A recent manifestation of the North/South, East/West political-economic divide is the international sex trade in women, of which trafficking in women for purposes of sexual employment is a large subset. Trafficking in humans in general, and women in particular, has taken center stage in many nation-states as an issue of a threat to national security and societal cohesion. This article explores some of the basic facts about trafficking and spotlights it as a truly global phenomenon, with its contemporary origins in the international capitalist market system. Furthermore, it argues that the international political economy of sex not only includes the supply side--the women of the third world, the poor states, or exotic Asian women--but it cannot maintain itself without the demand from the organizers of the trade--the men from industrialized and developing countries. The patriarchal world system hungers for and sustains the international subculture of docile women from underdeveloped nations. Trafficking in HumansIn 1999, the international trafficking o f i n d i v i d u a l s -m e n , w o m e n , and child r e n -h a s b e c o m e a major focus of academics, policymakers, h u m a n rights groups, and non-governmental organizations, as well as international governmental organizations. For example, Associated Press and Reuters closely followed events unfolding during the s u m m e r o f 1999 on the west coast o f C a n a d a where, after m a k i n g a grueling several-week long trip in the cargo holds o f two different ships, hundreds o f illegal Chinese were abandoned by their traffickers. W h e n asked, the migrants all tell a similar story: they paid s o m e o n e else to provide passage to a destination, or worse, they established an I O U with the trafficker and then they entered into a situation o f debt b o n d a g e in the new country. The transaction is often exploitative, but m a n y times "voluntary."
This chapter examines how the international community has defined and framed the issue of human trafficking over the last century, and how governments such as the United States have responded politically to the problem of human trafficking. Contemporary concerns about trafficking can be traced back to a late nineteenth-century movement in the United States and Western Europe against white slavery. White slavery, also known as the white slave trade, refers to the kidnapping and transport of Caucasian girls and women for the purposes of prostitution. The chapter first considers the definitions of human trafficking before discussing the anti-white slavery movement and the increase in international consciousness about the trafficking of women. It then traces the origins of the contemporary anti-human trafficking movement and analyses how trafficking emerged as a global issue in the 1990s. It also presents a case study on human trafficking in the United States.
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