Trafficking in persons is a serious violation of human rights. Trafficking works on the basis of the debt bondage imposed on the victim by the traffickers in order to pay their expenses. In the special circumstances of trafficking, it is extremely difficult for the victim to have the capacity to escape and denounce the system that has trapped them.

Trafficking in persons may or may not involve the crossing of international borders. In contrast to migrant smuggling, trafficking can occur within the borders of one country as internal trafficking. The causes of trafficking are many and varied. The causes are also different in countries of origin and countries of destination.

Trafficking involves aspects of migration, labour, gender, and criminality. Consequently, many different intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, with diverse mandates, are involved in either the discussion of trafficking issues or in the implementation of counter-trafficking activities.

Important Points

1. Trafficking in persons is an underreported crime. This is due to the low priority given by authorities in many countries to the problem of human trafficking. Legislation is often lacking, inadequate, or not implemented. This makes the prosecution of traffickers very difficult and often impossible. Trafficking convictions are often based on witness and/or victim testimony, which is hard to obtain because trafficking victims are either deported as illegal migrants or, if identified as trafficked persons, are often too frightened to testify. Inadequate legislation means that the law enforcement authorities often prefer not to prosecute traffickers since the effort expended seldom results in a conviction.
   
2. Trafficking should be seen as a process, starting with the recruitment and ending with the exploitation of the victim's work. The main elements of the process are coercion, which could start at any moment during the process, and exploitation, which normally starts once the victim has been put to work.
   
3. The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, provides a comprehensive definition of human trafficking. The definition may be paraphrased as:

   The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use 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 a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth above have been used.

4. This internationally approved definition has five elements:
   
   • recruitment (false job offers, kidnapping, buying a person, etc.)
   • physical transportation of the trafficked persons
   • physical or psychological coercion and/or the deception involved in the offer
   • exploitation of the work of the person as the final objective
   • absence of informed consent
     
5. In order to understand the nature of human trafficking, it is important to apply this definition and clear up a misconception, held by some authorities, that many of the victims of trafficking knew from the beginning that they would, for example, be working in the sex industry and, thus, trafficking as such does not exist. A person may understand the type of work he or she will be doing, but what is not known is that there will be no payment, the work will be forced and under unacceptable conditions, and that the victim will not have freedom of movement. Therefore, under these circumstances, the fact that the potential victim agrees to work, for example, in the sex industry, does not diminish the crime of trafficking and the significance of the serious violation of the human rights of the victim that is involved.

What You Need To Know About...

Causes of Trafficking in Countries of Origin

In the country of origin, the most common causes are poverty, unemployment, and lack of opportunities. These factors motivate potential victims of trafficking to look to other countries for opportunities they do not have at home. They become, then, easy prey for traffickers making false promises about job offers in foreign countries.

Political and humanitarian crises displace populations and expose the most vulnerable, usually women and children, to the designs of traffickers and criminal groups.

In many less developed regions of the world, children are entrusted to more affluent friends or acquaintances with the intention to improve their lives and relieve their families of economic burden. This practice often sends these children into the trafficking market for slavery. Some social and cultural practices in certain regions and countries, for example, the marginalization and/or subordination of women and girls combined with gender discrimination against them, increases their vulnerability and facilitates the trade in young women and girls by their families and friends.

Causes of Trafficking in Countries of Destination

The most important cause in destination countries is the demand for inexpensive labour. Inexpensive labour benefits entrepreneurs in destination countries and this demand is satisfied by irregular immigration, smuggling, and trafficking.

The demand for foreign women to work in the sex industry in countries of destination readily invites the satisfaction of that demand by making women and minors into commodities to be coerced, transported, and forced to work abroad.

Restrictive immigration policies in traditional countries of destination can push potential migrants to resort to the illegal migration services of traffickers and smugglers.

Trafficking Mechanisms

The first element of the mechanism is the recruitment of the victim by traffickers or intermediaries.

Recruitment can have different forms, the most violent being the kidnapping of the victim in a situation of extreme vulnerability. For example, in isolated places, a humanitarian crisis, or in refugee and displaced persons' camps.

Other forms of recruitment occur through false employment offers in urban centres in the country of origin or, more often, in foreign countries. These offers can be related to different types of employment, including entertainment, sex work, domestic work, studies, etc.

The reality the victims find at the destination point is normally different, consisting of forced and unpaid sex work, domestic or other type of slavery, or simply non-remunerated work. The victim is then forced to work in order to pay an accumulated debt with the traffickers for services such as travel documentation, visas, transportation, bribes, lodging, work placement, protection, medicines, and food.

Physical and psychological coercion are used to convince the victim to comply with the trafficking system. Women and minors bound for forced prostitution go through systematic rape and physical abuse that destroys their self-esteem and dignity. Psychological coercion includes threats of violence and of revenge against family members back home. Coercion can also include threats to denounce the victim to local police or to the family by disclosing the work activities of the victim. In these circumstances, combined with illegal residence, no documentation in the country of destination, and with no knowledge of the country or of the language, it is extremely difficult for the victim to have the capacity to escape and denounce the system.

The players in the trafficking process have diverse, but important, roles to play. Each of them contributes at different stages towards the final objective, which is the long-term exploitation of the victims for economic or other gain. Members of the trafficker gangs diversify their tasks starting with the recruiters, those involved in document forgery, then the transporters and escorts of victims, the corrupted public officials, those who receive victims in the country of destination, the job facilitator, the impresarios, the dealers, the debt collectors, the body guards, and the pimps.

Those involved in trafficking persons also tend to be active in other international organized criminal activities. For example, drug and arms trafficking, car thefts, smuggling of migrants, and the exploitation of prostitution.

Incentives for Trafficking

There are few risks for traffickers because, as yet, few countries in the world have adopted anti-trafficking legislation and supported it with strong enforcement measures. There is an increasing need to educate law enforcement officials and institutions about the realities of trafficking, investigation techniques, and the need to protect and assist victims. At present, the capacity to punish traffickers remains low.

While few traffickers are punished, many victims are. Many countries prosecute victims of trafficking as irregular migrants without paying attention to their needs for protection and assistance as victims of a crime.

Another incentive is the huge financial profits the traffickers obtain compared with the low investment they make. Compared with other illicit forms of trafficking such as drugs or weapons, the investment made by the traffickers on a victim are limited to transportation, and sometimes documentation, bribes, protection, and marketing. Normally, the selling price of a victim of trafficking is several times the investment made by the trafficker. Moreover, the permanent exploitation of the work of the victim by traffickers and intermediaries produces continuing financial profit for the latter. For example, the services of a victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation would be sold several times per day.

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