#55
COVID-19 and Human Trafficking: Unlikely Alliances

Among the many caught in the web of the COVID-19 crisis are people who are trafficked; vulnerable people made more vulnerable by the pandemic. In mid-April, a group of advocates urged UN Secretary-General António Guterres to ensure that the COVID-19 response includes sex trafficked, prostituted, and sexually exploited persons, and that it addresses the global surge in domestic violence linked to lockdowns.

The advocates reflect a coming together of diverse groups and individuals, also reflected in the Santa Marta group that, in alliance with Pope Francis, has worked to end human trafficking (the Santa Marta Group is an international alliance of police chiefs and bishops against human trafficking). The many and diverse signatories to the letter to Guterres include sex trade survivors, frontline service providers, religious leaders including “super nuns,” and women’s and human rights activists, all working to end sex trafficking and prostitution of women and girls.

COVID-19 is laying bare, they said, “the world’s socio-economic structural inequalities,” demonstrating clearly how crises exacerbate the vulnerabilities of disadvantaged people. The United Nations must not leave them behind. The letter noted how the lives of prostituted persons are often rooted in structural inequalities - sex- and gender-based violence, discrimination, poverty, displacement, racism, xenophobia, and systemic failures - which the pandemic has exposed and amplified. They lack any safety nets. Daily reports tell of women’s desperate need to survive, with no food, safe shelter, or medical assistance available to them or to their children. They face great risks and life-threatening harms, including increased risk of catching COVID-19 and increased online exploitation of women and children through a surge in the use of pornographic websites and other online exploitation vehicles. “Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the anonymity and ever-increasing connectivity afforded by the internet, which in the current environment is not being monitored by humans, means increasing numbers of women and children, especially adolescent girls, are vulnerable to grooming, online sexual exploitation and sextortion leading to sex trafficking."

The groups calls for a global fund for people exploited in the sex trade so they can have access to services. It would also look to exit support for those who seek to leave systems of sexual exploitation. The fund should “assist and uplift human beings who are bought and sold in the global multi-billion dollar sex trade; not further enable their profiteers or exploiters who deem sexual exploitation as a form of labour.”

(Based on: February 8, 2020, Vatican News article; April 17, 2020, Santa Marta Group article; and May 9, 2020, Modern Diplomacy article)