Is the Sex trade the new slavery?
© Icqurimage 2005
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 Great controversy
surrounds the massive wave of immigration of young women from Eastern Europe and the
developing regions into the West. Are
they mostly economic migrants seeking prosperity and opportunity, or have the
majority been forcibly trafficked to satisfy an expanding sex industry? Many of those inside the adult industry claim
that they are overwhelmed by girls seeking money and a taste of the high life,
whilst the media suggests that many girls are caught up in sexual slavery
through abduction, deception or financial bondage. Human sexuality is a complex issue, and the
economics of human sexuality are more complex still. So just how large and extensive is the trade
in human trafficking within the sex industry?
What evidence is there to support its existence? How do young women fall prey to the sex
traffickers, where do they come from, and to which wealthy markets do they
primarily go? Finally, is the influx of
young women from developing nations into the sex industry driven principally by
reward or by coercion?
A brief history of sexual slavery
 Before we look
deeper into modern patterns of sexual migration it is perhaps helpful to gain
an historical perspective. All economic empires, past and present, were built
on slavery. From the original slavs who
served the Romans as servants and concubines to the slave mistresses of the
Vikings who were slain and buried alongside their masters, captured women have
long been treated as sexual property.
Wealth cannot be measured solely in terms of material acquisitions,
money or land. The less those who sit at
the apex of the pyramid of wealth pay for goods and services, the greater their
effective wealth becomes – and what could be more precious than slave
labour? After all what is the value of
wealth without pleasure? Sexual slavery
has long served the pleasures of high society, from the harems of the East to
the courts of the West. A contentious
public debate in the 1970s, concerning the waves of Mexican immigration that
were alleged to be ‘ruining’ the State of California, was famously resolved
when the then Governor remarked that “Americans don’t pick lettuce”, or more
simply stated, you can’t have cheap food and no Mexicans. A nation’s wealth is
considerably diminished if goods and services cost more.  If the demand for mistresses and girlfriends
outstrips the supply of available women, then the price of sex spirals ever
upwards. The solution is obvious –
import more women to increase supply and lower prices.
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Sex slaves have been a universally traded commodity
throughout history. Sex is after all the
biological reason for the wars we wage.
Dominant and more aggressive nations expand through conquest, killing
the males of rival nations and capturing their women for purposes of sexual
gratification or child rearing. Indeed
the cultural fear of other nations or races taking women (i.e. the genetic
future of the colony) is deeply engrained.
In mid-19th Century America there was even a
‘white slavery’ scare when it was suggested that large numbers of white women
were being kidnapped and forced into prostitution. Even if such a trade had existed, the extent
of this trade was greatly exaggerated through a xenophobic fear of black
slaves. In fact, the vast majority of
victims of sexual slavery in America at this time
were women of Black African descent, often purchased exclusively for sexual
motives.
The global
tradition of slavery is as long as it is grimly fascinating, reflecting the
economic servitude of the ‘weak’ to the ‘strong’. As Hitler once phrased it, “Nations, like
individuals, are also engaged in a ceaseless conflict in which only the fittest
can hope to survive”. Twisted by Nazi
logic, this is only a short ideological side-step from ‘the strong dominating
and enslaving the weak’. A particularly
infamous campaign of sexual slavery was carried out by the occupying Japanese
forces during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Asian women were
obliged to serve the Japanese army as "comfort women" in occupied Korea, China and South-East Asia. The women and children of many cities were
gang-raped, and those who were not butchered were forced to become Japanese
"comfort women", an act epitomised in the “Rape of Nanjing”. This of course was not a purely Japanese
phenomenon. The German Army
systematically raped Russian and Ukrainian women during their Eastern campaign
of 1941, and in 1944 as the tide of war turned the Red Army repaid the
vendetta, raping countless millions of German women until 1948. Historically the women of a conquered nation
are as much a part the spoils of war as its land and gold.
The economic importance of slavery to an empire or economy
cannot be understated. The German car maker Volkswagen admitted to having used
17,000 slaves in one of its factories during World War II in Wolfsburg. Little wonder that the “People’s Car” was
such good value. Catherine the Great of Russia gave away an estimated 45,000
slaves as gifts, and in Texas in 1850 the average price of a healthy male 
slave was
equivalent to 200 acres of prime farmland.
