Another factor is the deployment of peacekeeping forces.
This very ugly aspect of sending international peacekeeping
missions is that it provides a ready market
for trafficked females.
We've seen this in Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Haiti,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone.
It's a common problem.
And then finally the trade in women
is extremely attractive to organized crime networks
because it provides immense profit
with very, very little risk.
The sex industry, sex trafficking in particular,
is a booming business.
Women now represent the second most profitable commodity
for organized crime after illegal drugs.
It nets for organized crime networkers
more than illegal weapons do.
Estimates are that maybe the profits from sex trafficking
are $32 billion a year.
Unlike narcotics which are sold and used once,
women are very profitable because they can be used,
and are used, over and over and over.
Now let me shift and talk about what
it looks like-- the phases of human trafficking
and the patterns that we see.
I'll start with recruitment, the main ways
that women and girls are recruited
into the sex industry.
Probably the most common is deception.
And that includes women-- Again, they're
seeking to improve their economic situation-- very often
to support children, elderly relatives.
And they accept offers which prove
to be false to travel to another place
where there are better economic opportunities.
And this includes a range of false offers
from jobs as nannies and waitresses
and hotel cleaners, models, dancers.
Also false opportunities for education, and fake marriages.
Fake marriages are particularly common in South Asia,
East Asia, and now also the former Soviet Union.
That's one whole category, this deception.
It's also a deception.
But I put it separately because it's a deliberate strategy,
and that I've listed here as romance and seduction.
It's also known as the lover boy approach where
a young man-- particularly, this is really common
in the US-- will befriend a runaway, a young woman who
seems to be disoriented or on her own-- pretend
to be her boyfriend and then sell her for sex.
Another very common method of recruitment is sale by family.
This is particularly common in Asia, prompted
by poverty, dislocation, desperation,
and the low status of females.
Families often sell their daughters, typically in Asia,
for initial payment.
And then they get small remittances
as the girl or the woman works in the sex industry.
One woman, who was able to get out of this,
referred to this as girls being slot machines
for their families.
Also recruitment by former slaves is common.
And that happens for a number of reasons.
One is very often, especially when
girls age six, seven, eight, are taken into the sex industry,
they become accustomed to it.
That's all they know.
At some point, they become allies of the brothel owners
and move into sort of a management position and recruit
others.
This is very common in India, for example.
Another reason that former sex slaves will recruit others,
this is very common today in Eastern Europe,
is that they're told by their traffickers,
after a while you can go if you replace yourself.
If you don't replace yourself, they
threaten them with violence.
This is sometimes known as happy trafficking.
And also women in various places will get a commission
if they recruit new victims.
And then finally there's abduction,
which is generally less common these days.
Second phase is the transportation or transit
phase.
And I'll just stress a couple things here.
An individual doesn't have to be trafficked
across international borders in order
to be considered trafficked.
Trafficking happens within individual countries as well.
And again, women seem to be taken
from richer areas to poorer areas,
and it typically involves the use of false documents
or bribery at borders.
And now the phase of exploitation.
I want to point out this is really important in assessing
whether someone has been trafficked.
It doesn't matter if someone isn't taken across a border.
Exploitation is the key.
It's the absolute essential element, I think,
of human trafficking.
And consent also doesn't matter because a woman may initially
consent, say to go work in the sex industry in Italy,
without knowing the slave-like exploitative conditions
that she will be forced to work in.
And that woman would still be considered traffic.
So in sex trafficking, of course, the exploitation
is coercive of sexual services.
And within this, women have no control whatsoever.
They have no control over the type of clients,
the number of clients that they have
to serve each day, the type of acts that they're subjected to.
Some women and girls report being
forced to serve as many as 40 clients a day
without any vacation.
Very, very often they are forced to submit
to abusive, degrading, and violent sex acts.
They have no choice in the use of condoms.
And of course they're not free to leave.
That's part of the slavery aspect.
Often sex slavery is operated as a form of debt bondage
where the young woman or woman is told by her quote unquote
"owner" that she owes him for her transportation
and her purchase price.
And then as she works, they also charge her for her food,
for her lodgings, for her clothing, for her makeup
and arbitrarily add fines.
You know, she's not satisfying the clients,
or someone complained about her; she's fined.
And very often when the woman is close to paying off
her supposed debt, she's simply sold to another person
and the whole cycle begins again.
Let me just say a little bit about the settings in which sex
trafficking occurs.
It's everywhere.
It's all around us.
Here is a list of the common settings.
Street prostitution, brothels-- particularly brothels,
if you've been to Amsterdam, Mumbai,-- nightclubs,
massage parlors.
Fake massage parlors are particularly a common form
of sex trafficking in San Francisco and Los Angeles,
for example.
It also occurs in private apartments;
that's very common in Europe and the United States.
In hotels-- there was less than a year ago,
a bust at the Holiday Inn at SFO for sex trafficking.
Also takes place-- strip clubs and escort services.
Also in the United States, truck stops
are a big setting for sex trafficking.
And, of course, the internet is becoming increasingly used.
The internet is used, first of all,
to advertise women and girls.
It's a way that clients can schedule meetings and arrange
for payment.
It's also a way to distribute pornography of trafficked women
and girls.
And, I think more troubling, is it's a way that traffickers
can provide sex slaves who can be used and tortured by clients
in real time through web cameras and through chatting programs.
It means that the clients and the victims
could be at various parts of the globe.
And it's very difficult to chase and to stop
because of encryption technology.
That means it's very low risk, both for the clients
and the traffickers.
And finally as far as settings go,
I'll just add that many women who
are trafficked for forced labor, particularly
domestic servitude, also become subject to sex
trafficking or sexual abuse.
I'll say-- I know my time is running
short-- I'll say a little bit about methods of control.
Once women and girls fall into the hands of traffickers,
how are they kept there?
Isolation-- they are very often moved
to communities where they, first of all, have no ties whatsoever
and often don't speak the language.
So they have no way of trying to get help.
The traffickers routinely confiscate the passports
of their victims.
They restrict their freedom of movement
by locking them in apartments.
In some cases, women and girls are
chained to radiators so that they can't leave.
They use violence, torture, and murder of anyone
who causes problems in order to break victims.
But this doesn't only happen at the beginning
of the trafficking cycle, but continues throughout.
Traffickers work very hard to force the women and girls
to become dependent on them.
They're dependent on them.
