Shared Hope International (SHI), with funding from
the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons, undertook an extensive twelve month examination
of the marketplaces of commercial sexual exploitation in four
countries: Jamaica, Japan, the Netherlands and the United States.
Each of these countries has major markets of commercial sexual
services, and each country is a destination for sex tourists internationally
and internally. Moreover, each country has a distinctly different
culture, economy, political system, and history of prostitution
and slavery which presented comparative examinations of the operation
of sex tourism and trafficking markets.
This report approaches sex tourism and sex trafficking from a
market-based perspective in which buyers demand commercial sexual
services, traffickers move victims like product to the markets
to satisfy the demand, and facilitators profit, directly or indirectly,
from the sale of commercial sex acts. In other words, the marketplace
of victimization operates according to the economic laws of supply
and demand, where supply increases to meet the growing demand
for sexual services throughout the world.
Through interviews and undercover conversations with
sex trafficking survivors, buyers, traffickers and outreach workers,
this documentary captures the hard reality of actual people and
places that make up these markets in the United States, the Netherlands,
Japan, and Jamaica.
The marketplace of commercial sexual exploitation has become a
multi-billion dollar industry. However, in supporting the sex market
and making traffickers rich, the buyer is causing extreme human
suffering. Every dollar spent on the sex market encourages traffickers
to recruit more victims. So the buyer, whether aware of this or
not, is directly facilitating a criminal enterprise.
The sex trade continues unabated due to constant demand. Uncountable
numbers of human beings are enslaved and destroyed year after year
so others can profit and buyers can satisfy a selfish urge. There
are many ways to reduce worldwide trafficking in persons, but the
most immediate is for buyers to stop buying. Without buyers there
is no sex market. Without a market there are no victims.
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