Just what is human trafficking?

Although the act of human trafficking has been going on for decades, it has only been a couple of years (2000) since the United Nations Trafficking Protocol (the Palermo Protocol of 2000, a global legal agreement attached to the US) was established containing the initial internationally agreed upon definition of human trafficking with the understanding that it is the force, fraud, and coercion in one person to another that defines the essence of the crime.

People often tell me that they think human trafficking is moving people from one country to the next, and while that is clearly a part of what the act is really, the heart of the problem is the mental and emotional movement of a person by another. The U.S. Trafficking innocentsatrisk.org of 2000 (TVPA) (created due to the UN Protocol) leaves out what things to me is the most significant aspect of the definition and therefore helps it be more challenging to prove an incident in court against alleged traffickers.

The heart of the U.N. Trafficking Protocol defines human trafficking as: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by way of the threat or usage of force or other styles of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of an individual having control over another person, for the intended purpose of exploitation.

The US-TVPA is weak and should use in it the terminology consistent with the U.N. Protocol since it further distinguishes that traffickers use deception, and abuse of power, or of a posture of vulnerability, when seeking their victims. Traffickers look for the vulnerable knowing how to deceive and manipulate them – the worst form of abduction – by causing someone to lose rely upon those they ought to trust the most. It requires a lifetime to “re-program” someone who has been manipulated in this manner.

Human trafficking must be placed near the top of the set of crucial social issues.

In current human trafficking advocacy circles, traditional ways of trafficking have been the focus and prohibit real discovery into the reality of what is causing modern-day slavery. Poverty, homelessness, runaways, broken families, senior high school drop-out rates, pornography (mass media): each are stand-alone social issues that merit our time and attention. Each brings using them a different set of problems that demand attention from those who are whole in our society. Yet whenever we look at human trafficking, we see these issues wrapped up in to the one almost such as a domino effect. Each of these issues is a contributing factor to those areas fueling human trafficking. And, I dare say, each of these issues are caused by one giant controlling america and manipulating our every move – greed. Traffickers not merely search for vulnerable and at-risk youth, they target the male population to enlist them as buyers.