During the last two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the news media focused on one story: the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The developing and probably lingering story that may dominate the news cycle for the remaining 18 months of Donald Trump’s first presidential term may turn out to be...
Legislation alone will not end the exploitation of women and girls in the United States. The internet has enabled sex trafficking to become the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, worth a staggering $99 billion a year. This expansion correlates directly with the increasing use of...
Violence against women in South Asia has become so common and normalized that, instead of decreasing, it is on the rise. A few days ago, I encountered a situation where one of my friends commented on how women’s working abilities are less than those of men. I responded to him about how...
At the fringes of the sex industry in the north of England, men and women are selling sex to survive. Any local pizza parlor, on any given day. Bright lights, cheap plastic, the smell of frying grease. Men hanging around the cramped tables, coddling beer bottles, chatting. The owner lets a woman...
As players in the service economy, pimps have learned to embrace the online marketplace and seem to be staying one step ahead of the law. America has always had an underground sex trade, and for decades most pimps followed the same general script: They would recruit sex workers on the street, in...
Sex trafficking is a global phenomenon that must be stopped. “Every year, 1.2 million children are sold into sex trafficking. About 250,000 of those children are sold for sex in the United States.” This is shocking. According to the International Labour Organization, as many as 4.5...
Each year, websites make millions from advertising women for sale. "!!! @ ALL Submissive @ All Bottom @ Slave Coco Chick in need of a DOMINANT master" — an online advertisement for a teenage girl on Backpage.com, June 1, 2012. Sex trafficking is serial rape for profit. That...
Sex trafficking would not exist without the “market” provided by prostitution. According to Gunilla Eckberg, former adviser on human trafficking to the Swedish government: “The prostitution of women and girls for profit is one of the fastest growing global...
If men know that the sex industry is harmful to girls and women, why do they participate in it? *[Note: The following is an excerpt from Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale, a memoir about Rachel Lloyd’s experiences as a survivor of commercial sexual exploitation...
Tiantian Zheng explores the intersection between sex work and human trafficking in post-socialist China. This is second of a three part series. Read part one here. In China, for thousands of years, the dynasties and states produced, regulated, sometimes threatened to abolish, yet at the same time...
Shirley Jülich explains the complexity of the Stockholm Syndrome in sex abuse victims. From time to time it is reported that yet another person, usually a young woman, has been held hostage as a sex slave for a lengthy period. There have been the recent events in Ohio, with Amanda Berry,...
Tiantian Zheng explores the intersection between sex work and human trafficking in post-socialist China. This is the first of a three part series. Current statistics showed that China hosted approximately 250,000 victims of human trafficking from both internal and international sources. Identified...
The reality is that sex trade and exploitation remains a part of society. Background How should society confront a topic that is not only taboo, but also operates underground — away from the diagnostics of aid organizations and with victims often too scared to seek help? The sex...
