Human trafficking is a global market with the victims representing the supply, while illegal employers and exploiters represent the demand. The main commodity is women and children. The confidential manner in which this trade is conducted, maintains the anonymity of the operating groups, and ensures continuity and confidence in the absence of prosecution.
The main source of such operations is from countries of low wages and lack of proper educational facilities, usually developing countries. Education provides character-building and helps people recognise their rights and duties. For the uneducated, it makes it difficult to face employers, claim their rights and adequate wages, and complain to the competent authorities to demand their rights. People also fear oppression from their employers, because of this ignorance.
Several elements bind victims to this trade, such as the desire for a better standard of living elsewhere, the weak economic and social infrastructure of their country, lack of employment opportunities, organised crime, violence against children and women, discrimination against women, government corruption, political instability, armed conflict, cultural pressures and slavery.
Global demand is also a factor for illegal employment and human trafficking. For example, the demand for domestic workers in booming East Asian countries, where many victims are exploited or enslaved into hard labour.
We must, before applying criminal laws, address the conditions conducive to the spread of human trafficking, through programs designed to sensitise communities to the dangers of human trafficking, improve education and the system of schools, create jobs, promote equal rights and educate targeted communities of their legal rights.
Victims need to be removed from their slavery-like conditions and work needs to be done to reintegrate them into their communities and with their families. Government organisations must cooperate closely to prevent traffickers from obtaining legal shelter. There needs to be investment into the study of anti-trafficking strategies on a regular basis to make sure they are still creative and effective. In conclusion, governments must train their officials on human trafficking mechanisms and how to track them down systematically in order to shed light on the nature and magnitude of the problem and also to understand the needs of the victims.
- The reader works in administration and is based in Al Ain
