Existing laws may go unenforced and lack of evidence often allows traffickers to escape lightly. Some 40,000 to 50,000 Thai women are illegally working as prostitutes in Japan, states the recently published United Nations Global Report on Crime and Justice. The number of illegal sex workers in the European Union ranges between 200,000 and half a million, with some two thirds coming from Eastern Europe and the other third from developing countries, according to the Global Report. Some 670 women victims of trafficking were registered in Vienna in 1995, about six times more than in 1990. Traffickers earn huge sums for their victims.
Brothels are likewise big business.
Brothel earnings and the prices prostitutes fetch point to a high demand for their services in both industrialized and developing nations. In parts of Asia, demand has soared with the growth of sex tourism, although Human Rights Watch reports that local demand is also considerable in this region. With the stakes so high, organized crime has stepped in to take its share. Of about 15,000 Russian and Eastern European women working in Germany's red-light districts, many work in brothels, sex clubs, massage parlours and saunas under the financial control of criminal groups from the Russian Federation, Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, the IOM survey states. Asian organized crime groups directly control about 70 per cent of the sex industry in the United States, according to Schiavi.