As Charlotte (Allen) noted earlier, the World Cup is providing attendees with more than amazing football action (Go Brazil!), it’s also a haven for sex trafficking, with an estimated 40,000 prostitutes brought to Germany to accommodate the “needs” of male attendees.
IWF director of international policy Yasmine Rassam has an article out today about sex trafficking. The picture is grim:
“While shocking, Germany’s magnet for sex trafficking is only the tip of the problem. Trafficking in human beings is a contemporary form of slavery-the U.S. government estimates that over 800,000 people are trafficked annually. Out of the 800,000 trafficked victims, 80 percent of them are females and 50 percent are minors. Often poor women are lured under false pretenses of real job offers in other countries only to find themselves sex slaves in a brothel or in forced domestic servitude. In addition, the International Labor Convention reports that millions are enslaved in forced labor where people are legally recruited for jobs only to find miserable working conditions, no pay and confinement in factories; as most of these workers take on large amounts of debt to secure the job, they are obligated by debt to stay.”
But, if you want some good news, the United States is leading a global effort to eliminate sex trafficking.
“The keystone to the United States government’s response to this modern day form of slavery is the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), which requires federal agencies to combat trafficking domestically and work with other nations on a global level to ensure that all countries take steps to eliminate these crimes. As part of the TVPA, the State Department issues its annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP), which ranks countries according to their efforts to combat trafficking. Countries that do not satisfy minimum standards or show an effort to combat trafficking can be subject to sanctions.”