The United Nations’ Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (2000) recognises that women are often in an unequal power situation and make decisions because of their lack of choices or the authority of the person or persons with whom they are dealing. In the protocol, trafficking covers a wide range of activities, including sexual exploitation, forced labour, and organ removal. It also holds that consent is not absolute – where secured through threats, deception, abuse of power, or other ways of gaining control over another person, consent is irrelevant.

There is currently limited information about how – or indeed if – traffickers are going beyond the obvious use of ICT for communication and if ICT are shaping the experiences of trafficked women. However, it seems ICT can work for traffickers and for others in at least six ways:

Communication between traffickers is made easier by ICT ranging from mobile phones to email. These technologies are not creating options that did not previously exist, but they are making trafficking easier.
Traffickers may also use the internet to communicate with and recruit victims. Concrete links between internet recruitment and trafficking are not yet very clear but there is concern about the ease with which this could happen.
• Traffickers can use the internet to advertise trafficked women and to identify markets.
Men using trafficked women can share information about accessing women over the internet. Such communication is both practical (outlining where and how to buy women) and cultural (reinforcing and normalising negative attitudes towards women).
ICT can also be tools for preventing trafficking and for protecting trafficked victims once they have been trafficked. For example, non-governmental organisations use the internet to provide education and information to women going abroad and to policymakers and others addressing trafficking.
Tools such as the internet can also be used in aiding women’s recovery, providing women with support and protection and helping to find women who have disappeared abroad, allowing quick exchange of information amongst groups.

There is more scope for addressing the relationship between ICT and trafficking from a cultural perspective, based on the idea that ICT can effect cultural changes that significantly extend the acceptance of violence and human rights violations and normalise, or make more acceptable, practices such as trafficking. There are also questions raised about what happens when a woman is not physically moved, but profits are generated from images of her body which are made available around the world. When virtual images can be detrimental to real people, determining whether the concept of trafficking necessarily involves physical movement takes on new urgency from a women’s rights perspective.

[This section is based on an APC Issue Paper on Digital Dangers: Information and Communication Technologies and Trafficking in Women written by Kathleen Maltzahn. For more information you can download the full paper.]