The issue of human trafficking has become one of the most disturbing for our society. It is the number one concern for the institutions that try to find all possible means of human rights protection. Many consider it as modern-day slavery and they are right. How do people become the victims of such a horrible cause? There are numerous reasons. The most “popular” ones that we can hear about are people being kidnapped, trapped, chained up and beaten almost to death in order to make them work hard, do jobs, which are incompatible with life. Some people are being promised better lives, somewhere in the countries where only happy future and lots of easy money awaits for them. Those “believers” usually have nothing to hold on to. It is not that much difficult to assure them that it is their last chance to get a life they have always dreamt of. As a rule, those “lucky” ones are too young or too lost in life. They have no parents or families of their own, no formal education, no financial sources to sustain themselves. Therefore, it takes no efforts to persuade them. Moreover, when they disappear, no one will care and the crime will stay silent.
Why has the issue of human trafficking occurred in the first place? The answer is obvious and shocking – it is a billion dollar business. In fact, it is hard to name the exact price of it, but the approximate number gets closer to $30 billion. In the United States a pimp (person, who owns sex slaves and finds business for them) can make as much as $250,000 per year from a single trafficked sex slave (“Human Trafficking” Courtney Farrell). However, this profit can be made only in sex industry. If you take slaves in the household, they do not give that much profit, however, the money, that would have to be spent on their wages, are still saved in the thick pockets of slave holders. Official statistics stay vague, but the numbers draw horror to our minds. According to the United Nations more than 4 million people are trafficked every year. The US Department of State claims that 14,500 to 17,500 individuals are sneaked on the US territory from other countries (“Human Trafficking” Kathryn Cullen-DuPont).
Unfortunately, most of us still have single-sided perception of human trafficking. We may be informed about people being kidnapped or tricked and sent far away from their homes. Though the forms of human trafficking are in fact much more broad than we think. Debt slavery, involuntary servitude, domestic servitude, kids and babies for sale, women trafficking, child trafficking, etc.; these are represented practically in every country of the world, which only confirms the frightening fact that the crime goes international.
In order to understand the whole scope of the issue, each form of it needs to be investigated. Let us begin with debt slavery. Sometimes you may hear how it is called bonded labor. When a person borrows quite a big amount of money, there is usually a deal or so called “bond” made – in case the borrower cannot repay the money, he has to work for the lender until the debt is paid off. Usually the person works for quite a long time and all the salary is taken away. What the person has to know is that he or she still owes the money. In the end, no matter how long you work, the debt does not decrease and there is no chance for the person to repay the whole amount. You may wonder how this is possible that the person cannot calculate the amount she owes, the salary she gets and the amount she needs to pay off. The answer is dramatically simple – a lot of these people have no formal education, they do not know math, so they are forced to believe their debt is so big, they need to work as long as possible in order to pay it off. People may work for the landowner for so long that they just settle their lives at their working site, marry and raise their children while continuing to work. Children of the laborers rarely have a chance to go to school. Harsh reality is in the fact that some children begin to work starting the age of 4 years old, so that they can contribute to paying off the debt of their parents. Consequently, there is no wonder that after their parents die, they inherit family debts. The unfortunate irony is that while laborer children inherit the debts, their employers also pass their business from father to son. So it may become a never ending chain.
This kind of debt slavery used to exist in quite many countries of the world, especially South Asia and Africa. Nowadays, it is against the law in the US, but occasionally still occurs in Nepal, India and Pakistan. The geography of the issue may be explained by the fact that these countries mainly deal with great poverty and desperation. Moreover, developing countries have much less means of fighting the issue.
Thus we may name some examples of law regulations passed in order to save people from debt bondage in those countries. In 1992 Pakistan passed the Bonded Labor System Act, making the practice of debt slavery illegal. Follow-up legislation in 1995 - the Bonded System Abolition Rules – established committees to find, rescue and rehabilitate bonded laborers (“Human Trafficking” Courtney Farrell). Also there is the Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance, which has outlined punishment for the traffickers, involved in the exploitation of people under the age of 18. The punishment was set to 7-14 years in prison.
The involuntary servitude is also considered as human trafficking. While kidnapped or simply tricked and taken out of country somewhere abroad, people are forced to do work against their will. But this is the case, when people do what they are told as they are threatened to be hurt by the trafficker physically. Who becomes the victim of the involuntary servitude? Usually, those are poor people, with no job and little food. They come to a new country illegally. And that practically gives freedom to the traffickers to do whatever they want. This is being practiced with many Mexican and Asian immigrants in the United States. What else is special about involuntary servitude as a type of human trafficking is that it involves very hard work, often quite dangerous. If the laborer refuses to do it he or she is threatened to be sent away to the home country. The reason why these people still continue to work and do not leave the country where they have been brought to is that usually they leave starving families back in their home countries. As they want to earn some money and send back to their families they decide to continue to work no matter what.
There is also another special type of involuntary servitude – the domestic servitude. Domestic servants are often hidden in the house of the trafficker to cook, clean the house, etc. The survivors tell that usually they are promised that by doing this job they will earn a lot of money or they will be given a chance to go to school. Obviously, that appears to be a lie, but it is discovered too late, unfortunately. Many times victims working as domestic servants are not allowed to leave the house. But even when they can go out, they might speak different language than people on the streets so they cannot tell anyone that they are being abused (“Human Trafficking” Joyce Hart).
