Written submission of C-Fam, Inc. for the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the Appraisal of the United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Human Trafficking

By Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) | October 30, 2025

Written submission of C-Fam, Inc. for the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the Appraisal of the United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Human Trafficking

Trafficking in persons is a serious problem because it attacks the intrinsic dignity of persons and violates their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the ability to determine and pursue their own goals.  Combating human trafficking requires, first and foremost, the recognition that human persons are not commodities to be bought and sold, whether for sex, for labor, or for any other purpose, including the desire to have a child.

In a rapidly changing world, in order to foster meaningful collaborative approaches to ending human trafficking, it is essential to reject attempts to create categories within the commodification of persons that are deemed to be socially or legally acceptable.  The effective abolition of sexual trafficking, which overwhelmingly involves the exploitation of women and girls, cannot be achieved in a context where the sale of sexual acts is tolerated and normalized, much less in contexts where the state stands to materially benefit from it.  The legalization and regulation of prostitution has not been shown to eliminate sexual trafficking; rather, it results in a two-tiered system in which illegal prostitution continues in the shadows, its victims typically immigrant women whose legal status within the country is precarious.

In such countries, the state receives tax revenue from the prostitution industry, incentivizing it to foster demand, which in turn drives both the legal and illegal forms of prostitution and renders the country a lucrative destination for human traffickers.  This reality has led to the term “pimp states” being applied to nations that directly financially benefit from the sale of sex acts within their borders.

Inextricably linked to prostitution is pornography, which perpetuates the exploitation of women and girls and normalizes violence committed against them.  The UN Special Rapporteur on the causes and consequences of violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, has called for the abolition of both prostitution and pornography, arguing in favor of the so-called “Nordic” model of abolition in which the buyers of sex acts are criminalized, while prostituted persons are not, in order to facilitate their exit from the sex trade.  Widespread adoption of this approach would contribute significantly to the abolition of sex trafficking internationally.

It is notable that the 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) uses the term “prostitution” rather than “sex work” to refer to the sale of sex acts, except when quoting the titles of other works.  We encourage UNODC and other UN agencies to avoid the “sex work” terminology, which is favored by advocates for the normalization and legitimization of prostitution.  As Alsalem writes, UN member states should “prevent the weaponization of anti-trafficking policies to avoid addressing the issue of prostitution as a form of violence against women by creating a harmful and artificial dissociation between so-called ‘forced’ prostitution assimilated to trafficking from a so-called ‘free’ prostitution assimilated to ‘sex work’” (A/HRC/56/48).

Another emerging area of concern in combating the trafficking of minors is the move toward replacing the term “child pornography” with “child sexual abuse materials” (CSAM), as in the recently-adopted treaty against cybercrime.  While there is much overlap between these terms, they are not directly interchangeable.  Child pornography includes virtual images of sexual abuse of children as well as materials created by minors themselves, including so-called “sexting.”  These things are absent from the definition of CSAM.  However, CSAM includes some elements lacking in the definition of child pornography, such as less explicit images of children posed erotically or child abuse paraphernalia.  In order to maximize protection of children and enable the widest range of legal remedies for their exploitation, we encourage UN member states and other stakeholders to insist on the inclusion of both terms together.  This is increasingly important as the use of artificial intelligence platforms rapidly expands and enables the widespread creation of virtual child pornography by platforms trained on countless images of actual children.  While it may be impossible to identify specific victims from such images, their creation and dissemination fuels the demand for more of the same, whether virtual or actual, and normalizes the sexualization of children.

One further area deserving of attention by anti-trafficking stakeholders involves the sale of children and the exploitation of women for purposes of reproduction.  In Alsalem’s recent report to the General Assembly on the subject of surrogacy, she writes, “the profit-oriented behaviour underpinning surrogacy service provision increases the risk of human trafficking at every stage of the process, including to other countries for forced reproductive labour” (A/80/158).  While this aspect is absent from the 2024 UNODC report, we encourage them, along with member states and other stakeholders, to consider this a key emerging front in the anti-trafficking effort.

Children born of commercial surrogacy are inherently commodified from the moment of their conception, which occurs pursuant to a financial agreement intended to end in their transfer away from the woman who gave birth to them, often across international borders.  In cases when these arrangements fail, surrogate mothers are sometimes pressured to abort, or their children, if born, are at increased risk of statelessness or abandonment if the commissioning parent(s) are unwilling to claim the child.  Children born of surrogacy are at increased risk of trafficking, and there have been reports of sex offenders commissioning children through surrogacy.

Surrogate mothers are also frequently victims of trafficking and forms of slavery, enabled and exacerbated by the fact that they are often driven to surrogacy by economic hardship while those commissioning surrogates have the financial means to do so.  The exploitation of women and girls for reproductive purposes is not limited to surrogacy alone, but also includes coercive practices involving egg donation to be used in in vitro fertilization.  As in the case of surrogacy, the women and girls pressured into making their bodies available to enable others to reproduce are often poor relative to those buying their services, and face significant health risks.

For these reasons, there is a growing international movement, supported by Alsalem, to ban surrogacy as inherently exploitative and incompatible with the rights of women and girls as well as the rights of the children being commodified through the practice.

Eliminating human trafficking in all its forms will require a redoubling of existing efforts by the international community coupled with attention to emerging and growing areas of exploitation and commodification of persons.  Some of these, including prostitution, pornography, and surrogacy, come with powerful and well-resourced lobbies calling for their normalization and acceptance and arguing that they can be regulated in ways that eliminate the abuses associated with them.  However, the evidence proves otherwise, as documented in Alsalem’s reports and elsewhere.  There can be no acceptable form of the sale of human persons: justice demands its abolition in all forms.

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