Where is this seemingly limitless supply of trafficking victims coming from, and what factors contribute to sustaining this supply? Desperate and gullible populations, especially in developing and transitioning countries, are susceptible to the promises made by recruiters (including family members) of a better life in another place, especially promises of paid work, marriage, or domestic service. Poverty, and the hope of a better life, create the conditions in which so many incidences of human trafficking occur. But poverty alone cannot explain the growth of TIP over the last 15 to 20 years when worldwide poverty has slightly decreased.

The ease of global transportation and communication is an important enabling factor. The frequency of international travel serves as a cover for human trafficking; cell phones create sprawling networks of criminal agents serving as recruiters, brokers, transporters, receivers, and distributors of the abused product—an unwitting human soul.

The worldwide increase in guest worker programs has also contributed to the ready supply of human trafficking victims. Increasingly, especially in countries that receive significant cash remittances from workers employed abroad, government-sponsored employment programs train rural woman and girls to work as domestic servants in homes far away, where they are vulnerable to exploitation. Social practices such as “fostering,” a practice mainly in Africa where children are given to relatives for schooling in exchange for the child helping in the household, often serve as a cover for human trafficking. Social disruption such as war, or political transition entailing widespread displacement as has occurred in the countries of the former Soviet Union, create the conditions for an increased supply of potential TIP victims. Gender discrimination—and an attitude regarding the expendability of women and girls—can serve as a fatal rationale for indifference toward child prostitution and trafficking in women and girls. And softening the ground for most trafficking schemes is corruption, which typically characterizes circumstances that facilitate human trafficking or the conditions that allow it to thrive.

The Dark Forces of Demand

The rudimentary market model tells us that supply is just potential inventory until it is put into motion by the forces of demand. Unfortunately, there is tremendous demand for low-cost labor in innumerable settings, from brick kilns in India to camel racetracks in the Middle East, from massage parlors in Los Angeles to Karaoke bars in Tokyo, from circuses to blue jeans factories to beer bars the world over. The exploiters invest very little in their human inputs; the endless supply of new victims makes it more economical to replace a slave as soon as he or she is used up.

Thus the economics of human trafficking include a huge demand for low-cost, vulnerable people in settings where the rule of law is felt only faintly. In these places, such as brothels, private homes, farms, and factories in obscure locations, the employer, overseer, pimp, or guard maintains near total control over the subject.

Western demand for sex slaves is encouraged by the ubiquitous presence of pornography and the glamorization of prostitution in films such as Pretty Woman. But in developing countries, too, there is often general social acceptance and rationalization of prostitution—even where it is illegal—which contributes to the domestic demand for victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

Because sex trafficking forms such a large part of human trafficking (66 percent of transnational TIP according to US Government estimates) and because prostitution is so inextricably linked to sex trafficking, we must pay special attention to how prostitution fits into the marketing metaphor. Superficially, it is a simple supply-demand equation. But that is only if you never ask questions about the life experience of those used in prostitution.

The vast majority of women in prostitution do not want to be there. Few choose it or seek it out, and most are desperate to leave it. A 2003 study in 9 countries led by Dr. Melissa Farley, first published in the scientific Journal of Trauma Practice, found that 89 percent of women in prostitution want to escape. Children are also trapped in prostitution—despite the fact that international covenants and protocols impose upon state parties an obligation to criminalize the commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Few activities are as brutal and damaging to people as prostitution. Dr. Farley’s field research concluded that 60 to 75 percent of women in prostitution were raped, 70 to 95 percent were physically assaulted, and 68 percent met the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder in the same range as treatment-seeking combat veterans and victims of state-organized torture. Beyond this shocking abuse, the public health implications of prostitution are devastating and include a myriad of serious and fatal diseases, including HIV/AIDS. Moreover, the path-breaking five-country academic study conducted by Dr. Janice Raymond, concluded that research on prostitution has overlooked “[t]he burden of physical injuries and illnesses that women in the sex industry sustain from the violence inflicted on them, or from their significantly higher rates of hepatitis B, higher risks of cervical cancer, fertility complications, and psychological trauma.” It is this violent reality that makes the application of market solutions to prostitution particularly in appropriate.

Controlling Human Trafficking

State attempts to regulate prostitution by introducing medical check-ups or licenses do not address the core problem: the routine abuse and violence that dominate the prostitution experience and brutally victimize those caught in its netherworld. Prostitution leaves women and children physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually devastated. Recovery can take years, but some never recover.

The limits of the market metaphor come in understanding sex trafficking: to conceptualize this unique global crime as a market implicitly lures us into a framework that posits regulation on the one hand, and minimal government intervention on the other, as logical approaches to sex trafficking and prostitution. Yet prostitution is not the proverbial “oldest profession” but the oldest form of oppression. Legalization, regulation, and normalization of prostitution obscures the violence at its heart and ignores that prostitution is a magnet for more trafficking victims. Organized crime networks do not register with the government, do not pay taxes, and do not protect prostitutes. Legalization simply makes it easier for them to blend in with a purportedly regulated sex sector and makes it more difficult for prosecutors to identify and punish those who are trafficking people.