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Nowadays, a stunning number of children, women, and men turned to be human trafficking victims for forced labor, sexual and other exploitation forms. The economic and human costs of this take the immense toll on the communities and individuals. The trafficking problem contradicts the development issues ranging from the prosperity and social inclusion to justice and the law. The modern criminal violence is named locusts because it affects the lives and dreams of billion people. It became usual to name it as the unique violence pestilence, and the punishing influence it has on the attempts to lift the global poor out of the poverty is entitled as the locust effect. The main point is that violence is a common issue for poor countries. In the life of poor, the violence has the power to destroy everything, and it cannot be stopped by the societal response. People that have to face the poverty are exposed to the violence. Hence, they are the most vulnerable part of the society that can easily become the violence victims. One of such violence forms is the human trafficking. However, it is crucial to notice that it is not only the problem of the poor parts of the society only but of the whole international community. Therefore, human trafficking is one of the most serious forms that is aimed at the child trafficking, sexual exploitation, and forced labor around the world.

Human Trafficking Definition and Data

Human trafficking is the process of people being recruited in their origin community and country and moved to the destination where they are being exploited for domestic servitude, prostitution, forced labor, and other exploitation forms. From the international perspective, the human trafficking definition is covered in the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children or Palermo Protocol that supplement the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Moreover, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as the secretariat of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Conventions against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols represent three main trafficking elements such as process, means, and purpose. According to the UNODC, the trafficking crime is defined through the combination of these three elements and not the individual components, though in some cases individual components constitute criminal offenses independently.

The global data showed that the number of enslaved or trafficked people varies greatly from six hundred thousand to two hundred million. Nonetheless, in reality, it is difficult to count such data, but still, it is suggested that millions of people are becoming trafficking victims annually around the world. The main problem is that the real numbers are not represented officially. The highest reported number of TIP victims worldwide was stated “49 105 in 2009, while the highest number of prosecutions in 2013 was 9640 and the highest number of convictions in human trafficking cases was 5776 in 2013”. Such difficulties with stating the exact numbers are explained by the challenges related to identifying and reaching trafficked victims and securing their cooperation.

Throughout the human trafficking process, such as recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring and, person receipt, traffickers play specific roles. From one perspective, traffickers can be transporters, recruiters, and other people that transfer victims in exploitative situations, making them people involved in related crimes. Every trafficker contributes to different stages in the human trafficking process in order to exploit the victims for economic or other goals.

Regional Trends of Human Trafficking

In the case of the Middle East and North Africa, the UAE, Qatar, and Israel were the found destination countries for victims that were trafficked from Central Asia and Eastern region. Human trafficking victims in the Middle East are also from East and South Asia just as Africa. A great number of victims in this region migrated voluntarily and found themselves in involuntary servitude or in debt bondage, and women as well as children are also trafficked by the family members in order to avoid difficult economic circumstances.

Most of the victims identified by the state authorities in North Africa and the Middle East are children and women. The most wide-spread human trafficking forms, in this case, are domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. Hence, “children are involved in prostitution, including child sex tourism, street begging, vending, domestic servitude, and forced marriage”. Hence, the human trafficking threat is highly serious in this region.

In addition, a high human trafficking percentage can be seen in the Sub-Sahara Africa region. Therefore, “Central and West Africa region victims are trafficked to other neighboring countries such as Togo, Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, Gabon, Cote D’Ivoire, and Benin”. In Southern Africa, the victims identified by the state authorities are from Zimbabwe, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, and Mozambique just as from the South, East and South-East Asia. In Central and West Africa, children are trafficked for such forced labor as camel jockeys, street begging, domestic servitude, and slavery, while in Southern Africa human trafficking forms involve domestic, slavery, and forced labor, and sexual exploitation.

In the case of Europe and Central Asia, it was found that almost all countries of this region are both destination and origin countries for intra-regional trafficking. This region is not the main trans-regional destination, but victim originating from it are identified in Central and Western Europe just as the neighboring Asian states. It was revealed that “most of the trafficking victims from this region are adult women, and sexual exploitation is the most common human trafficking form in this case”. Nonetheless, trafficking for forced labor accounts for over 1/3 of the whole number of victims identified by state authorities in Central and Western Europe as well as in Central Asia. Men and women are also exploited in the forced labor, particularly, textile, manufacturing, fishery, construction and agriculture industries, and domestic servitude. At the same time, “children are trafficked for the forced begging, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation”. Hence, this is another region with great problems regarding human trafficking.

In South Asia, from the human trafficking perspective, Bangladesh and Nepal are well-known victims trafficking origins, just as India is known as the destination country. Sexual exploitation is considered to be one of the most common forms of trafficking there. However, domestic servitude and forced labor trafficking are the problems that have equal significance due to their great scope in this region. Children are often trafficked for the forced labor in carpet-making factories, brick kilns, domestic service, forced marriage, forced begging, and sexual exploitation.

