Global synthetic dataset analysis
Gender of victims
Age of victims
Men and boys trafficked into sexual exploitation
Men and boys trafficked into sexual exploitation
This data story looks into the profile of male victims who were trafficked into sexual exploitation and assisted by CTDC partners. In total, they make up nearly 6% of the victims trafficked into sexual exploitation. Just over half of them were assisted by Polaris, about a third by Liberty Shared, and the rest of the them were assisted by IOM.
Profile
This profile summarises the victims' most common characteristics, based on the graphs below.
The typical victim is a boy under 18 years of age. In fact, the distinctive feature of the average male victim trafficked into sexual exploitation is that he is much younger than the average victim of sexual exploitation. He is also not likely to have education above middle school. He was trafficked within his subregion of origin. He is most likely to be recruited into trafficking by someone in his family. His exploitation is not likely to last more than one year.
The pie chart above showed that just over half of the male victims trafficked into sexual exploitation were children. The present bar chart shows that many of them are very young: in total, a fifth of all male victims trafficked into sexual exploitation are under 11 years of age. 37% are under 14 years old.
In contrast, the same number for all victims of sexual exploitation are respectively 3 and 9%.
This suggests a very different trafficking pattern for male and female victims.
Since over half of men and boys trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation are children, it is not surprising to find that the overwhelming majority of them are single.
60% of men and boys trafficked into sexual exploitation only have primary or middle school education, against 39% of all victims trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation. This is not surprising, given that in CTDC data, over half of the victims are children.
In line with the general profile of victims trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation, men and boys are more likely to be trafficked within their region of origin. This is the case in 83% of cases for men and boys, against 62% for all victims trafficked into sexual exploitation.
54% of male victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation are from South-Eastern Asia, 16% from Northern America and 11% from Eastern Europe. 55% of them are exploited in Northern America, 32% in South-Eastern Asia and 6% in Eastern Europe.
For the purpose of this analysis, region refers to the UN Sub-Regions.
The most likely recruiter for all victims trafficked into sexual exploitation is an intimate partner (35%), while for men and boys, it is a family member (43%). This likely reflects the fact that most of the male victims trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation are children.
RECRUITER RELATIONSHIP
There are no large differences in the means used to control male victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation when compared with other victims trafficked for sexual exploitation.
In line with the general profile of victims trafficked into sexual exploitation, the most common sector for men and boys to be trafficked into is prostitution. However, men and boys are more likely than others to be trafficked into pornography (23 vs. 7%) and private sexual services (12 vs 5%).
For all age groups, prostitution is the most frequent sector of exploitation. However, there are important differences, notably for the younger age groups. While 45% of the 0-8 years old are trafficked into prostitution, 41% are trafficked into pornography. Comparing with the other age categories, this is the largest proportion to be exploited in pornography.
For victims who are 48 years old and above, the graph is not likely to be representative, as for now they are very few victims in each age group.
Trafficking duration for men and boys in sexual exploitation is roughly similar to trafficking duration for all victims trafficked into sexual exploitation.
Nonetheless, men and boys tend to be in exploitation for slightly longer than others: exploitation lasts more than a year in nearly 40% of cases, against nearly 30% for all victims in sexual exploitation.
Lucky's story
Lucky’s story exemplifies the type of trafficking described in this data story. Lucky is a young Nigerian boy, who came to an IOM reception centre in Italy in 2016.
After his mother died, Lucky and his little brother went to live with their grandmother, who in turn died a short while later. At their grandmother’s funeral, the two brothers met Sunday, a relative who had been living in Libya. Sunday offered Lucky a job in Libya, which may pay 6,000 naira (around 18 euros) per day. According to what his relative promised, Lucky would repay the costs of the journey with the money he would earn in Italy.
Lucky then left his brother with one of his mother’s friends, promising that he would send her money to care for his brother, and began his journey with Sunday. After a long bus ride, they arrived in Libya, where Lucky ended up in a prison with 300 other people. After a week, Sunday took Lucky out of jail and brought him to his home.
Lucky was eventually sent to a woman and was told that he had to work as a prostitute for her. He first refused, but was beaten up by several men, including Sunday. Lucky was therefore forced into prostitution for about four months, until he asked to stop and managed to get permission to work in a car wash. He went to work with ten other boys of different nationalities. All the money they earned was collected by Sunday. Eventually, and after many more hardships, Lucky arrived in Italy at the end of 2015.
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