Sexual Exploitation of Women and Children Past to Present: Where’s the UN?

Mother’s Day honors women for the nurturing and care given children. Yet this positive picture is shaded by the sex trafficking of children and women which is widespread. Neither the U.S. or the United Nations has been able to prevent human trafficking and sexual slavery. It is another important reason to call for a review of the UN Charter to assess what’s wrong, why can’t the UN do better to protect women and children?

DWF NEWS brings us up to date on sexual trafficking with articles by Stephen Lendman (“Sex Trafficking: A Form of Modern-Day Slavery”) and Dr. Rudolf Hansel (“Decadent ‘Western Community of Values’ — Human Trafficking and Sex Slavery”). But we start with DWF Brain Trust contributor Dr. Kathleen Barry, a sociologist and leading feminist who brings us the broader perspective on global sexual exploitation.

Professor Barry’s book Female Sexual Slavery (1979, 1983) was written she explains “…at a time when there was no global or local awareness of the issue.” Her book, Prostitution of Sexuality: The Global Exploitation of Women (1995) is part of “…my 45 years of work insisting on action against sex trafficking [which] resulted in the global movement we see and know today and to which the article (by Lendman) refers. In 1983 I was responsible for the UN taking up the issue of sex trafficking again which they had left dormant for decades, although the UN has not cleaned up its own internal systems of sex trafficking.”

Dr. Barry has had a practical impact reducing international commercial prostitution. She writes “That prostitution in the field of human rights and feminist action is now better understood as a commercial form of violence against women. With that in mind, a multitude of nation-states have criminalized the buying of sex, another initiative I began, and where that is done, prostitution and that form of violence against women is reduced to negligible amounts.”

DWF is proud to have Dr. Barry’s expertise available to DWF NEWS. Her latest book Unmaking War, Remaking Men (2011) has been the basis for an Open Letter Position Paper to new Congress members titled “Nukes and Misdirected Manhood ln Washington, D.C.” (May, 2019) co-authored with DWF President Dr. Roger Kotila.

STOP.