(Institute/University)
Introduction
It can be indisputably averred that human trafficking is on track to become a major social and criminal issue in the United States. Commonly known as slavery, human trafficking is a criminal offense that involves “the exploitation of a person for the purpose of compelled labor or a commercial sex act.” With the adoption of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act, various personnel in the criminal justice system, from prosecutors and community leaders, have reported instances of slavery, debt enslavement, and being trafficked into the commercial sex work industry that have affected a wide range of American citizens-men, women, and even children-in the rural, urban, and even residential areas and are funneled into a host of industries in the United States. In assessing the data regarding human trafficking in the US, it has been found that children have a higher exposure level than the other victim categories in the country, particularly in the sex industry and to slavery. Though the definition in federal law defines child trafficking as “children forced to engage in a commercial sex act,” the definition have caveats- that there must be the presence of the use of force, deception, or the threat of force that will be used against the child (United States Department of Health and Human Services-Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, pp. 1-2).
Though human trafficking is commonly thought of as an international issue that only happens in poor developing nations, the crime of trafficking children for commercial sex work is rapidly becoming prevalent in the United States. Even though the issue has drawn attention from both sides of the political aisle, there are substantive challenges that face authorities in countering sex trafficking of children in the United States. One is the extreme dearth of credible information of child trafficking in the United States, specifically in the areas of the character and the magnitude of sex trafficking of children in the country. Two, though there has been an evolution in the manner that sex trafficking victims are depicted by American society, there is still a great deal of work to be done to frame the issue as a human trafficking of children rather than the prevailing perception of juvenile prostitution. Third, disruptions and breakdowns of overlying agency functions and social service structures heavily add to the continued scamming of children at risk for sex trafficking and contributes to missed opportunities to establish the identity of the victims of sex trafficking and provide the trafficked children a secure way out of their situation. Each of these situations strengthens and fuels the others (Parsons, Cray, Vafa, Saar, 2014).
Existing data sets are narrowly set on trafficking for forced sexual work as the research initiatives are biased in this area even though there are new research literatures on the subject. In this light, there is a need to widen the research base to include other forms of trafficking for slave labor and the need to include child begging into the research on child trafficking. It must also be proffered that given the inclination of many studies towards women and children; this will result in a deficiency in studies for other trafficking issues. It is also evinced that there is a gender gap with relation to the victims of trafficking (International Organization for Migration p. 8).
Contemporary data shows that child trafficking victims were likely to have interacted with US child care systems in the past. However, the tragedy here is that the US government has not taken any substantive steps to address this link. Under the ICCPR, specifically under Articles 8 and 24 of the accord, to build specialized mechanisms to defend children from human trafficking and forced labor; nonetheless, American government officials have failed in a number of areas. One, the government has failed in its duty to safeguard the well-being of the child that are currently in the child welfare system that are exposed to the threat of child trafficking and in meeting the distinct needs of trafficking victims who are then placed in child social services after these are rescued.
Each year, the Department of Justice reported that children in the child welfare system face an increased threat of becoming trafficked children in the US, with the juveniles in the foster system. In one state report, it noted that if the child has a history of being involved in the foster care system heightens the risk for children to be trafficked. It was also mentioned that child sex traffickers target group shelters and homes, looking to attract the most susceptible of the lot. Though studies done on a state level posits a strong link between the two factors, American government policy makers do not collate national data on the link between the exposure of the child to the child welfare system and child sex trafficking; this places an additional limitation on efforts in trying to accurately gauge the scope and magnitude of the problem. Furthermore, the American child welfare system does not have the necessary resources and equipping needed to sufficiently address the needs of the trafficked children.
In a research done by Loyola University in 2011, child welfare agencies in the country are ill-prepared to counter child trafficking even with the operation of laws obligating these agencies to address the needs of the trafficked children. Since many of the agencies are ill-equipped and lack the necessary protocols, policies and practices in this area, the victims are often deprived of critical support services opening the possibility that the child will be again trafficked and remain vulnerable to other threats and abuse (Santa Clara Law, 2016, p. 3).