In case of the Pacific and East Asian countries, the situation with human trafficking flows is the most difficult because “this region has the widest range of the trans-regional trafficking between origin countries and the victims’ destination”. For instance, Thai victims can be found in the Middle East, Europe, and Sothern Africa, while Chinese victims are identified in Africa, the USA, the Middle East, and Europe. Intra-regional trafficking is also the main issue because victims from the East Asian countries mostly move to Malaysia, Japan, and Australia. The main human trafficking victims in this region are girls and women, and they are transferred for the forced marriage and the sexual exploitation. Besides, victims can be men because they willingly migrate for work and became subjects to the conditions of forced labor in service, plantation, manufacturing, fishing, construction, and agriculture sectors. Moreover, in this region, children are transferred for the forced begging, domestic servitude, and sexual exploitation very often.

Additionally, the human trafficking is noticed in Latin America and Caribbean. At the regional level, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Bolivia seem to be the origin countries for trafficking victims, while the Eastern Caribbean countries, Guatemala and Chile are mostly known as the destination countries. The Caribbean and Latin America victims regarding trans-region trafficking are often found in North America and Europe and with lesser extend in East Asia and the Middle East.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, human trafficking victims are mostly adult women and girls that are transferred for the domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. Both boys and men are less often becoming the trafficking victims, but the increasing number of males being trafficked is reported. Children, men, and women in this region are also transferred for forced labor in sweatshops, mining, logging, factories, agriculture, and forced begging. Child sex tourism is also present. This is the great problem in Nicaragua, Mexico, Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Brazil. Poor families often push their young daughters to provide sexual service to wealthy men in exchange for gifts, money, and school fees.

Human Trafficking Purposes

In general, human trafficking has several purposes. The first one is the sexual exploitation. While trafficking for forced labor is recently reaching more recognition on its severity, sexual human trafficking is still the most common exploitation form. There are several common issues of recruiting victims in the sex trafficking that involve the promise of a good job in the other country, the false marriage proposal that turned to be a bondage situation, being sold in the sex industry by boyfriends, husbands, and parents, and being kidnapped by traffickers. Therefore, recruiters are often well-known people for victims, including family friends, acquaintances, boyfriends, the friends of friends, neighbors, and friends.

The next purpose is the forced labor. Trafficking for forced labor is less often discovered and reported in comparison to the sexual trafficking. It is difficult to separate trafficked victims from the migrant laborers. These people are often occupied in the hidden location and, as the result, are less likely to be identified in comparison to the sexual trafficking victims. Along with girls and women, boys and adult men can be the trafficking victims as well. Forced labor trafficking victims are often recruited with the promise of work, mostly through the persona contacts, the Internet, billboards, television, and newspaper advertisement. Hence, the main problem is that the difficulties in recognition trafficking victims and smuggled migrants lead to the failure to provide the true victims with protection and support as their fundamental rights.

The other aim is the children trafficking. It was found that “from 30% to 50% of all trafficking victims are children under eighteen years old”. Not only are children often exploited in the sex industry, including pedophilias and pornography, but also they are trafficked to work in untangling fishing net, begging, picking cocoa, and sewing good sweatshops. Traffickers can lure children and their parents in leaving home with the better life promised. In some cases, desperate parents can sell their children to traffickers in order to reduce mouths to feed. Moreover, “children forced conscription into armed conflicts is the other trafficking form that enslaves children in the war zones and removes their freedom”. Nowadays, there are still tens of thousands of children that are used in weapon fights or sexually exploited by armed forces and groups in nineteen countries and territories around the world.

Ways to Prevent and Reduce Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is a global problem, and it is crucial to realize how to handle it. First of all, legislation implementation plays essential role. For instance, many states enforced the Trafficking Protocol and have adopted new laws to regulate the human trafficking at the national level. However, many states still not following this tendency and they need to integrate numerous declarations and agreements that would cover all exploitation forms. There is a big problem that some countries see the problem in women trafficking while the other states consider children trafficking to be the biggest challenge. Such attitude is wrong because the complex and wide covered approach and strategy are crucial for the effective reduction of the human trafficking.

Moreover, a positive movement can be seen in establishing different specialized institutions aimed to respond to the human trafficking cases. Sometimes, these institutions are defined in the anti-trafficking state legislation, while, in some cases, they are defined separately. Such institutions can seriously vary and involve specialized prosecutors to prosecute and detect traffickers, special law enforcement units, bodies to coordinate the service provision to individuals that have been trafficked, interagency and inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms or bodies, and national rapporteurs. Such activities are really helpful, and more countries have to establish similar agencies for additional help in handling the human trafficking problem.

At the same time, it is crucial to learn the previous experience and analyze which approaches were efficient and which not. The main point is that not all investments and attempts led to the expected results. Some initiative turned to be counterproductive for the very people they were intended to benefit, while some did not to work when organized or replicated in different places. Despite there was a significant number of systematic learning, a lot of issues still has to be learned about constituting great practice and assessing the conditions in which specific techniques can be replicated successfully.

