Mafia Makes Billions From Trafficking People - UN
Originally published by Reuters, December 15, 2000
CATANIA — Trafficking in people, taking women and children into slavery and prostitution, is producing profits second only to those from the drug trade for organised crime, a U.N. official said on Thursday.
Calling on governments to unite to combat the trafficking, Pino Arlacchi, a U.N. under-secretary general, told a forum in Sicily that its victims were exploited repeatedly.
"It is painful to contemplate that, unlike illegal drugs, women and children are often sold again and again. Their abuse and pain are multiplied as the transactions increase," said Arlacchi, executive director of United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.
"The trafficking in people is the fastest growing transnational criminal activity…Never before has there been so much opportunity for criminal organisations to exploit the system."
Arlacchi, speaking in the city at the base of Mount Etna, said traffickers of people realise annual profits of some $7 billion from the global market in prostitution alone.
According to a review of figures from governments and Non-Governmental Organisations, between 700,000 and two million women and children are victims of trafficking each year.
London-based Anti-Slavery International estimates that more than 200 million people worldwide are now reduced to slavery, many of whom have been trafficked across borders.
Billons in profits
Arlacchi called trafficking of people "the biggest violation of human rights in the world" and said that while profits to transnational crime groups were still bigger in the illegal drug trade, the gap was narrowing.
Much of trafficking of humans involves criminal groups who exploit migrants who want to be smuggled into countries to begin new lives but are then forced to work for them in order to pay back the cost of the voyage.
According to U.N. documents, the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, has maintained a significant presence in Southeast Asia, where Japanese criminals have become a main organising force in the sexual slavery of women.
Frank Loy, U.S. Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs, said tens of thousands of people each year were victims of traffickers in the United States.
"When there are people who are held in quasi-slavery in sweat shops in California, in prostitution in Florida, in domestic service in New York it's a crime that we want to address … and I think this convention will help," Loy told Reuters in an interview.
In Italy, criminals operate an extensive and elaborate ring that lures Nigerian women into the country on the pretext of getting work. They are then sold to pimps for about $12,000 each.
"The girls are slaves. There is no other way to define it," said Father Oreste Benzi, a priest who founded an organisation to help women leave forced prostitution and start new lives.
"The pimps want to make a four-fold profit on their investment, meaning the girls have to pay $48,000 before they are free. They are told that if they flee or talk to the police, their families in Nigeria will be killed," Benzi told Reuters.
The forum was part of a four-day conference on the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime taking place in Sicily.
One of the protocols attached to the Convention involves a commitment by the countries that sign it to work together to combat the problem.