Owing to the covert nature of the crime of human trafficking, and combined with the exclusionary environments of the victims, credible statistics on the instance of human trafficking is difficult to obtain. Moreover, there are digressions as to the veracity of the existing data sets owing to there are digressions as to the very definition of sex trafficking between anti-human trafficking groups and analysts. These digressions are found in six areas. One, sex trading is covert in operation, with only a small number of human traffickers arrested and tried in court. Two, victims of human trafficking are not located in one area, moving from one place to another and thus hard to account for and codify; third, law enforcement organizations lack an operational, definitive comprehension of what actually comprises “trafficking.” Fourth, state-sanctioned extortion in “source countries” prevent the collation of accurate disclosure of victims; fifth, domestic officials cannot identify sex trafficking instances, and lastly, governments restrict information flows regarding the full scope of sex trafficking in their countries to ‘save political face (Schauer, Wheaton, 2006, p. 4).
In the estimation of the International Labor Organization (ILO), it is believed that approximately 12 million are engaged in slavery, compelled child labor, and in the sex grade at any given time. Other statistics place the number of human trafficking victims at 4 to 27 million. In addition, the US State Department regularly researches on the number of trafficked individuals in the world at more than 800,000 to 900,000 people: in the United States, it is believed that between 14,500 to 17,500 people internally ‘traded.’ These figures, though widely cited, are also being challenged by a number of local and international agencies, such the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the IOM. The GAO challenged these statistics on the basis that the approaches used by the government are inherently weak. Among the weaknesses cited were restrictions on being able to reproduce similar statistics owing to possibly undependable numbers that are ill-suited for use over time. Furthermore, the yearly Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report evinces highly irregular fluctuations in government issued human trafficking reports in the United States (McGaha, Evans, 2011, pp. 10-11).
Though the US government acknowledges the mandate set before it by the ICCPR, particularly Article 50 in developing programs and policies ‘appropriate to the federal structure’ with the objective of requiring local and state authorities to establish programs to address child trafficking in the United States, the government has blundered in collaborating anti-trafficking efforts with Federal, state and local agencies. The absence of collaboration efforts has greatly diminished the effectiveness of these agencies in the effort against human trafficking. Given this situation, human traffickers have been allowed to exploit the defenseless state of children by constantly moving the victims to numerous locations in order to avoid police investigations.
Aside from these assertions, law enforcement agencies at the local level that serve the needs of trafficking victims disclose an acute shortage in sustained, adequate funding in the drive against human trafficking. This lack of funding has proven to be a major hindrance in the fight against human trafficking and being able to rehabilitate the victims. At present, American federal funding is only given to a small number of local counter-trafficking agencies spread across the United States; this equates to one task force per jurisdiction. For the local police, these token allocations are inadequate for the departments’ recruitment efforts to increase the number of personnel in their department. Hence, the department will be compelled to reassign personnel from patrol and crime investigation functions and then redirect these to counter-trafficking activities.
Moreover, law enforcers at the local and state level agree that Federal law enforcement organizations must be able to develop and operate wide ranging policies that will standardize equipping programs for counter-trafficking programs that will get involved with possible trafficked individuals, inclusive of personnel in the areas of immigration, labor, and child social services. As seen earlier, child welfare services are ill-equipped to ascertain and effectively identify victims of human trafficking; recent studies also proffer that law enforcement agencies and personnel do not have the right training on how to effectively evaluate cases of human trafficking (Santa Clara Law, 2016, p. 4).
