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Under-Secretary-General Patten, you are firmly engaged in the work against sexual violence in conflict in Ukraine and you have also been closely involved in the new action plan on women, peace and security in Ukraine.ÌýWe would be very interested to hear your assessment on the current situation in the country.

The response to the war against Ukraine has been at the forefront of my Office’s efforts for the past year. I was in Ukraine on 3 May and I signed a Framework of Cooperation with the Government of Ukraine on the prevention and response to conflict-related sexual violence covering a number of priority areas such as justice and accountability, legislative reform, holistic services to survivors, security sector reform as well as trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The implementation Plan of the Framework of Cooperation was launched last year during Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵGA, and the implementation is ongoing. From 3 to 5 March, I went back to Ukraine for a conference focused on justice and accountability. During my visits, I met with survivors of sexual violence, frontline service providers as well as women’s rights organizations.

In terms of my assessment of the situation, what I can say is that this war has already taken an extraordinary toll on the lives of Ukrainian civilians: thousands killed or wounded; children subjected to forced deportation; men subjected to sexualized torture in detention; the bodies of women and girls used as part of the battlefield and cities reduced to rubble. The war has precipitated the swiftest and largest refugee migration in Europe since World War II. Millions of civilians, mostly women and girls were displaced or obliged to flee their country: as of March 2023, more than 8,156,960 Ukrainian refugees were recorded across Europe; inside Ukraine, over 7 million are internally displaced. According to the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there were 17.7 million people in Ukraine in need of humanitarian assistance and protection in August 2022. As we speak, the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine continues to deteriorate rapidly, with mounting numbers of casualties, refugees, and people on the move inside the country. While access to related protection services is deteriorating, the needs and protection risks continue to grow. It’s heart-wrenching to see the brutal impact that the conflict is having on women and children, whose lives have been uprooted overnight. Again, we see how men wage war and women and children bear the brunt and pay a huge price. This grave humanitarian crisis particularly affects the most vulnerable people, especially women and girls.

Coming to sexual violence cases, the first cases surfaced only a few days after the war started. Two Ìýrecent Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ reports confirmed that the number of reports have skyrocketed Ìýin numbers and variety since March 2022 with the caveat that due to the security situation and a lack of access to places of detention in territory occupied by the Russian Federation, it could not verify all allegations of sexual violence that it received; that the data it has provided does Ìýnot reflect the actual prevalence of CRSV but only illustrates broader patterns and trends observed based on 140 documented cases. ÌýThe age of the victims varies from 4 to 84 years. The report highlighted that rapes and gang rapes were committed at gunpoint, with extreme brutality and with acts of torture, such as beatings and strangling. Perpetrators, in some instances, executed or tortured husbands and other male relatives. Family members, including children, were sometimes forced to watch perpetrators rape their loved ones.

How can we strengthen and link the work against sexual violence in conflict and prevention of trafficking in human beings? And from your point of view, what needs to be done in order to create a safe environment for vulnerable groups?Ìý

The normative framework regarding the link between sexual violence in conflict and trafficking for sexual purposes is robust and exists since 2016, with the adoption of SCR 2331 which first articulated that nexus.

• SCR 2331 urged States to adopt appropriate measures within their national legal systems to investigate and prosecute those crimes.
• It recognized the extreme trauma experienced by the victims of trafficking;
• It highlighted the importance of assistance and services for their physical, psychological and social recovery, rehabilitation and reintegration and called on all refugee-receiving countries to provide information on the services available to victims of trafficking and sexual violence survivors.
• It specifically called for decisive and immediate action to prevent, criminalize, investigate, prosecute, and ensure accountability of those who engage in trafficking in persons.

