The underground market in people, termed human trafficking, functions by the benign rules of supply and demand—which makes this market particularly grotesque because the commodity is human life and the exchange results in modern-day slavery. By describing trafficking in persons (TIP), the relationship between trafficking and prostitution, and US efforts to end this burgeoning phenomenon, I hope to convey the urgency of the new abolition movement and the limits of the market metaphor in suggesting an appropriate response to global slavery.

Between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year­—approximately two-thirds are ensnared in sexual slavery, according to US Government estimates. This number does not begin to include millions more captured in labor and sexual exploitation within their own countries. By definition, human trafficking involves force, fraud, or coercion—legally sanitized words that cover intimidation, kidnapping, beatings, rape, deceit, abandonment, and murder. Victims describe mind-numbing varieties of torture, psychological abuse, and physical deprivation that are at the heart of the trafficking experience.

Portraits of Exploitation

Those numbers should not obscure the tragedy to each individual. The following are confirmed examples of typical victims, although names have been changed:

At 15 Shadir accepted a job that promised good clothes and an education. It proved to be a case of false advertising—a typical ploy of traffickers—for the job actually took him to a rural village in India where he was forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day producing hand-woven carpets. His only payment was two helpings a day of lentils and rice. When Shadir was unable to work, he was severely beaten.

Twenty-something Sorina was promised a restaurant job. So she left home, in Belarus, and was flown to a foreign capital where criminals locked her in an apartment and raped her. Not allowing her out of the apartment, they used her as a prostitute. She became so desperate that she jumped from the bathroom window. Still alive, on the sidewalk below, the sex buyers ran down to the street and watched her die.

Neary grew up in Cambodia. At 17 her sister arranged for her to be married to a man who, for US$300, sold her to a brothel owner. For five years, Neary was used by up to seven men a day until she contracted HIV and was discarded because she became too sick to make money for the brothel. Neary died of AIDS at 23.

Silvia, a single mother living in Sri Lanka, answered an ad for a housekeeping job in Lebanon. Once at the job agency, however, Silvia was put in a line with other female job applicants to be inspected by potential buyers. She was purchased and taken to a fourth-floor condo where she was used as a domestic servant 20 hours a day. Forced to rummage through garbage for her food, treated as a prisoner, and beaten daily, Silvia escaped by jumping from a window. She is now permanently paralyzed.

New Forms of Slavery

These stories are typical of human trafficking worldwide. Several common themes emerge from these cases. Each victim is manipulated through the threat of violence or its use; each is a displaced person, in foreign circumstances that increase his or her dependence on the slaveholder; each represents a profitable input in an underground market but is also considered, paradoxically, a highly expendable input; and each is, practically, surviving in a reality that evades the intervention of law. As Dr. Kevin Bales writes in Disposable People, the new slavery “is not about owning people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about controlling them completely. People become completely disposable tools for making money.” The slave victims I have met and the accounts anti-slavery advocates and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) submit to the US State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons confirm these common aspects of human trafficking.

Fundamentally, human trafficking deprives people of their human rights and freedoms. This is the most prominent reason that the US Government has assumed a leadership role in confronting this despicable practice, but it is not the only reason. Human trafficking is a multi-dimensional threat: it is a global health risk, profoundly harming individual victims and facilitating the transmission of disease including HIV/AIDS and fuels the growth of organized crime while weakening law enforcement entities. Too often TIP entails the participation or complicity of corrupt law enforcement agents who help by providing fraudulent immigration documents, allowing illicit border crossings, or protecting the oppressive workplaces and brothels where victims are trapped. Thus human trafficking undermines national security by eroding the integrity of national and local law enforcement and the rule of law.

The Supply of the Exploited

To explore the economic factors of human trafficking, let us return to the notion of an underground market. Much like the formal economy, as Dr. Bruce Wiegand writes in Off the Books: A Theory and Critique of the Underground Economy, underground markets are devoted to “the production, transport, distribution, and marketing of goods and services,” although the underground market functions outside the legal system. Applying Wiegand’s definition to the market for trafficked persons, we can substitute “procurement” for “production.” Traffickers use a range of techniques to entrap victims, from kidnapping or drugging unsuspecting victims, to lying about non-existent restaurant or babysitting jobs, to using lovers, even spouses, in order to bring a victim into slavery, especially sex slavery.

Why do they go to all this trouble? Money, and no small sum. Human trafficking is extremely profitable, contributing some US$9.5 billion to the world’s underground economy, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. The far-flung trafficking patterns that characterize this tragic market defy common sense. Young boys from Bangladesh and Pakistan are trafficked to the Gulf States to serve as camel jockeys, where they are kept in a half-starved state to maintain their small body size. Nigerian women wind up abused in prostitution on the streets of Western European cities. Colombian women entertain men at bars in Japan. Indonesians clean houses in Singapore. Each trafficking victim represents a profit center that continues to generate income for his or her exploiter, compared to illegal commodities such as drugs or arms that represent a one-time transaction.