TIM SWARENS

Swarens: The lucrative business of sex trafficking

Tim Swarens
tim.swarens@indystar.com

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — On a beautiful fall day in New England, Siddharth Kara is talking about some of the ugliest crimes on the planet.

Millions of people, primarily women and girls, forced into the sex trade. Millions more forced to work, often under brutal conditions, as slaves in fields, factories and fishing boats.

Kara, director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, mentions another area of his current research: the brutal business of harvesting organs from trafficking victims.

Is that really a thing, I ask? Kara insists that it is, driven by the same forces that propel sex and labor trafficking: strong demand, steady supply and huge profits.

“For traffickers, the human body is a commodity that can be monetized through coercion,” he said.

I am sitting on a park bench next to Kara on Harvard’s campus to draw on his expertise for a recent focus of my own work: child sex trafficking.

In 2009, Kara rose to international prominence with the release of his first book, “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.” Much of the book details Kara’s revelatory, often dangerous, field research in brothels and massage parlors in India, Thailand, Italy, Eastern Europe and the United States. The book has been turned into a Hollywood movie — Kara wrote the screenplay — with a cast that includes Anne Archer and Ashley Judd. “Trafficked” is scheduled for widespread release next year.

Nearly eight years after the book’s publication, Kara’s descriptions of his encounters with women and children raped day after day, month after month, to satisfy their buyers’ lust and their owners’ greed remain powerful and heartbreaking. But it was his economic analysis of the sex trade that may be Kara’s most lasting contribution.

In what he describes as a “light bulb moment,” Kara said he realized during one of his first research trips that sex trafficking is a high reward-low risk business model that uses slavery to maximize profits.

On the reward side of the equation, traffickers typically pay sex slaves nothing or only token amounts, and other overhead costs, such as food and medicine, are kept at abysmally low levels. That means sex merchants can reduce the prices they charge men: the lower the price, the larger the pool of buyers. And the high return on investment makes it one of the most lucrative crimes in the world.

The United Nation’s International Labour Organization estimated in 2014 that sex traffickers raked in about $99 billion a year in profits. (The ILO also estimates that about 21 million people are victims of forced labor and 4.5 million are trapped in the commercial sex trade. An estimated 900,000 to 1.2 million of those sex slaves are children).

As for risk, the vast majority of slave traders are never caught, in part because of how difficult it can be to infiltrate trafficking rings and to prove guilt. But also because in many places in the world, Kara says, the traffickers simply bribe police and public officials.

As important as it is to understand the economics of sex trafficking, such discussions can distract from what must be the primary focus: the immense human suffering inflicted on victims by traffickers and by the men who purchase sex from terrorized women and children.

In recent weeks, as I’ve undertaken a long-term reporting project on this issue, and as my understanding of commercial sex exploitation has expanded, my thinking has shifted in three key ways:

First, the horror is more common and the issues surrounding it far more complex than I realized, despite years of volunteer efforts with an organization that works to prevent child sex trafficking. Thousands of children are raped for-profit each year in the United States, and hundreds of thousands suffer the same fate around the world. We are never far from their suffering.

Second, the men who buy children for sex often do so with impunity. Even if caught, few face serious jail time or fines tough enough to discourage future crimes. The men also don’t fit common stereotypes. They don’t, for the most part, hang out in the streets or in parks prowling for victims. Instead, they’re scrolling through online ads and connecting with one another on message boards to share information. To stop this horrific crime, we must focus on the demand side, including tougher fines for buyers and required enrollment in treatment programs. “Frequent fliers,” men who buy commercial sex more than once a week, should face the threat of lengthy jail time.

Third, the compassion and outrage we feel on behalf of children trapped in the sex trade shouldn’t be limited by the age of the victim.

“You may encounter a woman (working in the sex trade) at age 25, but she probably started at age 14,” Kara said. “If she suffered 10,000 counts of rape from age 14 to 18, what options does she have now?”

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @tswarens.

Sold for Sex: Inside the Brutal World of Child Trafficking

IndyStar opinion director Tim Swarens has started a long-term project to investigate child sex trafficking, domestically and abroad. The series is planned for publication late next year.

Swarens will provide frequent updates of his findings on Medium.com, Twitter and Facebook as well as for IndyStar.

If you would like Swarens to discuss his ongoing research with a community group, religious congregation or class, please contact him at tim.swarens@indystar.com.

Please also help us build an audience for this important work, funded by a grant from the Society of Professional Journalists. Share updates on social media and with friends and family. Remember, hundreds of thousands of children are suffering from a horrific but preventable crime. Working together we can make a lasting difference in their lives.

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