Human Trafficking IN THE US Is the Most Important Social Issue of Our Times
Just what's human trafficking?
Even though act of human trafficking has been going on for decades, it has only been a couple of years (2000) since the United Nations Trafficking Protocol (the Palermo Protocol of 2000, a global legal agreement attached to the US) was established containing the initial internationally arranged definition of human trafficking with the understanding that it's the force, fraud, and coercion in one person to another that defines the essence of the crime.
innocentsatrisk.org tell me that they think human trafficking is moving folks from one country to the next, and while that is clearly a part of what the act is really, the heart of the issue is the mental and emotional movement of an individual by another. The U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) (created because of the UN Protocol) leaves out what 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 heart of the U.N. Trafficking Protocol defines human trafficking as: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by way of the threat or use of force or other styles of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a posture of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of an individual having control over someone else, for the purpose of exploitation.
The US-TVPA is weak and should use in it the terminology consistent with the U.N. Protocol because it further distinguishes that traffickers use deception, and abuse of power, or of a posture of vulnerability, when seeking their victims. Traffickers search for the vulnerable knowing how to deceive and manipulate them - the worst type of abduction - by causing someone to lose trust in those they should trust the most. It takes an eternity to "re-program" anyone who has been manipulated this way.
Human trafficking should be placed near the top of the set of crucial social issues.
In current human trafficking advocacy circles, traditional ways of trafficking have been the focus and prohibit real discovery into the reality of why you have modern-day slavery. Poverty, homelessness, runaways, broken families, senior high school drop-out rates, pornography (mass media): each are stand-alone social conditions that merit our time and attention. Each brings with them a different group 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 into the one almost like a domino effect. Each one of these issues is a contributing factor to those areas fueling human trafficking. And, I dare say, each of these issues are due to one giant controlling america and manipulating our every move - greed. Traffickers not merely search for vulnerable and at-risk youth, they target the male population to enlist them as buyers.