Financial Times book review – Prof. Kara’s “Sex Trafficking”

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https://www.ft.com/content/339b0ee8-e8d ... 00779fd2ac


Financial Times – 1/23/2009

Sex Trafficking
Book Review by Jonathan Birchall [Financial Times Correspondent]


As the chief executive of a small investment company in California, Siddharth Kara could have relied on his MBA and background in investment banking and stuck to the business of making money.

Instead he chose to spend time and money investigating the soul-crushing world of sex trafficking, trying to understand how by his estimates 500,000-600,000 women and children a year are forced against their will into prostitution.

He sat in the brothels of Mumbai’s Falkland Road and investigated massage parlours and apartments in Bangkok and Turin. He chatted to teenagers working half-naked in the freezing winter cold on Rome’s Via Salaria. He travelled to Nepal, to northern Thailand and India’s Bihar state, and to Moldova and Albania, the poverty blighted zones of the world that provide the victims of trafficking.

He talked to scores of women who had endured unimaginable suffering and abuse, such as a 16-year-old Moldovan girl who had applied for a job as a house cleaner. Instead she was raped and then trafficked via Serbia and Greece to Italy, where she was told she had to pay back the €4,000 she owed by working as a prostitute. Twenty-six months later, she eventually escaped and found sanctuary at a women’s shelter, afflicted with syphilis, a damaged uterus and two broken fingers. She was offered residency in Italy but only if she testified against the feared agent who had trafficked her.

In India’s Bihar state, he met Salim, a villager who explained in matter-of-fact terms how he bought children from impoverished families. Salim sends the boys to weave carpets in towns around Varanasi and Badoi while the girls went to the sex trade in New Delhi and Badoi, getting around $110 for a boy and $175 for a girl. MB, a flamboyant brothel owner in Mumbai, tells how he buys women from Nepal and Bangladesh, complains about police bribes, and laments that young girls have become very expensive.

All this could have made for a sensational exposé, the tale of a do-gooder businessman seeking his own vicarious existential meaning in virtuous indignation at the suffering of others. There are, after all, plenty of aid groups who have witnessed and reported in greater detail on these subjects.

But what distinguishes his book is his decision to surround the narrative with his own campaign proposals for action based on his economic analysis of sex trafficking. These proposals are displayed in a series of tables that compare the economics of trafficking across a range of sex trade locations – for example a bungalow brothel in Mumbai, a massage parlour in Kathmandu or an apartment in western Europe.

In India, he argues a bungalow brothel makes an average of $12,926 on each slave annually, a profit margin of 72 per cent. On the street in a western European city, where the acquisition costs are higher, the estimated profits of $76,180 represent an even bigger 75 per cent margin.

The cold numbers, he argues, show that sex trafficking is more profitable for criminals than drug trafficking – with many of the same overhead costs, such as bribing local policemen and border guards, but far lower risks of getting caught. But he also argues that there is a limit on the prices that can be charged in the sex trade, where overall prices have historically been declining, in part due to the impact of trafficked labour. So if penalties, including fines and prison terms, are increased, then the economic lure of the trade will diminish.

Conviction rates, he argues, could be increased along with penalties by setting up an international inspectorate, rather like United Nations weapons inspectors, with the power to assist local police forces and to monitor judicial prosecutions.

At a local level, he supports the idea of “community vigilance committees”, or surveillance networks that would monitor local sex trade for evidence of trafficking, and would be ready to assist freed victims with counselling and help to rebuild their lives. The idea mirrors efforts in the US, where the federal government has set up similar “rescue and restore coalitions” aimed at all forms of forced trafficking. Since he identifies demand as the motor that drives the machine in the sex trade, the author argues for making it a crime to pay for sex trade services – as both Sweden and Norway have done – rather than criminalising prostitution and brothels, as in the US and UK.

But the intersection of human trafficking and the sex trade is more controversial than this campaigning book acknowledges.

The sex trade accounts for only a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of people who are enslaved by various forms of forced labour, from the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast to the sweatshops of Los Angeles.

In Cambodia, for instance, police last year launched an anti-trafficking crackdown that led to the closure of hundreds of illegal brothels, apparently motivated by an effort to get the country upgraded in the annual US trafficking report. The campaign was criticised by some international health NGOs, which warned the closures would push sex workers away from established networks used to distribute condoms to fight HIV infection.

So would Kara’s “community vigilance committees” working with “the moral rigour of tens of thousands of committed citizens” be seen by the sex trade as allies and defenders, seeking to eradicate violence and compulsion, or as moralistic enemies of the sex-trade itself?

Kara acknowledges that the measures he proposes are “highly theoretical” and that his efforts to increase the costs of operating in the sex trade would not necessarily provide “the required inversion in the risk-reward profile of sex slavery”. But he has written an eloquent, campaigning book that addresses an evil that belittles our humanity.