April 15, 2004

"I realized that slavery was still alive," said John Miller, Director of the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. He was telling World magazine about the arrest of men who trafficked in sex slaves.

"I'm reading about how they lured these girls from Asian nations, promised them restaurant jobs, modeling jobs, ... seized their passports, beat them, raped them, moved them from brothel to brothel," he said.

This was not happening in some distant Third World nation, however. "There it was in civil Seattle," Miller said.

It is a crime -- and a sin -- that is almost too horrible to think about, but for the thousands of children and women trapped in the international sex slave trade, it is a nightmare with which they must live every day. Most people, however, would be stunned to know that the United States may be becoming a major importer of unwilling participants in this ghastly enterprise.

By the Thousands

This industry is technically called trafficking: "knowingly obtaining by any means -- often by force, fraud, or coercion -- any person for involuntary servitude or forced labor," according to Thomas M. Steinfatt, professor of communication at the University of Miami, who studies the subject.

It operates just like any other export-import business. According to Donna M. Hughes, professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on the sexual exploitation of women, girls and women are procured in one nation, conveyed through transit countries, and finally arrive in the nation of destination.

There, "men use them in legalized or widely tolerated sex businesses, and men physically travel around the world to buy women and children in prostitution, as a form of tourism," said Hughes. "Through recently developed global communications technology, these forms of sexual exploitation are now carried out through phone lines and satellite transmission," namely the Internet.

To call what happens to these women slavery is not hyperbole. Hughes said, "The methods used in trafficking for sexual exploitation comprise a modern slave trade. The perpetrators range from loosely connected procurers and pimps to transnational organized crime networks."

It's big business. Hughes said estimates of the money that pours in through the sex industry -- prostitution, the sale of women and children through sex trafficking, the sale of child pornography, etc. -- are between $7 billion and $57 billion a year.

That indicates that a lot of flesh is being peddled, although exact figures are difficult to come by. Hughes said a United Nations estimate puts the number of women and children who are sexually exploited by the sex trade industry each year at one million, while child-advocacy groups, according to a story in USA Today, estimate that there are currently two million children worldwide that are working as sex slaves.

Locked in Cages