Virtually every nation on earth has a law prohibiting slavery and human trafficking. Yet by almost all accounts, human trafficking is growing worse: a $32 billion global business that is now on par with illegal drugs and weapons sales.
As the scourge of modern-day slavery continues to seep into the fabric of contemporary societies world-wide, an obvious question arises: what can — and is – being done about it?
If there’s any group or sector for which this question is especially pressing, it would be the world’s law enforcement agencies and criminal justice systems. It is police and prosecutors and judges, after all, who make up the frontline troops in the battle to check the spread of slavery. Are the world’s police agencies and judicial systems up to the task of identifying trafficking crimes, arresting the perpetrators, disbanding trafficking rings, helping protect victims and obtaining successful prosecutions?
The answer right now is no, according to a compilation of research studies by a Swiss-based think tank, the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). The business of buying and selling humans on a global scale, the report concludes, is growing faster than the ability of law enforcement to control it and courts to prosecute it.
For anyone seriously interested in understanding contemporary slavery, the report, entitled “Strategies Against Human Trafficking: the Role of the Security Sector,” is a must read. Through more than 514 extensively researched and annotated pages, dozens of scholars and security experts probe the issue of human trafficking from the perspective of how well or poorly police, prosecutors, judges and victim advocates at the local, national and international levels are dealing with the issue.
The report’s overall conclusion is not encouraging. Police, starting with the proverbial cop on the beat, are falling behind in the battle to stop trafficking. Although prosecutions are increasing worldwide, the experts writing in the DCAF report say that the number of cases actually brought and successfully prosecuted is woefully inadequate. Just as alarming, the report contends that human trafficking victims often end up as legal lost souls who remain vulnerable to further exploitation.
There isn’t a chapter in DCAF report about the United States. But much its overall findings echo an assessment made in a recent series or articles in the Kansas City, Missouri, Star newspaper. That series had this to say about domestic efforts to gain control of trafficking: “After spending millions of taxpayer dollars, America appears to be losing the war (against trafficking) in its own backyard.”
The Kansas City series, like the DCAF report, dwells extensively on the pivotal role and response of law enforcement units, the court system, and government agencies to the trafficking issue. The DCAF report covers a broad, transnational canvas; the scholars whose chapters are included in the report are experts in their field whose writings draw upon extensive research in Europe, Southeast Asia and the UK.
If the overall assessment is grim, the reasons for the report’s pessimistic tone are manifold, ranging from inadequate intelligence to the lack of inter-agency cooperation at both the national and transnational levels. Police corruption is also a factor, especially in poorer nation states. Most of all, the report says, a pervasive lack of acknowledgment by the “security sector” (i.e., law enforcement and the criminal justice system) that there even is a contemporary slavery issue is holding back progress. Absent stepped-up training and enforcement, which would produce more prosecutions under existing laws, the DCAF report concludes that the contemporary slave trade in human beings will continue to expand its tentacles around the globe.
Since its release this past summer, the DCAF report hasn’t gotten much attention by the world news media. But there’s much in the study worth commenting upon. So over the next week or so, we will delve into the DCAF report in a series of posts here on the Freedom Blog.
The first blog will deal with how the lack of trafficking data is hindering progress.
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