In this light, it is proffered that there is a need for the development of extensive legislation that will homogenize the language for trafficking cases. The issue lies in the context on the urgency that the legislation must be enacted and the fervency of the response attendant to the presentation. Before the passage of the TVPA, Congress in 1999 learned of the abhorrent practice that is human trafficking with the testimonies of the victims as well as a number of traffickers. In the wake of the hearings, lawmakers asked for the pertinent data to get a better grasp on the magnitude of the problem of human trafficking in the country. The figures given at the time were extremely disturbing; during the time of the hearings, it was evinced that there were 50,000 slaves in the United States and approximately 700,000 trafficked in various countries. It was on these premises that Congress adopted the 2000 TVPA.
Though there have been fluctuations in that statistics over time, this is not to be interpreted as a decrease in the instances of human trafficking in the United States. Rather, the drop in the statistics s only indicative of a shift in the methodology engaged by agencies to arrive at these projections. The method used by the State Department, called the “Markov Chain Monte Carlo,” is often engaged in medical polls and in complicated research collation instances. The approach displaces unidentified and lost data by engaging possible values for unrecognized data. Simply put, the mew method fills in the area where no data is present. In addition, the new data underwent another examination method, a “Bayesian” analysis, which incorporates information from previous human trafficking surveys; if such surveys are not available, academic or peer-reviewed surveys are used.
However, given the clandestine nature of the act, getting credible data on the crime of human trafficking is extremely difficult to gage. Victims can be in extremely delicate or hazardous conditions and may be hesitant or even resistant to give information or to look for assistance. What is worse, the authorities can be in conspiracy with the traffickers and if these are discovered in giving information to aid organizations, these are repeatedly threatened with incarceration, deportation, and even torture. Identification and other travel documents are often confiscated by the human traffickers as a supplementary measure to detain their victims. Engendering fear in the authorities is one of the more common mechanisms human traffickers use in keeping their victims ‘under their thumbs (McGaha, Evans, 2011, p. 5).
Given that the area of servicing the needs of trafficking victims are still in the period of adjustment, it is imperative that regulation and assessment research must be a critical part of all assistance policies and programs, whether in the public or private sector. Well-constructed regulation and assessment research initiatives, especially when undertaken by external parties, can help in establishing practical policies and “best practice” methodologies as well as evaluate the efficacy of other programs on the subject. The United States has allocated significant amounts of funds to implement “Rescue and Restore” programs across the world; however, there have been no follow-up practices to monitor the victims that have been returned to their native lands. It is important to address this lack of homogenized and integral information, as the lack of such knowledge can contribute to the strengthening rather than the weakening of the factors that contribute to human trafficking (IOM, p. 169).
References
International Organization for Migration “Human trafficking: new directions for research” Retrieved 23 July 2016 from <https://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/microsites/IDM/workshops/ensuring_protection_070909/human_trafficking_new_directions_for_research.pdf
McGaha, J, E., Evans, A (2011) “Where are the victims? The credibility gap in human trafficking research” Retrieved 23 July 2016 from <https://maggiemcneill.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/the-credibility-gap-in-human-trafficking-research.pdf
Parsons, C., Cray, A., Saar, M., and Vafa, Y. (2014) “3 key challenges in combating the sex trafficking of minors in the United States” Retrieved 23 July 2016 from <https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/report/2014/04/08/87293/3-key-challenges-in-combating-the-sex-trafficking-of-minors-in-the-united-states/
Santa Clara Law (2016) “Troubling gaps in the US response to human trafficking under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” Retrieved 23 July 2016 from <http://law.scu.edu/wp-content/uploads/130823_-Santa-Clara-ICCPR-Hum-Traff-Shadow-Rpt_FINAL.pdf
Schauer, E., J., Wheaton, E.M. (2006) “Sex trafficking in the United States: a literature review” Criminal Justice Review Volume 31 pp. 146-169 <http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_research-brief_human-trafficking.pdf
United States Department of Health and Human Services-Administration for Children, Youth, and Families “Guidance to states and services on addressing human trafficking of children and youth in the United States” Retrieved 23 July 2016 from <https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/acyf_human_trafficking_guidance.pdf
