© A B Academic Publishers-Printed in Great Britain TRANSNATIONAL SEX TRAFFICKING: ISSUES AND PROSPECTS

One of the highest priorities on the agenda of the international community at the onset of the 21st century has been the trafficking of human beings across nations and continents. With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening of once closed national borders, the quickened pace of globalization (Sassen, 2002), and the migration of large numbers of peoples displaced by war and regional conflicts (Beyrer, 2001; Rathgeber, 2002), trafficking, particularly the trafficking of women for 'sexual exploitation ' (ordinarily but not exclusively prostitution1), has become a concern to many countries. The heightened concern for sex trafficking as a transnational 'social problem ' represents the confluence of two long-standing reform movements or 'claims-making ' (Spector and Kitsuse, 2000) campaigns. The first is the anti-slavery campaign, traceable to the peti-tions to abolish the slave trade submitted to Parliament by Quakers in the 1780s and subsequently the establishment of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 (Oldfield, 2001). The second is the anti- 'white slavery ' campaign (Doezema, 2000) initiated in the second half of the nineteenth century b