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Human trafficking is a large and growing problem, and sex trafficking is a particularly egregious form of contemporary enslavement of the most vulnerable: women and children. The United States Department of State estimates that up to 820,000 men, women, and children are trafficked internationally each year, while the International Organisation for Migration cites a rough figure of 800,000. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that at least 1.39 million people are victims of commercial sexual servitude worldwide, though this includes both transnational and domestic trafficking. United Nations standards, US aid conditionality, and human rights network campaigns have inspired dozens of countries to prohibit trafficking in persons. There are educational, law-enforcement, and victim-assistance efforts in sending and receiving countries, via regional programmes in North America, Europe, and South-East Asia, and through global bodies such as the International Organisation for Migration, the ILO, and UNICEF. Yet a decade of anti-trafficking programmes has done little to reduce the phenomenon, and may even have diverted attention from some of the root causes of trafficking, the large numbers of victims in the developing world, and equally harmful practices of labour exploitation beyond prostitution and within national borders.1
Globalisation's Victims
Contemporary slavery, including human trafficking, is best understood as a particular form of human rights abuse by non-governmental perpetrators-"private wrongs" in which the state fails to protect its citizens and/or outsources its authority to abusive businesses, families, and criminals. While the enslavement of tens of millions of Africans in the Americas was state-sanctioned and sometimes state-sponsored, modern slavery operates in the gaps of governance: in rural backwaters, failed states, and the freefall of illicit migration. The victims of most current forms of exploitation are second-class citizens and "disposable people"-women, children, outcastes, and the marginalised poor.2 Contemporary slavery is a predatory strategy of commodification of fellow human beings in a privatising world. In this "race to the bottom", traditional inequities and stigmas are brands, signalling who can be exploited and how. Women are especially vulnerable to the sex trade-but they are also vulnerable to exploitation in the "maid trade", and any other traditional role where domestic disempowerment meets globalised displacement.
Globalisation creates "people out of place" who are unable to enjoy the resources of citizenship, whether or not they cross borders....