hudsonhudson1
Human Trafficking IN THE US Is the Most Important Social Problem of Our Times 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 United Nations Trafficking Protocol (the Palermo Protocol of 2000, a global legal agreement mounted on the US) was established containing the first internationally agreed upon 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 the crime. People often tell me that they think human trafficking is moving people from one country to another, and while that is a section of what the act really is, 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 significant aspect of the definition and therefore helps it be more difficult 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, by way 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 posture of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or advantages to achieve the consent of a person having control over someone else, for the intended purpose of exploitation. The US-TVPA is weak and should include in it the terminology consistent with the U.N. innocentsatrisk.org since 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 type of abduction - by causing one to lose trust in those they ought to trust the most. It takes a lifetime to "re-program" anyone who has been manipulated this way. Human trafficking should be placed at the top of the list of crucial social issues. In current human trafficking advocacy circles, traditional ways of trafficking have been the focus and prohibit real discovery in to 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 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 of these issues wrapped up into the one almost just 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 caused by one giant controlling the United States and manipulating our every move - greed. Traffickers not only look for vulnerable and at-risk youth, they target the male population to enlist them as buyers.