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How Big is the Market for Sex Trafficking?

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October 18, 2010

Mark Leon Goldberg

Rights |

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (signed in Palermo, Sicily of all places). Ahead of a meeting in Vienna, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released its annual “Threat Assessment” of Transnational Organized Crime.  Not surprisingly, trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation remains a top criminal enterprise.

So how big is the market?  From UNODC:

National survey data suggest the percentage of men who have purchased sexual services in their lifetimes varies considerably between countries and over time. According to the Kinsey surveys in the 1940s, 70% of adult males reported having paid for sex at least once in their lives, but this was at a time when non-compensated extramarital sex was far less common than today. More recent surveys suggest the figure today is closer to 19%. Recent surveys in other countries suggest a similar figure in Sweden (13%), the Netherlands (14%), Australia (15%) and Switzerland (19%). Spain (39%) is an outlier in Europe, as is Puerto Rico (61%) in North America. The comparable figure is even higher in Thailand (73%).

Extrapolating from International Labor Organization data, UNODC estimates that one in seven sex workers in Europe are trafficking victims. These victims are exploited for, on average, two years.  This means that 70,000 women must be trafficked annually to meet market demands.   Using other survey data, UNODC deduces:

If there were indeed 140,000 trafficking victims in Europe, they could produce perhaps 50 million sexual services annually. At €50 per client, this would constitute a market worth €2.5 billion (equivalent to some US$ 3 billion) annually.

To sum it up: in Europe about 19% of men purchase sexual services from sex workers. About 1 in 7 of these sex workers are victims of trafficking by organized criminal groups. These groups, in turn, gross about $3 billion annually.   Each of these cases are individual tragedies.  But taken together this data shows how public policy is failing to protect hundreds of thousands of women from exploitation and abuse.


  • Netajibasumatary

    What is the root course for other 6 sex workers in this trade those not victims of trafficking. where the starting source of trafficking. Coordination among nations and state will able to check and minimise the quantum of trafficking.

  • Andrew Hunter

    UNODC should be ashamed of themselves for cooking up such blatantly false statistics. Instead of “extrapolating” figures, they should get European police figures. Instead of making up or using figures from anti-prstitution organisations about numbers of clients they should check on the UNAIDS datahub
    Instead of suppressing the many research findings shosing massive drops in sex trafficking in Asia- they should focus on the results which show the majority of trafficking victims in South East Asia are men trafficked into fishing, agriculture and construction, but it’s not quite as sexy and would put lots of UNODC officials out of jobs…..
    Andrew Hunter
    apnsw.org

    • Mama_kin72

      Andrew, yours is the kind of stick your head in the sand attitude that allows these horrific crimes to continue.

      • http://www.realprincessdiaries.com Alexa

        And Mama_kin72, yours is the kind of “let’s accept any figure pulled out of someone’s ass as legitimate” attitude that causes the real nature of the problem to be not understood. Made up or “estimated” figures do nothing but cause people to flail about and use resources ineffectively. I agree with Andrew – they should be using stats derived from local and state law enforcement agencies on what they’re actually finding. Just blanketly stating that 70K women are trafficked (this week – a while back the figure was in the millions. See a pattern developing?) doesn’t make it so. In fact, there was one study a year or so ago that showed the actual number of trafficking victims was far, far less than estimated for one country. I don’t recall where it was off the top of my head, but the point still stands.

        Why aren’t you harassing these organizations producing such SWAG figures and asking them to substantiate how they came to arrive at those?

        • Mark Leon Goldberg

          These numbers are not “made up.” If you read the report, you’ll see that the data actually comes from the International Labor Organization and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the latter of which used data collected from state law enforcement agencies to compile these figures.

          • http://www.realprincessdiaries.com Alexa

            Dude, please. Read what you wrote yourself: “****Extrapolating**** from International Labor Organization data, UNODC ****estimates**** that one in seven sex workers in Europe are trafficking victims.”

            Extrapolating? Estimates?

            No one denies there’s a problem, but please, pulling these figures out of your ass (and the ass of others) just to drive hysteria really isn’t necessary.

  • http://www.34millionfriends.org Jane Roberts

    Poverty is the root cause of trafficking and sexual slavery. Gender inequality also plays a big role. 34 Million Friends of the United Nations Population Fund works at the root causes. I am cofounder of 34 Million Friends of UNFPA. This weekend, the world is celebrating UN Day. Look up the Millennium Development Goals. These should be the world’s highest priority. They deal with root causes. Cheers, Jane Roberts I am Chapter 8 of Half the Sky by Kristof and Wudunn which talks about trafficking and sex slavery quite a bit.

  • Mspicka

    Divide the statistics in half and we should all be just as outraged!

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