To Win Against Sexual Slavery, Fight Demand

"The only way to decrease the problem and the victimization is to go after the perpetrators," Guy Jacobson, director of the new film, Redlight, told me in a phone interview on Friday. Fight demand for child prostitution, among other things, and we'll reduce the money going into the dens, and that will reduce the numbers of kidnappers seeking to enslave children.

Recently, there's been a huge upsurge in efforts to fight human trafficking for the sex industry. Primarily because the global community is beginning to see that human trafficking isn't just people volunteering for a boat ride to find work, but is much more often people being kidnapped, locked in a room, and then raped repeatedly. And many of them are children.

Leaders in the movement against trafficking, slavery, and child prostitution include not only Guy Jacobson's group's Redlight Children Campaign and the widely-celebrated Cambodian genocide and child prostitution survivor, Somaly Mam, but also an incredibly vast assortment of local organizations working on the grassroots level, the best of which are likely linked by funding through either UNICEF, UNIFEM, or the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Here's the latest UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons which provides formal stats.

Why is there a Cambodia and southeast Asia theme in so much of the literature? Trafficking abduction and sexual enslavement happens everywhere. In Cambodia in particular, there is an interesting phenomenon which may have made the country's experience of these crimes even more difficult than usual. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge murdered millions of people who did not agree with their political ideology. Those who survived who did not have a role in government turned to desperation.

Many opportunists came across surviving orphans. Some did the right thing and created orphanages. Others enslaved the children and attracted customers by offering extremely low prices. Such is the story of Somaly Mam and so many others. The demand which largely created the southeast Asian market for child prostitution grew as wealthy Westerners and Asians flocked to see the sights in Thailand and at Angkor Wat and discovered the world's least expensive and largest supply of enslaved children. Don't take it from me, see the movie, Redlight. The site also includes advice on what to do, including how to donate to their causes.

There are roughly four ways the global community can help. First, fight demand for child prostitution and other forms of slavery though a campaign to discourage or prevent potential customers to the crime. Second, support locally-based organizations to provide safe houses so that liberated people have somewhere to go where their captors cannot recover or hurt them. Third, support and encourage law enforcement agencies to fight the criminals abducting, enslaving, and torturing people, and not by talking around the details but by calling it what it is. Some may argue that it might even help to distinguish sexual enslavement from other forms of prostitution because the prosecutorial process can be so different.

But another piece of the puzzle which is critical but very hard for the global community to tackle directly is changing the way societies value people who have survived sexual slavery or rape. In many parts of the world, women are blamed if they lose their virginity, even in a rape, and are not marriable. At the same time they are not being allowed many employment opportunities. Because of this, many local communities do not strongly oppose the enslavement of people who they believe will have no life or sustenance outside of their slavery, so there is a long road ahead in restoring the value of people who have suffered in their own communities. It's a huge, huge undertaking which challenges the sanctity of indigenous tradition, but one very much worth making.

Photo credit: Nick Rain