{"id":76950,"date":"2016-08-01T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=76950"},"modified":"2016-07-28T17:04:55","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T16:04:55","slug":"30-july-un-designated-day-for-developing-awareness-of-human-trafficking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/30-july-un-designated-day-for-developing-awareness-of-human-trafficking\/","title":{"rendered":"30 July: UN-designated Day for Developing Awareness of Human Trafficking"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ren\u00e9<\/a>The recent interception by the Italian Navy of two ships filled with refugees from Syria and other migrants has highlighted in a dramatic way the ever-growing trade in persons.\u00a0 On both cases the captain and crew had abandoned the ships, which were heading toward a rocky shore when the ships were boarded by the Italian Navy.<\/p>\n

30 July has been designated by a UN General Assembly Resolution in 2013 (A\/RES\/68\/192) as a day to develop awareness of human trafficking.\u00a0 Awareness has been growing, but effective remedies are slow and uncoordinated.\u00a0 Effective remedies are often not accessible to victims of trafficking owing to gaps between setting international standards, enacting national laws and then implementation in a humane way.<\/p>\n

The international standards have been set out in the \u201cUnited Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime\u201d and its \u201cProtocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.\u201d The Convention and the Protocol standards are strengthened by the \u201cInternational Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families.\u201d\u00a0 The worldwide standards have been reaffirmed by regional legal frameworks such as the \u201cCouncil of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite clear international and regional standards, there is poor implementation, limited government resources and infrastructure dedicated to the issue, a tendency to criminalize victims and restrictive immigration policies in many countries.<\/p>\n

Trafficking in persons is often linked to networks trafficking in drugs and arms.\u00a0 Some gangs traffic in all three; in other cases agreements are made to specialize and not expand into the specialty of other criminal networks.\u00a0 These networks often act with a high degree of impunity from government services.<\/p>\n

There are three sources of trafficking in persons.\u00a0 The first, as highlighted by the intercepted ships, are refugees from armed conflicts.\u00a0 Refugees are covered by the Refugee Conventions supervised by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the country of first asylum.\u00a0 Thus Syrian refugees are protected and helped by the UNHCR in Lebanon, but not if they leave Lebanon.\u00a0 As \u00bc of the population of Lebanon are now refugees from the conflicts in Syria, the Lebanese government is increasingly placing restrictions on Syrian’s possibility to work in Lebanon, to receive schooling, medical services, proper housing etc.\u00a0 Thus many Syrians try to leave Lebanon or Turkey to find a better life in Western Europe.\u00a0 Refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan follow the same pattern.<\/p>\n

The second category are people leaving their country for economic reasons \u2212 sometimes called \u201ceconomic refugees.\u201d\u00a0 Migration for better jobs and a higher standard of living has a long history.\u00a0 Poverty, ethnic and racial discrimination, and gender-based discrimination are all factors in people seeking to change countries. \u00a0With ever-tighter immigration policies in many countries and with a popular \u201cbacklash\u201d against migrants in some countries, would-be migrants turn to \u201cpassers\u201d \u2212 individuals or groups that try to take migrants into a country, avoiding legal controls.<\/p>\n

A third category \u2212 or a subcategory of economic migration \u2212 is the sex trade, usually of women but also children.\u00a0 As a Human Rights Watch study of the Japanese \u201csex-entertainment\u201d businesses notes, \u201cthere are an estimated 150,000 non-Japanese women employed in the Japanese sex industry, primarily from other Asian countries such as Thailand and the Philippines.\u201d \u00a0These women are typically employed in the lower rungs of the industry either in ‘dating’ snack bars or in low-end brothels, in which customers pay for short periods of eight or fifteen minutes.\u00a0 Abuses are common as job brokers and employers take advantage of foreign women’s vulnerability as undocumented migrants: they cannot seek recourse from the police or other law enforcement authorities without risking deportation and potential prosecution, and they are isolated by language barriers, a lack of community, and a lack of familiarity with their surroundings.\u201d\u00a0 We find similar patterns in many countries.<\/p>\n

The scourge of trafficking in persons will continue to grow unless strong counter measures are taken.\u00a0 Basically, police and governments worldwide do not place a high priority on the fight against trafficking unless illegal migration becomes a media issue, as did the interception of the two ships.<\/p>\n

Thus, real progress needs to be made through non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Association of World Citizens.\u00a0 There are four aspects to this anti-trafficking effort.\u00a0 The first is to help build political will by giving accurate information to political leaders and the press.\u00a0 The other three aspects depend on the efforts of the NGOs themselves.\u00a0 Such efforts call for increased cooperation among NGOs and capacity building.<\/p>\n

The second aspect is research into the areas from which children and women are trafficked.\u00a0 These are usually the poorest parts of the country and among marginalized populations.\u00a0 Socio-economic and educational development projects must be directed to these areas so that there are realistic avenues for advancement.<\/p>\n

The third aspect is the development of housing and of women’s shelters to ensure that persons who have been able to leave exploitive situations have temporary housing and other necessary services.<\/p>\n

The fourth aspect is psychological healing.\u00a0 Very often women and children who have been trafficked into the sex trades have a disrupted or violent family and have a poor idea of their self-worth. This is also often true of refugees for armed conflict. Thus, it is important to create opportunities for individual and group healing, to give a spiritual dimension to the person through teaching meditation and yoga.\u00a0 There are needs for creating adult education facilities so that people may continue a broken education cycle.<\/p>\n

There are NGOs who are already working along these lines.\u00a0 Their efforts need to be encouraged and expanded.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens and <\/em>editor of Transnational Perspectives. He is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are three sources of trafficking in persons. The first are refugees from armed conflicts. The second category are people leaving their country for economic reasons \u2212 sometimes called \u201ceconomic refugees.\u201d A third category \u2212 or a subcategory of economic migration \u2212 is the sex trade, usually of women but also children. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}