Clearly, this is all about economics in the end. For many women, this is the job that's available to them because of the gender division of labour. That's what's out there. That's certainly what women in Thailand told me. That's what women in the Maritimes, where I have just surveyed 64 of them working in sex work, told me. They said this is the best job they can get for the kind of money they can make. That included people working on the street. It might not be what they wanted to do ultimately--for some it was--but it was the best money they could make.
Of course, in the big picture, the more we can address women's economic inequality, the less we're going to have things like trafficking, where people are taken advantage of when they're trying so hard to make money, essentially to get a better job.
With respect to good policy-making, the irony in anti-trafficking prevention programs is that the manufacturing and job training programs that CIDA is undertaking now, say, in Thailand and elsewhere, may actually miss the point, because the people most likely to migrate are those with some skills. They're not the poorest of the poor. The poorest of the poor don't migrate. Those who migrate are those with some education and vision who think there could be a better world. So there is bit of irony in that one.
Nonetheless, I think overall economic preventative measures clearly are going to address all the sorts of problems both of us are identifying.