Human trafficking is a criminal type of activity that is forbidden in the modern world in every country and in all of its manifestations.
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Purposes and Reasons of Human Trafficking
- The most widespread of them are sexual slavery, when unwilling people are forced to sexual relationships with other people. This issue is more linked to the various religious practices and occultism in order to make people participate in such actions as victims, which are necessary for making this as a ritual.
- Illegal labor force, when the business is ran in an illegal way and the owner does not pay workers for labor. This issue is especially dangerous for people who want to leave their country and immigrate to another in search for better life conditions. Often, the unhappiness and experience of living in a motherland attract criminals; those people promise a better life after emigration, while later, they take away vistims documents and then use these people in profitable affairs.
- The other reason of human trafficking is the extractions of organs; the participation in the market of organ transplantation is now a very prosperous business and criminals receive sky-high money. Sometimes, it even comes to surrogacy and ova removal.
- The other reasons for trafficking are indebtedness and child labor. In the first case the person is illegally sent to another country because of the work he/she must do as a compensation for their debt. But usually, after the debt is compensated, the person remains in the other country. The second case is especially dangerous because it affects the development of the personality in a very negative way and prevents the normal education process. Usually, this experience also strongly affects the psychic condition of the child.
The prohibition of human trafficking I supported by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children adopted by the United Nations Organisation in Palermo in 2000. The document plays a very important role in the life of today's global community and performs two functions. The first function is to facilitate international cooperation that fights crime in different countries around the world, which means that responsible officers from different countries are able to share their databases and elaborations in the sphere. The second function is the protection of the rights of the victims that experienced human trafficking and prevention of such cases in the future.
There has to be a differentiation between the notions of human trafficking and people smuggling; although, the terms have much in common.
- Human trafficking is the transportation of a person to another destination without his or her will.
- Smuggling often occurs with the initiative of the person that is about to be smuggled. He or she decides that he/she wants to leave the home-country and find a person who can help to make this real. This person is called a smuggler. In most cases, the ways of the smuggler and the smuggled separate after they reach the desired destination. However, there are some exceptions from this right. In these cases smuggling re-qualifies into human trafficking.
The numbers of people that have been trafficked all over the world are impressing. In the 2008 reports there is stated that 2.5 million people from 127 countries have been trafficked. This seems to be a very profitable business. The total annual revenue for trafficking is about $5-9 billions of dollars. This makes human trafficking one of the most profitable illegal businesses in the world, second to the drug trafficking.
Smuggling and Trafficking of Human Beings: All Roads Lead to Americaby Jeremy Norwood
The first article that to analyze in this respect is Smuggling and Trafficking of Human Beings: All Roads Lead to Americaby Jeremy Norwood. It is dedicated more to human smuggling. The original book, where the article is written, is the work by Sheldon X. Zhang. The author of the book presents a deep study into the methods and strategies that human smugglers use aiming at illegal crossing the borders along with their clients. According to Zhang, human smuggling can be narrowly defined as ''the act of assisting or facilitating, often for a fee, the unauthorized entry of a foreign national into another country'. But often, the aims of the smugglers differ from the aims of their clients. Smuggling results into human trafficking for different purposes, the most widespread from which are illegal labor and sexual slavery. Zhang states that the USA is the most popular receiving country, as it is desirable to reach by most of the people that want to leave their own country in search for happiness. From myself, I can say that this desire results from an image of the so-called American dream that promises democratic, fair and wealthy life for every person that crosses the border with an aim of constant living in the country. Zhang focuses on the USA as the primary receiver for the smuggled people, but he also takes into account the role of the countries that the smuggled come from. To my mind, it is very important, because in different countries different laws are applied and some of them are less strict for emigration than others. In the process of facilitating, in contrast to human smuggling and trafficking, it seems that countries policies, where people came from, play a significant role.
According to the theoretical framework elaborated by Zhang, there are three major reasons for human smuggling and trafficking:
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growth of international inequality. As globalization develops at a furious pace and people are more and more knowledgeable about the way people live in the other countries, the salaries they receive for their work, the conditions in which they work and in which they grow their children. All this makes people from developing countries think that the best way to have a proper living is to immigrate to the country where the life conditions are completely different. I can say that in most of these cases people do not realize that the salaries, the jobs and the living conditions are true only for those people who are legal citizens of the country. They have all the privileges of citizenship and really have a higher level of life than in other countries. However, the immigrants have much less rights. In most cases, they even do not have a right to work, which forces them to search for illegal work where there rights are overlooked and their salary is not official and less than the citizens of the country have on the same conditions. Moreover, this money is not taxed and so the person is socially-unsecured, deprived of the right to receive pension in old age. The other fact is that non-citizens of the country have no medical insurance, and the medical services, if necessary, can result into very big amounts of money which that person cannot earn physically.
