COMMUNITY ACTION TO PREVENT TRAFFICKING

Prevention is one of the “3Ps” – prevention, protection, and prosecution[i] – which were the initial pillars of both the U.S. federal response to human trafficking (Trafficking Victims Protection, TV Act of 2000)[ii] and the United Nations’ instrument known informally as the Palermo Protocol[iii] which outlined the international response. As the need for multidisciplinary, inter-agency, and cross-border cooperation became increasingly clear, a fourth “P”, partnership, was added to this approach.

Protection efforts (such as the T-Visa, survivor access to health and social services, funding for support programs, etc.), prosecution (identifying, investigating and prosecuting traffickers, restitution orders) and partnership between agencies were – and continue to be – essential to ensure justice for persons who have been victimized by trafficking. They also contribute to prevention by supporting survivors in rebuilding their lives in ways that reduce risks of revictimization, and by reducing the chance for convicted traffickers to harm others.

However, two and a half decades in, prevention as a primary approach, as a means of stopping victimization before it begins rather than responding after the fact, has yet to receive sufficient attention. There are multiple reasons for the lack of attention to prevention, but a persistent reason is that prevention is harder to see and harder to quantify than actions to correct a problem after it has occurred. If prevention is successful, and no harm or injury occurs, we often fail to recognize the behind-the-scenes work that prevented it from happening.

Although successful prevention is difficult to see, the value of prevention is not at all hard to recognize. Although we want protections in place to address crime and assist victims, we hope that those we love would never need these services. Above all, we hope they would never be victimized. And if we think beyond our own circles of family and friends, we can recognize how much better – how much more just it would be – if no one ever had to endure the horror of a crime like human trafficking.

Therefore, in the interest of justice, we need to work to prevent such harm from occurring to any member of our community. Our actions after-the-fact – no matter how much they are needed – are not truly just if we are not doing everything we can to genuinely prevent trafficking.

There is a tendency to see vulnerability as something that exists within an individual, and that therefore we need to “help” the individual change. But research suggests that many factors contributing to trafficking are external to individuals, that circumstances or characteristics of communities (and states and nations) can place people at risk. So instead of trying to “help” people reduce their vulnerability to exploitation, we might instead ask: how can we reduce the risk of our own actions – individually and collectively – contributing to trafficking.

We can start by trying to educate ourselves on the realities of human trafficking. We need to be mindful that the depiction of trafficking we see most frequently in the media is a distorted and limited picture of a very complex issue, and work to grasp that complexity.

And we can come together with others, in groups we already belong to (civic organizations, professional organizations, communities of worship, neighborhood and friendship groups), or groups we create, to promote circumstances that ensure all members of the community are less vulnerable to exploitation.

Actions can include educating and advocating with community leaders and policy makers, volunteering or otherwise supporting community groups and nonprofits working on these issues, or otherwise promoting change in your community toward:

• Development of a community plan for affordable housing.
• Increasing minimum wage to a living wage that can allow individuals and families to support themselves in dignity and safety.
• Enforcement and preservation of existing child labor laws; ensuring parents, school officials, and businesses are aware of these laws and heeding them to protect youth from workplace exploitation.
• Establishing social norms that expect the fair treatment of all workers, free from coercion, intimidation, harassment, wage theft, or exposure to unsafe or unhealthy working conditions.
• Establishing or supporting existing programs to provide safe spaces to assist children and youth who have run away or are homeless.
• Engaging in efforts to strengthen and support high-quality public education for all children in all parts of the community.
• Maintaining or establishing policies that provide a safety net for families in crisis due to job loss, domestic violence, loss of health insurance, or other factors that can increase vulnerability to exploitation.

These are not easy or quick solutions – but there are no quick fixes, no simple solutions. We must do the hard and not-very-glamourous work of building primary prevention into our response to trafficking, or we cannot truly claim that we are serious about ending this exploitation. It is encouraging to realize, however, that we may already be engaged in actions that contribute to prevention locally or globally: efforts to address climate change and environmental protection, developing humane migration/immigration policies, safe-guarding civil rights and human rights, combatting racism, working to end poverty, working for peace, indeed any actions that contribute to safe and healthy and secure lives, have the added benefit of helping to prevent human trafficking. Building common cause with these efforts is prevention.

[i] U.S. Department of State. (2011a). The 3Ps: Prevention, protection, prosecution. Retrieved from http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/167334.pdf (retrieved in 2011; no longer available on U.S. Department of State website).

[ii] Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 22 U.S.C. § 7101 (b)(2). (2000).

[iii] United Nations. (2000). Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. Retrieved from http://www.uncjin.org/Documents/Conventions/dcatoc/final_documents_2/convention_%20traff_eng.pdf