Human Trafficking
Perpetrators of human trafficking crimes and the reasons for human trafficking
Traffickers entice and trap individuals into forced labor and sex trafficking by manipulating and taking advantage of their helplessness. Human traffickers recruit, transport, harbor, acquire and take advantage of victims-regularly utilizing lies, force, threats and other psychological duress. Perpetrators of these crimes do not fit a sole stereotype. They embody every ethnic, social and cultural group. Some of the perpetrators are associated with local gangs while others belong to bigger countrywide gangs and criminal gangs, and some are not affiliated to any one group (Stoyanova, 2017). Pimps, family members, owners of small businesses, employers of domestic servants, labor brokers, and owners of big factories have also been found guilty of human trafficking. Their general thread is a readiness to take advantage of other people for profit. Human traffickers can also be women-actually, most women run established rings throughout the country.
Human trafficking can be attributed to various reasons. One reason is demand for cheap labor. The service industry, especially kitchens and restaurants, are regular exploiters of human trafficking. There is a high demand for inexpensive agricultural and domestic labor (Shin, 2017). At the start, workers are usually promised a secure work space and a constant salary, only to realize later they are paid less than minimum wage and overworked. Poverty is also a contributor of human trafficking. Poverty can influence people to become traffickers; it can prompt parents to sell their children or other members of their family into slavery. This is the reason why traffickers target poor people, and pretend to offer them a way to earn cash when, in the real sense, they will actually not benefit from anything but will end up being treated as slaves.
Human trafficking is practiced because it generates huge profit. According to Shin (2017) the industry of human trafficking generates a profit of approximately 150 billion dollars annually. Two-thirds of the profit is generated from profitable sexual exploitation, whereas the remainder comes from coerced economic exploitation like agriculture and domestic work. Human trafficking is the fastest-growing and 2nd biggest criminal industry in the globe, after drug trafficking. Conflict and natural disasters cause human trafficking as well. Conflict and natural disasters can cause economic unsteadiness and lack of human rights, providing traffickers with an avenue to exploit vulnerable groups of people (Stoyanova, 2017). In regions affected by conflict and wars, some military groups or rebels will utilize child soldiers and keep sex slaves. In addition, conflict and disasters can cause people to migrate to safer areas and they become more susceptible to traffickers, particularly if they are looking for work or paying smugglers to get to where they want to go.
The victims of human trafficking
Victims of human trafficking can be adults or children, men or women, foreign citizens or U.S. nationals. Whereas victims share the characteristic of susceptibility, they have varied socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, diverse education levels, and may be documented or undocumented. According to the U.S. law, human trafficking victims can be divided into 3 populations, i.e., i) children aged below 18 years introduced to money-making sex, ii) adults aged 18 years and above introduced into profit-making sex via force or fraud and iii) children and adults induced to engage in labor or services via force or labor.
Whereas human trafficking spans all demographics, there are a number of situations or susceptibilities that lead to a higher vulnerability to victimization and human trafficking. Homeless and runaway youth, as well as victims of war, domestic violence, sexual assault or social discrimination are regularly targeted by traffickers. Foreigners who have paid considerable recruitment and travel charges normally become highly indebted to traffickers or other agents. Traffickers usually control and manipulate these people by taking advantage the non-portability of numerous work visas and the victims’ lack of familiarity with the environments, fluency of language, laws and rights, and cultural comprehension.
Current employed methods to combat human trafficking in the United States, and examples to support findings
The United States has formulated various strategies to combat human trafficking in the country. For instance, the federal government has developed a policy against human trafficking. It has taken a solid position against human trafficking within the United States borders and beyond. At the domestic level, human trafficking is considered a federal crime under Title 18 of the U.S. Code. According to Section 1584, it is a crime to coerce an individual to work against his/her will or to sell an individual into a condition of unintentional servitude (Chisolm-Straker & Stoklosa, 2017). Similarly, Section 1581 makes it unlawful to coerce an individual to work via “debt servitude.” The 13th Amendment forbids human trafficking as it pertains to unwilling servitude and slavery. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration, the United States Marshal Service, and the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division are at the forefront of enforcing the federal laws on human trafficking.
Another strategy pertains to human trafficking hotline. The federal government has established a National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline. The hotline mainly provides answers to human trafficking queries and responds to crises in up to one hundred and seventy languages and offers materials in more than twenty languages. Since the year 2007, the hotline has gotten more than 60,000 calls (Chisolm-Straker & Stoklosa, 2017). Those who call encompass human trafficking victims seeking services and people and organizations seeking information with regards to human trafficking. So far more that 25 states have authorized particular kinds of businesses to post a hotline. Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Tennessee have their own hotline whereas the others utilize the national hotline.
