What I am saying is the following. I'd like to see banks putting conditionality on lending, rather than having beautiful cosmetic campaigns about how to call in to help the girls and so on. That is something churches or NGOs can do.
There is a lot of investment in the tourist business--in hotels, in tourism, in all sorts of things--that can be or cannot be promoting or condoning the sex trade. In some cases it may promote illegal practices involving trafficking of persons, and so on.
What parliamentarians can do, for example, is to press their banks, the international community, and international banks to promote conditionality on, for example, fundamental human rights that include all these questions we're talking about.
For that we need clarity about what is really a crime--what practices are criminal from an international standpoint and what are not, whether we're talking about children or not, whether we're talking about forced labour trafficking or not, or whether we're talking about whether it's consented to or not.
I think when we're talking about labour markets, we're also talking about having a minimum floor on trade and globalization. At a minimum floor, we have universally accepted standards--core labour standards--that have been defined. It's in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, so parliamentarians can be promoting that as part of trade agreements. Some of the trade agreements have made passing references to these things, but they are not always being pushed forward in all bilateral agreements either, depending on the country, so you could have a role there too, and on and on.
The ILO has two conventions that deal with forced labour, and they have been highly ratified by its member states. One has been ratified by 170 member states and the other one by 166.
A number of changes in national legislation have to occur. Our experience is also telling us that we have a tendency these days to have a lot of social assistance, helping the victim kinds of initiatives. In many of our projects in the ILO we find that things can work for a while, but then they don't work anymore because the police at the local level get interested and then all of a sudden they don't have support from above, or, as someone has said, those who demand the sex services from the girls go on and nothing happens; there is pure impunity, and they travel back home. Sometimes they're caught by the police but have to be released. So there is a need for international and national integrated work.
My key piece of advice on all this is that whatever a particular country is thinking of doing, they should do it together with the international and the national communities--different actors--because we all have different kinds of advantages in this process.