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CIAO DATE: 03/01
Foreign Policy
E-Trafficking
Scott Worden
The world's oldest profession is teaming up with the world's newest technology to satisfy the global market for sex. No, not just online pornography. Traffickers are using the Internet to prey more easily upon women in developing countries and lure or even kidnap them into sexual servitude–then sell their wares around the world.
In the June 2000 edition of E- Law, the online law journal of the Murdoch University School of Law in Australia, Australian attorney Vanessa von Struensee reports that trafficking in women and children has become the world's fastest growing form of international organized crime.
The growth in trafficking goes hand in hand with the feminization of poverty worldwide and the Internet's ascendance as the premier forum for buying and selling sex. Women in poor countries are enticed to seek better jobs abroad, only to be forced into the sex trade as prostitutes booked online, e-mail-order brides, and video-conference strippers. The result, says von Struensee, is obscene profit margins for porn purveyors rivaling those from illicit drugs. Revenues from the Internet sex trade already top $1 billion annually and are growing at an astounding rate.
Policing these sites is almost impossible. Consider one particularly lurid example that invited viewers to log on and "humiliate these Asian sex slaves to your heart's content." The site was created by an American, filmed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with Thai and Cambodian prostitutes, and hosted on a server based in the United States. The site was still running on its U.S. server six months after Cambodian authorities shut down the local operation and deported its founder.
Commercial sex tours fill another expanding niche of e-commerce, cheaply linking customers with prostitutes around the world. Von Struensee cites one study that found details on how to find and buy prostitutes in 97 European cities just by surfing the Web. One Web site details exactly how to procure a prostitute in over 100 countries and includes brothel reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers. For those who prefer to stay at home, von Struensee writes, there are mail-order bride sites, although many, she explains, are merely fronts for prostitution services, and several aim to lure women abroad into the sex industry.
While the international sex trade has flourished for decades, the speed and anonymity of the Internet has enabled the market to grow exponentially. Customers who previously would never have ventured into a porn shop or ordered sex products through the mail now feel comfortable exploring explicit material from the privacy of their PCs. Visits to pornography sites doubled last year, outpacing the rate of new Internet users and lavishing some sites with as many as 50 million hits.
Von Struensee stresses that the current law enforcement approach is shortsighted. Police and immigration officials focus on female victims and not on the traffickers or Web sites that fuel the trade. Domestic laws prohibiting citizens from exploiting women abroad would be an important step in curbing the demand that is created by new Internet technologies–especially given law enforcement's lackluster record patrolling the Web.
Scott Worden is an associate at the law firm of Coudert Brothers.