Trafficking in persons (TIP) is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons, typically for, but not limited to, the purposes of sexual exploitation or forced labor ( UNODC 2018). “Trafficking” is also described as a modern slave trade, a throwback to an ancient time that has its roots in precapitalist societies. Until recently, there was no international agreement on the legal definition of trafficking. In 2000, the United Nations (UN) Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its accompanying protocols–more commonly known as the Palermo Protocols–were adopted by the UN General Assembly to clarify the term and distinguish the phenomenon from human smuggling. According to the UN, human trafficking involves “the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation … shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth … have been used” ( UN 2000: 42).
Nonetheless, in public discourse, TIP often continues to be confused with the smuggling of people (som), which is “the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident” (UN 2000: 54–55). The conflation of trafficking with smuggling also seems to be sanctioned by the Palermo Protocols (Sharma 2005). While these are intended to differentiate TIP from som, the distinction has been collapsed in law. As Nandita Sharma argues, “by making the consent of the migrant in her/his movement across borders ‘irrelevant’ if they experience any form of deception, coercion, or abuse in the process, this definition also dramatically expands the scope of trafficking” (Sharma 2005: 90). This is even more evident if we consider that “coercion,” within the definition of TIP, is not only understood in the terms of brute physical force or mental domination, but also in more general terms as the abuse of a position of vulnerability (Sharma 2005). It is thus very difficult to set human smuggling apart from human trafficking, especially if the former occurs in a condition of extreme vulnerability, such as that faced by war-displaced communities.
Although there is no consensus on the actual number of trafficked persons, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there were 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally in 2016 alone ( ILO 2019). In this context, TIP has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry in which, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), females are mostly trafficked for sexual exploitation and males for forced labor ( UNODC 2018). Studies suggest that minors increasingly make up larger shares of the total number of trafficked persons ( UNODC 2018).
Lately, recognition of how humanitarian crises such as armed conflicts and forced displacement exacerbate people’s exposure to trafficking and exploitation has grown. In other words, human trafficking flourishes in wartime because people are particular vulnerable and criminals are less compelled to abide by the rule of law (Shelley 2010). However, a growing body of critical scholarship on TIP has begun to question the narratives of victimization and criminality in the official discourse on trafficking as inadequate categories to account for the complexity of the phenomenon (Davidson O’Connell 2010). One of the main conclusions of recent research on the effects of the Syrian war on TIP, for example, indicates that much of the exploitation taking place is not carried out by criminal minded organizations, but rather involves families and communities left with no viable alternatives for survival other than situations that can be characterized as exploitation, both in the terms of exploiting and being exploited ( ICMPD 2015).
A large swathe of literature has also demonstrated how tightening border controls and the implementation of restrictive immigration policies favor the emergence of TIP (Andrijasevic 2007). Along those lines, other studies have argued that, instead of conflating human smuggling with human trafficking, researchers and humanitarian practitioners should better address the implications of stricter border regimes and the militarization of border control on smuggling and trafficking in human beings (Achilli 2017).
References
ILO (International Labour Organization) (2019) Forced Labour, Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking. www.ilo.org.
UN (United Nations) (2000) United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto. www.unodc.org.
UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) (2018) Global Study on Smuggling of Migrants 2018. www.unodc.org.