EU initiative to stop sex trafficking
LUXEMBOURG – While Syrian humanitarian disaster and Mediterranean refugees have made headlines in the media, Europe is still struggling with the human trafficking crises created by the collapse of Soviet Union.
In order to prevent sex trafficking, brothel owners must “communicate in the same language with the prostitutes,” European Court of Justice ECJ ruled on October 1, 2015.
Four years ago, the mayor of Amsterdam declined to grant new permits to a brothel owner J. Harmsen who rents space to Bulgarian and Hungarian women in the city’s red light district. The mayor rejected the permit on the ground that the said brothel owner can’t speak the prostitute’s language and hence can’t decide whether the sex-workers has been trafficked or forced to sell themselves.
Harmsen filed the case in ECJ saying the Dutch mayor was being “discriminatory” and “disproportionate” and tried to invoke a 2006 EU law on the “single market for services.” But the ECJ declined his request.
A report published by European Union, says Netherland has been identified as the largest destination of sex trafficking victims.
Trafficking in humans has become one of the fastest growing illegal activities and is producing 7 to 10 billion dollars a year. Ran by organised crime syndicates, it is committing massive human rights violations and causing serious problems for national and international governments including European union.There are four main motives for trafficking such as sexual exploitation, forced labour, sham marriages and forced begging and crime activities.
European Comission is particularly concerned that major proportion of human trafficking in western Europe comprises of vulnerable women exploited as sex workers. The European Commission noted 30,146 recorded cases of human trafficking between 2010 and 2012. Eighty percent of them were women and almost 70 percent of all the trafficked people were sold into the sex trade.
Regarding the historical context of the issue, the collapse of the Soviet Union and EU enlargement is one of the main contributing factors for the decade old exponential increase in human trafficking in Europe. Legalization of the prostitution in Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Greece has further accelerated the trafficking and made it profitable to transport the victims for human traffickers.
The Majority of the sex trafficking victims are exploited by their close acquaintance network as friends, neighbour, boyfriends and sometimes by facebook contacts while the real recruiter acts from the backstage. Victims are also hired through newspaper and internet ads and are lured to work in the modelling industry. Recruiters insist that the victim chose to work in the sex industry on her own free will. Evidence show that many of the immigrant sex-workers had known their prospective profession in destination countries.
A UNICEF Report on child trafficking in South Eastern Europe emphasizes that militarization and the war in Balkans have led to the trafficking of thousands of women for commercial sex exploitation.
According to another study published in Oxford Journal, the soldiers at the military bases drove the demand for brothels in Balkans.
“The distinctiveness of post-Soviet and Eastern European trafficking is the speed with which it grew and globalized…..as a result of poverty, ineffective countermeasures, the frequent collusion of government officials in this trade, and the rise of criminal entrepreneurship,” writes Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) in her book Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective.”
La Strada, European Network against human trafficking La Strada has noted that media often portrays trafficked women as helpless victims forced to work in sex industry and depicts them as commodities.
– Tazeen Hasan, Correspondent (Europe)
Image Courtesy: Women’s eNews (https://flic.kr/p/7gwZpY), Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic | Flickr
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