Introduction

The scale of trafficking worldwide can at best be estimated, but most practitioners and scholars agree it is both significant and increasing (Aronowitz 2009; Shelley 2010), aided by improved transportation infrastructures and advances in communication technologies, which traffickers are able to exploit in an increasingly globalised world.

There can be little doubt that globalisation has exerted transformative influences on the world's social, political and economic landscape. It has produced ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ (De la Dehesa 2006) and, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), it has promoted crime beyond borders (UNODC 2002). It has also contributed to accelerating rates, and changes in patterns, of migration. Increasing numbers of people now reside and work outside their countries of origin (Monzini 2005), while globally, at any given moment, significant numbers of individuals are on the move, so much so that we are now said to live in a ‘world in motion’ (Inda and Rosaldo 2002). This perpetual movement has transformed the nature of social relations that span borders; changes that have unsettled historic population movements and have seen the emergence of new, more fluid, transnational formations (Cohen 1997; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Turner and Kelly 2009). The last few decades, however, have also witnessed other, historic changes. The collapse of the former Soviet Union towards the end of the last century, the wars and subsequent reconfiguration of borders across the region, all generated unprecedented movements of people, while the transition from command to market economies produced social and economic asymmetries which enriched some and simultaneously impoverished others.

These are among the factors that account for the rise and spread of trafficking. The disparate effects of globalisation, poverty, wars, political instability and the lack of sustainable livelihoods comprise the ‘fertile field’ (Kelly 2005), or conditions conducive to trafficking. Yet, in whatever combination they affect the lives of individuals, they do not sufficiently account for the increase in the sex trafficking of women and the growth of commercial sex markets across the world. While trafficking into other sectors is a significant phenomenon, and while the sex trafficking of young men and boys remains ‘thus far a terra incognita in terms of sociological research’ (Morawska 2007: 98–9), there is good reason for the continued focus on the sex trafficking of women, albeit with a shift in perspective.