Written By: Mrs Olabisi Omolona | Project Director | Business and Professional Women’s Club, Akure.

Meaning of Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is the trade of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring or receiving a person through the use of force, coercion or other means for the purpose of exploiting them.

Human trafficking is a form of modern slavery whereby humans are traded for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labour or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others.

Every year thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers in their own countries and abroad.

1. Agents of Trafficking

The Traffickers

The Trafficker is the link between supply and demand, on one hand increasing supply through the recruitment, deception, transportation and exploitation process and on the other hand boosting demand by providing easy access to the trafficking victims. This includes recruiters as well as transporters, receivers, pimps, brothel-keepers, corrupt border guards and producers of false documentation, all of whom benefit from victims who pass through their hands. The trafficker is often part of the extended family nucleus or is someone known within the local community.

2. The Trafficked Victims

These include all the men, women and children who are deceived, transported and delivered into the hands of those who exploit them for profit.

Causes of Human Trafficking

• Lack of employment opportunity: The economic system of some countries have left many people jobless. Those that are desperate thereby get lured and deceived by traffickers because they want to get out of the country by all means.
• Extreme greed for wealth: Some people want to amass great wealth or get rich quick. They end up in the hands of traffickers.
• Poor economic system: This may cause citizens to want to travel abroad for a better standard of living.
• Unwholesome business gains: Trafficking has somehow become a massive business industry in the world, thereby luring individuals with criminal minds to join.
• Low self-esteem: Some people do not have self-esteem either they are not educated (illiterates) or want to have a better life or they may end up leaving the country by all means possible.
• The search for greener pasture: Some people believe that travelling abroad is the only way one can make ends meet in all aspects of life.
• Poverty: Some families with a large number of children may be poor and might not be able to cater to all the needs of their children. They end up giving out some of their children to people as maids and this way some of their children may fall into the hands of traffickers.

FORMS OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING

1. Child Labour

Child labour refers to the employment of children in any work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful.

2. Child Sex Trafficking

Thousands of children are lured, sold, or kidnapped for the purpose of sexual

exploitation in hotels, night clubs, brothels, massage parlours, private residences, on sex tours e.t.c. annually. Sex trafficking has devastating consequences for minors, including long-lasting physical and psychological trauma, disease (including HIV/AIDS), drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism, and sometimes death.

3. Debt Bondage

Bonded labour is similar to slavery because it involves a debt that cannot be paid off in a reasonable time. The employer/enforcer artificially inflates the amount of debt, often adding exorbitant interest or charges for living expenses, deducting little or nothing from the debt and increasing the amount of time the individual must work. It is a cycle of debt where there is no hope for freedom.

4. Involuntary Domestic Servitude

Involuntary servitude occurs when a domestic worker becomes ensnared in an exploitative situation they are unable to escape. Typically in private homes, the individual is forced to work for little or no pay while confined to the boundaries of their employer’s property. This isolation keeps them from communicating with family or any other type of support network, increasing the subjection to psychological, physical and sexual abuse.

5. Child Soldiers

It is illegal to recruit through force, fraud, or coercion of children under the age of 18 as combatants or in other roles associated with conflicts, such as messengers, sex slaves/’wives’, servants, or cooks.

CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING ON VICTIMS

Sexual Abuse

Health Risk in Women Adolescents

Psychological Trauma

Stigmatisation

Effect on population growth

Modern Slavery

Illegal Immigrants

WAYS YOU CAN HELP FIGHT HUMAN TRAFFICKING

• Anyone can join in the fight against human trafficking. Here are just a few ideas to consider.
• Learn the indicators of human trafficking so you can help identify a potential trafficking victim. Human trafficking awareness training is available for individuals, businesses, first responders, law enforcement, educators, and federal employees, among others.
• Volunteer and support anti-trafficking efforts in your community.
• Meet with and/or write to your local, state, and federal government representatives to let them know you care about combating human trafficking, and ask what they are doing to address it.
• Host an awareness-raising event to watch and discuss films about human trafficking
• Organize a fundraiser and donate the proceeds to an anti-trafficking organization.
• Encourage your local schools to partner with students and include modern slavery in their curricula. As a parent, educator, or school administrator, be aware of how traffickers target school-aged children.
• Be well-informed.
• Work with a local religious community or congregation to help stop trafficking by supporting a victim service provider or spreading awareness of human trafficking.
• Businesses: Provide jobs, internships, skills training, and other opportunities to trafficking survivors.
• Students: Take action on your campus. Join or establish a university club to raise awareness about human trafficking and initiate action throughout your local community. Consider doing one of your research papers on a topic concerning human trafficking. Request that human trafficking be included in university curricula.
• Health Care Providers: Learn how to identify the indicators of human trafficking and assist victims. With assistance from anti-trafficking organizations, extend low-cost or free services to human trafficking victims.

The Nigerian government has made lots of effort to eradicate Human Trafficking by establishing some agencies to fight human trafficking, and also the enactment of laws to guide and support their actions.

1. NAPTIP(National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons)
   NAPTIP is a governmental organisation created for the eradication of human traffic in Nigeria. The 2003 NAPTIP law enforcement and administration Act amended in 2005 to increase penalties for trafficking offenders, prohibits all forms of human trafficking. The Law’s prescribed penalties of 5 years imprisonment and/or a $670 fine with hard labour. Ten years imprisonment for the trafficking of children and forced begging or hawking and 10 years imprisonment – life imprisonment for sexual enslavement are sufficiently stringent and commensurate with penalties prescribed for other crimes such as rape. Nigeria’s 2003 Child Rights Act also criminalises child trafficking.
2. (WOTCLEF) Woman Trafficking and Children Labour Eradication Foundation – WATCLEF is a Non-governmental organisation which has embarked on lots of public awareness programmes and other efforts to stop human trafficking mostly on female folds who end up becoming prostitutes abroad thereby giving Nigeria a bad image abroad. WATCLEF together with NAPTIP enacted the July 2003 abolition laws of human trafficking of children under 18 years of age.