Human Trafficking In America Is the Most Important Social Problem of Our Times

Just what is human trafficking?

Although the act of human trafficking has been going on for decades, it has only been a couple of years (2000) since the US Trafficking Protocol (the Palermo Protocol of 2000, a global legal agreement mounted on the US) was established containing the first internationally arranged definition of human trafficking with the understanding that it is the force, fraud, and coercion from one person to another that defines the essence of this crime.

People often tell me that they think human trafficking is moving people from one country to another, and while that is clearly a section of what the act really is, the heart of the problem 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 challenging to prove a case 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 means of the threat or usage 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 use in it the terminology consistent with the U.N. Protocol 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 form of abduction - by causing someone to lose rely upon those they should trust the most. It takes a lifetime to "re-program" anyone who has been manipulated this way.

Human trafficking must be placed near the top of the list of crucial social issues.

In current human trafficking advocacy circles, traditional methods of trafficking have already 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 (media): each are stand-alone social conditions that merit our time and attention. Each brings with them a different group of problems that demand attention from those who are whole inside our society. Yet whenever we look at human trafficking, we see most of these issues wrapped up in to the one almost just like a domino effect. Each of these issues is really a contributing factor to those areas fueling human trafficking. And, I dare say, each of these issues are caused by one giant controlling america and manipulating our every move - greed.  innocentsatrisk.org  look for vulnerable and at-risk youth, they target the male population to enlist them as buyers.