Notes

Human Trafficking IN THE US Is the Most Important Social Problem of Our Times
Just what is innocentsatrisk.org trafficking?

Although the act of human trafficking has been going on for decades, it has only been a couple of years (2000) since the United Nations Trafficking Protocol (the Palermo Protocol of 2000, an international legal agreement mounted on the US) was established containing the first internationally arranged definition of human trafficking with the knowing that it's the force, fraud, and coercion from one person to the next that defines the essence of the crime.

People often tell me that they think human trafficking is moving people from one country to the next, and while that is a section of what the act is really, the heart of the issue is the mental and emotional movement of a person by another. The U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) (created due to the UN Protocol) leaves out what to me is the most important aspect of this is and therefore helps it be more difficult to prove a case in court against alleged traffickers.

The heart of the U.N. Trafficking Protocol defines human trafficking as: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, through 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 posture of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or advantages to achieve the consent of an individual having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

The US-TVPA is weak and really should include in it the terminology in keeping with the U.N. Protocol because it further distinguishes that traffickers use deception, and abuse of power, or of a position of vulnerability, when seeking their victims. Traffickers look for the vulnerable focusing on how to deceive and manipulate them - the worst type of abduction - by causing someone to lose rely upon those they ought to trust the most. It takes a lifetime to "re-program" someone who has been manipulated this way.

Human trafficking should be placed at the top of the set of crucial social issues.

In current human trafficking advocacy circles, traditional ways of trafficking have been the focus and prohibit real discovery into the reality of why you have modern-day slavery. Poverty, homelessness, runaways, broken families, high school drop-out rates, pornography (mass media): each are stand-alone social issues that merit our time and attention. Each brings using them a different group of problems that demand attention from those people who are whole inside our society. Yet whenever we look at human trafficking, we see all these issues wrapped up in to the one almost such as a domino effect. Each of these issues is really a contributing factor to those areas fueling human trafficking. And, I dare say, each one of these issues are due to one giant controlling america and manipulating our every move - greed. Traffickers not merely search for vulnerable and at-risk youth, they target the male population to enlist them as buyers.
Homepage: https://www.innocentsatrisk.org/