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Rise in domestic sex trafficking

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trafficking- Photobucket - cianjurcybercity[1]Women and children are being forced into modern-day slavery.

In the USA, January was declared National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month by President Barack Obama.

In the same month as Obama is re-inaugurated, America is marking the 150th anniversary of the emancipation proclamation, the order which abolished slavery in the country.

According to the US government’s own report into human trafficking released last year, an estimated 27 million people, including children, are still victims of modern-day slavery across the globe.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that 59 per cent of trafficking victims are women, with women and girls accounting for three quarters of all trafficked people.

An estimated 27 per cent of victims are children, with two in three of those being girls.

The sex industry is the biggest driver for the trade in people, particularly women and girls; 58 per cent of all cases reported by the UN between 2007-2010 were linked to sexual exploitation.

According to Anti-Slavery International, this figure shoots up to 98 per cent for trafficked women and girls, and female victims also make up the majority of people trafficked for other reasons, including forced labour and domestic servitude.

Victims of human trafficking are often perceived as migrant workers, looking for a better life and coerced or deceived into exploitation.

They are stigmatised as illegal immigrants, isolated by language barriers and often criminalised by the countries they find themselves in.

Figures released by the UK’s inter-departmental ministerial group on human trafficking last year show a rise in the number of people trafficked into the UK; the BBC reported 946 victims, compared with 710 in 2010.

The figures are based on the number of victims reported to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the framework for identifying and assisting victims of human trafficking in the UK.

Due to the nature of the crime however, no one really knows the exact number of people trafficked into the UK year on year.

According to the government report, Nigeria, Vietnam and Romania are the largest contributors to the trade in human beings the UK, and it is easy to view it as an issue that affects people from outside our borders.

In reality, an increasing number of people are being trafficked within the UK, and, disturbingly, we are seeing an even larger increase in the incidence of child sex trafficking within our borders.

The ongoing case of six girls in Oxford who were groomed, raped and trafficked around the UK for prostitution is a harrowing example of the trade in vulnerable children that happens on our own soil.

According to the Guardian, the nine men are charged with a total of 51 offences which took place over a period of eight years, including forcing a child into prostitution and seven counts of rape of a child under 13.

Last year Rochdale hit the headlines for equally disturbing reasons, when nine men were jailed for grooming and sexually exploiting teenage girls as young as 13, a tragedy exacerbated by reported shortcomings in the |UK’s social services system.

The number of children trafficked within the UK specifically for sex has rocketed by 84 per cent in the last year, according to figures from Barnado’s reported in Metro this month.

Ann Marie Carrie, chief executive of Barnardo’s, said: “We are shocked at the rise in the number of children reporting they have been moved around the country by abusers.

“Domestic trafficking of children for sex is a sophisticated type of exploitation, a sinister form of organised violation through networks of criminals.

“Nobody currently knows the full extent of these crimes because of their hidden nature, but what we do know is that every time we open a new service for victims it quickly becomes fully subscribed.

“If we are to save children from suffering for years at the hands of their abusers, more must be done by the authorities to identify victims of child sexual exploitation who are being internally trafficked and to stop this activity earlier on.”

Convictions for human trafficking in the UK remain low, with just eight convictions recorded in 2011. Six members of the Rochdale gang became the first people in Britain to be convicted of sex trafficking in May 2012.

It is 180 years since slavery was abolished in the UK and what was then its sprawling empire, but in 2013 we are witnessing an increase in modern-day slavery.

And it is driven in a large part by the trade in women and girls for sex.

The government launched its human trafficking strategy in 2011, but the Guardian reports that a year after David Cameron pledged to make Britain a ‘word leader’ in the fight against people trafficking, the government’s spending cuts are threatening the future of its anti-trafficking unit.

Unfortunately the slave trade is not something that we, nor the USA, can assign to history, as more and more cases of domestic and international trafficking are reported.

International travel and modern technology have made it increasing easy to move people around the globe, yet the trafficking of human beings is a reflection of the inequalities that still exist within societies and across borders today.

Unfortunately, as long as the sex trade fuels demand in the UK, vulnerable women and girls will continue to be targeted by organised gangs for sexual exploitation.

  1. vicki wharton says:

    Until we start naming and shaming the demand side of the rise in the rape trade in the UK, then we are just wringing our hands in a PR exercise. Pornography, the media arm of the sex industry with its mantra that its all good cos its all consensual, is a sick joke by the media who sex slavery acceptable and fashionable whilst making huge sums of money off the back of it.

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