Text

Trafficking in women, girls and boys. key issues for population and development programmes

---

Trafficking in persons, their transportation and sale for labour of any kind, whether within or outside national boundaries, is a modern form of slavery and a violation of the human rights of the victims. More than 700,000 persons are trafficked each year from one country to another, but the numbers are greatly magnified when in-country figures are taken into account. An overwhelming majority of victims are women, girls and boys.The primary objective is commercial sexual exploitation. Giving expression to its concern, UNFPA organized a consultative meeting in Bratislava from 2-4 October 2002 to seek ways of addressing the problem. The present report is the outcome of this meeting.The Consultative Meeting on Trafficking in Women and Children was held in Bratislava, Slovakia, from 2 to 4 October 2002. The encounter brought together 60 participants from 30 countries, including government and NGO representatives, as well as key persons from UNFPA and other UN agencies. UNFPA’s concerns with this contemporary issue are rooted in the historic Programme of Action adopted in Cairo at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The complex trafficking issues are seen by the Fund as being directly related to the focus in the Programme of Action upon gender equality, women’s empowerment, violence against women, and reproductive health and rights. Trafficking in persons for the purpose of labour and commercial sexual exploitation is a modern form of slavery, according to Article 3 of United Nations Protocol 2000, which supplements the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime,1 adopted by the General Assembly in November 2000. (“The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children” has been signed by 80 countries.) The agreed definition was helpful to the participants at the Bratislava meeting as they pursued their agenda. At the outset, participants set the objectives they wished to achieve during their deliberations: building a common understanding of trafficking issues and their impact on reproductive health and rights; identifying approaches, methods and good practices in tackling the issues; identifying UNFPA’s comparative advantages as well as possible partners for implementing actions at field level. The meeting framed trafficking as a gender and development problem, and much attention was devoted to the exploration of gender perspectives. The situation facing children at risk was, therefore, discussed in terms of girls and boys; similarly, the gender of the traffickers was highlighted for the insights that might be revealed. The gendered dimension of poverty itself was viewed as an important reason for trafficking, notably because of the poverty-driven construct of ideas and attitudes regarding women and children that so easily permits their bodies to be turned into commodities.

---

Availability

KP.IV.00038

KP.IV.3 INT t

My Library

Available

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

KP.IV.3 INT t

Publisher

New York : United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)., 2002

Collation

vii, 80p. ; 27cm.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

08714676x

Classification

KP.IV

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Trafficking
Perdagangan manusia

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment