IMHO, most women who work as prostitutes in any country, whether foreigners or native-born, knew full well what they would be doing, rather than getting conned into it by traffickers. They do so because it pays better than other kinds of work they can get.
"Prostitution has an unusual feature: it is well paid despite being low-skill, labor intensive, and, one might add, female dominated. Earnings even in the worst-paid type, streetwalking, may be several multiples of full-time earnings in professions with comparable skill requirements. For instance, newspaper reports of earnings for prostitutes in Sweden in 1998 were as high as SEK 14,000 (U.S.$1,750) a day (Aftonbladet, September 25, 1998), amounting to about a month's earnings in a regular unskilled job. The Economist (February 14, 1998) reported that Arabic women could make $2,000 a night in the Gulf states, and in the same article, a Latvian prostitute claimed she averaged $5,000 per month, 20 times the average wage" (Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, "A Theory of Prostitution," Journal of Political Economy 110.1, 2002, <http://www.iies.su.se/seminars/papers/Edlund.pdf>).
Trafficking scandals mask this reality. Those who don't like women doing sex work should work to raise the compensations of other kinds of work to the levels of what prostitutes get.
Aside from decriminalization of prostitution, reforms that migrant women who get into a sex industry in a foreign country would benefit from include immigration reforms, such as issuing general-purpose work visas rather than work visas that are valid only for work in specific industries, and labor reforms.
Here is what the Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan, a Japanese NGO, proposed in 2002, in addition to specific measures that aimed at trafficking:
<blockquote>3-2 Rights proper to the migrant female worker
3-1-8 Make efforts in the labor administration to widen the area where female migrant workers can work, and to assure them their human rights.
3-1-9 Most of female migrant workers who enter Japan with an entertainer visa shall be treated as workers in the labor supervisory administration since they are employed as a matter of fact in the service trade as stipulated in the Act to Control Businesses which may Affect Public Morals. The labor supervisory administration shall, in addition, take sufficient measures to protect them and their rights in accordance with the related labor laws. The rights of such female migrant workers who work substantially in the service trade shall be redressed as such, regardless of status of residence including temporary stay and entertainer according to the Immigration Control Law. (See 2-1-10.)
3-2-10 Give more guidance to the employer who employs female migrant workers to follow the related labor laws when treating them.
3-2-11 Notify the parties concerned that the Labor Standards Inspection Law shall be applied to a female migrant worker who is employed as a domestic worker by an individual. (See 2-1-11.)
3-2-12 The Japanese government shall be administratively responsible to request the foreign embassies and consulates in Japan to apply the labor laws to domestic workers employed by any of them.
<http://www.jca.apc.org/migrant-net/English/proposal/proposal_03_e.html></blockquote>
You're right that the USG uses aid to promote the kind of NGOs that share its ideology, but Japanese unions, NGOs, etc. don't need any international funding if they want to do any outreach to sex workers or immigrants or anyone else, so it's not the USG's fault if few of them are doing it.
The same goes for family planning. Almost any government, even relatively poor ones like the governments of Thailand and the Philippines, can afford family planning without foreign funding. Lack of US aid is no excuse.
I'd rather ban the USG from funding any foreign NGO for any purpose. The negatives of US funding outweigh any positive that its funding produces. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>