Indeed African-American slaves performed an estimated 222 million hours
of labour between 1619 and 1865, equating to around $100 trillion in today’s
money. These figures are merely a
snapshot of the economic value of slavery throughout history, from the American
Plantations to today’s textile factories of South America, Asia and Mexico.
Perhaps the most insidious example of sexual slavery was
perpetrated in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The so-called Joy Division were groups of
Jewish women who were kept solely for the sexual gratification of the Nazi
concentration camp guards. They were not
worthy of genetic equality of course, but were deemed satisfactory for sexual
service. Most perversely the infamous Dr.Joseph Mengele would ritually
entertain the most attractive Jewish arrivals to the camp, and would play his
piano for them as a prelude to a night of sexual intercourse before executing
them the next morning. Contrary to
popular Jewish opinion, the Nazis were not unduly selective between those they
perceived to be of inferior stock or race.
Indeed Polish and Ukrainian women were also forced into sexual servitude
within the German brothels of World War II.
Sexual servitude through conquest is by no means a recent
phenomenon. Many men living today within
the regions of the former Mongol empire are believed to carry the Y (male)
chromosome of the 13th Century Conqueror Genghis Khan. His genetic legacy equates to some 16 million
descendants, or 8 percent of the modern male population. Clearly Genghis Khan enjoyed the fruits of his
conquest.
Of course Western
civilization was not the first to rise, or the first to adopt sexual
slavery. Whilst in Islamic countries the
Qur'an recommended the liberation of
slaves unreservedly, the Hadith and
most traditional schools of Shariah
permitted slavery. Although Islamic
culture frowns severely upon sex with married women, in Sunni tradition
previous marriages of enslaved infidel women are considered to have been
dissolved. While traditional Islam
permits a Muslim man to marry many wives, he could also buy 'Right hand possessions'
who could not marry without his permission.
The marriages of these slave girls could be dissolved at will, and their
master was allowed to have sex with them 'by right of possession' unless she
was married. However if a slave girl
were made pregnant by her master her status would be changed to that of 'mudabbar', a free woman.
As there were
inevitably more eligible bachelors than brides within Islamic Society, this
cultural imbalance spawned a flourishing trade in female sex slaves imported
from the Sudan, Mauritania and Zanzibar. Traditionally Arab slave traders exported
African males to the American plantations and sold their women to the Islamic
nations. Indeed the slave market in the
Holy Saudi city of Medina continued until
1923. The Ottoman Empire and their
ancestors obtained their slaves by abducting children from the conquered
Circassians (Northern Caucasus), Armenians and
Greeks. The captured boys became soldiers and many of the girls were taken as
concubines for the harems of wealthy officials.
Sex slaves were also taken from South Asia and from Eastern Europe, although some
Western Europeans were also abducted by Barbary raiders.
Global scale of the sex slave trade
A UNICEF report
in 2004 claimed that slavery continues today within every African nation, and
is booming in south Asia. One
estimate in 2000 put the global slave population at 27 million, although this
is without doubt an underestimate given that this does not take into account
debt slavery or the clandestine nature of the trade. For instance many ‘economic immigrants’ to
Western countries arrive to find that their passports and money have been
taken, forcing them into complete dependence upon their new ‘owners’. Sex slavery through debt bondage is
especially common in Germany, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands and the USA. The brisk trade in Eastern European sex
slaves began in the early 90’s with the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The trade expanded with the end of the
Yugoslavian wars of independence and the ‘opening up’ of South-East Asian
markets. According to the US State Department’s own international figures, at
least half a million women and children are forced into sexual slavery or
prostitution annually, again a conservative estimate.
Slavery rather than prostitution is the World’s oldest
profession. The slave trade generates
global revenues well in excess of $31bn annually, half of which is in the
industrialised world. Sex slaves
presently retail at around $67,200 a head in the Industrialised West, $45,000
in the Middle East, $23,500 in so called transition countries,
$18,200 in Latin America, and $10,000 in Asia or Africa. Indeed as many as 2 million women and
children are sold into the sex trade every year. Between 600,000 and 800,000 people are
‘trafficked’ across international borders annually, including more than 20,000
into the United States, 80% of whom are
females destined for the commercial sex trade. UN figures suggest that profits
from human trafficking are as high as $9.5 billion a year, ranking it alongside
the trade in illegal drugs & arms as a leading source of revenue for
criminal organizations.
