"DEMAND" and Sex Trafficking

It is a pleasure to be with Shared Hope International to help release the documentary and report "DEMAND." Congresswoman Smith is a leader in the movement to end human trafficking at both the level of policy and level of services for victims, which is so rare. I want to thank her, personally, for initiating the research being presented. I commend Shared Hope International for putting a spotlight on the demand for victims of sex trafficking, because this demand creates the perverse market in people put up for sale that the U.S. Government is dedicated to ending.

Worldwide, the reason most victims are trafficked is to be turned into commodities in a massive global sex industry. Approximately two-thirds of transnational human trafficking victims, each year, are pulled into the commercial sex industry. And victims keep getting younger.

The research conducted by Shared Hope confirms something important: Despite very different economic realities, GDPs, cultural contexts, and levels of government commitment to confront human trafficking, the four countries in which Shared Hope worked all share a situation of sex trafficking and sex tourism ruining lives, yet going largely unnoticed, due to, as the report says, "A culture of tolerance."

Well, over the last five years, at the federal level, we are no longer tolerating the extreme human rights abuses of sex trafficking. President Bush signed the National Security Policy Directive 22 (NSPD-22) in December 2002. It says that prostitution is inherently harmful and dehumanizing. It draws a direct connection between prostitution and human trafficking.

As you see in the documentary "DEMAND," normalized, tolerated, regulated prostitution is a clear driver for sex trafficking. And as this market flourishes, the most hideous acts of brutality are occurring. Let me mention just one true story, that typifies the horror we find in case after case after case after case of sex trafficking.

A girl like a 15-year-old Lithuanian I'll call Ilka. Ilka was promised a holiday job in England, and she was flown from Vilnius to London, accompanied by a Kosovar who had befriended her. As soon as she arrived, the Kosovar turned her over to a Macedonian living in England who raped and then sold her to an Albanian for 4,000 pounds. Ilka was enslaved in a series of brothels and re-sold seven times. Thankfully, she escaped and ran, half-dressed, to a police station in Sheffield. The first three traffickers were found guilty of trafficking for sexual exploitation, and sentenced to 18, 15, and 7 years. It was the first case to be tried under an anti-trafficking law in England passed just two years ago.

It's a sign of progress that the criminals got so much jail time. But it is repulsive that hundreds of johns, who raped this poor girl--the sex buyers who constitute demand--walk away. Unfortunately too many people adamantly resist the extensive evidence that it is prostitution that creates the demand for sex trafficking victims.

They say they want to protect victims by regulating the sex industry, make brothels pay taxes, offer free medical check-ups--that is, to women and girls routinely being beat up and raped. Clinical evidence documents that people used in prostitution want to escape. They are beaten, raped, and terrorized. The majority exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder on the same scale as combat veterans or victims of dictatorships' terror, according to Dr. Melissa Farley in field research published in the Journal of Trauma Studies in 2003.

State-regulated prostitution is a huge magnet for sex trafficking which provides a convenient cover for criminals and legitimizes the dehumanizing fate of those enslaved. A few years ago, the U.S. Government offered a resolution at the Commission on the Status of Women that highlighted this link and called on countries to take steps to confront the demand for more victims.

Who resisted this resolution? Initially, the greatest resistance came from wealthy nations where the "culture of tolerance" for commercial sex is strongest. These countries were shamed into agreeing to the resolution but we still have not gotten far enough in confronting the demanddescribed in the report being released today.

There are few "Pretty Woman," or "voluntary," cases of prostitution in real life. Prostituted children, women, even men are trapped. Trapped by the rapacious greed of their pimps and ravenous desire of johns enabling their victimization. We need to educate our own citizens to this fact, not just confront Europe and Japan about it.

To emancipate slaves in prostitution, slaves rented to johns and pedophiles, as a nation, we must decide that it is not ok to buy a body for 30 minutes--buy a fellow human being--let alone for months or years. Exploiters must be held accountable for the misery and degradation they cause. Justice requires that.

Shared Hope International's important research and products devoted to ending the voracious demand for prostituted people is an excellent step toward ending sex trafficking as well.