Kids and babies for sale. This might sound as the most terrifying type of human trafficking. Babies and kids are usually sold, and there is a horror in the fact, by their own parents. It is confirmed by many journalist investigations, the UNICEF and the UNO researches, inspectors and police that some parents give birth to children so that they can sell them. Many documental movies are filmed in order to show this horror coming to life. And it is hard to believe that such things are still happening somewhere in the world right now. The “hot spots” where all the business takes place are Mali, Nigeria, Togo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Gabon and Benin and Cameroon. Babies, even newborns (they are ranked the highest price), are sneaked far away from their home countries. The main purpose of this trade is the race for healthy organs, stem cells or adoption.
Not only babies are sold in the “hot spots” of the business. Starting the age of 2 kids are being trafficked mainly as the source of cheap labor, for domestic work, farming but also for sexual exploitation. Nearly 90 percent of these trafficked domestic workers are girls (“Human Trafficking Movie Project”). The problem is reaching its point of no return as according to some calculations 1.2 million children are trafficked each year. This amount is enormous and it is growing. Child trafficking is lucrative and linked with criminal activity and corruption. It is often hidden and hard to address. Trafficking always violates the child’s right to grow up in a family environment. In addition, children who have been trafficked face a range of dangers, including violence and sexual abuse. Trafficked children are even arrested and detained as illegal aliens (“Human Trafficking Movie Project”).
The most terrifying and unbelievably cruel type of child trafficking is the one for sexual exploitation. Children are very vulnerable to this type of exploitation. Some sources claim that many kids get HIV/AIDS in 95% of cases. There is an untrue belief in the countries of Africa and South Asia that HIV/AIDS can be cured if you have sex with a virgin. As a matter of fact, kids get infected and then left aside like a useless product. What adds to the expansion of child trafficking is also child pornography on the Internet. A lot of websites also offer sex tourism targeting children. Statistics of the cause are quite sad and shocking. In the Mekong sub-region of Southeast Asia up to 35% of all sex slaves are those who have not reached 18 years old. Their age is usually from 12 to 17 years old. According to the reports of Mexico’s social service agency more than 16,000 kids are used for prostitution with tourist destinations being among those areas with the highest number (“Human Trafficking Movie Project”). There is also such information that in Lithuania up to 50% of prostitutes are children. There have been some loud cases when children from orphanages, usually not more than 10 to 12 years old, have been asked to make pornographic movies.
Despite the high demand for children and babies, women trafficking stays the most profitable type of “business”. It also has other numerous names “prostitution”, “sex trafficking”, “sex slavery” and so on. Russian and Eastern European women were trafficked into prostitution in the pre-revolutionary period in Argentina and China. However, until the late 1980s, the trafficking of women was primarily an Asian phenomenon (“Human trafficking: a global perspective” Louise Shelley). The whole concept of the case is that the traffickers make money every time their victims have sex. “Price” is set for an hour or so. That is also a well-known fact that victims are usually forced to have sex many times a day. The truth is horrifying as in some spots of sex slavery, especially India, there are places where women are exploited 10 to 40 times a night! The victim can keep no more than 20 rupees (which is less than 50 cents) per encounter. The Madam, usually the name for the manager of the brothel, takes the biggest amount of the money paid to a prostitute. Afterwards she pays to landlord, pimps and her “protectors”. Not only in India but also in the countries of former Soviet Union the “protectors” are often found among authorities and police. Government corruption is one of the driving factors behind the burgeoning trade in human beings (“Human Trafficking Movie Project”).
Many of us may wonder how women get trafficked if the issue is exposed and everyone is well informed about some special types of common “fantastic” jobs abroad that may be a hidden slavery in fact. Traffickers have their own genuine tricks though and those are being improved more and more. For instance, a very popular way is pretended affection. There is a big variety of virtual dating web-sites where women are promised to find their true love and wealthy husband from somewhere abroad. After flirting with the victim online the traffickers use their “lover boy approach” in reality as they meet the girl in person and charm her into trusting them. The girl may believe that she is in a loving relationship but finds out otherwise when the boyfriend sells her for prostitution (“Human Trafficking” Courtney Farrell).
After examining the most frightening forms of human trafficking we might be wondering how that is possible that having all human right protecting organizations all over the world, constitutions which grant human right protection, a well developed infrastructure of trafficker-hunting police, we still have the issue expanding more and more with new forms of it being created. Even though human rights concerns may have provided some cover for collective action, it is the sovereignty and country security issues surrounding trafficking which makes it hard sometimes to intrude into the matter even for the global level organization or regulation (“Human Trafficking” Maggy Lee). However, the UNO is working hard on improving the situation. The UN Human Rights Committee has affirmed that the rights set forth in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights apply to everyone, irrespective of reciprocity, and irrespective of his or her nationality or statelessness. Thus, the general rule is that each one of the rights of the Covenant must be guaranteed without discrimination between citizens and aliens (“The international law of human trafficking” Anne T. Gallagher)
Good news exist though. The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially women and children, was adopted by the United Nations in December 2003. The US Trafficking Victims Protection Act, first enacted in 2000, was reauthorized in December 2008. Moreover, not only the US but all the countries of the world enact complex anti-trafficking laws which, hopefully, will act as necessary weapon to eliminate the issue.
Works Cited
Farrell, C. (2011) Human Trafficking. Juvenile Literature. Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.
Joyce, H. (2009) Human Trafficking. First Edition. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.
Lee, M. (2007) Human Trafficking. Willan Publishing
Cullen-DuPont, K. (2009). Human trafficking. New York, NY: Facts on File.
Human Trafficking Movie Project Child Trafficking-Human Trafficking of children. Web. 3 July 2013.
Shelley, L. I. (2010). Human trafficking: a global perspective. Cambridge, [UK: Cambridge University Press.
Gallagher, A. T. (2010). The international law of human trafficking. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Aronowitz, A. A. (2009). Human trafficking, human misery the global trade in human beings. Westport, Conn.: Praeger
