Female sex traffickers

[EightWheelGirl]

I’d always assumed the vast majority of sex traffickers were male, but with the Ghislaine Maxwell case currently getting a lot of attention in the media I’ve read a fair few statistics lately that suggest women are actually fairly well represented in this area - in fact, significantly more so than in other criminal activities. I found this quite surprising as you’d think women would have more empathy for the victims than men, with the vast majority of victims presumably being female. However, it seems that this isn’t the case.

I wonder if this is similar to the situation whereby the sexually abused are more likely to become abusers themselves.

Worldwide, 38% of the suspected perpetrators of human trafficking are female [25, 26]. Women from Central Europe and East Asia are even twice as likely to be a suspect of human trafficking than men (68% versus 32%) [25, 26]. Research by Van Dijk et al. [28] into prostitution-related human trafficking in the Netherlands between 1997 and 2000, shows that a quarter of the perpetrators were female. A small part (14%) of this group of women were considered by the police as one of the leaders of the criminal organization [28]. Staring [22] reports that, in most cases, women are part of the criminal group. These figures demonstrate that the proportion of female perpetrators in human trafficking should not be underestimated. Despite these considerable numbers of female suspects, little research has been conducted into this phenomenon. Therefore, theoretical and empirical advancement in this area is nearly absent.

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-019-09840-x

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said that 28 percent of convicted traffickers between 2010-2012 were women, many of them acting as guards, recruiters and money collectors, to gain the trust of female victims.

news.trust.org/item/20141124163933-6vy1j/

Agreed.

On the subject of slavery (you mentioned domestic servants etc) I was surprised to recently read that there are estimated to be 40 million slaves in the world today. That’s crazy when you think than the African slave trade was around 12.5m slaves over about 350 years.

In September in Oxford this year a woman was caught as part of an FBI operation and convicted of sexual abuse and other sadistic abuse of her children posted online. In October in Lanarkshire, similar caught by UK police.

Neither case seems to have been widely reported- possibly because the facts in both are so horrific it's almost impossible to report without the reports themselves becoming pornographic. Whilst both women were selling their children to men online there was no indication that either were being coerced by men to do so.

@saraclara, I see in your post that you do voluntary work with sex trafficking victims. So I find your statement that "some women manage to be able to take the emotion out of sex. To see it as transactional and just pity the men (often) rather than feel uncomfortable about it."

I wonder where you got this from. Did one of the women that you work with - someone who was forced into prostitution - actually tell you that she pities the punters? I mean, if anyone said that, would you believe it? That they pity their rapists? If true, don't you think this could be a psychological defence mechanism more than anything? A narrative developed to see themselves as "not victims"?

With your voluntary work, you're much closer to the topic than I am, but "some [sex workers] take the emotion out of sex" is also a bit of a strange one for me. In the sense that sex between two consulting adults will have some emotions involved (love, lust), but otherwise, what's the emotion that you think sex workers are taking out of sex that makes the sex work "okay" for them? They are able to take the fear out of being physically assaulted? They are able to get assaulted without feeling degraded and humiliated? Or are you thinking they are simply able to have sex without needing to feel "love or lust"? Because I think we all agree that prostitution does not involve love or lust on the part of the person who sells their body to strangers who can pay.

Sorry if I'm nitpicking your words, but for someone who works with victims of sex trafficking, your description sounds strangely naive: do the victims pity the men who rape them, and which emotion are they suppressing in order to get through the day while being physically assaulted?

You probably don't mean it that way at all, but to me it sounds a bit like "oh, some women are not so emotional, so they can work as prostitutes no problem".

Emotions/psychological impact aside, prostitution is a very dangerous line of work. Many, but not all, women who work as prostitutes will be using drugs to numb themselves enough to get through the day, and then of course that creates a vicious circle of needing money for drugs and needing drugs to get through the day.

I don't think we should be pushing the line of argument that actually, if only women managed to be a bit less emotional, then sex work's really just a transaction: the only ones to feel sorry for are the poor little punters.