Category: Trafficking 
2009-04-02
The European Convention on Action against Human Trafficking comes into force in the UK this week - the result of a vigorous campaign fought by organisations as diverse as Amnesty and the Poppy Project - for trafficked people to be seen as victims of crime rather than as criminals who have broken immigration laws. Trafficking is a lucrative activity, estimated to be worth $32bn globally per year. It is the selling of women and children into the sex industry that usually takes the limelight, eclipsing those trafficked into Britain to do work that is dirty, difficult and dangerous - construction, care work, cleaning and agriculture - for little or no pay. The focus on the sex trade is driven in part by the fact that larger numbers are involved where violence as a tool of control is endemic, but also because it drives media sales.
As it is mostly an underground industry, estimates of scale and size are bound to be provisional. However, the most widely accepted figures, from the US state department, indicate that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year; 70% are women, most of whom are destined for the sex trade. In Britain, it is estimated that 80% of the 80,000 women in prostitution are foreign nationals, most of whom have been trafficked.
These figures are important, because there is a disgraceful attempt by those who support prostitution as a career option to rubbish these figures, which fatally undermine their argument around choice. Central to the concept of trafficking is the idea that women have been deceived or coerced in the recruitment process, including deception about the conditions of work even if they know they are entering the sex industry. For who would willingly agree to work 12-18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in conditions of bonded labour, where their so-called wages only just cover their exorbitant and inflated living costs? Migrants without legal status make the perfect victims for traffickers.
A vocal minority of women in the sex trade have been arguing that prostitution is a job like any other, where unionisation can help improve working conditions. This superficially attractive argument has been winning over sections of the progressive left who believe, along with libertarians, that opposition arises from a moral agenda or "killjoy" feminists.
Although it is imperative to make conditions as safe and healthy as possible, and to campaign against criminalisation of women working in the sex industry, it is also important to recognise that this industry can never be made truly safe and that women want to get out as soon as alternatives are available.
The police estimate that 10 to 15 years ago, only 15% of the women in the UK sex trade were trafficked. It is tempting to see the reduction of local women in the industry as evidence of economic growth and high employment. Everywhere you look, women leave prostitution as soon as there are alternatives. In South Korea, for instance, when the economy improved in the 1990s, local women deserted the bars and clubs. In order to service the needs of Americans on military bases, the government had to issue E6 entertainment visas to attract women from other countries such as Russia and the Philippines. Choice driven by hunger and desperation is not choice at all.
The European convention allows victims of trafficking a 45-day period of rest and reflection with access to support and accommodation - which can be extended by another 45 days, if necessary, in which to provide proof of having been trafficked and to claim asylum if they so wish. They will also be granted residency permits of up to a year if they want to give evidence against their traffickers. It is to be hoped we will not see any repeat of the scenarios in which police raid a brothel accompanied by immigration officers who throw any woman whose papers are not in order into a detention centre.
As the government, to its shame, has to be forced into any liberalisation of immigration controls, we can expect the culture of "disbelief", which characterises its approach to potential immigrants, to minimise the number able to take advantage of the convention through arguments about the precise nature of their "deception".
Those people who decry the anti-trafficking lobby as white, neo-colonialist do-gooders (I've never heard Amnesty described as such), determined to destroy the agency of migrant sex workers, are paradoxically placing themselves on the same side as the government. By insisting that only a minority of women are trafficked, they are taking us back to the bad old days when women without papers were quickly deported.
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