Another strategy relates to the formulation of safe harbor laws by the U.S. government. These laws safeguards victims of human trafficking from lawful prosecution of crimes committed while under the trafficker’s influence and offer services like housing and counseling and safeguard them from their exploiters. The federal Stop Exploitation Through Trafficking Act encourages states across the country to pass safe harbor laws. The Act even elevated the National Human Trafficking Hotline’s status. Training and outreach is also part of the strategy used to combat human trafficking. The Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) is part of the Justice Department Law that seeks to offer broad training and guidance to Helpant U.S. Attorneys and agents across the nation and the globe who are working cases that relate to child sexual exploitation. For instance, the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit and CEOS provide broad, country-wide in-person training via their participation in national conferences.
Determining if these tactics to combat trafficking are effective and recommendations for improvements where necessary
The above mentioned tactics have been effective in combating human trafficking in the United States. With regards to the federal government policy in fighting the vice, the policy has driven the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to gear its efforts towards fighting against human trafficking. For instance, the department has called on many components to contribute to the fight against this crime, and the department’s efforts encompass investigating and prosecuting perpetrators of these crimes, providing services to victims, and offering support for state, cultural, and local authorities as well as external stakeholders. The various elements that the department works with include the HTPU, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices (USAOs), the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), and the Department’s Collaboration with Survivors. Despite the great strides, the government needs to increase public awareness regarding the human trafficking laws for effective criminal prosecutions and victim services.
The human trafficking hotline has also been an effective tactic. Cases of reported human trafficking continue to go up annually, with the most considerable increase in the just concluded year. In 2017, 8,040 cases were reported to the hotlines, which encompass 7,570 cases to the National Human Trafficking Hotline from within the United States and 300 reported cases from abroad. This statistic compares to 5,960 reported cases in 2016. Chisolm-Straker & Stoklosa, (2017) attribute this rise to larger awareness of human trafficking and the National Hotline, particularly as more individuals become aware of its efficiency in linking individuals to a wide range of services.
The CEOS have been effective in tackling human trafficking as well. For instance, through the training and outreach initiative, CEOS have helped to formulate and host numerous courses on “investigating and prosecuting the prostitution of children” and Helped in formulating and sponsoring the Project Safe Childhood Advanced Online Child Exploitation Seminars which have been attended by more than eighty Helpant U.S. Attorneys. Safe harbor laws have been ineffective in combating human trafficking and this is attributable to the fact that they are inadequately funded (Horwich, 2018). Therefore, there is the need for the federal government to allocate more funding for the effective implementation of the laws.
A plan for early detection and proactive response to human trafficking in the United States
The plan will entail raising public awareness on the existence of human trafficking within communities, the behavioral and psychological clues they can look out for to identify the victims of human trafficking, and the various channels they can use to report such cases. Victims normally develop general feelings of shame, helplessness and humiliation, suffer from shock, become drug addicts as a way of coping, become detached and depressed, and suffer from phobias and panic attacks among others (Hopper, 2017). This way, the public is able to refer these cases promptly to the necessary agencies for action to be taken to help victims and apprehend perpetrators. In particular, focus will be put in raising awareness within schools, civic and cultural groups, local faith-based groups, migrant farm worker groups, homeless organizations, sexual assault and domestic violence advocates as well as utility workers, and truck drivers among others.
This plan will also leverage the use of technology in combating human trafficking by establishing a web presence. This will be attained by creating a task force Website which will be a source of information to the aforementioned psychological and behavioral clues for human trafficking and to providing a reporting mechanism for the public who are suspicious that a certain person is a human trafficking victim or are suspicious that particular activities they observe could be related to human trafficking but are reluctant to contact authorities (Rabbany, Bayani & Dubrawski, 2018). The site will include links and lists to all taskforce member organizations and agencies.
References
Chisolm-Straker, M., & Stoklosa, H. (2017). Human Trafficking Is a Public Health Issue: A
Paradigm Expansion in the United States. Springer.
Hopper, E. K. (2017). Trauma-informed psychological assessment of human trafficking
survivors. Women & Therapy, 40(1-2), 12-30.
Horwich, A. (2018). A Call for the SEC to Adopt More Safe Harbors that Limit the Reach of
Rule 10b-5. Business Lawyer, 74(1).
Rabbany, R., Bayani, D., & Dubrawski, A. (2018). Active search of connections for case
building and combating human trafficking. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (pp. 2120-2129). ACM.
Shin, Y. J. (2017). A Transnational Human Rights Approach to Human Trafficking:
Empowering the Powerless. Leiden, Netherlands: BRILL.
Stoyanova, V. (2017). Human Trafficking and Slavery Reconsidered: Conceptual Limits and
States’ Positive Obligations in European Law. Cambridge University Press.
