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.
