The trafficking of human beings, in its various forms, has been receiving unprecedented publicity in recent years. It is now one of the key topics on the political agenda of quite a number of regional and national governments and organisations. The publication of a clutch of international reports that show that the number of people trafficked has really taken off in the last ten years, and that the growing interest of investigative journalism in this phenomenon has caught the attention of several governments, faced with a situation which constitutes a serious violation of human rights.
But this is by no means a new phenomenon, nor is it now confined to the borders of one or two countries and/or regions of the world. Clearly global and transnational, the main novelty is that today it is a highly lucrative business, and hugely attractive to organised criminal gangs. And their operating methods have been getting more and more sophisticated. Trafficking in people is now regarded as the third most profitable illegal activity in the world, beaten only by weapons and drugs trafficking. Furthermore, traffickers are becoming increasingly creative and this, along with certain gaps in the law and the problems faced by the criminal police forces in some countries, means that there is a low risk of detection, investigation and punishment of this crime, compared with other illegal activities.
One of the most visible forms of trafficking today is that of women, for the purposes of sexual exploitation. According to the US State Department (2005), around 80% of the people trafficked every year (between 600 000 and 800 000) are women and young women who are almost all trafficked for the purposes of commercial exploitation. This is a complex phenomenon, with many aspects, and many, too, are the inequalities that underlie it: economic inequality; the division of borders between rich and poor; certain of the first world’s migration policies which, instead of organising immigration, push it into the arms of mafias and criminal gangs; and the “desperate expectations” which get people to believe in promises of a better life in a world which, according to Stuart Hall, has fewer and fewer certainties.
To this list we can add another inequality, not yet seen in contemporary societies: gender inequality. The phrase “weaker sex” is very well known. It stamps a stereotyped vulnerability on more than half of humankind. So it is that violence against women transcends societies, cultures, classes, geographic regions, and so on. The trafficking and sexual exploitation of women is a singularly cruel expression of such violence.
Migrant women are especially vulnerable to trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, for a number of reasons: they have little economic independence (thanks to the inequalities in entering the official, non-precarious, labour market); the imperative of sustaining their children, for whom they are often the first and only carers; and their individual introduction into transnational migratory strategies.
This then is a globalised phenomenon, and one that poses serious problems of human rights, and which, under the Rule of Law, neither the domestic nor the international legal system can ignore.  So it is essential to focus the attention of political leaders and of public opinion on the human rights of citizens and “non-citizens” which, in this domain, are being violated in an especially shocking manner.
            Portugal has shared the growing concern of international and European institutions in recent years, and has paid greater heed to the trafficking of women for the purposes of sexual exploitation. This research project results from a contract between the Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality, as the interlocutor entity of the CAIM Project and the University of Coimbra’s Centre for Social Studies to conduct a study to identify and characterise the dynamics and current trends in trafficking in women for the purposes of sexual exploitation in Portugal.