Sex trafficking - Research Paper Example

It involves traffickers detaining or transporting victims for commercial sexual exploitation as defined by Moser (222). To bring into perspective the prevalence and trends of this social vice in the 19th Century, this paper borrows from the novel Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn who narrates the struggles of women to earn their dignity and respect in early America through the life story of a Chinese girl, Lalu Nathoy whose father referred to her as Thousand Pieces of Gold, just as the title of the novel.

With the famine of 1871 in northern China, he sells off Lalu to a brothel and later to a slave merchant travelling to America. This was the turning point in the life of the young girl. This paper guides on this discussion on sex trafficking, giving leads on how victims get lured and evaluating possible solutions in the light of the findings. Socio-economic misgivings, particularly poverty and wrong perception of better lives in other countries propagate sex trafficking. In this early society, sex trafficking was widely spread across the board.

Not even were children spared as Li, the sex trafficker in the novel, traffics children together with her other victims. This comes to light when she quarrels Lalu for not getting the fraudulent customs clearing procedures right, claiming that “Even children: some of them are only ten, eleven years old. Children” were much better than she was (Gold 95). The cultural beliefs treated women as objects meant for the pleasure of men, while men were exalted as the only gender that had the right to work for a living.

This therefore meant that women could be used in whichever way men would find pleasurable to them. Comparably, Moser (226) cites the US Department of Health and Human Services documenting sex trafficking as the second largest and fastest criminal industry worldwide. Women and children still comprise the majority of victims at about 80%, with two million children estimated to be in the commercial sex trade. Borrowing statistics from the United Nations, the researcher further estimates the market value for this crime at over $32 billion.

Before the year 2000, sex trafficking was not prosecuted as a crime in itself but under other crimes such as promotion of prostitution. This exhibits the society’s clinging onto ancient belief of men as the superior gender. Just as Gold observed that a woman was not to “work like a man” so as to look appealing for marriage in the early days, the society still does not appreciate a woman as a laborer (356). Having pointed out that sex trafficking still remains rampant in the modern society as was in the 19th Century, it would be critical to understand how the vulnerable groups find themselves as victims of this crime.

Deception, as put by Walters and Davis (1) stands out as a leading approach in luring victims of sex trafficking. The novel tells of Li, the trafficker, who took advantage of the naive American dream that Lalu had to lure her into her trap. Using America as a destination for her victims