The Unknown Candidate: Trafficking Policies Against Trafficking Sex

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Trafficking Policies Against Trafficking Sex

Nicholas Kristof continues to call attention to the problem of human trafficking, urging Bush to make it a higher priority as well.

Hitting Brothel Owners Where It Hurts
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

Calcutta

Imagine what you would have done if you'd been in Hasina Bibi's sandals.

She was a lonely 16-year-old working in a garment factory in Bangladesh when an older employee began mothering her. They grew close, and one day the older woman gave Hasina some cakes to eat.

Two days later, Hasina emerged from a drug-induced stupor in India, sold to a brothel in faraway Gujarat. The brothel's owner beat Hasina and threatened to deform her face with acid if she tried to escape. She had to do whatever the customers wanted, with or without condoms.

But Hasina, in contrast with most girls who are trafficked into brothels, had a fourth-grade education and was literate. So although she earned no money, Hasina asked customers for tips and was able to amass a secret stash of rupees. She learned a bit of Hindi. Finally one day she jumped into a rickshaw and ran away.

It would be nice to say that she lived happily ever after, but trafficked children rarely do. Ashamed to return home, Hasina is now an independent streetwalker here in Calcutta.

So as we try to develop policies to reduce sex trafficking, there are a couple of lessons here. First, it's difficult to extricate girls from prostitution after they've been trafficked. It's far more cost-effective to focus resources on reducing the number of newly trafficked people each year - now hundreds of thousands.

Second, educating girls is the best way to give them the tools to resist trafficking or escape brothels. In the long run, one effective way to knock down brothels is to build schools.

But that's for the long run. To have a more immediate impact, we need to reduce the economic incentives for traffickers. Here are my suggestions:

Pick our battles. Look, prostitution will always be around. But progress is possible by targeting the very worst abuses, like the brothels that imprison girls (some boys are also trafficked for sex, but not as many).

Emphasize criminal sanctions. Effective law enforcement may not rescue many individual children (those numbers are tiny), but it deters all brothel owners from forced prostitution and from pimping minors. If brothel owners see that they risk jail for imprisoning and peddling 13-year-olds, they instead employ semivoluntary 17-year-olds who claim that they are 18 (few people in poor countries have good documentation of age). In this world, that's real progress.

Focus on virginity sales. In some areas, like Southeast Asia, the business model of sex trafficking depends on selling virgins for $500 or more apiece. That's where traffickers reap their biggest profits. So let's encourage sting operations that arrest both buyers and sellers of virgins. Buyers are usually wealthy foreigners, often Arabs or ethnic Chinese, and a few heavily publicized arrests would help dry up sales of virgins.

Inspect brothels regularly for prisoners. Frequent inspections make the brothel owners more likely to employ willing prostitutes rather than unwilling ones. During inspections, girls should also undergo mandatory testing for diseases, including H.I.V.

Some people worry that cracking down on trafficking just drives it underground. I don't worry too much about that. The brothel business depends on being readily accessible, so driving it underground makes it less profitable and smaller. And my interviews with brothel owners suggest that many find the business only marginally more profitable than peddling pirated DVD's or smuggled cigarettes. Eat into their profits a bit more, and they'll switch businesses.

The first step is to put forced prostitution on the international agenda, just as the abolitionists put slavery there in the early 19th century. To his credit, President Bush, far more than his predecessors, has pushed other governments to crack down on sex trafficking. His State Department office on trafficking should get a medal.

Mr. Bush could make the issue a higher global priority by raising it in his State of the Union address and in his coming visit to India. Just imagine if he visited the New Light anti-trafficking center here in Calcutta. A local woman, Urmi Basu, used her savings and American foundation grants to build New Light, which battles trafficking, teaches English to the children of prostitutes and provides health services. (Here's a video of Ms. Basu and a list of aid groups that do great work fighting trafficking is at www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

Mr. Bush could do so much good by leading dignitaries and TV cameras through a red-light slum and down a fetid alley to the sewer-side offices of New Light. The entourage could then spotlight reformers like Ms. Basu, the abolitionists of the 21st century.

In case you missed it, you can watch "A Call to War" from my recent trip to Sri Lanka and "The Next Atlantis?" from my visit to the Maldive Islands.

Photo credit: Nicholas D. Kristof (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)