Before reading Chapter Two of Half the Sky, entitled “Prohibition and Prostitution”, I was familiar with the concept of sex trafficking, but had never thought that much about it. Most of the times I had heard about incidents of trafficking, they were described briefly and depicted as mere tragic occurrences of everyday life for women in some foreign countries. Although Cambodia may seem far from the United States, the two stories of Srey Nem and Srey Momm felt close to heart. Getting involved in the trafficking process appeared so easy compared to getting out of it. It seemed to me that, logically, women who were trafficking victims would jump at being freed when the opportunity came. But as I researched a topic from the New York Times, I found a document by the Siren Report entitled, “Why Victims of Trafficking Decline Assistance.” I initially thought the answer was obvious: trafficking victims were afraid of the traffickers beating or killing them if they sought assistance or help, as we saw in Half the Sky. But fear of the traffickers was only one reason touched on in the three underlying factors of declined assistance from trafficking victims. One factor is “personal circumstances.” Whether One example of this was introduced in Half the Sky when the author described the classic case in which girls borrow money from traffickers and then are unable to pay back the loans (41). The girls are then sold to brothels and must decline assistance until their debt to the trafficker is paid for fear that they or their families will be harmed. The second factor is “difficulties in the victim protection systems.” Often, victims are offered broad verbal descriptions of assistance programs and services which they can perceive as a test by traffickers, or even perceive the descriptions as something similar to the trafficking process itself, causing them to decline assistance. This is demonstrated in Half the Sky when Neth first thought the questions asked by Nick were set up as a test by her pimp, and so, initially lied about her circumstances in the brothel (36). The third factor in declining assistance is “the social context and personal experiences as obstacles to assistance.” This addressed stigmas associated with victims identifying themselves as trafficking victims, as well as an unwillingness in some victims to cope psychologically with their experiences or tell others for fear of judgment. We saw this with Neth, as she was unable to articulate her experiences with trafficking, saying “For the first time, somebody really loves me. It’s so hard to tell [my husband] what happened to me.” The motives for declining assistance now seem more understandable to me. I realize that each trafficking victim’s circumstances are different, and so, assistance is not a “one size fits all” concept and must be made to fit the needs of each individual victim.
"Why Victims of Trafficking Decline Assistance": http://www.no-trafficking.org/reports_docs/siren/SIREN%20GMS-05%20Why%20victims%20decline%20assistance.pdf
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ReplyDeleteThis past winter break I watched the movie "Taken" for the first time. My aunt had insisted that it was a movie I had to see before my spring break trip to the Bahamas so luckily for me it was one of the in-flight movie selections. The fictional tale opened my eyes to how prominent and alive sex trafficking is in the world. Ignorant little me knew that prostitution existed but I thought that the majority of girls who had been roped into the system were there because financially it was their only option. It never occurred to me that of the 32 million people who are enslaved in the world, 80% of them were there due to outside forces*. The statists alone prove just how naive I was in thinking that sex traffic was more for older women desperate to find a job. According to *istoptraffic.com "in the United States it is estimated that 50-75,000 victims are trafficked into America for sexual servitude and that is not factoring the 100,000-300,000 American children forced into prostitution under our noses." Sex trafficking is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
ReplyDeleteAs we continue to discuss sex traffic I am hope we get a chance to talk about the laws in Scandinavia as personally I think they make the most sense. According to a *CNN article a women moved from Africa to Denmark because she was promised a cleaning job however, when she arrived in Denmark she was automatically forced into a brothel, "One young woman told CNN she was promised a cleaning job in Sweden - but within hours of arriving in the country she was locked in an apartment, raped and beaten and had her passport taken away from her." This women is obviously not alone. I think that her story coupled with thousands of others proves the fact that it is better to imprison the "Johns" rather than the prostitutes.
http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/30/sex-trafficking-countries-take-different-approaches-to-same-problem/