The New Sex Trafficking

Over the next several months I will write a series of posts on what I have come to call the "New Sex Trafficking". I hope everyone here is familiar with sex trafficking/white slavery where women and girls (largely, though not exclusively) are abducted or manipulated into a situation where they must earn their keep, but never their freedom, as sex workers.

This new form of sex trafficking is something women more often walk into of their own free will. They ask for it, even demand it. Even though it is a form of prostitution (selling their bodies for another's pleasure), they willingly embrace it for the monetary rewards.

This new sex trafficking is found in those practices which use a woman's body, or parts thereof, for another's profit or pleasure. "Womb rental" is sex trafficking. Egg donation is sex trafficking. These are practices which objectify women, in ways similar to pornography and prostitution. She is reduced to her usefulness to others, an object or a provider of a good or service and not a subject or a person of worth in her own right.

There will be much more coming, but for now let me leave you with just a few resources:

The Body Shop

I include the Body Shop, even though it's campaign is focused primary on traditional sex trafficking, because of the warm reception I received at my local store when I explained about the newer forms of sex trafficking (such as those I will be writing of here). You can use opportunities like this, when you shop at these stores and buy the campaign products, to open up conversations about these other forms of trafficking.

The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network

Jennifer Lahl and the CBC do stellar work in this area. Here you can read some of their articles and find links to other resources.

Lines that Divide

This is the CBCs film about stem cell research. It exposes all the dirty little secrets surrounding the ESC-hype.