INT’L WOMEN’S DAY: It Means Little to a Sex Slave

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Mar 8 2005 (IPS) - Among the millions who travel to Europe every year are a few hundred thousand who will end up as sex slaves. To them International Women’s Day means little.

“The figures on this issue are very tricky,” Matiada Ngalikpima, French lawyer and author of a new book on human trafficking and sexual slavery told IPS in an interview. “But most multilateral institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working against sexual exploitation agree that every year in Europe between 200,000 and 500,000 people become victims of illegal rings of human traffickers.”

Most victims of human trafficking are young women later forced into prostitution and pornography. The trafficked include children who are abused or forced to deal in drugs.

“They come mostly from the south, from the Maghreb countries and Africa to the European Mediterranean shore, from the Balkans through Greece and Italy, and from East Europe through Germany,” Ngalikpima said.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that between 10 and 30 percent of all victims of sex slavery from East Europe are minors.

The United Nations makes a clear distinction between human trafficking and smuggling of migrants. “The smuggling of migrants, while often undertaken in dangerous or degrading conditions, involves migrants who have consented to the smuggling,” a UN report points out. “But in human trafficking, victims have either never consented or, if they initially consented, that consent has been rendered meaningless by the coercive, deceptive or abusive actions of the traffickers.”

Another major difference is that smuggling ends with the arrival of the migrants at their destination, whereas trafficking involves continuing exploitation of the victims to generate illicit profits for traffickers, the UN says.

Europol estimates that human trafficking is now worth several billion dollars a year.

Ngalikpima says in her book ‘L’esclavage sexuel: un défi à l’Europe’ (‘Sexual slavery: a Challenge for Europe’) to be published this month that sex slavery and human trafficking is the most pressing human rights issue in Europe.

“The challenge for the European Union lies in the urgent need to harmonise diverging national legislations, in fully applying the UN conventions against human trafficking, and treating the question in a global manner, and not in the compartmentalised way it is being handled now,” Ngalikpima said.

Corruption too needs to be addressed, she said. Officials from France and Germany have been suspected of complicity in trafficking recently, Ngalikpima said.

In 2001 Dominique Chassard, French ambassador in Bulgaria was summarily dismissed after an investigation revealed that Bulgarian prostitutes in Strasbourg and other French north-eastern cities had been issued business visas.

The investigation revealed that senior personnel at the French embassy in Sofia worked in collusion with dubious travel agencies to issue visas that were later used by illegal human traffickers for prostitutes.

In Germany an inquiry is under way into the large number of visas issued in Ukraine. The inquiry will examine concerns that many of these visas were issued to human traffickers. The opposition Christian Democratic Union says foreign minister Joseph Fischer acted as “an accomplice of traffickers and pimps.”

Ngalikpima says such cases illustrate the flaws in European policies. “One the one hand governments toughen their migration policies to combat illegal migration, which is a really a minor problem compared with human trafficking. On the other, bureaucracies are implicated in issuing visas for sexual slavery.”

Besides harmonising legislation at the European level and fully implementing the UN protocols against human trafficking, governments should offer full legal protection and rehabilitation to the victims, she said.

The fight against sexual slavery and human trafficking must follow patterns used against drugs mafias and other organised crime, she said, such as blocking money transfer channels and freezing suspect funds.