Just what's human trafficking?

Although the act of human trafficking has been going on for many years, it has only been a few years (2000) since the US Trafficking Protocol (the Palermo Protocol of 2000, a global legal agreement attached to the US) was established containing the first internationally arranged definition of human trafficking with the knowing that it's the force, fraud, and coercion in one person to the next that defines the essence of this crime.

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

The center of the U.N. Trafficking Protocol defines human trafficking as: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, through the threat or usage of force or other forms 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 really should include in it the terminology in keeping with the U.N. Protocol because it further distinguishes that traffickers use deception, and abuse of power, or of a position of vulnerability, when seeking their victims. Traffickers search for the vulnerable knowing how to deceive and manipulate them - the worst form of abduction - by causing one to lose rely upon those they should trust the most. It takes a lifetime to "re-program" someone who has been manipulated in this manner.

Human trafficking should be placed at the top of the list of crucial social issues.

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