Human Trafficking Attorneys Serving California Injury Victims
Trafficking of children is a form of
human trafficking and is defined as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, and/or receipt” of a child for the purpose of slavery, forced labor and exploitation.
This definition is substantially wider than the same document’s definition of “trafficking in persons”.
Children may also be trafficked for the purpose of
adoption.
Though statistics regarding the magnitude of child trafficking are difficult to obtain, the
International Labour Organization estimates that 1.2 million children are trafficked each year. The trafficking of children has been internationally recognized as a serious crime that exists in every region of the world and which often has human rights implications. Yet, it is only within the past decade that the prevalence and ramifications of this practice have risen to international prominence, due to a dramatic increase in research and public action. A variety of potential solutions have accordingly been suggested and implemented, which can be categorized as four types of action: broad protection, prevention, law enforcement, and victim assistance.
Sex trafficking is
human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation, including
sexual slavery.
Sex trafficking has two aspects of supply and demand. The sex exploitation is based on the interaction between the trafficker selling a victim (the individual being trafficked and sexually exploited) to customers to perform sexual services.
Sex trafficking crimes are defined in three ways: acquisition, movement, and exploitation,
and includes child sex tourism (CST), domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) or commercial sexual exploitation of children, and prostitution.
According to a 2012 UN report, there were 2.4 million people around the world who are victims of human trafficking at any given time.
In this annual US$32 billion industry, 80% of victims are sexually exploited.
According to the
International Labour Organization, there are 20.9 million people subjected to forced labour, and 22% (4.5 million) who are victims of forced sexual exploitation.
However, due to the covertness of sex trafficking, obtaining accurate, reliable statistics is difficult for researchers.
Most victims find themselves in coercive or abusive situations from which escape is both difficult and dangerous. Locations where this practice occurs span the globe and reflect an intricate web between nations, making it very difficult to construct viable solutions to this human rights problem.
Human trafficking is the
trade of
humans for the purpose of
forced labour,
sexual slavery, or
commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others.
This may encompass providing a
spouse in the context of
forced marriage,
or the extraction of organs or tissues,
including for
surrogacy and
ova removal.
Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim’s rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial
exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in people, especially women and children, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another.
According to the
International Labour Organization (ILO), forced labor alone (one component of human trafficking) generates an estimated $150 billion in profits per annum as of 2014.
In 2012, the I.L.O. estimated that 21 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery. Of these, 14.2 million (68%) were exploited for labor, 4.5 million (22%) were sexually exploited, and 2.2 million (10%) were exploited in state-imposed forced labor.
Human trafficking is thought to be one of the fastest-growing activities of trans-national criminal organizations.
Commercial sexual exploitation of children (
CSEC) is a commercial transaction that involves the
sexual exploitation of a child, such as the
prostitution of children and
child pornography.
CSEC may involve
coercion and
violence against children and amount to forced labour and a form of
contemporary slavery as well as offering the sexual services of children for compensation, financial or otherwise.
A declaration of the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm in 1996, defined CSEC as:
- ‘sexual abuse by the adult and remuneration in cash or kind to the child or a third person or persons. The child is treated as a sexual object and as a commercial object.’
CSEC includes
child sex tourism and other forms of transactional sex where a child engages in sexual activities to have key needs fulfilled, such as food, shelter or access to education. It includes forms of transactional sex where the sexual abuse of children is not stopped or reported by household members, due to benefits derived by the household from the perpetrator. CSEC also potentially includes
arranged marriages involving children under the
age of consent, where the child has not freely consented to marriage and where the child is sexually abused.
The
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) states that roughly one out of every five girls and one out of every ten boys will be sexually exploited or abused before they become of age.
UNICEF says that child sexual exploitation is “one of the gravest infringements of rights that a child can endure”
Contact Our California Child Sex Trafficking Lawyers
Please
contact our team of
California child sex trafficking lawyers. They offer free consults and charge no fee unless they recover for you.
