Human trafficking how does it work

At a minimum, one element from each column must be present to establish a potential situation of human trafficking. These cases involved 10, individual victims; nearly 5, potential traffickers and 1, trafficking businesses.

Human trafficking is notoriously underreported. Shocking as these numbers are, they are likely only a tiny fraction of the actual problem. Human trafficking can happen to anyone but some people are more vulnerable than others.

Significant risk factors include recent migration or relocation, substance use, mental health concerns, involvement with the children welfare system and being a runaway or homeless youth. Perpetrators of human trafficking span all racial, ethnic, and gender demographics and are as diverse as survivors. Victims of sex trafficked are moved from hotel to hotel, province to province. Individuals subjected to labour trafficked are isolated, sometimes on rural properties which little contact with the outside world.

Exploitation : Exploitation is the key element of human trafficking offences within the Criminal Code of Canada. Exploitation occurs when someone forces another person to provide labour or a service by having them fear for their safety, or the safety of someone known to them. Why Does Human Trafficking Happen? This means that there are relatively low prosecution rates worldwide. She ponies up the money, or agrees to pay the company out of her waitressing earnings, and boards a plane.

Instead, she's taken to a brothel, where she's sold to the owner and forced to become a prostitute. She's in a country where she knows no one, where she has no official paperwork and where she's been threatened with violence or death if she runs away from the brothel.

If she's not taken to a brothel, she might be taken to a sweatshop, where she works alongside small children for 15 hours a day. She might work in a private home, tending to a family's needs; unlike a nanny or a housekeeper, however, she'll never receive a paycheck or a chance to talk to her family again. Human trafficking claims many victims -- men , women and children from all over the world. It's a crime that many people want to put an end to, but it will be no easy task.

In this article, we'll take a closer look at human trafficking and the struggle to stop it. Discussions of human trafficking are generally divided into two components: sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Sex trafficking tends to garner more headlines in the media due to its sensational nature, but labor trafficking is more common.

Victims of labor trafficking might work in sweatshops, agriculture, mines, construction, service industries and restaurants. Younger victims may be exploited for their innocent looks and forced to beg on the street all day, with all the funds going to their captors, or they may be enlisted in armies as child soldiers.

Working conditions, as you might imagine, are usually primitive and exploitative, and the workers are at great risk of physical injury. Sex trafficking victims are forced into prostitution, pornography and other commercial sex acts, such as performing in sex shows -- and they might have to perform sexual acts for dozens of men a night.

They may live in what looks from the outside like a private home, but is known locally to be an operating brothel; they may also be transported from city to city as local men tire of them.

In industrialized countries, a woman could earn even more. As sex slaves, these women are in danger of physical injury from violent johns or pimps, and they're also at risk for a host of sexual health issues, including sexually transmitted diseases everything from syphilis and gonorrhea to HIV and AIDS , unintended pregnancy , forced abortion and sterilization.

While trafficking victims may be forced into different types of work during the day, they're linked by the psychological damage done to them as well as the ways in which they're forced to perform this work. On the next page, we'll examine how traffickers capture their victims. If you'd like to see a country-by-country look at the problem of human trafficking, then peruse the U.

State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report. The document discusses every country's trafficking issues, the specific efforts they're taking or aren't taking to combat trafficking and recommendations for how they can improve their efforts. These three words, used in legal definitions of trafficking, get to the heart of how traffickers do their dirty deeds.

Force refers to how traffickers gather their victims, as well as how they maintain control over them. For example, some human trafficking victims are kidnapped, and once enslaved, traffickers use tactics like rape, physical abuse, food and sleep deprivation , or drug administration to control and condition them.

The traffickers usually keep their victims under lock and key, complete with guards who become violent if anyone tries to escape. In the introduction, we talked a little bit about how fraud works in human trafficking. In addition to luring victims with the promise of a good job or a better life, traffickers may also approach poor families and offer to send their children to countries where they'll be able to get an education and live with a loving family, only to sell the children to a diamond mine.

When fraud is used in this way, the victim's initial consent becomes invalid. Traffickers often use fraud -- by setting a price for travel or shelter, and ordering the victim to pay it off through prostitution or forced labor -- to convince their victims to work.

Such a practice is illegal; you can't dictate how a debt has to be paid off. However, victims don't know this, or they may lack the math skills to notice that no matter how much they work, the debt owed never seems to get any smaller. Practices such as these are often called debt bondage.

Lastly, coercion is a powerful tactic in keeping trafficking victims enslaved. Not only do traffickers threaten violence against their captives, they also threaten violence against beloved family members and friends should the slave get out of line.

Traffickers may use blackmail: They may threaten to send compromising photographs to the victims' families. In some countries, a woman's loss of virtue would be a black mark on the family's name, or could even result in the victim's arrest or deportation back to a shamed family.

Since the captors usually hold their prisoners' travel documents if there were any , this is a frightening prospect for people in a country where they may not even speak the language.

More information on regional trends in human trafficking can be found here. Human trafficking has many forms. These include exploitation in the sex, entertainment and hospitality industries, and as domestic workers or in forced marriages.

Victims are forced to work in factories, on construction sites or in the agricultural sector without pay or with an inadequate salary, living in fear of violence and often in inhumane conditions.

Some victims are tricked or coerced into having their organs removed. Children are forced to serve as soldiers or to commit crimes for the benefit of the criminals. The Global Report on Trafficking in Persons shows that 50 per cent of detected victims in were trafficked for sexual exploitation, 38 per cent were exploited for forced labour, six per cent were subjected to forced criminal activity, while one per cent were coerced into begging and smaller numbers into forced marriages, organ removal, and other purposes.

The detected forms of exploitation vary widely across different subregions. The share of detected victims trafficked for forced labour has steadily increased for more than a decade. No industry or economic sector is immune to human trafficking.

There are high-risk sectors, in which victims are most frequently found, such as agriculture or horticulture, construction, the garment and textile industries, catering and restaurants, domestic work, entertainment and the sex industry.

The criminals who engage in trafficking range from organized criminal groups to individuals operating on their own or in small groups on an opportunistic basis. The more organized groups are commonly involved in other serious crimes, such as trafficking in drugs, arms and other illicit commodities, as well as corruption and the bribery of officials.

When organized criminal groups are involved, many more victims are trafficked, often for longer periods, across wider distances and with more violence. While most countries have had comprehensive trafficking in persons legislation in place for some years, the number of convictions has only recently started to grow.

The increased number of convictions broadly follows the increases in the number of detected and reported victims, which shows that the criminal justice response is reflecting the detection trend.

However, several areas continue to have very low numbers of convictions for trafficking, and at the same time detect fewer victims. Limited numbers of detected victims and few convictions does not necessarily mean that traffickers are not active in these countries.