In the vile business of human trafficking, there is a giant tree that does not show the forest and that is the trafficking of women and girls for the purpose of sexual exploitation, which includes prostitution, of course, but also its derivatives of blackmail. for pornography and virtual adult services. The serious problem of sexual exploitation constitutes an abject multinational industrial activity, as or more profitable than the arms trade, but the victims of many other purposes of trafficking in human beings are also hidden. This hidden forest of human trafficking includes other purposes such as forced labor in agriculture, construction or the fishing sector, as well as domestic servitude, if not the recruitment of girls for the commission of criminal activities, begging and forced marriages.Finally, and as a residual percentage, is the trade in organs, according to the latest global report on Trafficking in Persons from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), with statistics from 2018.
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Trafficking does not necessarily involve large-scale activity or activity by illegal networks.
It is also about the humiliating trade in human beings carried out by people who are not part of criminal gangs, in an almost traditional way and to benefit personally or family, abusing someone's situation of vulnerability.
The recent victim of a vileness of this type was Pauline, a 38-year-old woman, born in Gabon and captured in her humble workplace by a European citizen who proposed to work taking care of her children and as a domestic servant, in her home, in Spain. Pauline, who was supporting a teenage daughter alone, agreed. At the Madrid airport, the wife and mother-in-law of the man who had hired her were waiting for her. Shortly after arriving, she noticed that the working conditions were far from the promised ones and began to suffer permanent abuse from the two women of the house, with unlimited working hours, strict control of her telephone communications (Pauline has a brother in France, but they prevented her from asking him for help), while imposing punishments that included leaving her without food.
Without receiving any salary for two months, Pauline tried to escape, but the family locked her up, without a phone or a passport, until the moment came when they decided to return her to her country. At the airport, Pauline distrusted the trip and managed to get away to ask for help from an airline employee. This story with no tragic end is one of the many that the awareness techniques of the Esperanza Project (Adoratrices and Sicar Cat) have collected over the last two years in Spain, specializing in comprehensive support for women who have been trafficked for any purpose. purpose of exploitation, some of which are reported in its analysis and recommendations document, presented a few weeks ago, after the end of the # TambelvesTrata campaign.
Marta González Manchón, coordinator of awareness of the Esperanza project, defines trafficking as a crime and a violation of human rights that involves a series of actions that range from capturing someone, transferring that person, hosting or receiving them, using any illegal means that it can be deception, abuse of a situation of need or vulnerability through threats, coercion, violence, kidnapping, kidnapping or fraud. “It is produced with the intention of subjecting that person to sexual exploitation or not. It can impose forced labor in any sector, or a marriage and even for the commission of crimes or the extraction of organs ”, he clarifies in a telephone dialogue. This definition, which is used in the field of Law, is in line with the premises of the Palermo Protocol of the United Nations, of the year 2000,and the European directive 36/2011.
For it to be considered trafficking, it is not necessary "a crossing of international borders, nor that the exploited persons are immigrants or are in an irregular situation", clarifies González Manchón. However, what differentiates trafficking from forced labor (or slavery) is that the three elements are present together: recruitment, transfer and exploitation, even if no economic profit is generated. The latter often occurs with the “hiring” of adolescent domestic workers in rural areas, both to be transferred to other countries or to cities within the same country, a very frequent practice in North Africa and Latin America. From time to time, international organizations such as UNICEF and some media echo what, for example,It happens in the neighborhoods of the big Moroccan cities with the little maids (les petites bonnes).
"Not all cases are extreme and comparable to slavery," says the expert from the Esperanza Project.
However, in recent years, many situations with very different intentions have begun to emerge, constituting "the tip of the iceberg of human trafficking".
Robbery for love
A phenomenon that the workers and educators of the Spanish prisons know well is that of the
charge fines
for love. These are women from very disadvantaged backgrounds, primarily in South American countries, who are deceived and manipulated by alleged boyfriends who convince them to transfer drugs into their bodies. Anyone who has ever visited a penitentiary will be able to collect devastating testimonies from women who have spent years in prison without having stepped on more Spanish territory than a couple of meters from an airport.
The document of the Esperanza Project collects cases of sentimental deception such as the one suffered by the young Colombian Astrid, 28, who met Dragos through Facebook and, after several months of virtual relationship, decided to accept his offer to travel to Spain, where they were going to get married to regularize their situation.
Upon arrival, after several comings and goings of shared flats, Astrid learned that her mission would be to steal clothes in stores and shopping centers, in order to be resold by a gang that employed other women pressed by travel debts and without documentation in order.
In Spain, the law guarantees the protection of someone with minimal suspicions that they may be a victim of a trafficking crime
Marta González Manchón, awareness coordinator of the Esperanza Project
How do you protect these people who are harassed and in a situation of irregularity, with fear of reporting and being even more helpless and exposed in Europe? “In Spain, the law guarantees the protection of someone if there is minimal suspicion that they may be a victim of a trafficking crime. If she has been held in a Foreigners Internment Center (CIE), she is removed from there, of course; You cannot initiate an expulsion proceeding or it must be paralyzed if it is initiated. It is necessary to protect with mere indications, and for that there is the support in shelters, without conditioning the assistance to the victim reporting it, although in the case of collaboration with the justice, these people have the right to obtain a residence and work permit " , observes the specialist.
Understanding trafficking as a very broad and dynamic business will improve the detection of unexpected cases and the protection of victims, regardless of their region of origin or destination.
"The problem is that the legislation is not applied correctly in all cases, since there are too many demands when it comes to identifying the person as a victim of trafficking," he adds.
For this reason, the objective passes, in his opinion, to "improve the detection of those exploitation purposes that still remain hidden and invisible."
Bride in a refugee camp
The synthesis document of the
# TambienesTrata
campaign
mentions the need to stimulate public policies and provide a larger budget for trafficking services, beyond that aimed at prostitution, which, according to the UN, it constitutes half of the human trafficking that occurs in the world, followed by that which targets forced labor, which represents 38%, in 2018 figures.
The routes of human trafficking cross all the geographical areas of the planet, including the itineraries traced by fishing boats in demonic latitudes, which seem like the Far West turned to sea (as the journalist Ian Urbina explains in his book
Oceans without law
). The social, political and economic precariousness ups and downs favor some forms or others to make profitable the market of people; the world's hot spots are on the move, but the unscrupulous always find the most vulnerable beings to profit. Each region has its specialty. For example, according to the report, in South America, the vast majority of victims of trafficking (80%) are female, women and girls. Adult women narrowly constitute a general majority of those detected (51%), while girls represent a significant proportion (31%). These are found more often than children. There are, however, other subregions of the continent in which they constitute the majority.
In this last decade, to the sad reality of the adolescents of the Yazidi minority, kidnapped, harassed and sold by members of the Islamic State, the desperate situations of mass emigrations have been added in which the buying and selling of people with multiple purposes. "In refugee camps, for example, cases of forced marriages are increasing," explains González Manchón.
Understanding trafficking as a very broad and dynamic business, diversifying at different scales, will improve the detection of unexpected cases and the protection of victims, whatever their region of origin or destination, whatever the purpose for which they were captured. .
Hence the importance of training professionals from the public sector and NGOs in unified Human Rights protocols that allow a sensitive look and the identification of the largest number of cases.
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