Sex Trafficing

Today's presentation was about sex trafficking. A sad topic affecting women, children, men and transgendered people all over the world.  It is horrible to think of sex and human bodies being bought and sold like a commodity and treated as if they are nothing less than animals. The issues that make up why sex trafficking occurs are complex. Mostly, women are sold because they live in impoverished countries. Their families may have had a bad year in terms of crops or are in other ways financially desperate. They may sell their daughter in order to keep feeding the rest of their family. This issue needs to be addressed on the supply side through development of impoverished countries. On the other side of the supply and demand of humans there will always be a supply of humans when there is a demand for humans.  When we were going more in depth on how we might go about ending trafficking of humans in class it became obvious that any real solution would be very long term and would probably not directly help the lives of people being trafficked currently.  I think that if we legalize prostitution it would mean that the government could better regulate how women were treated as well as brought to the country. This would mean better living conditions for people in the business, this may also help regulate who is brought into the trade and if they had been brought it legally or not. However, I do not think that a government can condone such prostitution acts such as rape, child prostitution or any other harmful sexual practice in the same way it would not be right for the government to legalize hard drugs such as cocaine or heroin. The think is, is that people will always want to use this drugs and there will be people who will always have horrible sexual fantasies that they want to play out. Another way to help stop human trafficking is to punish those who use services rather than punishing those who provide it.