The human trafficking threat

Newcastle Corporate Communications has released an awareness statement to help address common misconceptions and misunderstandings relating to the trafficking of persons. It reads as follows:

“Trafficking of children, aged from as young as five, across Southern African Borders is expected to increase sharply. Sadistic traffickers are cruel enough to lure children away from their poverty-stricken parents, leading these parents to believe that their children will have better a education and more job opportunities in South Africa. Children in rural areas are often recruited or even bought from their parents and relocated to cities. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that these children will be beaten, raped, and forced into drug addiction before they are used as prostitutes by paedophiles. Disoriented and far from home, these children become the slaves and prisoners of traffickers and seldom, if ever, find their way back home. Below are some key definitions to take note of:

Abduction: Some people are trafficked through the use abduction; this means that they are lead away by force or fraudulent persuasion.

Assisted voluntary return: Logistical and financial support to rejected asylum seekers, trafficked migrants, stranded students, qualified nationals and other migrants unable or unwilling to remain in the host country who volunteer to return to their countries of origin.

Debt bondage: One way used by traffickers to control their victims is through debt bondage and is defined as the status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his or her personal service or those of a person under his or her control as security for a debt. The value of this service is not directly applied towards the liquidation of the debt. The length and nature of those services are not respectively limited and defined.

Deception: With regards to migration, the context of this term not only refers to false or incorrect information, but also to the intentional abuse by capitalising on the lack of information available to the migrant. For example, victims of trafficking are deceived by traffickers who offer them a better life.

Exploitation: The act of taking advantage of something or someone, in particular the act of taking unjust advantage of another for one’s owns benefit. Examples are sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery and servitude.

Human Rights: Liberties and benefits which, by accepted contemporary values, all human beings should be able to claim as of right from the society in which they live. Human trafficking violates the liberties all human beings are entitled to by forcing people to live under slave-like conditions.

Smuggling: 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 of which the person is not a recognised permanent resident. Smuggling, contrary to trafficking, does not require an element of exploitation, coercion or violation of human rights.

Human Trafficker: It is an intermediary who moves people in order to obtain an economic or other profit by means of deception, coercion and other forms of exploitation. The trafficker’s intention is to exploit the person and gain profit or advantage from this exploitation.”