What is Human Trafficking?

It is modern-day slavery.  It exploits and controls other persons through force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of obtaining labor or commercial sex acts.  The most common and severe forms of human trafficking are sex and labor trafficking.

 

The Action-Means-Purpose Model describes three components of sex and labor trafficking:

  • Action.  Recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining of an individual. Additional actions considered sex trafficking include patronizing, soliciting, and advertising an individual.

  •  Means used.  Force, fraud, or coercion. 

  • Purpose. Compelled labor or services or commercial sex act(s).

 

Force, fraud, or coercion involving children under the age of 18 does not have to be demonstrated to constitute sex trafficking.

(National Human Trafficking Hotline (2020). Human Trafficking. Retrieved from https://humantraffickinghotline.org/type-trafficking/human-trafficking.)

 
 

(a) “Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of 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 position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;

(b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used;

(c) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered “trafficking in persons” even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article;

(d) “Child” shall mean any person under eighteen years of age.

(Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol defines human trafficking as Accessed from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, https://bit.ly/38NW4f9)