During this week, although we focus on various aspects of women's work, we are primarily talking about what women do when they are faced with living in poverty, a state of being deprived of financial resources as well as deprived of other resources to fully participate in society. Performing sexual services for money, because of poverty, lack of alternatives, and/or coercion, is, unfortunately, a common form of work in the global informal economy. And at the far end of the spectrum of exploitation is modern-day slavery—the worldwide trafficking of women and children, of which about 65% to 95% has to do with the sex industries. The United Nations estimates that two-to-four million women are trafficked each year. U.S. government agencies estimate that between 600,000 and 800,000 women and children are trafficked annually for sex and labor. However, neither of these estimates includes within-country trafficking, and all such statistics are at best educated guesses or attempts to illuminate a hidden world of exploitation and abuse. It is important to remember that trafficking includes not only sexual exploitation but also forced labor, domestic servitude, organ harvesting, and agricultural work. However, our discussion focuses on coerced sexual activity because that is what women themselves were communicating to the Global Fund for Women about. What is trafficking? According to the 2000 UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, "trafficking in persons" is "the recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments to achieve the consent of the person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation...." The definition goes on at length and is discussed on pages 207 and 208 of our text. Suffice it to say that trafficking denies the right to liberty, the right not to be held in slavery or involuntary servitude, the right to be free from cruel and inhumane treatment, the right to be free from violence, and the right to health. It is an issue that clearly illustrates human rights violations and injustice having to do with power. Economic desperation provides the conditions for the rapid growth in human trafficking. Globalization has made it easier in some regions to cross borders or move people distances around the globe. Technical innovations, such as cell phones have served traffickers by providing ease of communication. Trafficking is widespread: virtually all countries both receive and supply trafficked persons. Please read pages 206 to 215 for discussions of trafficking, including information about the profound health consequences of trafficking and the agents of this practice. We also have a video of Kathryn Jolluck, who teaches in the History Department at Stanford University, speaking about these issues.