Human trafficking is world-wide plague. Trafficking is the placing someone in situation of exploitation, including, slavery, forced marriage, prostitution and removal of organs. There are currently an estimated 20-40 million victims of human trafficking across the entire world. This number is such a wide range because of a very small number of human trafficking victims being identified, mainly because many countries soft or nonexistent laws do not do enough investigation. A high percentage of trafficking victims are taken out of developing countries in Asia and Africa (such as South Sudan), and taken into richer developed nations such as many countries in Europe and the Americas. Aid needs to be given to nations in which people are being taken out of, and stricter laws need to be passed in popular destination countries to better recognize and stop trafficking.
Some nations don’t have laws against trafficking because of lack of information, lack of aid, or because big corporations that help their economy are benefitting from the exploitation. Traffickers worldwide earn about $150 billion a year off exploitation of their victims, and an estimated $99 billion comes from sexual exploitation specifically. There are many measures that have been taken by nations such the United States to punish companies, specifically hotels that benefit from sex trafficking.
The best way to combat trafficking is to have strict laws and investigations into human trafficking, to limit success of many large, trans-national operations. Many countries become a beacon for human trafficking simply because of their strategic location or their lenient laws against it. Being one of these countries, South Sudan has passed the Combating of Human Trafficking Act, which aligned with the United Nations definition of human trafficking itself. This Act also establishes the National Committee for Combating Human Trafficking (NCCT). South Sudan urges all other nations that don’t have a pre-existing law against human trafficking to create acts and laws to combat this global issue. The money in human trafficking and the low chance of getting caught is the reason that it is still such a pressing issue across the world.
Another way to lower human trafficking victims is to educate people on how to recognize trafficking. If people know when possible trafficking is going on, and how to prevent it, then more crimes would be reported, and in turn, more people would be prosecuted and jailed. Most traffickers are repeat offenders, so preventing them from continuing to commit these crimes will stop many more of them from being committed.
Human trafficking is an enormous problem for poor, rich, developed and developing nations. To combat it, the entire world needs to have a standard for how to stop it. Between educating the common people on how to identify and report trafficking, prosecuting the offenders, and establishing oversight committees to do large investigations; it can be eradicated worldwide.
Works Cited
1. ENACTAfrica.org. “Is Sudan Committed to Fighting Human Trafficking?” ENACT Africa, 7 Mar. 2019, https://enactafrica.org/enact-observer/is-sudan-committed-to-fighting-human-trafficking.
2. Department of Homeland Security. (2019). What Is Human Trafficking?. [online] Available at: https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/what-human-trafficking [Accessed 15 Nov. 2019].
- Claire Martin
