Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.
My short presentation today can only highlight some of the major points that you can find in the paper I produced for this meeting. The paper provides a quick overview of major trends and new developments and some of the gaps and some priorities, including those that have to do with the ILO instruments and experience.
ILO is a tripartite organization. It's the oldest organization of the UN system, and it has been in place since 1919. We have a particular dimension of combining representatives of governments and employers' and workers' organizations, and that puts us sometimes in a very special position to try to negotiate consensual interventions and agreements for taking action. We have a number of instruments, including treaties--two of them on forced labour--that include trafficking. They have special importance in the context of fighting sexual exploitation and other forms of forced labour, although, through our experience, we also know that, depending on national legislation, these may not be enough, because we're dealing here with questions of crimes and therefore not just with questions of labour law.
In any case, this is just a very brief introduction.
At the outset, I'd like to say yes, together we can go about cracking down on sexual exploitation and related trafficking, which, specifically in the case of sexual exploitation, targets particularly women and girls. When I say “together”, I mean that parliamentarians, policy makers, journalists, researchers, officials of international and national agencies, as well as the donor community, consumers, and employers' and workers' organizations can all play a role in this.
In recent years, we have all been very outraged and disgusted by the sorts of films and news about how gangs can exploit women and girls, and, of course, as a result, we have been developing a number of initiatives concerning that exploitation.
Yes, let's put the scavengers in jail. Let's put them behind bars. But the question is why there aren't many scavengers engaged in this business behind bars. That, obviously, is where we start. We have few people behind bars. We have to be more effective in closing the circle and the gaps and legal loopholes. To do that, we must know exactly what we are fighting against to be able to close down the circle.
On the global dimensions of this problem, we don't have very good figures for anywhere in the world. Last year the ILO, with the global report on forced labour, presented the first attempt internationally to come up with some estimates. We're not proud of these estimates, but they show some very key things, which are very important to put this whole business that we are discussing into perspective.
When we're talking about an estimate of 12.3 million victims of modern forced labour, including 2.5 million victims of human trafficking, that means that trafficking is about one-fifth of the total of our estimates. We're talking about very moderate numbers. We also know that almost 10 million of these victims are in Asian-Pacific countries. There are about 1.3 million in Latin America.
What we are really concerned with is trying to understand what this all means in terms of characteristics. Although victims of forced labour are not always victims of trafficking, the trafficking victims almost always end up in some form of forced labour. Among the victims of trafficking, most end up in labour for commercial sexual exploitation. Some 95% of them are women and girls. At least one-third are also trafficked for other forms of economic exploitation, and the numbers of these are underestimated. For forced economic exploitation specifically, other than sexual exploitation, we estimate that about 56% of the victims are women and girls. About 40% of the overall victims of forced labour are under 18 years old.
The interesting thing is that over the years there's been a change in the question of who's the exploiter. In the past, most of the exploiters of forced labour were the states, because of prison labour, and today we find that four out of five cases are really private. So this is a big change. We see more sexual exploitation on the radar now, whereas in the past we didn't see as much of that, maybe because of the lack of information.
Based on these estimates, we have to make an appeal to address the plight of women victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation, not as a stand-alone issue, but rather as a subset of a much wider problem of forced labour and trafficking practices.
The more we reflect on our experience in the ILO, the more we recognize that trafficking for forced sexual exploitation is part of broader problems that are related to forced labour and trafficking. These practices are tightly connected with deficiencies in labour markets and migration and related laws and policies.
Why is this so? Where is the connection? Indeed, the significant part of the trafficking for sexual exploitation is a result of false promises and illusions about jobs, better jobs. The typical stories get repeated over and over. It's the girl, the young woman, who gets offered or attracted to a specific job, and then she travels, and when she gets there she realizes she's trapped.
It is an interesting phenomenon that doesn't just apply to women; it also applies to men.The women who get trapped are not just getting trapped into forced sexual exploitation; they can also get trapped into other things. In some cases they may be the victims of trafficking, but in some cases they may not be the victims of trafficking. There may be a case of an illegal migrant who is already in situ and who then gets trapped. So for us this means what? It means that we should stop putting the focus just on trafficking alone and put the focus on the much wider perspective of issues that go beyond trafficking. There are a number of people who fall prey to these practices who are not necessarily trafficked.
We're not saying implicitly that these things are related only to labour markets. They may be related to labour markets and to migration, but what we have here is that the problem of both false promises and illusions are really rooted in the growth of a labour market informality, including illegal labour practices. Why? Because if that girl or woman was not promised a better job elsewhere and she didn't have the illusion of going there, she wouldn't fall into this situation. The reason they fall into this situation is when they get there, chances are they will find an illegal job, and they know that, because their cousins and friends have found illegal jobs without any legal papers. So we get into a vicious circle; it is a real problem. We have the illusions and the promises that are rooted in the informality, the growth of informality, in illegal labour practices, and this is partly related to the excessive deregulation of the labour markets.
In turn, as a result, we have a promotion of illegal migration, and as a result, we have a promotion of trafficking, because without illegal migration, you don't have a place for trafficking. So we have to close the circle by looking at these issues together. This is why it is important to focus on trafficking from the perspective of labour markets, migration, and immigration laws, legal and illegal--legal immigration laws and illegal migration practices.
We need, in this process, first of all, a better mapping of the roots, of the patterns, of the trafficking, both for sexual exploitation and for other forms of forced labour. Much like drugs and arms trafficking, trafficking in persons for sexual or other forms of exploitation has both a supply side and a demand side. The major gap here is that most of us in the last few years have tended to focus excessively on the supply side and not enough on the demand side. As a result, we don't get the picture together and we end up going around in circles. Sometimes the innovative initiatives don't really add up to close the gaps, and--