Women and sexual slavery Essay
80% of slaves are young women and girls. Succumbing to the temptation of newspaper ads to make money fast by working as a waitress, a housekeeper or a photo model, they are recruited for employment abroad. “Marriage agencies”, “employment agencies” and all sorts of “visa offices” offer help in resolving this matter. But when women are on foreign land, it appears that they are simply deceived and forced to work in the local sex industry. They are deprived of documents, intimidated, and never given the money earned by hard work.
Caught in such terrible conditions, women are afraid to go to the police, most often because they stay in the country illegally, and so they beware of harassment by pimps or seek to avoid deportation.
It should be noted that women who are trafficked to foreign countries in order to use them in the sex industry are extremely isolated and passive group. Human rights violations and violence against them are massive. Women work for 12-15 hours, and often a whole day in sex clubs, brothels or sexual services bureaus (Kara, 2010; Jones, 2011; Quirk, 2007). In addition, the owners of these establishments use them as cleaners, waitresses, or housekeepers. Using the constraints, blackmail and intimidation pimps make women completely docile and manageable. It is clear that in such circumstances a person goes through the psychological, moral and physical challenges. One important factor is that very often a woman lives in the country illegally. Official documents she arrived with are taken away or invalid. A woman is told that she is illegal in the country and it can cause many adverse effects. Therefore, such a woman is interested to avoid contact with the authorities. In such cases it is impossible or very difficult to implement any legal defence to the victim (Rijken, 2009). Not surprisingly, deeply frightened, blackmailed and threatened, the victims of sex business even when returning home very rarely venture to address to justice against pimps and testify against them in court. In addition, sometimes a foreign language becomes a barrier in cooperation of the victim and the authorities abroad.
70% of women leaving to work abroad really believe that they will be employed as nannies, waitresses, dancers, or models. Every 11 minutes a new sex slave appears in the world. The price for a girl from Eastern Europe is 500-1000 dollars. Reselling a concubine several times, the pimp gets up to 250 thousand dollars.
Taking into account that the open sex work and sex-related employment provide most of migration opportunities for young women, one could argue that the greater part of female labor migration is a marginal area of labor relations. Human rights violations in this area are widespread and associated not only with sex-employment. A quarter of women surveyed said that all the work overseas is a big risk, another 43% also felt some danger (Kara, 2010).
Less than 5% of the respondents consider themselves to be protected when going abroad for work, and almost 60% reported about their full insecurity. Over 40% of respondents agreed that many women who left to work abroad, got in slave conditions. Approximately the same number thinks it is an exaggeration. And only about 5% disagreed with this statement.
Dutch human rights activists from the NGO “Foundation against trafficking in women” believe that trafficking in women is when someone by using force, fraud or abuse their authority forces women into prostitution. It does not matter whether she was engaged in this before. The basis of such a crime is the violation of freedom of women (Nieuwenhuys & Pйcoud, 2007; Rijken, 2009).
The following situations can be regarded as the signs of trafficking in women (Kara, 2010; Jones, 2011; Quirk, 2007):
– The woman did not know that she will be engaged in prostitution or was misled about the circumstances in which she would have to work;
– The woman is not free to take a personal decision about whether she wants to be engaged in prostitution;
– The woman is forced to give her earned money to other persons;
– The woman is burdened with debts, which she at first has to pay off before she can dispose of her own income and decide freely whether or not she can abandon this activity before she gets back her passport;
– The woman is constantly kept under the control by other persons;
– The woman is deprived of the freedom of movement or of the possibilities to communicate with other people;
– The woman is not free to refuse certain customers or protest against certain types of sexual contact.
The priority countries of trafficking in women include: Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Czech Republic, Croatia, Germany, United Arab Emirates, Syria, China, Netherlands, Canada, and Japan (approximately in order of importance). At the same time, according to surveys by the focus groups, the main countries in which women would like to work (not in the sex industry, but in other areas) are the USA and Canada (54%), Italy, Spain, Switzerland, France (50%), Germany, the Netherlands (36%), and this is natural, since women chose more developed and economically attractive countries. But at the same time, these are the countries where it is almost impossible to find a legal job for people from less developed countries (Salt, 2000; Bales & Soodalter, 2010; Shelley, 2010).
Most women do not know the immigration laws, they believe that foreigners have the right to work abroad as local citizens and get the same money. Also only a small number of women are aware of the fact that the tourist and visitor visa (and these are the types of visas those girls are traveling abroad with and then falling into the illegal sex business) do not provide the permission to work.
The countries in which women are willing to work have a fairly strict laws and restrictions on employment of foreigners. This is a very serious discrepancy between desires and realities. Significant social and psychological problems occur in women because they are in countries with unfamiliar laws, traditions and language.
