Human Trafficking as a Women's Issue

“[W]omen concentrate in temporary, casual, and flexible labor primarily due to their subordinate social and economic status, [and they] are hired as cheap, compliant labor that can be hired and fired more easily.”

Women comprise at least 56 percent of the world’s trafficking victims. They are exploited in fields and brothels, in homes and conflicts, and in factories and fisheries. More women are being pushed out of developing countries due to economic, familial, and societal pressures – becoming ever more vulnerable to modern slavery.

This feminization of migration is seen in Indonesia, where millions of girls and women – almost 70 percent of all departing migrants – leave to find work abroad, including as domestic servants in more developed countries in East Asia and the Middle East. They often end up in places void of protections from abuse and enslavement, and some feel compelled to make the journey more than once to try earning the money they were initially promised. New routes of feminized migration have appeared in recent years – from Madagascar to Lebanon, from Ethiopia to the Persian Gulf states, and from Indonesia to Malaysia and the Middle East.

Women continue to be enslaved in commercial sex around the world. They are often arrested for participating in a crime that victimizes them when they should instead be provided with services and benefit from a well-trained police force implementing proven and compassionate victim identification measures.

Women continue to toil in sweatshop factories without food or break, sewing garments, peeling shrimp, and weaving carpets under threat of violence. Bonded by debt and force, they pick cotton, mine conflict minerals, and harvest rice alongside their children. They toil in diplomatic households and suburban residences as domestic workers often without anyone knowing they are there let alone being abused.

Women are not just the victims; in so many countries, they are the solution. In the United States, the victim-centered approach of the TVPA was patterned on the lessons of legal reforms targeting domestic violence and sexual assault.