With regard to your first question on procuring and its links to human trafficking, there are various opinions. Generally speaking, I think that the more some of these activities remain clandestine, the easier it is for organized crime to exploit people. I do not think for a moment that the suggestion is being made that procuring should be decriminalized where children are involved. However, where adults are concerned... One thing that helps criminal groups is the fact that prostitution remains clandestine and therefore the people who work in this area do not dare to ask for help because they do not know what kind of response they will get from the authorities, especially when they come from other countries, where there may be a lot of repression. This is a complex question and I cannot avoid it, but I think that the answer lies in part in measures that would make prostitution legal, particularly between consenting adults.
The figures from the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention that you quoted are right, but you probably noticed also that readers of these reports were advised to take into consideration the fact that the reason why this percentage is so high is that these are the types of cases that are being studied.
I said to you earlier in my presentation that our positions on human trafficking often dictate our actions. If we think that human trafficking is practised above all with a view to prostitution or sexual exploitation, we are going to focus our attention on those areas, we are going to assign investigations to the morality squads, and so on. The results will confirm our impression that the aim is mainly sexual exploitation.
If in another country you start paying attention to, say, the exploitation of farm workers, suddenly you will realize that 80% of workers are victims. We have to be careful with these percentages. Nevertheless it is quite clear, as you said, that sexual exploitation, particularly that of women and children, is one of the major dimensions of this problem. It is probably not the only one, but it is a major one.
All we know about organized crime operations is that they take advantage of the fact that we have reduced these activities to clandestine activities in our society. It is difficult for victims to ask for help.