Dr. Marcel van der Watt
Appearances
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
Hi, Anoushka. Thank you for this time, for having this conversation.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
Well, sex trafficking at its core revolves around the use of fraud, force, or coercion to exploit people, usually for commercial sex. There's obviously also forced labor, but when you're talking about sex trafficking, there's always the commercial sexual exploitation component to that crime.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
so many of the victims in these crimes don't think they are victims or even consider themselves victims they are either parts of the definition of sex trafficking where it talks about the abuse of a position of vulnerability you know where people where a vulnerability is taking advantage of because of factors like social circumstances economic circumstances being pregnant being undocumented
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
Some of it could be in a nightclub. It could be in a brothel. I've done work elsewhere in the world. Some areas' brothels are legal. In some places, they are not. So it could be a brothel, a strip club, definitely at house parties often where there's a very, very kind of a controlled way of knowing who enters and who doesn't.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
and everybody at a venue like that has some value that can be extracted by the the criminal group and sometimes these are just social events in in the public eye you know depending on what the
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
The purpose is of the party, is it part of a method to build a relationship, to build rapport with a possible investor or an asset, or is it really just to go all out and abuse, exploit, you know, usually women, and in the process entertain, and in the process, again, corruption, complicity, compromising people in order to extract value from them subsequently.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
Well, sex trafficking can happen as linear as being trafficked from one house to another house in a street by an individual trafficker, right? It could be an organized criminal group. I mean, the nature of transportation systems and we're looking at technology, et cetera, has really made these groups very, very fluid, very dynamic. These relationships are often relationships of convenience.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
Today I use you, tomorrow I don't. There's usually a core group of people working together and the rest is really kind of, you know, you are an investor or you're an asset to this group and it's all about money. And again, really infrequently, it's only sex trafficking.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
And when we're talking about sex trafficking and organized crime, you know, you are bound to find some form of official complicity and corruption. So the whole syndicate or the criminal group is geared at making money. So we know that sex trafficking, it's not a recent statistic, but I mean, it generates more than 100 billion US dollars annually. So it's really, it's all about money.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
Well, I am a former law enforcement officer. You know, I've investigated transnational organized crime syndicates and sex trafficking is one of those. And that's really needed to understand the kind of the inner workings of these criminal networks.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
you are always very, very conflicted. I mean, you know that there's a role that you have to play, there's a specific systematic methodological approach to gathering evidence and to gathering intelligence, but you are also so close to everything that happens, you know, whether it is on the one end of the scale, which is just a drug, abuse to people actually sometimes being harmed, you know.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
So there's always this conflict and this dissonance that one walks around and just kind of trying to remain objective.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
Well, sex trafficking is an enormous problem, not just in the USA. A lot of these things have just become normalized in society. Sexual objectification, if you think what Hollywood and media and pop music tells us, you know, you've got subtle undertones of of simulated rape. You've got undertones of choking. And we are exposed to these things in and out every day.
Diddy On Trial
What is sex trafficking?
And I think that contributes to how we view the world, how we view sexual relationships. And, you know, that just creates this enabling environment where we just don't see what we ought to see when something intuitively should trigger a response. And some questions whether, you know, this is not normal. This is not supposed to be how things are.