Moreover, it is highly critical to work together as a team from the global perspective. Traffickers routinely move their victims from one state to another and, as the result, the efficient response to such crime demands multiple agency collaboration as well as the united practice of two or more countries. The progress can be seen in improving coordination between separate agencies within the last years at international, regional, and national levels.

In order to coordinate the national action plans or programs to combat the trafficking or anti-trafficking initiatives, states must have the institutional framework to provide the cooperation between agencies in the country. In the case of the designated coordinating body absence, the concerted action against trafficking can develop the coordination between agencies in the country less easy. Such different coordination mechanisms explain the different agencies’ responsibilities and roles. In particular, they are helpful in cases when the individual has been identified as the trafficking victim and required referral to different agencies for assistance.

In some countries, mechanisms for referring trafficking victims to the needed services also operate at the local level. This enables locally based agencies to coordinate their efforts to protect people that have already been trafficked with their prevention attempts and to concentrate prevention on communities, households, and individuals that share characteristics with those already trafficked, that is to say, characteristics that occur to increase the likelihood that they might be trafficked.

At the status level, countries have signed bilateral agreements on the law enforcement cooperation and mutual legal assistance. They specify how citizen from one state that has been trafficked to the other state should be treated and assisted in returning home. Such agreements usually put an accent on the human rights and respect importance in order to prevent trafficked people being imprisoned, to ensure that they are protected and kept safe while being repatriated, and to keep protecting them upon arrival in their own country. Some agreements refer to children and women, particularly, such as the one between Thailand and Cambodia, while others focus only on children like the agreement between Mali and Cote D’Ivoire.

Nonetheless, despite such bilateral agreements’ existence, a lot of people are exploited or trafficked from the states that are the bilateral agreements’ parties, and they have not been identified as the crime victims; , instead, they have been dealt with as irregular migrants by denying assistance and protection and are subjected to the deportation procedures. At the same time, in some other cases, for instance, in South-East Asia, long delays in official repatriation procedures led to the victims deciding not to identify themselves to return home faster by being deported.

At the regional level, such intergovernmental organizations as OSCE, ECOWAS, and ASEAN implemented declarations against trafficking and action-oriented plans for the coordination and cooperation improvement among member states’ attempts to reduce human trafficking. At the international and regional levels, different training materials and reference guidelines were published to train and inform the wide range of law enforcement, government and other professionals about what can be done to deal with the human trafficking. Nonetheless, relatively few materials were translated in the national languages and most of them are still in English. Therefore, the contents of such material are not guaranteed.

At the international level, the UN plays a great role in handling the human trafficking because it implies a significant number of programs to combat this threat. Moreover, the intergovernmental organization that does not belong to the US system plays a crucial role in providing services to trafficked people and organizing their voluntary repatriation. At both regional and international levels, it is quite unclear whether one of these agencies is taking coordination or the lead of the others actions, or if the regional or national body assumes that role. The main problem is that despite the theory, these bodies seem to be in competition in practice.

Trafficking is a multidimensional threat that raises the issues that many various bodies are equipped to tackle with at the national and international levels. Health, migration, gender, economic development, human rights, and law enforcement are all relevant, and many various intergovernmental agencies see themselves as leading actors in these cases. Similar coordination challenges appear in the case of child labor and attempts that were made to resolve them at two international conferences. Hence, the NGS observed in the child trafficking study that the lack of coordination between different organizations within the UN system was hampering their effort's effectiveness.

Conclusion

Overall, the modern world is suffering from many global threats and challenges. One of the most crucial issues is the high level of poverty that provides negative issues to people. Those that live in poverty are exposed to the violence, and the main idea is that no problem can be handled while people are not protected from it. One of the most serious and widespread violence forms is the human trafficking. Nonetheless, this threat is posed not only to the society parts experiencing poverty but to the whole international community. Human trafficking is the global problem that provokes human rights violation in each region around the world. The human trafficking has several purposes such as children trafficking, forced labor, and sexual exploitation. Many efforts directed on the human trafficking reduction and prevention are provided at local, regional, and international levels. Nonetheless, they have some weaknesses such as the lack of effective cooperation.

References

Haugen, G.A. (2014). The Locust effect: Why the end of poverty requires the end of violence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Makisaka, M. (2009). Human trafficking: A brief overview. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Timoshkina, N. (2014). Human trafficking: Assumptions, evidence, responses. International Journal of Arts & Sciences, 7(4), 409-421.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime. (2008). An introduction to human trafficking: Vulnerability, impact and action. New York, NY: United Nations.

1.Haugen Gary, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence 1, 10 (2014).

2.Makisaka Megan, Human Trafficking: A Brief Overview 1, 2 (2009).