In 2003 a UN official described the trafficking of women
and children across Asia as "the largest slave trade in
history". More than 30 million
children have been traded over the last three decades in Asia and the Pacific Rim alone, the
victims usually being teenage girls who find themselves in sweat shops or
brothels. The trade is so lucrative that government officials and the police
afford Asian traffickers and pimps State protection. As a consequence more people are enslaved
today than at any time during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, even
though there is no longer a census.
It is important to realise that this is a global problem
that is endemic within human nature rather than being exclusively an Arab,
Western, Asian or Jewish phenomenon. All
over the world women are lured into economic migration with misleading promises
only to find themselves enslaved within the growing sex trade. We shall now consider the patterns of these
migrations to try to gain an insight into the major trading routes, origins and
destinations of the human sex slave trade.
North
America
The Johns Hopkins University Protection Project
suggested that more than 15,000 women are trafficked into the United States every year,
mainly young girls from Eastern Europe, Mexico and Asia. The U.S. State Department
puts this figure at over 50,000. Asian women are sold to brothels in North America for around
$16,000 a head, and each woman may come to represent up to $250,000 in profit.
Such 
women are tricked
into believing that there are well paid jobs waiting for them in America as au
pairs, maids, dancers, waitresses, or models, but instead often find themselves
drugged, beaten and sometimes raped as part of their preconditioning for the
sex industry. Some are sold to strip
clubs or brothels, whilst others are destined for more selective clientele or
for family use. Recently in San Francisco officials broke
up a prostitution ring of six brothels containing Asian women, and a further
ten such women were found in various suburban homes.
The United States is believed to
be both a major transition point and destination for the sex slave trade. Women have claimed to have been tortured as
part of their conditioning and then ordered to have sex with hundreds of men to
work off transportation "fees" as large as $60,000. Once in the United States they are usually
rotated from one city to another to evade the officers of the law and
immigration, and also to supply clients with fresh faces. The trafficking routes are not
straight-forward, and women are often imported indirectly via a third transit
country. For instance, a multi-million
dollar Russian slave ring is believed to import women from Russia to Los Angeles via Mexico, whilst another
ring "breaks in" Mexican girls in Mexico City brothels, and
then transfers them to serve as prostitutes within suburban New York. The Mexican city of Tijuana is a particularly
popular transit point into the States, and is in of itself a popular sex
tourist destination.
Perhaps it might be fairer and more balanced to suggest
that many such women are actually aware that they are being illegally smuggled
into the United States for the purposes
of prostitution. Some may even be
prepared to risk entering into debt bondage in the hope of finding a better
life, but they are unprepared for the torment and suffering that awaits them. Others are even less fortunate and find
themselves abducted, tricked or even sold by their own families. The true scale
of the industry is impossible to estimate, but a silent stream of slaves flows
almost invisibly across the world’s busy borders every day. The Chicago Police Vice unit
have assigned no fewer than two people who are dedicated to monitoring human
trafficking in the City. In a city of
almost 3 million inhabitants with mass road, rail and air transit systems this
must seem like an open invitation to the traffickers. Since 2000, the United States has dedicated at
least $295 million to address the problem globally in 86 countries, or $686,000
per country per year - a tiny fraction of the value of the global sex slave
trade (U.S. State Department
figures). Apparently maintaining the illusion of concern is more important than
regulating the flow of such immigrants.
Europe
Every year some 120,000 women are smuggled into Western Europe from Eastern Europe to feed its
thriving sex industry. Some regions of Europe such as Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia have become
particularly important hubs for this trade.
These areas are war-torn and in sharp economic decline, providing
smugglers with little interest or opposition to their activities. Some former Communist countries such as Albania,
Moldova, Romania, Latvia, Russia and the Ukraine have become major sources for
women entering into the sex slave trade, whilst some nations including Albania,
Greece, Croatia, Italy and Bosnia serve as important transit countries in their
distribution and processing.
