And the results are in for our Sex Trafficking Survey.

On the 11th of March, Hamish Joshua and I asked our colleagues and friends to head over to Survey Monkey and fill out really simple questionnaire. In this survey we asked 10 simple questions about peoples perceptions of the Global Sex trade and Human Trafficking for Sexual Purposes. Since then we have had a pretty good number of respondents. More specifically, as of the 5th of April we have had 114 unique respondents answer all the questions. We decided to randomly take 100 of these responses and analyse the results. Here are the questions and the pooled responses.

The first couple of questions we asked dealt with our sample demographics. So these are things like age and gender.

 

Thus it looks like the majority of our sample population are between 20 and 30 years of age with females representing 2 two-thirds of respondents. We next tried to identify how big of an issue Human Trafficking (as well as Sex Trafficking) is in the world by asking how many (people) and what proportion are male. 

From this figure above, our respondents think between 3-30 million people are affected by human trafficking, this value is surprisingly close to the actual numbers reported by the UN.  Furthermore, the majority of responses put the proportion of male victims worldwide at around 1%. But given the poor reporting of male sex trafficking, some figures place it at around 0.6%(1). What is clear is that a majority of victims of the global sex trade are female.

The next two questions involved the regional distributions (by countries) of both victim origin as well as their country of destination. Overwhelmingly, our respondents suggested that victims come from 'poorer' or developing countries such as Ghana, Bangladesh, Thailand (Africa/Asia) as well as Eastern European countries such as  Moldova, Ukraine and Russia. As for the destinations, we observe a shift in responses towards more developed or western countries including: France, United Kingdom, America, Germany and The Netherlands. Thus, it would seem that female victims are transported from poorer countries to richer countries for sexual exploitation. When we look at individual responses and correlate the answers for: where from and where too, in a majority of cases - they are different countries. Only a minority of respondents suggested that victims stayed in their own country. 

One of the more troubling questions that we asked was Q7 where we asked people to think of how old victims are when they are first trafficked. The findings are saddening although, not surprising. In our sample The age of victims is thought to be less than 15 years. We are seeing girls being trafficked for sexual purposes.  In terms of financial gain, How much money is generated in the global human trafficking/ sex trade (Q8)? Interestingly our respondents placed a moderate dollar value (~100 million dollars) on the global trafficking trade. Unfortunately, the UN places the annual dollar amount at closer to 30 billion dollars. Such a large annual figure places Human Trafficking in the top 3 global issues (behind Illegal Drugs and Arms Dealing).

On more local matters, we ended the survey with a couple of questions dealing with Australia and the respondents themselves. We were interested in if Australia contributes to Human trafficking (Q9) and if our respondents (who were predominantly Australian)  had ever contributed to groups who provide assistance to victims of sex trafficking. Overwhelmingly our respondents did view Australia as being a contributor to sex trafficking. While we can not identify how our respondents believed Australia contributes (either in the supply side or in the demand side) both are equally deplorable. Fortunately, a small number of people surveyed (~20%) had made a contribution to charities who deal with Human trafficking or try to combat the global sex trade. 

And so there we have it. The survey responses are in. It took an average of 4 minutes and 11 seconds for a respondent to complete our questionnaire. In this time, we have been able to generate a valuable snapshot of peoples views on the human trafficking and the sex trade.

 From our reading and understanding, our respondents were 'right on the money' in terms of the gender, age and geographical locations of the victims. We rightly think that victims come from poorer countries and are 'shipped' to richer countries with clients who pay for their services. We must also be careful not to underestimate the amount of money that is made form human trafficking and the associated sex trade. 

By Andrew

References

 (1) This percentage was calculated from data derived from: Ukraine Helsinki Report on Human Rights 2008. Chapter 18, Human Trafficking as a Violation of Human Rights.