“There is an increasing awareness of human trafficking around the world today. But more needs to be done. We have to change attitudes. Too often, women and girls trafficked for sexual exploitation are victims twice over because of the stigma attached to prostitution,” said Ndioro Ndiaye, IOM’s Deputy Director General.

Efforts to help victims of human trafficking focus largely on prevention campaigns and victim assistance such as the setting up of emergency rescue hotlines, help with returning to home countries, rehabilitation and reintegration assistance including counselling, medical care, training or grants to set up businesses. However, few programmes address the stigma that women have to live with for the rest of their lives and which can leave them exposed and vulnerable again to abuse.

The shame of sexual exploitation can lead to social ostracism for trafficked women and girls and is a fact of life for victims all across the world. Families either disown their offspring or risk being disowned themselves by communities who believe that the fault lies with the victim and not the trafficker.

In Southern Africa, trafficked women from poor rural areas often rejected by their families upon their return, are forced to move to urban areas and work in the sex industry in order to survive. For them, commercial sex is the only way they know of earning a living. In other parts of Africa, and elsewhere in Europe and South America, there is the stigma of failure if a trafficked victim returns without any money or the promised wealth that going abroad was supposed to achieve, regardless of how that money was gained.

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the stigma of being trafficked for sexual exploitation is forcing the majority of trafficked women and girls who return home not to seek assistance they need to recover, even though comprehensive assistance programmes are available.

“The shame factor of having worked in the sex industry means that trafficked women and girls simply don’t want to admit to what happened to them, what they had to do in order to survive at the hands of unscrupulous traffickers. It’s deeply worrying that this prevents them from coming forward for help when they clearly need it. We could be helping so many more victims,” said Oksana Horbunova, an IOM counter-trafficking programme coordinator in Eastern Europe.

The stigma attached to women trafficked for sexual exploitation is not just present at the end of trafficking process, but from the beginning of it. IOM’s database of trafficking victims show a significantly large number of women who are single parents made vulnerable to trafficking because of poverty and lack of opportunities and the stigma and discrimination attached to those factors. A high percentage of women trafficked are also victims of domestic abuse.

When trafficked, their treatment at the hands of traffickers, clients and law enforcers is symptomatic of the stigma attached to their predicament. More importantly, the victims don’t always receive the support they need from authorities once rescued, and are sometimes treated as criminals in the interviewing process, put into prisons and finally deported.

“Although attitudes are improving in some countries through legislation, the creation of non-governmental organizations specializing in trafficking issues and the training of law enforcers, it is a slow process. More alternatives need to be available to trafficked victims than being sent home which is not always ideal when one sees what women and girls have to return home to,” said Richard Danziger, IOM’s head of counter-trafficking department.

One such example is in the United States where victims of trafficking are given visas that allow them to stay in the country if they want to and bring over immediate members of their families.

“By breaking down the stigma and by empowering trafficked women to step forward and speak of their experiences, global efforts to counter human trafficking, particularly of women and girls for sexual exploitation, will be much more successful. But this can only be done by tackling ignorance and prejudice among the public at large as to why women fall prey to traffickers,” added Ndiaye.