Between 60 and 70 percent of those unemployed in Russia and the Ukraine are women. Traditionally paid less than their male counterparts,
they often have difficulty holding down regular employment. The infamous "Natasha trade" refers
to the women who are trafficked from Russia and the Ukraine, an activity
which generates profits in excess of $83 million a month in Italy alone. These
vast profits have generated a culture of endemic corruption amongst state
officials, and even NATO and UN peacekeepers have been implicated within the
sex slave trade in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Bosnia many of the
estimated 5,000 women who are trafficked at any one time are held near the
bases of the NATO peacekeeping force for their pleasure. Sarajevo alone has some
forty so-called “nightclubs” which feature sex slaves as “dancers”. Many of these young women are orphans,
runaways or from broken homes, and only a small percentage ever return alive to
their native homes. Often these sex
slaves become too physically ill or traumatized to be of use to their owners
and mysteriously disappear.
Officials have
blamed "Natashas" for the rising incidence of AIDS in Turkey where condoms
are not universally used. The AIDS
epidemic is now rampant in the former Soviet Union with 250,000
people infected in 2004 alone, and over 1% of the adult population of the Ukraine is now estimated
to be infected. The Ukraine, Russia, Moldova and Romania are the
principal source countries for European sex slaves, who are usually routed via
the transit countries of Albania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia. The major
destinations for the "Natasha trade" are Germany, Italy, Turkey, Israel, the United States and the United Arab
Emirates (UAE).
Indeed the profits are so abundant that even after ten years of bitter
civil war within the Balkans, the Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Albanians have set
aside their rivalries to co-operate to reap the vast profits of the trade.
The Ukraine has now eclipsed
Latin America as the leading source of trafficked women.
As many as 120,000 young Ukrainian women are trafficked every year, resulting
in the loss of some half a million women over recent years. Ukrainian women have become a feature of the
brothels of Turkey, the UAE, Italy, Greece, Spain, and the Netherlands. The greatest problem is what becomes of them
after they have served as sex slaves. In
2003 the International Organisation for Migration determined that 75% of
clients preferred prostitutes aged 25 or under, and 22% preferred those aged 18
or younger. Sex slaves are therefore both a perishable and a disposable
commodity, and with a constant supply of fresh young girls available, most will
not be retained beyond the age of 25.
European officials suggest that some 200,000
women and girls, a quarter of the world’s sex slaves, are smuggled out of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union every year. Around half of them are transported to Western Europe, and a quarter
to the United States. This phenomenon has been attributed to the
collapse of the border controls and economies of these countries. Since the fall of the Soviet Union a quarter of a
million Moldavian women, some 10% of the female population, have been sold into
prostitution largely because of their poverty and their attractive
features. The lucrative sex slave trade
in the Balkans, which yields billions of dollars in revenues every year, pays
for luxuries and for arms for organised crime syndicates and dissidents. In addition to its role as a transit country,
some 35,000 Albanian sex slaves currently reside in Italy, and another
17,000 have been trafficked elsewhere by Albanian gangs who are renowned for
their brutality. Europe remains the
international hub of the sex slave trade.
The Middle
East
By virtue of its geographical location as a bridge between
three continents, the Middle East has always been
a primary route for the slave trade, and its importance has increased further
with the opening of the Suez Canal.
Israel is a focal point
for the global sex slave trade. Amnesty
International reported that within the past ten years some 10,000 women from
the Ukraine, Russia and Moldova have entered Israel to become sex
slaves. Police estimates put the numbers
who come into Israel to work in the sex
industry at between 2,000 and 3,000 a year, feeding a $450 million-a-year
prostitution industry which is centred around Tel Aviv and its estimated 250
brothels. Between 100,000 and 150,000
women are sold annually in Israel as part of a
“mail-order bride” scheme. Many of these
women and girls end up as sex slaves, entering an industry which is worth an
estimated $17 billion a year. Most are
promised well paid jobs, and many more are sold dreams of happy marriage. Even though some are well aware that they
will work as prostitutes, they do not anticipate the abuse and enslavement that
they usually encounter. Working in collusion with Jewish organized crime rings
on the European mainland, Israeli traffickers and pimps earn somewhere in the
region of $50,000 - 100,000 a year from each trafficked sex slave.
Arab countries in the Persian Gulf are a popular
destination for young Iranian girls, notably Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab
Emirates.
Indeed there is a booming trade in the large-scale trafficking of women
from Iran to the Gulf
countries and Western Europe, which some say involves Iranian government
officials and clerics. In Tehran alone there are
an estimated 85,000 women and young girls engaged in prostitution either on the
streets or within the City’s many brothels.
