Caroline Black and Donna Lee Bowen, Political Science
Pervasive, complex, and often little-‐understood, trafficking of women is a worldwide epidemic. Although many acknowledge the problem that trafficking of women, hereafter known simply as trafficking, is, the large dark numbers associated with it make trafficking hard to fully track. Many studies have previously focused on trafficking victims and their experiences with the intent of understanding what demographic factors influence the likelihood of someone becoming a trafficking victim. However, there is little to no research on the macro causes of trafficking. This paper will focus on those macro causes, which are the percentage of women in parliament and women’s political rights. This paper argues that as women’s political rights increase, the prevalence of trafficking decreases. This paper also argues that this is a greater contributing factor to trafficking prevalence than GDP per capita. This is significant because better wages and economic opportunities are often cited as common reasons a woman is lured into trafficking.
One possible reason that greater women’s political rights leads to less trafficking is because the more women there are in government, an indirect effect of greater political rights, the more focus women’s issues, such as trafficking, receive. Women are more likely to pay attention to women’s issues because these issues affect their daily lives and the lives of women they know; these issues hit close to home. Also, when women are part of the constituency politicians must appeal to, politicians are more inclined to include a focus on women’s issues as part of their platform. Because trafficking is predominately a women’s issue, there is greater likelihood that politicians will take political action against trafficking in an attempt to appeal to their female constituents.
Research indicates that women are often lured into trafficking through the promise of better economic opportunity than that which is available in their home country. This research also alludes to economic opportunity, and therefore GDP per capita, being one of the greatest causes for trafficking. However, this paper will show that, although there is credible research indicating that women are more likely to be lured into trafficking if economic opportunity is lacking in their home country and that wealthier countries are more likely to be destinations for trafficking victims, GDP is not a main, or even a statistically significant, indicator of trafficking prevalence. Rather, this paper will show that women’s political rights are the most important factor in the prevalence of trafficking in a country.
The researcher finds that, contrary to other research suggesting that GDP per capita is one of the leading contributors to trafficking prevalence, GDP per capita is not actually a statistically significant contributor to trafficking prevalence when trafficking prevalence is defined as laws on the books, enforcement of those laws, and occurrences of trafficking. At least part of the reason for this is that poor countries tend to be the source for trafficking victims, whereas rich countries tend to be their destination, therefore more or less cancelling out any correlation for how much trafficking takes place, although the different countries typically experience opposite ends of the trafficking supply chain. In addition, although not statistically significant, the log of GDP per capita has a negative relationship with trafficking prevalence because theoretically the victims are concentrated in their countries of origin, often poor countries, but are spread out between various destination countries, often rich countries.
This paper also finds that, although not statistically significant, in countries in which prostitution is completely legal, trafficking prevalence is lower. However, research shows that complete legalization of trafficking actually makes it easier for traffickers to hide their operations, such as is the case with trafficking and legalized prostitution in Germany. Also, this paper finds that the less corrupt and more democratic a country is, the lower its trafficking prevalence will be, which are both statistically significant. These relationships are easily explainable in that trafficking relies on corruption and bribing officials, so when a country is less corrupt then officials will be less easy to bribe and therefore make it harder for traffickers to go about their activities. Also, when a country is more open and democratic, the leaders of the country tend to be more in touch with the needs and wants of the people. In addition, leaders are more willing to protect the people when information about the government failing to protect the people is readily available and when the politicians rely on the citizens to get elected.
The most important finding of this paper is that the percentage of women in the legislature does not statistically influence trafficking and that women in parliament is a by-‐ product of the largest influencer of trafficking prevalence, women’s political rights, which is statistically significant. Without the other key aspects of women’s political rights, such as the right to vote, join political parties, and petition politicians, being fully protected and accepted by society and implemented at all levels of government, having a large percentage of women in parliament alone is ineffective in fighting trafficking.
Therefore, based on these findings, it is important, in order to fight trafficking, that every country ensures that women’s political rights at all levels of government and in all aspects are a top priority of the national agenda. In addition, it is advisable that countries also legalize the selling of prostitutes while criminalizing the purchase of prostitutes, as Sweden has done. This makes trafficking harder to hide while still protecting the victims of trafficking, which laws that criminalize the selling but not buying of prostitutes fail to do. Although this author also recommends more open and democratic governments and less corruption, the author recognizes that these have both been suggested by many and are much more easily said than done, even in comparison to the other suggestions, which are also easier said than done.
| Parli’t 2011 | Parli’t ’09 & ’11 Diff | Prost. legal? | Corrupt 2011 | Wmn Econ Rights 2011 | Wmn Poli Rights 2011 | Polity | Legis. Quota | Civil. Factor | Log GDP pc 2011 | Conflict last 5 years? | Const. | Obs | 𝑅2 |
| .007 (.008) | ‐.016 (.019) | ‐.073 (.133) | ‐.094* (.044) | ‐.115 (.104) | ‐.368* (.163) | ‐.043** (.012) | ‐.117 (.126) | .069* (.03) | ‐.069 (.03) | .21 (.137) | 3.64** (.681) | 138 | .49 |
* indicates significance at the 95% confidence interval
** indicates significance at the 99% confidence interval