[Index]
FACT SHEET 1 |
Geneva, 15 December
2004 |
Economic Roots of Trafficking
in the UNECE Region
Regional Preparatory Meeting
for the 10-year Review of Implementation of
the
Beijing Platform for Action
Geneva, Switzerland, 14-15 December 2004
Over the past decade, there
was a dramatic increase in the number of women
being trafficked from Eastern Europe and the
Commonwealth of Independent States to North
America and Western Europe. The rise in trafficking
was an unexpected outcome of the events that
brought about much enthusiasm and expectations
– the dismantling of the ideological
and systemic barriers that had divided Europe
for almost a century. One of the most rapidly
growing illicit activities over the past two
decades has been trafficking in women and
girls mainly for the sex industry in Western
Europe (Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Germany
and United Kingdom) and the United States.
Some Data
-
According to various
estimates, up to 80 per cent of the women
and girls trafficked from Central, Eastern
European and CIS countries to Western
Europe are destined for the sex services
market.
-
There are about 15,000
Russian and Eastern European women working
in Germany's red-light districts. Many
work in brothels, sex clubs, massage parlours
and saunas under the financial control
of criminal groups from the Russian Federation,
Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, according
to a survey of the International Organization
for Migration (IOM).
-
According to the United
States State Department’s Trafficking
in Persons Report of 2004, the annual
supply of women from Eastern, Central
European and CIS countries to the sex
industry of Western Europe has been between
120,000 and 175,000 since 1989.
-
Some European estimates
suggest that, in 1990-1998, more than
253,000 women and girls were trafficked
into the sex industry of the 12 EU countries.
The overall number of women working as
prostitutes in these countries has grown
to more than half a million (
Table
2).
-
In Vienna, almost
70 per cent of prostitutes come from Eastern
Europe and CIS countries.
-
The sex industry in
the EU member States has become one of
the most lucrative businesses. In the
Netherlands, where prostitution is legal,
the sex industry generates almost US$
1 billion a year.
-
Total annual revenues
of traffickers are estimated to range
from US$ 5 billion to US$ 9 billion.
Sending Countries
Lack of jobs and increased
poverty, among others, push women to choose
the way of illegal immigration. Dramatic decrease
in real wages (as an example: by 2001 women’s
wages in the Republic of Moldova reaches only
1/3 and in Ukraine – 46% of wage’s
level in 1989). Among other factors are: increased
economic insecurity; limited opportunities
for legal immigration; resurgence of traditional
discriminatory practices against women.
Whereas the Czech Republic
and Poland were among the sending countries
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Republic
of Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine
have become the main supplying countries since
the mid-1990s. Recently, they have been joined
by Albania, Lithuania, Romania and Central
Asian countries. Some of these countries,
such as Poland, also became “receiving”
countries in the late 1990s with inflows of
trafficked women especially from Albania,
Belarus and Ukraine. Working in the informal
economy is an important factor of women's
vulnerability to trafficking. The main trade
routes for women from Eastern and Central
Europe and the Western CIS countries have
been Turkey, Greece, but also Germany and
Italy, while for women from Central Asia,
these have been mainly the Russian Federation,
but also the Republic of Korea, India, China
and Arab States.
Receiving Countries
On the demand side various
factors stimulating trafficking are the following:
cost-reduction race in response to growing
international competition; demand for cheap
labour in some weak and declining sectors
of the developed countries; weak and/or absent
legislation on illegal immigration; internationalization
of illicit activities and the growth of the
sex industry internationally. Globalization
and the opening of countries in transition
to the world economy have created an opportunity
for national criminal groups to extend their
illicit economic activities by establishing
links with foreign and international criminal
networks and maximizing their profits by creating
economies of scale.
Legislation gaps give incentive for criminal
authorities within countries to be interested
in the trafficking. The laws and regulations
in both groups of countries, sending and receiving,
consider trafficking and sexual enslavement
to be minor offences, which reduces the “transaction
cost” of trafficking. Furthermore, the
existence of many loopholes (the absence of
any law on trafficking and prostitution, for
example) undermines the effectiveness of the
efforts of the police and prosecutors to combat
trafficking in people and sexual exploitation.
Corruption of law and customs officers, as
well as other government officials, allows
criminal groups to operate at a relatively
low risk.
What Could Be
Done?
The focus of international
cooperation should be on removing the primary
causes of illegal immigration and prostitution
in the UNECE region.
First of all there is a need for the economic
empowerment of women: increasing women’s
employability; tackling the gender pay gap;
increasing the number of women entrepreneurs;
bolstering women’s representation in
governing bodies; fighting discrimination
in employment; creating more childcare places;
extending childcare services in disadvantaged
areas.
There is also a need for national programmes
to alleviate poverty; development of large-scale
job-creation projects within the national
poverty eradication programmes; studying and
use of successful cases of other countries;
more intensive participation of women in the
political life of their countries; further
study of informalization of labour relations
and its impact on female workers both in sending
and in receiving countries.
More public awareness campaigns should be
launched in sending countries and the poorest
regions within these countries on the dangers
and risks associated with trafficking combined
with job-creation programmes.
More efforts are also needed
to improve legislation and law enforcement
and to introduce other measures within a human
rights approach. This may include measures
to:
-
Delink the international
crime chain by establishing an international
regime that raise the cost of trafficking
in human beings. This is possible only
if both sending and receiving countries
are firm, and sincerely committed to criminalizing
trafficking in people;
-
Assist sending countries
to draft legislation to undermine the
activities of traffickers, to institutionalize
migration through migrant labour relations,
and to strengthen their law-enforcement
mechanisms and agents;
-
Strengthen border
control in all the countries concerned
using new technologies without restricting
international trade and tourism;
-
Improve the transparency
and monitoring of the activities of tourist
and recruitment agencies, including by
setting up an intergovernmental interactive
consumer awareness web site with information
on recruiting, advertising and tourist
agencies implicated in crime groups;
-
Establish an international
network of recruiting agencies by means
of international licensing;
-
Study the experience
of countries like the Netherlands needs
to evaluate the impact of its new regulation
of the sex industry on the supply of trafficked
women.
Tables
Table
1. Trafficking and economic indicators
in selected sending countries (1989-2001)
Table
2. The scale of the sex services market
in Europe
Table
3. Punishing trafficking in peoples and
sexual exploitation
For further information, please contact:
Ewa Ruminska-Zimny
Coordinator, Beijing +10 Regional Meeting
United Nations Economic Commission for
Europe (UNECE)
Palais des Nations – Office 329-1
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Phone: +41 (0) 22 917 16 98
Fax: +41 (0) 22 917 00 36
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.unece.org/oes/gender
References
“Economic Causes of Trafficking in
Women in the UNECE Region” - Secretariat
Note for the Regional Preparatory Meeting
for the 10-Year Review of Implementation of
the Beijing Platform for Action (Beijing +10)
- ECE/AC.28/2004/10
Report from the Regional Symposium on Gender
Mainstreaming into Economic Policies,
28-30 January 2004 (http://www.unece.org/oes/gender/documents/REPORT.pdf)
Ref: ECE/GEN/04/N03