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The Crime without borders
Supply and Demand
What's the real cost?
People as commodities
The Crime without borders
It's often secret and always shocking. It's one of the world's fastest growing organised crimes and it makes a mockery of human rights.
Human trafficking is nothing less than modern day slavery. It happens when people are recruited, transported or received through deception, threat or force. Once trapped, they are exploited using threats, physical force or emotional abuse. Some are told they must pay off a so-called 'debt' to their captors. They may be enslaved for years, even for life.
The scale of the problem is enormous. It's hard to say exactly how many people are trafficked, because it's so difficult to identify the victims or pin down the traffickers. Also, trafficking is a complex issue and often defined in different ways.
One estimate is that trafficking enslaves 27 million people around the globei. Another is that 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders each yearii and we know this doesn't even include the millions more enslaved within their own countries. At Don't Trade Lives, we believe one person trafficked is one person too many.
Supply and Demand
Like any other crime, human trafficking follows the rules of supply and demand. Poverty, lack of access to employment and education, domestic violence and cultural practices create a ready supply of children and adults. And they are easily manipulated by traffickers.
On the demand side, the desire for cheap labour and growth in the global sex industry make trafficking a high-profit, low-risk business for criminal networks.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, human trafficking generates $7 billion a year in criminal proceeds and takes place in more than 120 countries. It is the third biggest crime in the world after drugs and arms.
True Story: No Bed of Roses
The slums of Bangkok are home to thousands of migrants from neighbouring Myanmar.
At the age of 7, Mia was sold by her mother and trafficked from her home in Myanmar to Bangkok, Thailand. She worked from 9pm to 6am every day, selling roses to customers in a chic bar. Each night she carried and sold about 100 roses for 20 baht ($0.64) each.
"Sometimes, people bought all of my flowers," she says "They said children shouldn't work and I should go home. The first time that happened I was stunned. I always thought it was normal for us to work."
After almost four years, she was arrested by the Bangkok police, sent to the Immigration Detention Centre and then transferred to a local government-run child protection centre.
She was eventually tracked down and brought home by a World Vision employee who works to assist, support and protect trafficked women in Myanmar.
Now Mia attends World Vision Foundation of Thailand's education centre studying Burmese, English, Thai and other life skills. She's enthusiastic about the future. "My mother calls me sometimes. She says she doesn't want me to work any more. She wants me to stay here and go to school."
*Note: Names have been changed.
Human trafficking is most prevalent in south and southeast Asia. West Africans are trafficked into western Europe, along with people from central and southern Europe. The United States is a well known destination for many victims trafficked out of Latin America.
Here in Australia, women and girls have been trafficked from southeast Asia to work as prostitutes. In 2007, evidence was found of human trafficking and exploitative labour in our hospitality and mining industries.
What's the real cost?
Trafficking has a devastating impact on individuals. They are exposed to repeated and sustained emotional, physical and sexual abuse, exposure to HIV and AIDS, and even death. The fear, degradation and cruelty they experience is almost impossible to imagine.
Once they have been trafficked, victims often lose control of their identity when their passports and other documents are taken away. They lose contact with their families and may even have their names changed so that they lose all sense of self. Seeking help from police and other authorities isn't usually an option, especially if they are trafficked across international borders to become illegal migrant workers.
People as commodities
Trafficking reduces human beings to commodities, bought and sold to service the ever growing demands of global consumers for cheap goods and services, from agricultural products to commercial sex.
Some consumers are well aware of the exploitation involved in their transactions. But many millions more are ignorant of the human suffering that is behind the products and services they buy.
Take chocolate, for example. About 70% of the world's chocolate is produced using cocoa beans farmed in West African nations. In the Ivory Coast and Ghana, children are routinely forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions to help harvest the beans.
Some of these children are taken or enticed from their homes. Others come "voluntarily" to cocoa farms, only to find themselves enslaved.
This is one of the most appalling kinds of exploitative labour. And it's all because corporations middlemen and farm owners are eager to profit from the world's insatiable appetite for chocolate on the one hand and easily exploitable labour on the other.
i Source: "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy" by Kevin Bales (University of California Press, 2000).
ii Source: Trafficking in Persons Report 2007, The US Department of State.
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