Combating Sex Trafficking Around the World

Shared Hope International was established in 1998 by the Washington State Congresswoman Linda Smith. During a visit to India, Smith stumbled across scores of women enslaved in the brothels of Mumbai, victims of the sex trafficking industry. Although Shared Hope’s early efforts targeted the international sex trafficking industry in countries including India, the organization was also alerted to the extent of sex trafficking in the United States and has worked extensively to prevent sex trafficking both nationally and internationally.  

In February 2020, IranWire interviewed Sarah Bendtsen, Policy Counsel for Shared Hope, to find out more about the work of the organization, its domestic and international impact, and about some of the challenges it faces as it tries to stem the tide of human trafficking. In her role as part of Shared Hope’s policy team, Bendtsen is responsible for overseeing the organization’s state legislative advocacy work. Shared Hope’s legislative advocacy work operates in all the 50 states in the United States while the headquarters is in Vancouver, Washington state. 

Exit Opportunities for Exploited People

The organization has a small team of employees with a mobilizational capacity across the United States. “Shared Hope started with the goal of developing comprehensive specialized services and exit opportunities for exploited people in several countries around the world,” Bendtsen told me. While there have been a plethora of other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on the issues of human trafficking, Bendtsen points out that “they were not necessarily working in an interconnected way. That’s the presence that Shared Hope brought. Certainly, the driving forces of exploitation differ depending on where they are, but [one can easily detect that] there are many similarities in terms of what exploitation looks like.”

Ways of dealing with human trafficking have also differed from one organization to another. Shared Hope deploys a three-pronged approach to deal with sex trafficking: prevent, restore, and bring to justice. “Our goal was to provide some sort of foundation for a response that might work well in several different places,” Bendtsen said. 

Working with other groups and NGOs is an important component of Shared Hope’s work in many countries, including India, better equipping the organization to provide exploited persons with exit opportunities. “It is very easy to say that in 22 years [since Shared Hope was founded] a lot has changed in India. There has been a lot of civil society mobilization around this issue and there has been a lot of attention brought to the government [which resulted in] government action. In terms of Shared Hope’s role, there are still a lot of resources lacking in terms of safe homes for survivors or ensuring that there will not be a continuation of exploitation amongst generations. So what we do is to provide services through several of our partners [on the ground]. We fund several homes and initiatives in India that provide direct services to exploited persons in the brothel districts. We also provide safe homes and educational opportunities for the children of exploited persons.”

While women are disproportionally exploited worldwide, it is a misconception that they are the only victims of trafficking and exploitation. “It’s not just women that are exploited,” Bendtsen said. Fifteen-20 years ago, that was just the narrative. We definitely are trying to make headway in terms of ensuring that all persons that are exploited are provided comprehensive services, including those that are exploited in India.”

Prevention: Starting with the Identification of Driving Forces and Vulnerabilities

Detecting the driving forces of exploitation is indispensable to prevent it from happening. “Exploitation doesn’t happen in a vacuum and there are many ways that we can attend to and respond to driving forces,” Bendtsen said. There are systemic forces of inequality, for instance, that drive exploitation. We are very diligent in ensuring that we’re responding to those.”

Tackling the driving forces of exploitation, both in the West and in the developing world, requires recognition of the vulnerabilities of the persons susceptible to exploitation. “What are the driving forces in society that create vulnerabilities for persons to be exploited? Until we tackle those, we’ll never be able to prevent the crime.”

Also key to prevention is identifying and targeting the existing demand for exploited persons. “If there was no demand for exploited persons, there would not be a supply. We spend a significant amount of time raising awareness on the harms that demand can do and the role that demand plays,” Bendtsen said. “In other words, we are applying the basic economic model to this crime.”

Although demand can be repressed, Bendtsen notes that “stifling demand does nothing to elevate vulnerable communities. We need to touch on some of the root causes of why people are vulnerable to exploitation. The other part of our work is trying to uncover what creates vulnerabilities and how we can mitigate or remove them”.

Vulnerabilities can be prevented through the provision of “equitable opportunities” for people who are susceptible to exploitation. As Shared Hope’s work in Jamaica, India, and Nepal indicates, “until we are providing equitable opportunities for the children [of people who are susceptible to being exploited], they are likely to experience the same exploitation that their mothers did. We are shifting some of our resources into the area of prevention to ensure that we are not in the same situation 50 years from now.”

Sex Trafficking: Not a Uniquely Developing-World Problem 

Often, sex trafficking is relegated to the rank of a developing world problem only. “Sex trafficking has always been happening. We assumed that we were privileged and assumed that it wasn’t happening on our soil. Once we were enlightened to the fact that it was happening here too, it created [quite a lot of reactions] here in the West.”

Yet, the prevalence of sex trafficking, even in the developed world, is very difficult to measure for a variety of reasons. “Because we are talking about vulnerable people who have gone missing, that people are no longer looking for, particularly, just looking at the US, there are so many cases [of children] involved in our foster care system that go missing. We are starting to uncover the fact that no one is actually looking for them.”

Secondly, racial dimensions of the problem render certain communities more vulnerable to sexual exploitation in the US, such as the indigenous communities. As Bendtsen points out, indigenous communities fall victim to sexual exploitation and sex trafficking “in numbers we cannot comprehend.” Many such cases are also not reported.

The problem of sex trafficking and exploitation is so widespread in the US that Bendtsen stresses, “for the first time in all of US history, we are starting to recognize this as a crisis.” Despite the enormity of the problem, numbers are hard to come by as there are conceptual mistakes surrounding the identification of sex trafficking and exploitation.  “We are still misidentifying it as consensual sex, prostitution, etc. For these reasons, we cannot quantify it. It is obviously impossible to quantify missing people that aren’t actually documented as missing.” 

For this reason, it is important to exercise caution when citing numbers, although the problem is projected to be very widespread in the US. “There isn’t any credible national survey or statistics on the number of sex trafficking victims in the US. But we rely heavily on our partners like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). They release very credible numbers. Eighty percent of the kids who are reported to NCMEC have factors that would demonstrate exploitation. That is incredibly high and we are very alarmed.”