What’s the other side of the story?

It seems to me like a lot of the efforts made to combat sex-trafficking and sex tourism are focused on the perpetrators.  I read the Department of Justice’s stance on sex-trafficking and what laws are being put in place.  As I read the pages of cases of convicted sex-offenders, what I kept wondering was what happened to the women and children who were victims?  I completely agree that these men should face the legal ramifications for their disgusting actions.  I’m relieved for every sex-offender that comes to justice.   But what I want to know is what’s being done to combat the poverty and social structures that trap human beings in this kind of slavery and make sex-tourism and trafficking available in the first place. 

Media coverage that I have seen of global sex-trafficking tends to sensationalize the issue and make a spectacle of the perverts and their sexual misbehavior.  But as much as we want to make scapegoats of these men, they are not the source of the problem.  In this sort of media entertainment, the voices of the victims are lost.  They are not just victims of pedophils and perverts.  They are the victims of poverty, inequity, weak states, corruption, and injustice.  We don’t stop sex-trafficking simply by putting creeps in jail.  The purpose and answer to anti-sex trafficking is to improve the lives of women and children who otherwise have no choice but to fall victim.