Module 2: Community Program Design (((Human Trafficking))

Human Trafficking Community Intervention

Abstract.

Human Trafficking is a global issue affecting different countries across the world. The recurring phenomenon is leaving men, children, and women victim to traffickers. Human trafficking violates human rights, gender issues, the criminal justice department, and public health as a complex regime. This study briefly examines modern slavery concerning human trafficking with its advantages and disadvantages. This research paper is majorly from secondary data source, especially on available literature on human trafficking and modern-day slavery (Kara, 2017). The method the study uses are analytical and descriptive. Nonetheless, this study concludes that the univocal approach to human trafficking is an inferior method for eradicating human trafficking. Government should adopt a multidimensional approach to target human traffickers, victim protection. When addressing human trafficking, it is best to bring all stakeholders on board significantly affected family members and communities facing human trafficking. Introduction. Human Trafficking encompasses men, women, and children exploitation in different economic sectors such as forced marriages, commercial sexual exploitation, organ harvesting, and forced labor. Therefore, Human Trafficking is an extreme exploitation form of modern slavery in the 21st century. It comes third in organized crimes, right after the illegal arms and drug trade. Human trafficking generates approximately ten billion dollars per annum. According to Elliot 2015, around seven thousand to four million individuals are victims of trafficking each year. And the majority are people between eighteen to twenty-four years (Agnew, 2018). To combat human trafficking, the federal government, in association with international origins campaigning against human trafficking, should sensitive the general population on modern-day slavery, especially human trafficking making the community aware of criminal hunting strategies to capture their prey.

Laws against Human Trafficking

. Human trafficking mutates over time and assumes new forms with the changing times. It is a global issue affecting every stakeholder in the business. The victims in human trade, the merchants in human trafficking, and the slave's owners. For example, the India's bonded labor system, slaves worked for money. Similarly, the African-American slavery system where blacks labored for whites as servants and slaves. Human trafficking is an advanced slave trade. Introduction to slave trade is associated with capitalist market and colonization where the imperial regime illegally acquires African resources such as raw materials and free labor (Greenbaum et al., 2018). In 1904, international organs formulated the first anti-trafficking law to combat slave trade cutesy of the League of Nations. Other legislations followed suit to abolish child labor, prostitution, and forced labor globally.

However, using laws to combat human trafficking is a challenge because the international organs assume human trafficking is the unwillingness of physical movement from one place to another as they forget that local trafficking exists. Therefore, it is difficult to track human trafficking at its pioneer stages, and this is before the exploitation begins. Human traffickers intercepted at borders are charged with migration felonies and not human trafficking (Greenbaum et al., 2018). The system should charge these individuals with human trafficking charges and so that they are convicted to serve sentences instead, they walk scot-free. The international laws are weak, limiting judicial powers to prosecute human traffickers for the correct charges. This means human trafficking is here for a long time and may not end any time soon.

Demand and Supply laws

Traffickers hunt for vulnerable migrants and subject them to exploitative, inhuman employment forms. The traffickers prey mostly on poor people, and the very powerless and unsuspecting community members manage human trafficking. The demand side is continuously eager to exploit and exhaust traffic victims while the supply side looks for appropriate victims. According to UNODC, the rise in human trafficking demands links to the rapidly changing global informal sectors, increasing criminal syndicates, globalization, enhancing transport and communication, and demand for cheap labor (Mendel & Sharapov, 2016). Therefore, foreign policies for promoting tourism, migration, industrialization, revolutionizing commercial sex sectors, male dominance, child labor, and uneven resource distribution set a trap for human trafficking. The human trafficking supply chain preys on poverty, deprivation, inadequate education, unemployment, gender, and economic disparities. Between supply and demand, impunity drives human trafficking. Trafficking regulations and poor politics will free traffickers even though the perpetrators may be prosecuted on meager charges and subdued to minor punishments (Mendel & Sharapov, 2016). Hence, insufficient legislation, poor law enforcement, corruption, and system incompetence play an important role in fueling human trafficking while appreciating the Sex industry as the driver to the human trafficking car.

