Willing sex slaves

Diane Monaco dmonaco at pop3.utoledo.edu
Sat Mar 3 20:35:10 PST 2001


At 08:09 AM 3/3/2001 +0900, you wrote:
>are the policies to tighten the grip on the borders solely to stop human
>trafficking on 'human rights' grounds ? or are human rights only an excuse to
>fight immigrants attempting to get their piece of the cake ?

What policies? The increasingly global economy only makes it easier to trade in women's bodies.


>not all trafficked humans are slaves and some regular immigrants know they
>are going
>abroad for prostitution

The typical scenario of a trafficked woman is not a 28 year old single mom with an engineering degree, but rather a young peasant "girl" from a feudalist rural area of a developing country. For example, a scenario might begin with a highly mobile multinational corporation that makes a production switch away from domestic high wage labor toward foreign low wage labor in a developing country where the low wage poor are often unsuspectingly lured into bonded labor practices. Families are often lured from their rural homes with small income advances, promises of good future wages, and better living conditions. But then unforeseeable events, such as an illness, results in borrowing from the employer and/or local feudalist power broker. As the family accumulates debt sums they could never pay, they become the victims of these brokers. The daughters in these peasant families are lured by these brokers of organized crime to pay the parent's accumulated debt. They typically offer the hope of employing the young daughters in a rich second country, and there may even be a promise of marriage for the daughters. But once in the second country, the daughter's immigration papers are confiscated, if they ever had any, and they are ultimately "employed" as prostitutes. What can a little peasant girl do now?

But it does take the guilt pressure off the demanders if one can imagine that the trafficked supply are not poor little peasant girls but rather 28 year old willing engineers, doesn't it?


>(and are encouraged by both countries, see the
>overseas contract workers in the philipines and the visa aggreements with
>japan : most philipina have an entertainer visa which allows them to work in
>red light districts where japanese women don't work any more).

Do these girls even know what kind of visa "uncle" (as the brokers are often called) is getting for them?


>why do we have to be surprised that some people know their body has more
>value on the other
>side of the border ?

Who knows it? Uncle? The pimps? The brothel owner?

There is much more to read out there on the realities of sex trafficking.

Diane



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