VIENNA (IDN) — The Covid-19 pandemic has increased human trafficking using social networks and the Internet as a platform, Lead Author of the UNODC Global Reports on Trafficking in Persons, Fabricio Sarrica, told IDN.
He was highlighting some salient aspects of the 2022 UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, the seventh of its kind mandated by the General Assembly through the 2010 United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Published on January 24, 2023, it covers 141 countries and provides an overview of the response to the trafficking in persons at global, regional and national levels by analysing trafficking cases detected between 2018 and 2021. A major focus of this edition of the Report is on trends of detections and convictions that show important changes compared to historical trends since UNODC started to collect data in 2003.
Everything that happens in the virtual world is reflected in events in the real world. There are only new instruments that traffickers use to recruit victims. They use hunting techniques and go from profile to profile on social networks to find potentially vulnerable victims. The young generation usually publishes everything. Hunters use the Internet and social networks to verify victims’ identity and profiling explained the UNODC expert on human trafficking.
Potential target
“For example, I can determine that it is a young girl, very attractive, and at the same time, the phases she is going through in her life. This is how they do a profile check, identify a potential target, and then start building a friendship with the potential victim to recruit them. Then the recruitment process could turn offline: ‘Let’s meet, come to my country’. And then they are exploited in many ways offline. However, we have cases in which Internet platforms are also used for trafficking victims between dealers and for communication between criminal networks,” noted Sarrica.
There are also cases of children being sexually exploited directly in front of webcams. According to researchers, this is also an instrument increasingly used by human traffickers. From a trafficker’s point of view, this is commercially very convenient.
“If you have a victim in front of a webcam, you can have millions of clients simultaneously in many parts of the world exploiting the victim by just one client.” In addition, they can recycle images many times over different periods. From a criminal point of view, it is very profitable.
Women and children more vulnerable
Female victims (women and girls) account for 60 per- cent of the total number of detected victims in 2020. The marked reduction in the detection of sexual exploitation drives the decrease in the number of female victims per 100,000 population (a decline of 11 per cent in one year)
Despite this drop, women and girls comprise a higher number of victims of trafficking than men and boys. But a longer historical trend towards identifying more male victims seems to have accelerated in 2020.
Analysis of the case summaries collected by UNODC suggests that traffickers use more violence with women and child victims, especially girls.
Female victims of any age described in these cases are three times more likely to suffer physical or extreme violence (including sexual violence) during trafficking than males. The same dataset shows that children (girls and boys) are 1.7 times more likely to suffer physical or extreme violence than adults (men and women), and girls are 1.5 times more likely to suffer violence than women. This is relevant in the case of all regions of origin, regardless of the type of criminality involved or the form of exploitation.
More impunity equals more victims
Convicted traffickers often operate in small groups, loosely connected through business-type arrangements, acting individually or in pairs. However, an analysis of convictions in recent years shows that when large criminal organizations with territorial control engage in trafficking in persons, they are more violent and traffic more victims for more extended periods and farther distances compared to less organized criminals.
One noteworthy finding of the Report is that most victims identified in adjudicated cases are “self-rescued”, suggesting that proactive identification remains limited in scope and effectiveness—a review of court cases found that the majority of cases are brought to authorities by victims who manage to exit exploitation and come forward on their own.
Diverse forms of trafficking
The profile of victims of trafficking facing mixed forms of exploitation typically shifts according to the type of hybrid exploitation. Other examples of diverse forms include victims exploited in forced labour.
Detected victims who experience this form of tracking are overwhelmingly males, especially boys at 68 percent. The case summaries analyzed by UNODC involving trafficking for forced criminality included shoplifting, pickpocketing and other theft of cars, petrol or jewellery, drug trafficking and fraud in different forms. Among the other forms of exploitation, exploitative begging accounted for about one per cent of globally detected victims in 2020.
Another one percent of detected trafficking victims in 2020 were subject to forced marriage. This crime takes different forms, as described in court case summaries reported to UNODC. One type exploits women trafficked and forced to marry foreign men who can gain legal rights to enter and stay in the country in so-called sham marriages. Such trafficking exists in European Union countries.
Other forms of trafficking for forced marriage concern girls forced to marry in the context of harmful social practices.
Victims tracked who face other forms of exploitation exist mainly in mixed labour and sexual exploitation situations. Such a subset of victims is increasing in share worldwide. Whereas two percent of all detected victims underwent mixed forced labour and sexual exploitation in 2018, ten percent did in 2020. -IDN