Facts about Human Trafficking

Nowadays, we often see that career consultancies recruit educated youth from various parts of the world promising them lucrative salaries. Later on, they convert the employees into "bond slaves" by making them sign a two / three years' contract. This is a new form of human trafficking. In concrete terms human trafficking or trafficking of individual means the recruitment, transportation, transfer or harboring of people by means of threat, fraud, deception or force. Hence the victims of trafficking are recruited, transported and also sold to rich owners converting them into labors, prostitute, farmers and child armies.

Facts about Human Trafficking

As an effect of this, people lack freedom, peace of mind and suffer from many health hazards like depression, insomnia and fatigue. Hence, their health begins to deteriorate. Human trafficking exists in two main types. One is labor trafficking and the other is sexual trafficking. However, apart from the above-mentioned two, there are other examples of human trafficking, such as involuntary slavery, domestic slavery and forced labor.

According to a recent research, almost 600,000 to 800,000 people are ill-treated by their bosses or masters. The senior workers force their juniors to work the whole day and exploit them physically and mentally. In some cases, they abuse their workers directly or indirectly and threaten against the loss of their the job as well as life. The masters engage their workers for 12 hours a day at low wages. Hence human trafficking can also be called human exploitation.

Sex Trafficking

The cases of sex trafficking are very common nowadays. This means to force a person to work as sexual slave. The victim can be a child, a teen or an adult. Almost 80% victims of human trafficking are female and around 70% of them are sexually exploited in the film industries, advertising industries, fashion industries and private organizations.

Girls from poor families are lured by the traffickers from across the world with the promise of a new life and subsequently they are sold at the brothels and bars. According to recent research, most of the traffickers buy and sell women among Asia, Soviet Union, South America and the West Coast. The numbers of sex slaves are increasing day by day. Girls who work in massage parlors and bars are often exploited sexually by the traffickers. They threaten the victim to harm their families or to put them into prison and terrify them by confiscating their legal documents like visa, passport, birth certificate, etc. The victims of sex trafficking are not allowed to keep in touch with the outside world and often they have to face rude behavior of their bosses and brutal beating.

Child Trafficking

Child trafficking is one of the world’s major problems. Every year 1.2 million children are trafficked by different agents. The traffickers bring children and engage them in factories, mills and brothels. It is a worst form of child labor as defined by ILO (International Labor Organization). Here the traffickers recruit, transport, transfer children for the purpose of exploitation.

The agents involved in trafficking attract the child and his family under the guise of providing employment. They lure them with the promises of a lucrative job and comfortable lifestyle abroad and bring them to sell at a high amount of money. Then the child is engaged into begging, smuggling, drug trade, military and circuses, beer bars, factories as laborers. As such, the child has to face tremendous torture physically, sexually and mentally. There is a wide network of these cheats, often known as traffickers. Brokers, owners of brothels, family relatives, friends, the police, and political leaders may be connected with this network.

To save individuals from human trafficking, effective legal agencies should be set up that work against traffickers and exploiters. Since the network of traffickers is interrelated, we need to take strict measures to save people from human trading. These include effective monitoring of trafficking, effective coordination between the ministries of tourism, labor and transport to fight against this socio-economic problem. This is an issue that needs to be dealt with an iron hand as it involves child abuse and the denial of basic human rights.