Author: tahrajirari28

   The fight to end Human Trafficking, begins with you, and whether or not you are able to dedicate yourself and time in order to affect these helpless victims. There are thousands of international human rights violations occurring across the globe as of right now. Currently there are around 25 million humans being trafficked in the world, with 80% being women and children. Though there are several definitions to this term, the United Nation defines trafficking as “at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. The human rights community as a response works incessantly to attempt to diminish these disastrous acts.  

“Laura, a school counselor, called the National Human Trafficking Hotline because she was concerned that one of her middle school students, Alyssa, was engaging in commercial sex. Alyssa was a frequent runaway and was recently found at a home with several adults where commercial sex was believed to be taking place. Laura told the National Hotline that Alyssa’s foster family had noticed that she had recently received some expensive gifts, and some of Alyssa’s peers had reported that she was having sex in exchange for money. Laura planned to speak to Alyssa in order to get a better understanding of what was going on, but wanted the National Hotline’s guidance. The National Hotline talked through some of the indicators of trafficking and how to do a trafficking assessment.  Additionally, the National Hotline provided Laura with referrals to local resources and sent her a comprehensive assessment tool for educators. “

I believe it becomes quite evident on how we can redress the problems that occur when it comes to the eradication of human trafficking. This could be done by granting asylum to those who attempt to seek it right away. What prevents several courts from granting these victims asylum as they are technically committing a felony if they entered a country illegally however, these victims had absolutely no choice in this matter and had either their own life or families life threatened in order to being coerced to commit these awful acts. To create several restrictions and guidelines to those who attempt to seek asylum prevent them from ever gaining freedom and to live this awful life until the day it may be taken away from them. Victims who are seeking asylum are not given the same rights to those who have been granted it, which makes their journey to be able to access it even more difficult. Asylum seeking victims have limited access to safe accommodations, education, work as well of acquiring long-term stay in the United States. There is also a limited amount of economical funding to these survivors as those who are in the process of being granted their freedom end up residing in temporary residence units, that are typically co-ed. The dangers of this include a young girl who has just been through something traumatic is forced to be placed in an area with men at the danger of being groomed, or even worse harmed all over again. The government needs to allocate funds to these victims so that they are protected in a safe environment and do not risk being trafficked all over again. These survivors as well should be placed in as program where they are constantly checked up to make sure they remain safe, until they are mentally and physically able to be on their own again.

Tweets by reformforhuman1

In April of this last year, the President signed the ‘FOSTA’ bill which intent is to end online sex trafficking. This act allowed prosecutor’s the tool to be able to go after the thousands of websites such as “Backpage.com” that would launder young girls, which at times resulted in their death. Though this bill may seem like a step into the right directions, scholars such as, Eric Goldman have voiced otherwise. FOSTA reinstated the “moderators dilemma”, allowing Goldman to state that “Some services can’t afford to exercise full editorial control, and other services (such as tools for real-time communication) can’t function with full editorial control. Thus, if failing to moderate content perfectly leads to liability, some online services will abandon their efforts to moderate user content or even shut down.” .   The bill itself has come across as “too broad” this creates a liability for websites who have before been under protection by the Communications Decency Act, which protected content posted under third parties. I agree with this approach far more than the Simmons approach, as though she recognizes prostitution a completely different field than sex trafficking, Goldman understands that the prostitution is in itself is a completely different realm, and deserves to remain intact under the laws that have been protecting it, before this bill has come into place. Advocates for sex workers have strong critiques for this act as it removes a safe space for sex workers to to screen customers. This act will ”push traffickers to overseas websites that are beyond the reach of law enforcement, making it harder to prosecute them and harder to find them through the victims.”. Our government should work to instill laws and acts that will only benefit victims who are coerced into this human rights violation, as implementing acts such as these tend to burden those who choose this certain lifestyle willingly.

    The Trafficking in Persons report however remains to be extremely politically motivated carrying a large bias. A strong example of one of the bias that the United States gives off is the rating that China received in the most recent scorecard. China received a rating of Tier 3 which is the highest on the scorecard, meaning that China is not doing well whatsoever at combating human trafficking. It has been suggested, however, that the Trump administration has given this score based on their negative bond with China as a whole and decided to rebuke it by grouping it with North Korea, Iran and Syria, three similar countries that America is currently not on good terms with. America continues to keep a focus on other countries stances on human trafficking in order to easily prosecute criminals of other countries in America’s favor, thus hindering the legibility of the report.

    The questioning of viability of this report continues as human trafficking is comprised of a number of crimes including, but not limited to, documentation forgery, fraudulent promises, kidnapping and immigration law abuse. The multiplicity of crimes make it rather difficult to rate countries based on the one crime, which is why it may become easy to falsify scorecards, especially when it is America rating itself. Scoping the analysis of the scorecard we were able to find out that “There were only 13 prosecutions of labor trafficking cases in the United States, which is a shockingly low number and entirely inadequate given the scope of the problem.” However recent reports have established that due to an extreme amount of deportation cases occurring it makes it difficult for migrants to report crimes, in fear that they will not receive immunity and be deported as well.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton