Human trafficking: causes, consequences, and countermeasures

Human trafficking is a form of present-day slavery characterized by the use of coercion, fraud and force to exploit people for commercial benefits. Each year, a huge number of women, men and children worldwide, incorporating in the United States, fall victim of human trafficking. Victimized people are frequently attracted with false guarantees of well-paying occupations or controlled by individuals they trust. Instead, they are compelled or coerced into domestic servitude, prostitution, factory labor, or different forms of forced labor (Warner, 2010).

The Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. is answerable for investigating human trafficking, protecting victims and arresting traffickers. DHS conducts a series of investigations and makes various arrests each year, utilizing a victim-focused methodology. DHS additionally processes migration alleviation through Continued Presence (CP), U visas and T. visas, to human trafficking victims and other designated criminal acts (Forest, 2010).

After the passing of the 1949 UN Convention, human-trafficking fell far from global consideration, and was reinvented at the close of the twentieth century in the wake of globalization. Battling human trafficking re-developed as a worldwide necessity in the late 1980s as various states, human rights activists, non-governmental organizations and various religious and feminist movements tried to make the publicize issue. Although global human trafficking does not pose any military danger, government officials around the globe contend that the act gravely jeopardizes the state of human dignity and respect (Morehouse, 2009). For instance, the U.S. Government Accountability Office considers that its topmost objective in fighting trafficking is to dismantle and disrupt criminal agencies with the help of the Department of Homeland security. These goals include surveying vulnerabilities and alleviating dangers to homeland security.

These dangers to homeland security focus on cross-border arranged crime and security of national borders. Responding to the evidently developing threat postured by trafficking, the United Nations passed the Protocol to suppress, prevent and punish human trafficking, involving children and women. This is a supplement to the United Nations Convention against Trans-border planned Crime of 2000 (Forest, 2010). This methodology commanded the criminalization of trafficking, strengthened border controls, repatriation of victims and reinforced more secure cross-border traveling documents. The Trafficking Protocol additionally incorporates measures to safeguard the human rights of trafficking affected persons. However, critics of human rights protocol contend that, while human rights concerns might have given a few impetuses for collective activity, it is the security issues revolving around migrant smuggling and trafficking, which are the correct driving forces behind such exertions.

The phenomenon of organized crime systems and threatening ma-as exists in debates and discussions related to human trafficking. The Center for United States Policy studies notes that Anti-trafficking strategies have put an accentuation on transnational and organized criminal activities. Such progress has imposed harsher punishments for perpetrators of human trafficking. Cross-border organized crime is seen as the dull side of globalization, damaging and threatening economic and democratic basis of societies. This weakens institutions and the practice of the rule of law (Forest, 2010). Instead of depicting a departure from conventional organized criminal acts, human trafficking appears to complement the current activities carried out by criminal networks.