Many of them are street children or from impoverished rural areas,
others are sold into sexual slavery by their parents, whilst some lost their
fathers in the Iran-Iraq War. A number
of prostitution rings which operate from Tehran sell girls to France, Britain,
and Turkey, whilst thousands of girls from eastern Iran are sold as ‘brides’ to
Pakistani men who then sell them on to brothels in Pakistan known as
“Kharabat”. It is estimated that 90% of
Iranian runaways will find themselves engaged in prostitution within an Islamic
country which officially does not accept or support prostitution. As all tiers of the religious establishment
and government of Iran are alleged to
be gainfully involved in the country’s sex trade, contradictions abound.
Natashas travel
to Turkey by ferry across the Black Sea in their droves, both to harvest the
country’s booming economy and to take advantage of its lax immigration
laws. Prostitution is actually legal in Turkey within licensed
establishments known as "general houses" where full medical care is
available, although the popular taste for these young Slavic women has spilled
over into the streets.
Asia
The sex trade is
thriving in Asia. Throughout South-East Asia some 300,000
women and children are trafficked annually as part of the sex trade. It is
believed that 20,000 women from Myanmar currently reside
within Thai brothels, with 10,000 fresh faces imported each year. The total
prostitute population of Thailand is estimated to
lie somewhere between one and two million, of whom many hundreds of thousands
are infected with HIV.
Perhaps as many as 200,000 women are sold into sexual
servitude in Pakistan each year, many
of whom are abducted in Bangladesh. Hundreds of young girls are smuggled into Thailand each week from Myanmar, Laos or China, and crime
syndicates export Filipino girls to East Malaysia and Indian girls
to the Middle East. There are as many as 200,000 girls from
Nepal working as sex slaves in India, and a further 20,000 women from Burma
have been pressed into prostitution in Thailand, where light-skinned Northern
Thais, Mongolians and Tibetans are generally preferred over the darker
complexions of the region’s ethnic Muslims and Malaysians.
A classic example
of a change in social policy or culture impacting upon the economics of supply
and demand is the phenomenon of bride-trafficking in China. Whilst modern urban Chinese couples are less
selective about the sex of their newborn children, the vast majority of the
population in the countryside still favours boys over girls, often to the
extent of committing infanticide. This
means that China faces a shortage
of women to such a serious extent that by 2020 an estimated 40 million Chinese
men will remain bachelors. This inevitably causes a desperate need to import
brides at affordable rates for Chinese men, a demand that the slavers are all
too ready to satisfy.
Sexual slavery also abounds in Africa. However it is much more difficult to define
as it is common tradition in many African communities that the husband must pay
the bride’s family a dowry, in essence a payment for a hand in marriage. Slavery was officially abolished in former
colonial territories in the 19th century, but in Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, northern Uganda and Congo the practice
continued to thrive. The sex slave trade
is now rampant throughout the continent, although there are particular hot
spots. South Africa has become a source,
transit and destination country for women trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation.
Women from other African countries, especially Mozambique, are trafficked
into South Africa and then often
on to Europe. North Africa has become a supply route for
black women, many of whom enter Europe through Spanish and French ports, although
the extent of this trade has not been well characterised. South America serves as a major source for
sex slaves, many of whom are trafficked into America through Florida, Louisiana and the Caribbean. In fact South American women are in great
demand all the world over, although patterns of their trafficking seem to be
poorly recorded.
The scale of the modern sex slave trade certainly dwarfs
that of the American colonial plantations.
Whilst there is little doubt that many of the young women who are drawn
into the sex industry willingly agree to be trafficked to richer countries,
most find themselves exploited or actually enslaved. It seems that only a relaxation of
immigration laws and the legalization of prostitution can bring the industry
above ground and reduce the financial incentives for sex traffickers and
pimps. There is a simple law of
economics - where there is a demand there will be a supply. If men seek sexual companionship with young
women then they will certainly obtain it if they have the means, and their
financial means provides an irresistible lure for economic migrants and
traffickers alike. If it were not
illegal for young women to enter countries looking to provide sex or to marry
single men, then immigration, STD’s and prostitution could be more effectively
and safely monitored. Who knows the Pink
Cadillac may one day be downsized to a Ford.