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the growth and popularization of international networks. Usually, a person has more chances to decide to leave their motherland if he or she has some acquaintances in the country they desire to enter. Zhang does not mention that in the modern world of internet technologies it is very simple to find your friends or relatives in the country you desire to enter, or if you have no such acquaintances in order to create them. Moreover, the internet facilitates the search of the smugglers and establishes relations with them.
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labor shortage. Nowadays, this is a quite popular reason for those people who want to leave their home-country. People want to work, but they do not have a place where their work is necessary. Furthermore, illegal businessmen are highly interested in labor force from other countries. It can be paid much less than the work of the native worker. In this way, this business profit entering a market of a much cheaper labor force.
Zhang also seeks the reasons in criminological aspects of human smuggling and trafficking. To my mind, this is a quite effective approach, as most of the previous studies of the past were dedicated to the economic and political reasons of human smuggling and trafficking. The author does not concentrate on the very immigrants, their personality and psychology. It is simple to understand that the reasons that make immigrants enter other countries are quite similar for a vast majority of them. Instead, Zhang concentrates on the criminal structures and strategies that facilitate human smuggling and trafficking. He also explains the link of the terrorist and criminal organizations to the process which provides deeper understanding of the very process of human smuggling and trafficking and shows how profitable it can be and what criminals earn from it.
Zhang outstands from the majority of the researchers of this topic applying both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in his research. Zhang's collected data includes published governmental and non-governmental agency reports, academic studies, news and media reports, and personal interviews with illegal immigrants and human smugglers. He also interviewed law enforcement representatives such as police, lawyers, and district attorneys. This work provided him with the amount of data that is enough for illustrating the whole book, which makes it a profound study of human smuggling and trafficking.
Organizational Innovations in Counterterrorism: Lessons for Cyber-security, Human Trafficking, and Other Complex National Missions by Daniel R. Langberg
The second article to analyze is Organizational Innovations in Counterterrorism: Lessons for Cyber-security, Human Trafficking, and Other Complex National Missions by Daniel R. Langberg. It tells that the assuring of national security on all levels is a complex challenge.
In his article the author criticizes the work of the national security and the foreign policy because of the inability to use previous experience in current affairs and to learn lessons from every new case. He states that the schemes and principles that the criminals use on the international level are systemic and repeat themselves from time to time. This is why it is important to hold a unique database of all such cases on the international level and study the previous cases thoroughly in order to extract the most often schemes and strategies used by the criminals.
One problem that is demanding special attention in the modern security situation is how to improve the entire governmental approaches to complicated national missions better. These approaches comprise of combating terrorism and human trafficking to security of cyberspace. Such security challenges need to have an integrated outcry. However, the system of national security in most countries is developed along functional linear structures (law enforcement, military, intelligence, and diplomatic) with quite weak mechanisms of coordination in every of these functions. Today, there is no definitive model for integrating capabilities and funding for inherently interagency missions.
The USA security offices have recently presented a case study that analyzes the major principles of terrorism that is true in the country. From this report, it comes out that the terrorism and criminal cases such as human smuggling and trafficking are the major 21st century challenges that are difficult, complex and multifaceted. This means that solving such problems demands a full-fledged cooperation in the fields of legal, financial, law enforcement, military, diplomatic and other aspects of the terrorist danger.
The author provides the reader with useful methodology upon how to fight terrorism and criminal action, employing such methods as clarifying interagency roles and responsibilities, conducting integrated policy with other countries (which corresponds the ideas of Zhang that were discussed above), developing national strategies, conducting deliberate, dynamic and contingency planning, and conducting assessments of the nation's progress in meetings its goals and objectives.
It has to be said that the article by Langberg presents the author's opinion on how the policy should be ran in the United States. It mostly criticizes the existing approaches and suggests the new ones; although, they look evolutionary: they are not applied yet and tested and thus, cannot be taken as the most effective ones. Moreover, the author tries to suggest new ways of fighting the entire complex of criminal problems in a five pages article, so it is understood that his analysis is quite surface.
To conclude, I would like to say that although forbidden by the laws of all of the countries, human smuggling and especially trafficking are still true in the modern world and involve millions of people all around it. It is great that research is done on these topics. It would be useful to gradually apply and test the suggested methods in real life, improving the systems of transnational security to fight such phenomena.