Reverse Tracking.

Human trafficking is a human rights violation. Therefore, the state uses reverse tracking from victims working backward to trace the perpetrators. It is evident that human trafficking victims are both ordinary men and witnesses to criminal proceedings in recent years. Therefore, witness protection victims can only get witness protection when cooperating with the judiciary in prosecuting traffickers. Human rights violations are significantly reducing since the introduction of this law (van der Watt & van der Westhuizen, 2017). According to article 5 on forced labor and slavery of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, human trafficking is a prohibited act. The Convention's article six discourages any discrimination forms on women and suppresses all women trafficking conditions and prostitution exploitations.

Reverse tracking works under universality, indivisibility, interdependence, equity, and non-discrimination; participation and inclusion. According to anti-trafficking intervention, the human rights framework maps essential protection on human trafficking victims and their humane treatment (van der Watt & van der Westhuizen, 2017). In the human rights approach, the main objective is to encourage individual human rights and maintain human trafficking victims' dignity, ensuring that the two factors maintain while fighting against human trafficking. Psychologically it is not ideal to detain victims of human trafficking for persecution on offenses. The government should afford all these victims the freedom to move.

Human Health

Human trafficking breeds public health problems. Individual victims manifest a range of health problems. Such as emotional, physical, and mental abuse, rape, blackmail, and sometimes death. Most victims develop this problem while in transit. For example, the journey Phase when individuals move from one area to another transporting the victims to places associated with transmission of airborne or vector-borne diseases, the constant stress, and discomfort from the cargo trucks or ships because in mass trafficking victims hidden in containers and transported as goods (Greenbaum et al., 2018). Physical injuries from the container may result in individual death from exposer to chemicals from other transit goods within the cargo transportation. The health department suggests that the government consider combating individual trafficking-related health problems as state crime next to smoking, highway accidents, and community violence.

The importance of fighting human trafficking through public health is that it is more flexible than the legal perspective. Trafficking is a subsidiary business with zero reliable data and most research done tends to approximate the statistical figures. The assumption based on statistical figures makes it difficult for the government to articulately make policies that can successfully combat this vice (Greenbaum et al., 2018). Therefore, public health data is the most reliable data on human trafficking. Therefore, the government should derive policies on human trafficking from the health data. The public health approach goes beyond criminal laws and narrows down to state, focusing on nailing perpetrators within the community and population. This approach fights human trafficking through community intervention and involvement at every stakeholder level.

Conclusion

Human trafficking assumes many forms. It is a global issue affecting different countries across the world. The recurring phenomenon is leaving men, children, and women victim to traffickers. Therefore, human trafficking is a violation of human rights in every aspect, and the government and international organizations should work hard to eradicate human trafficking. To curb human trafficking, the government legislatures against human trafficking focus on prosecuting perpetrators rather than protecting and preventing trafficking future events. The approach provides weak legislation and limited judiciary power that leaves culprits walking free. Demand and supply laws that keep human trafficking alive. The government should get a counter policy against the supply and demand chain on human trafficking. The reverse tracking approach is effective with some hope in reducing human trafficking. The health department data approach should be more elaborate to get more traffickers out of the system.

References

Kara, S. (2017). Modern slavery: A global perspective. Columbia University Press.

Greenbaum, V. J., Titchen, K., Walker-Descartes, I., Feifer, A., Rood, C. J., & Fong, H. F. (2018). Multi-level prevention of human trafficking: the role of health care professionals. Preventive medicine, 114, 164-167.

Mendel, J., & Sharapov, K. (2016). Human trafficking and online networks: Policy, analysis, and ignorance. Antipode, 48(3), 665-684.

van der Watt, M., & van der Westhuizen, A. (2017). (Re) configuring the criminal justice response to human trafficking: a complex-systems perspective. Police Practice and research, 18(3), 218-229.