OneWorld.net (U.S.)

Your feedback is welcome and encouraged! Comments may be directed to: . After review, we will post selected comments to this page. Due to time and space considerations, we cannot guarantee that every response will be posted, but priority will be given to those comments that offer positive insights or first-hand experiences on the issue of human trafficking.

As an added thank you for your insights and engagement on human trafficking issues, one person who submits a comment will be chosen at random to receive a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com.

Here’s Some “Food for Thought” on Trafficking:

• Does it make more sense to you to devote efforts to prosecuting traffickers, curtailing demand, or helping potential victims to avoid being trafficked?
• What about our societies might need to be changed to ensure that people are less vulnerable to trafficking networks?
• For some women in poor countries, prostitution may be their only means of making a living. What do you think about their options and how NGOs can best assist them?
• How can NGOs better address the corruption that fuels the trafficking trade?
• Should trafficked victims have rights to stay in the countries to which they have been trafficked? Why or why not and under what circumstances?
• What kind of programs addressing gender equity would make a difference to combat the trafficking of young women and girls?

From: Jennifer

I have studied trafficking very briefly and from a legal perspective. I am curious about how many of the countries plagued by trafficking have strong penal systems. The social aspects of the problem are very important, but it is difficult to suggest where money and effort are best spent without knowing what the options are. If punishment of offenders is not certain, then it is not a deterrent. If it is not harsh enough to make the draw of the illegal activity less attractive, punishment doesn't work.

Do you have any information about which countries have the death penalty, hard labor, lifetime sentences, or financial forfeit of assets? Is there collated information about which countries have legalized prostitution?

Is data available on countries that excuse or glorify the murder of women for "cultural" reasons?

This kind of information would be useful to evaluate the priorities given as choices for participation. Particularly in the most grievous cases of child prostitution, I would like to see severe punishment for both purveyors and clients. Mandatory publication in the home country of anyone arrested for either offense is a creative and inexpensive deterrent for some. In Arizona, those arrested for prostitution were printed in the newspaper. Business plummeted.

I will not go on, but would be interested in developing culturally sensitive programs. If you have the following data or links to it, I would appreciate it.

Response from: John T. Picarelli, Project Director for American University's Transnational Crime and Corruption Center

As I read them, your questions are by and large aimed at two issues related to the trafficking in persons. One is the correlation of risk to reward--many experts in the past identified minor penalties as an enticement for traffickers to perpetrate their criminal activities. In the past five years, the hard work of these experts in NGOs and government agencies around the globe has culminated in numerous successes to pass new laws with tougher penalties for trafficking. Just as important, these same organizations have come together to increase the capacity to enforce these laws in a way that focuses on the victims of trafficking, protecting their needs while preventing trafficking and prosecuting the perpetrators. For example, the trafficking in persons protocol of the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime of 2000 (see http://www.unodc.org/palermo/convmain.html) helped to harmonize laws while elevating the need for states to put such laws on the books, while the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking (www.state.gov/g/tip) has worked tirelessly with countries to strengthen their anti-trafficking laws.

Trafficking, as your questions note, is not solely a result of risk-reward criteria on the part of criminals, however. Trafficking is the criminal activity that most directly abets modern-day forms of slavery, and thus understanding why trafficking in persons persists requires us to consider how social structures rooted in class, gender, race and ethnicity interact with the economic determinants to create markets for trafficked persons in modern times in much the same way they once interacted to form markets for African chattel slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries or even slaves in the Roman Empire. A critical facet of the fight against trafficking is to understand how gender and other sociocultural factors fashion the demand for trafficked victims. The most public expression of this element in the anti-trafficking community is the significant debate about the relationship between prostitution, pornography and sex trafficking. While vastly oversimplified, one can reduce the debate into two camps. On one side are those who see prostitution, pornography and sex trafficking as co-equal forms of patriarchal power over women and thus proclaim strong ties among the three, while another side has those who believe that women can freely choose to engage in prostitution and thus see looser ties among the three. For more nuanced and detailed explanations of these positions and how they translate into policy and practice, I would invite you to see the websites of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (www.catwinternational.org) and the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (www.gaatw.org) as two expressions of these stances.

In order to learn more about the policies and laws of specific countries, you might consult the State Department's Annual Human Rights and Trafficking in Persons reports, both of which are available online at www.state.gov. The website of the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, found at www.american.edu/traccc, also contains a plethora of information and links for further research. ____________________________________________________

From: Rene Wadlow

Trafficking and sexual exploitation are symptoms of a social problem, namely the vulnerability in which too many people are trapped, lacking the material and educational tools to live in dignity. Children are the ones who suffer the most and have less means of protecting themselves. Vulnerability is a silent social disease. Many societies live with it and do not take firm and continuing actions to face it until the consequences erupt in violent and dramatic forms. Prevention means acting before this happens. It means preventing the social fabric from tearing apart, especially in those areas of a country with little economic and social opportunity.

No part of the world is free from these forms of contemporary slavery. Prevention, protection of the vulnerable, and recovery are the three levels of necessary action. There is a need for a sound knowledge of the area and social groups exposed to higher risks of servitude. There is a need to develop awareness and political will so that police and social welfare officials carry on systematic protection. There is a need to develop capacity for recovery through the creation of shelters, workshops for psychological care, education, and training. The spiritual aspects of healing for those who have been trafficked into prostitution is underdeveloped and where research and special efforts are needed.

* Rene Wadlow is editor of the on-line journal of world politics www.transnational-perspectives.org and chief Representative to the United Nations, Geneva of the Association of World Citizens. Formerly, he was professor and Director of Research of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, University of Geneva.