TRAFFICKING IN HUMAN PERSONS
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| | Trafficking in people, as 21st century slavery is called, has become a global business that affects people of every race, age and sex. In essence, trafficking is the use of force and/or deception to transfer individuals to situations of severe exploitation.
Figures for those trafficked each year into Europe and the USA are estimated in hundreds of thousands though the real extent is impossible to know. The trade reaps enormous profits for traffickers and their intermediaries, thought to be in the region of $5 – 8 billion annually. No continent, and hardly any country in the world, is immune.
Trafficking is almost always a form of organised crime with traffickers belonging to global criminal networks, though they can also operate within small-scale informal networks. Men, women and children are trafficked for forced or bonded labour in factories, farms or construction sites, for forced marriage and sexual exploitation.
There is ample recorded evidence to indicate that the methods of recruitment and entrapment are similar world-wide. Vulnerable people, with little prospect of employment at home, answer advertisements offering lucrative employment abroad for low-skilled jobs. They can also be approached by a friend, or a friend of a friend.
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Once in the destination country they discover the promised job does not exist. Their documents are confiscated and they are forced to work in slave-like conditions. Most women and girls find themselves trapped into prostitution.
TIP remains a crime about which large portions of the population are ignorant, or only vaguely aware. This is understandable to a certain extent because it is such a hidden, underground criminal activity and very hard to detect. We do not see the evidence on the streets as we do with drugs and gun crime.
When apprehended without documents – passports or work permits – trafficked people are likely to be treated as illegal immigrants and subject to imprisonment or deportation or both. Those who survive the awful experience of being treated as mere commodities to be bought and sold are always deeply traumatised. They feel degraded and humiliated; they have lost all sense of self worth and often feel ashamed and guilty, blaming themselves for what has happened to them. They need time and space, as well as physical and psychological care to be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society.
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Strategies for combating trafficking:
Most organisations working to eliminate human trafficking have a threefold aim: prevention, protection and prosecution. They try to achieve this in largely similar ways.
To see how this is tackled we could usefully look at the strategic plan of a specific organisation. APT, (‘Act to Prevent Trafficking’), is a group of men and women belonging to Religious Congregations or Missionary Societies all of which are members of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) and the Irish Missionary Union (IMU). They enjoy the support of the leadership of both organisations.
APT was established because its members were seriously concerned about the growing problem of the trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation. They were convinced that members of religious communities and missionary societies must always be at the cutting edge, taking up issues that the State and civil society are not yet confronting.
They came together to explore ways of working together to prevent this great evil. Because of their international contacts through their members in every part of the world they are ideally placed to know what is taking place on the ground, particularly in countries of origin. They can inform, alert, and provide emergency help when required.
They formulated a vision:
‘Our vision is that of a world in which all persons are respected, valued and given the dignity which is theirs by right, a world where no one seeks to exploit or to enslave another for the purposes of sexual gratification or financial gain.’
To achieve the aim of “prevention, protection and prosecution”, which form a single interconnected goal, APT has three main thrusts: awareness raising, legislation and networking.
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