DUAL PERSPECTIVE...
Captive Daughters condemns the practice of sex trafficking from both a human rights perspective and a feminist perspective.
• Sex trafficking is a HUMAN RIGHTS issue: As a founding principle, Captive Daughters believes that the practice of sex trafficking is a direct assault on the basic human rights of women & children and violates their rights to live a safe and secure life free from slavery and degradation.
• Sex trafficking is a FEMINIST issue: As 80% of the victims trafficked annually throughout the world are females, Captive Daughters believes that sex trafficking cannot be eradicated without simultaneously combating the pervasive and harmful attitude that women and female children are expendable, unworthy of respect and sexual objects.
PROSTITUTION & SEX TRAFFICKING...
• Sex trafficking is the delivery system for prostitution, plain and simple. Captive Daughters supports the direct linkage of prostitution and sex trafficking as set forth by the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor & Combat Trafficking.
• Prostitution and related activities, including pimping and patronizing or maintaining brothels, fuel the growth of modern-day slavery by providing a façade behind which traffickers for sexual exploitation operate. Where prostitution is legalized or tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and nearly always an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery.
• Of the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders annually, 80 percent of victims are female, and up to 50 percent are children. Hundreds of thousands of these women and children are used in prostitution each year.
• A 2003 study in the scientific Journal of Trauma Practice found that 89 percent of women in prostitution want to escape prostitution. Children are also trapped in prostitution despite the fact that a number of international covenants and protocols impose upon state parties an obligation to criminalize the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
• Field research in nine countries concluded that 60 to 75 percent of women in prostitution were raped, 70 to 95 percent were physically assaulted, and 68 percent met the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder in the same range as treatment-seeking combat veterans and victims of state-organized torture.
• State attempts to regulate prostitution by introducing medical check-ups or licenses do not address the core problem: the routine abuse and violence that form the prostitution experience and brutally victimize those caught in its netherworld. Prostitution leaves women and children physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually devastated. Recovery takes years, even decades, often the damages can never be undone.
TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS DEFINED...
From the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report 2005, published by U.S. Dept. of State
The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (one of three "Palermo Protocols"), defines trafficking in persons as:
• The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
• Many nations misunderstand this definition, overlooking internal trafficking or forms of labor trafficking in their national legislation, and often failing to distinguish trafficking from illegal migration. Most often left out of interpretations of this definition is involuntary servitude, a form of trafficking that does not require movement. The TVPA defines "severe forms of trafficking," as:
1. sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or
2. the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
• These definitions do not require that a trafficking victim be physically transported from one location to another.
