims has increased, traffickers have realized that there is an untapped market in the bottom economic brackets. As with any market, “the drop in the retail price of a sex act functions exactly the same as an increase in a customer’s disposable income, and as Keynes argues, ‘the fundamental psychological law… is that men are disposed, as a rule and on average, to increase their consumption as their income increases'” (34).

CK Prahalad realized the potential in the untapped market of the world’s poorest four billion people (Prahalad and Hammond 2014). His research has driven some multi-national companies to invest in low-cost goods marketed to the world’s vast poor, because selling low cost goods in large quantities can bring enormous profits. The same is true of sex trafficking. With a seemingly unlimited supply of “product,” traffickers can sell sexual services for very small amounts of cash to meet the demand of poor male buyers. This increases the demand for more product, and the cycle continues to feed itself as long as the product remains in abundant supply.  Kara’s statistical analysis of his research shows that there is a price point at which poorer customers are no longer willing to buy sex acts (driven by elasticity of demand), instead putting their money into other pursuits such as alcohol and pornography (37).

The concept of the elasticity of demand for sexual services matters greatly to those who want to see sex trafficking reduced. In fact, it is the key. As Kara writes, “If real-world prices could be doubled and achieve a decrease in demand by even one-half the amount predicted by the data I gathered, the profitability of the sex trafficking industry would be severely compromised” (37). To put it more concretely, if there was a way to drive up prices, the demand for sexual services of slaves would be reduced and it would no longer be profitable to traffic so many into sexual servitude.

Find Sex Trafficking as a Capitalist System: Part 2 here for an exploration of how to tackle demand and profitability through an economic lens…

[1] Working with a much smaller number of 1.2 million sex slaves (an older figure assuming the most conservative possibilities), Kara estimates that that only 0.5% of adult men are needed to purchase sex on a given day.

References Cited

Kara, Siddharth. Sex trafficking: inside the business of modern slavery. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Prahalad, C.K., and Allen Hammond. “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably.” Harvard Business    Review. July 31, 2014. Accessed August 14, 2017. https://hbr.org/2002/09/serving-the-worlds-poor-profitably.

The post Sex Trafficking as a Capitalist System: Part 1 appeared first on Dark Bali.