The challenge is to close the gap between commitments on paper, at the global and regional levels, and compliance; to turn resolutions into solutions on the ground. Indeed, our response to trafficking arising out of the conflict in Ukraine may well be the litmus test and we cannot afford to fail. We cannot allow this humanitarian crisis to turn into a human trafficking crisis. Scarcity of data should in no way be taken to indicate a lack of criminal activity, especially for human trafficking, which often deprives its victims of voice and agency and reduces capacity for detection. As earlier migration crises have demonstrated, criminal groups or individuals do take advantage of large flows of people to exploit the most vulnerable in transit and destination countries.ÌýIt is critical to not lose sight of the crime itself. Too often, it goes undetected and undeterred. To a chilling extent, trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation remains an underground crime against a perceived underclass of victims. To address it, the issue must be visible, and on the radar of law enforcement officials.

The way we view the issue also matters, and I would like to mention three critical lenses:

• The first is a gender lens: Even if we dismantle the criminal networks and brothels, deter demand, and arrest the perpetrators, unless there are educational opportunities and viable economic alternatives, women and girls will always be at heightened risk. The one constant in human trafficking is poverty, and poverty has a female face. We will never break the vicious cycle of gender-based violence and exploitation without prioritizing the economic empowerment of women.
• The second consideration is that we cannot be conflict-blind: From Ukraine, to Myanmar, and elsewhere, we see that women and girls comprise the vast majority of civilians forcibly displaced by war, who flee with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, and the belongings they can carry by hand. Women’s physical security and economic security are indivisibly linked, with conflict dynamics compounding economic desperation. For instance, nearly half of all victims of trafficking in Cox’s Bazar since 2017 are Rohingya refugees, driven from Myanmar by military attacks, and left without economic or social safety nets.
• The third lens is that of the survivor: Survivor engagement is essential, as they know firsthand the tactics traffickers use, including online; the obstacles survivors face; and what works to support socioeconomic reintegration.

In the context of Ukraine, measures must be strengthened:

• to effectively prevent trafficking inside Ukraine as well as in countries of transit and destination;
• to enhance protection as well as prosecution;
• to adopt robust anti-trafficking legislation which is a precondition for effective intelligence gathering, intelligence sharing and prosecution;
• toÌýimproveÌýtheÌýresponsesÌýofÌýpolice, border authorities and other security personnel including training to address important deficits in the border management dimensions of the trafficking response;
• to conduct education and awareness raising campaigns targeting at-risk groups of people as well as buyers of sexual services;
• to address and sanction those who create the demand as well as platforms that facilitate and enable the exploitation and trafficking.

The war in Ukraine is far from the only situation in the world putting women and children at risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking in human beings.ÌýCould you walk us through your main areas of concern right now?

Conflict-related trafficking is not exclusive to the conflict in Ukraine. In the last decade, conflict-driven trafficking for the purpose of sexual violence gained particular visibility as a feature of the modus operandi of terrorist groups like Boko Haram and Daesh. In the Sahel, the trafficking of women and girls, both by armed groups and organized criminal groups and networks, is a well-documented reality. In Libya, an important hub in the migration route to Europe, patterns of conflict-related sexual violence, including sexual exploitation and forced prostitution continue to be perpetrated against women and girls. My main concerns are that:

• These groups continue to be active in Nigeria and in other parts of Africa, using the threat of, and proceeds from, trafficking to advance their strategic objectives and to finance their operations.
• To this day, most of these women and girls are yet to be recognized as victims of trafficking or, indeed, legitimate victims of conflict and terrorism, their rights are yet to be realized, and adequate assistance is yet to be provided.

Finally, a trend that is often overlooked is the heightened exposure of internally displaced and refugee women and children, with limited economic opportunities or resources having fled their home and homelands due to conflict, to trafficking and exploitation, leading to alarming patterns of predation in places as distinct as Cox’s Bazaar or Ethiopia.

ÌýAfter this interesting exchange, is there aÌýkey message in one sentence, or an important concept which you would want to highlight, that we should not lose track of in order to strengthen the work against trafficking in human beings for sexual purposes?Ìý

In short, it is inequality, poverty, and insecurity that forge the chains of human trafficking, and it will require a gender-responsive, survivor-centered approach to finally break them.