Hollywood Introduces Human Trafficking and Sexual Enslavement

DVD jacket cover for movie Taken (2008). All rights Twentieth Century Fox

I was watching the movie Taken (2008) a couple of weeks ago with some friends from Uni, Josh and Hamish, where young ladies are kidnapped by a gang of Albanian sex traffickers and sold into the sex industry. Conveniently, we were chasing down a topic for our MD Global health and social justice project and so we thought about investigating the global sex trade and human trafficking for sexual purposes.

Still Image from the movie Taken (2008, Twentieth Century Fox), showing one of the characters who has been sold into sex slavery. All rights Twentieth Century Fox

So getting back to the movie, we know it’s Hollywood riiiight? and so it can’t really be Taken at face value, but the movie did get us thinking about the global sex trade. We quickly came to the conclusion that we knew very little about the issues surrounding human sex trafficking. Who’s involved? Why are they involved? Where is sex trafficking most prevalent? What can we do about it?and does it happen in Australia?  

Firstly, we wanted to see if other people had any ideas on human trafficking or sex slavery, so we put out an online survey over at survey monkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NG7MJ8Y). This survey was sent to our MD colleagues and involved 10 questions about the global sex trade. We asked questions like 'which people are trafficked?' and 'how much is the sex trade worth annually?'. This online survey is still active and we encourage you to head on over and help us out in identifying what people know about the sex trade. The answers that you provide will be used to help us make a small presentation to our colleagues. We will also collate these findings and then put them up onto this blog so you know some interesting facts about perceptions of the sex trade.

We also wanted to know about the history of sex enslavement.  What are the motivators of traffickers? Are they in it only for the money? Or are there factors that we more commonly associate with the pornographic industry at play? Given the serious health risks faced by voluntary sex workers, what are the health risks faced by enslaved people?

We never really think of Australia as playing a role in the sex slave trade, however, we have come across some newspaper articles that show Australians are regularly going to south east Asia as sex tourists. It also seems there are a number of people trafficked to Australia to work in the sex industry against their will. So it appears that a small number of Australians are contributing to the sex slave trade by being consumers. We must then ask ourselves do we provide a demand for sex traffickers?

Finally, we wanted to look into the charities and not-for-profit organisations that raise awareness and money to help prevent sex trafficking. We’ll look into what charities like SharedHope (www.sharedhope.org) are doing to stop both the supply and the demand of sex slaves.  We will also explore just how successful  they have been in combatting the sex slave trade. 

Hopefully we will begin to explore these ideas and investigate global sex trafficking  and its effects on global health and social justice. 

Andrew, Josh and Hamish.