Human Rights- What is Human Trafficking?

After reading a few articles in the book Global Issues, Local Arguments by June Johnson I was able to truly understand what human trafficking meant and how victims of human trafficking are trafficked. Many victims of trafficking are forced to work in prostitution or sex entertainment. However, trafficking also takes place as labor exploitation, such as domestic servitude, sweatshop factories, or migrant agricultural work. Traffickers use force, fraud and intimidation to force women, men and children to engage in these activities. Force involves the use of rape, beatings and confinement to control victims. Forceful violence is used especially during the early stages of victimization, known as the ‘seasoning process’, which is used to break victim’s resistance to make them easier to control. Fraud often involves false offers of employment. For example, women and children will reply to advertisements promising jobs as waitresses, maids and dancers in other countries and are then forced into prostitution once they arrive at their destinations. Intimidation involves threats of serious harm to, or physical restraint of, victims of trafficking; any method, plan or pattern intended to cause victims to believe that failure to perform an act would result in restraint against them; or the abusers family. Victims of trafficking are often subjected to “debt-bondage,” usually in the context of paying off transportation fees into the destination countries. Traffickers often threaten victims with injury or death, or the safety of the victim’s family back home. Traffickers commonly take away the victims’ travel documents and isolate them to make escape more difficult. I am also aware that there is a huge difference between human trafficking and migrant smuggling. Migrant smuggling consist of migrants consent to being smuggled and smuggling is always transnational.