By Rasleen Uppal (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: April 11, 2012
Modern-day slavery, also known as human trafficking, occurs everywhere. According to Aaron Cohen in Slave Hunters, slavery didn’t disappear when it was abolished by law. “It more like fell off our radar,” he says, “went underground and changed its face.”
Human trafficking is a form of slavery practiced throughout the world today; many children, men and woman are globally “recruited” into this business through abduction, deception or abuse of power and transported to private locations for the purpose of exploitation, slavery and forced labour.
There are volunteers in many organizations making tremendous efforts to stop this insidious business, but nothing stops the trafficking. The one most powerful authority in every country must get more involved; the government needs to increase the amount of funding given to non-profit organizations, educate everyone on the issue (especially the poor) and make the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Protocol (UNODCP) stricter. By modifying these issues, governments can reduce the estimated rate of 1.2 million children being trafficked each year around the world by half.
As a role model for the sorts of changes that must take place, the government of Nebraska is offering support for those taking action to prevent trafficking. Amanda McGill of District 26 had developed the Nebraska Prostitution Intervention and Treatment Act in 2005, “but the government vetoed funding for it two years in a row.” The governor claimed that the funds should not be given to someone who has an illegal problem but instead to someone with a substance abuse problem.
Organizations need the money to get victims out of the trafficking businesses, put them into rehabilitation centres, and provide the education they need. Sometimes the only way to help the victims is to buy the victims out of the system, and even then that doesn’t necessarily save them.
Julia Ormond, the president of Asset Campaign, told the public about a testimony of a young girl.
“I remember in particular one girl … [who] wasn’t crying because she had been forced into the sex trade … She was crying because after her rehabilitation … she had nowhere else to go.”
Without the government providing more money, many victims will not receive the full support they need. They will eventually return to being victims of trafficking.
This is the reason that money is also needed to educate the poor on this topic. Many families cannot afford an education for their children and as a result are illiterate in what happens around them. Without being exposed or educated about those who have different intentions, the victims easily get themselves trapped in this business.
When a stranger says they can provide a job and a safe place to live, these victims are innocent and believe the stranger, not knowing their true intentions. With funds supporting education, especially in poorer regions, their understanding can mature and they will never fall into these traps.
Education is necessary in all regions; trafficking is not only occurring in third-world countries but also in developed countries and in North America. Benjamin Perrin, as associate law professor at UBC, explained that Ontario is one of the top destinations for foreign victim-trafficking in Canada. It basically comes down to the fact that if people don’t know about it, they will never notice it.
The American government has taken action against human trafficking, but it isn’t enough. They have created the UNODC protocol, a legal documentation that includes a three-tiered system ranking countries in how active they are in fighting trafficking. Countries that are placed in the third tier for more than three years get cut off from the non-humanitarian American aid.
Before being placed on the third tier, many countries are put on a watch list for two years, unless there is a special political waiver. In a recent Mizzima News article it stated that when the US created a report to protect trafficked victims, China was given this political waiver. In this case China has been granted this special waiver several times, and it has been on this watch list for seven years total.
Even though China’s population is largely affected by this issue, they keep denying help from the American government. This shows how little China is concerned about the trafficking and the effect on its people. By making the UN protocol stricter, and enforcing harsher penalties on countries that don’t comply, situations such as this will not occur and more countries will become motivated to get ranked as first tier.
Although trafficking in developed countries deals mostly with the import side of the business, the issue remains the same. In the world today there are more victims of modern-day slavery than there have ever been before. Completely stopping the trafficking would be a dream come true, but we all know that’s a long way away, if possible at all. However, through action, the government can at least lower the rates of people being trafficked.
This industry has profited by billions of dollars. As blogger Emily, on Just trying to navigate the world with elephant grace reported, “Not even Starbucks, Google and Nike combined make a profit close to the trafficking industry.”
But with the government investing more of their funds to prevent trafficking, and the UN making their protocols stricter, maybe these victims can be given their lost humanity back.
