Human Trafficking

HUMAN trafficking refers to the exploitation of people through transporting, recruiting, harboring, providing, or receiving people for a number of activities in which others benefit financially. It is a global problem and a social concern for many who are trying to thwart organized criminal activity. Human trafficking is logically considered a subset of organized crime, but it also has strong tangential relationships with white-collar crime: The same criminal elements in many parts of the world are engaged in political corruption, bribery, payoffs, and kickbacks, and drug and human trafficking.

Human trafficking involves both adults and children, males and females, and often has disastrous consequences for the victims of these activities on personal as well as governmental levels. It is an issue that is global in scope and that involves the abuse of the most basic tenets of human rights. Human trafficking vividly illustrates the results of poor economic conditions and the devaluation of oppressed people. It is estimated that approximately 900,000 people are trafficked each year globally[Page 407] and 20,000 are trafficked into the borders of the United States.

Forced labor, more commonly known as slavery, has likely been around since shortly after the dawn of humankind. This abhorrent practice continues throughout the world despite attempts and varying strategies by governments to stop it. Many adults and children are lured into positions of forced labor in the hope of a better way of life. It is widely believed that slavery no longer exists in the modern world; however, this is a fallacy. Slavery has simply changed form over time.

Slavery continues to exist. Kevin Bales, a leading expert in the area of what is known as “modern slavery,” notes the differences between the old slavery of ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome, and even the “peculiar” institution of 19th-century American slavery, and the new type of slavery that has developed globally since World War II.

The contemporary forms of slavery have resulted primarily from population increases and social change. A typology of this new slavery is also provided by Bales: 1) chattel slavery, a remnant of the old slavery, in which people are born, captured, or sold into slavery; 2) debt bondage, sometimes called peonage and the most common form of contemporary slavery, in which people are enslaved in order to pay off debts (sometimes continuing through several generations of family servitude); 3) contract slavery, in which false or deceptive contracts are used to justify or explain forced slavery; 4) war slavery, in which people are enslaved in order to defray costs associated with military campaigns; 5) domestic servitude, in which “extra children” (children from excessively large families) are placed into domestic service, often for extended periods of time, and 6) ritual (religion-based) slavery, in which people (usually young girls) are provided as slaves, often in sexual enslavement, to atone for the sins of family members. An understanding of the new forms of slavery is important in understanding the various aspects of trafficking in humans.