“You can buy a woman for $10.000, and you can make the money back in a week if she is pretty and she is young. Then everything else is profit”. This quote is how a trafficker describes his business. It shows what the sex trafficking trade is: a market. Many goods are sold once. A woman can be sold multiple times, and to multiple people. Victims are expendable, reusable and resalable. This makes the sex trafficking industry highly profitable, valued to be an estimated $32 billion-a-year global industry, making it the second most profitable and fastest growing crime in the world. In Europe, sexual exploitation accounts for 79% of all detected trafficking victims, more than every other form of exploitation combined.
The public debate about trafficking focuses overwhelmingly on the supply-side: poverty, conflicts and desperation that leave people vulnerable to traffickers. Most victims registered in the EU are not EU citizens; victims often come from regions plagued by poverty, conflict, and limited economic opportunities, susceptible to traffickers’ promises of employment and a better life. Promises that turn out to be lies, used to trick and trap women and children to work as prostitutes.
While not wrong, this view is incomplete. Vulnerability creates the possibility of exploitation. Male demand is what turns it into a business. In areas where sex trafficking and prostitution were previously non-existent, an increase in demand has resulted in an exploding commercial sex industry: when US military personnel was deployed to Southeast Asia in large numbers in the 1960s, a commercial sex trade expanded rapidly around them, and wherever male demand has grown since, brothels and trafficking routes have followed the same pattern. The demand for sexual services was there, the market delivered.
None of this is as fixed as it may appear. The desire for buying sex is sometimes conflated with the desire for sexual intimacy. The latter may be biologically conditioned; the notion of a ‘male need’ for paid sex is not. It is a socialised concept, kept alive by a culture that dehumanises prostituted women as ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’ who exist only to satisfy it. This language makes it easy to ignore whether a woman consents, since she has already been cast as existing for exactly this purpose. Every time the notion of male need is used to explain buying sex, it perpetuates an explanation for it. It sits further in a large umbrella of oppression, in jokes, in pornography, in the way men talk to each other about women. In this sense, ‘male need’ functions the way Judith Butler argues gender does: something continually performed and reproduced through repeated social practice, a role rehearsed until it is natural.
Catherine MacKinnon goes further. Prostitution is one of the clearest institutions of inequality between men and women. Who ends up prostituted is a matter of gender more than anything else, since men who are in equally precarious situations are rarely found selling sex in comparable numbers. Poverty cannot explain the gap. What keeps the system running are the millions of men who create demand for buying sex in the first place, the customers and perpetrators.
If demand were a constant, a biological imperative, it would not matter if one tried to change what men believe or what they risk. But it is not. So, change might be possible. As argued by Iris Yen, men who are fully aware of the impact of purchasing sex might be dissuaded from it. And because demand is a belief people are taught to hold, it is one they can be taught to let go of. What is more, even a buyer who holds no belief about entitlement will still buy less of something that has become more expensive or more dangerous to acquire, and awareness of the serious criminal consequences of purchasing sex can be enough to dissuade on its own. Both routes (changing what men believe and changing what it costs them) have been tried.
The Philippines offers one test of whether demand responds to changed belief. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women initiated an educational programme targeted at young men in twelve communities with high levels of prostitution. This project aimed to prevent sex trafficking and discourage the demand for prostitution. Behaviours of young men were changed through educational workshops that showed the harm of prostitution and trafficking, as well as men’s roles in perpetuating sexual exploitation and trafficking. It was found that such educational programmes can be an effective way to deter men from patronising the commercial sex industry.
A different approach was found in Sweden. In 1998, the Swedish government passed the “Act of Prohibiting the Purchase of Sexual Services”. Prostitution was regarded by Swedish legislators as a significant manifestation of male violence and oppression against women. The act stiffened criminal penalties, and aggressive enforcement has impacted the conviction rate greatly. The act regards prostitution and sex trafficking as inseparable and equally harmful practices; thus, by targeting male demand for commercial sex, legislators sought to eliminate both trafficking and prostitution. A reduction of 75% in the number of individuals engaging in the purchase of sexual services was observed within two years. Sweden is now regarded as a particularly bad environment for trafficking operations due to the risk of being caught. The combination of rising costs and a reduction in the number of clients have resulted in a decline in the profitability of trafficking operations.
Neither country eradicated sex trafficking. It is an industry which operates covertly. Still, the Philippines showed demand falling once men were confronted with what they were paying for; Sweden showed it falling once buying sex was riskier than they were willing to accept.
Vulnerabilities will keep exposing people to traffickers who will exploit them regardless of what happens to demand. But demand is part of the equation that most anti-trafficking policy still leaves out, even though the Philippines and Sweden suggest, through belief and cost, that it does not have to stay that way. To tackle sex trafficking, we should see it for what it is: a market driven by demand.
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