Dr. John A. King defines human trafficking and how it differs from sex trafficking. Trafficking includes forced labor and sexual exploitation across or within borders, and connects to consumer products like electronics through supply chains, including cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Hi, how are you? I want to take the next 2 posts to talk about human trafficking and human trafficking for sexual exploitation. Recently, I was talking to a guy, Chris, that I do some training with. And Chris, 20-year veteran as a police officer, and he very simply asked, look, I need you to give me a definition of human trafficking. I meet a lot of people out here. They're always talking about human trafficking, but no one can actually tell me what it is. He said, "What's the difference between human trafficking and and say prostitution? What what's the difference?" And he was being absolutely sincere. And I had another friend, a great supporter of what we do, after hearing my last post on on sex trafficking is not just an Asian thing, read the testimonies from the cases we're involved in and asked the question: Well, well, this person's a little older. I thought. Sex trafficking only happened to underage girls. So I want to address those 2 issues. I want to first look at what is human trafficking, give you a very clear definition of that. I think that's important. Human trafficking is coming to a fore and there's lots of people running around talking about it, but in anything like this, it gets very emotional and I'd like to be a little bit logical and give you some hard facts on what is human trafficking as opposed to human trafficking for sexual exploitation. And we'll talk about both of those things this weekend And next week. So human trafficking, there's a difference. Human trafficking, you could see as an overarching term, and human trafficking for sexual exploitation or human trafficking for labor exploitation or military exploitation would be subsets of it. Human trafficking is the overarching term which deals with, with anything that where a human being is victimized or moved transnationally across a country for the means of exploitation. So here is, here's a definition of it. Human trafficking is the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of forced labor, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficking of others. This may encompass a spouse in the context of forced marriages, the extraction of organs, surrogacy. Human trafficking can occur within a country or transnationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because it is a violation of the person's right. The movement through coercion and because of commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is a trade in people and does not necessarily involve the movement of people from one place to another. So you can be trafficked within your locale. You can be trafficked within your nation. You can be trafficked just by moving from state to state. That all of those things are human trafficking because it's about the violation of the rights and the coercion into an activity that is against your will. And that's where it gets crosswired with people saying, well, it's got to be kidnapped or not kidnapped. It really doesn't. And I'll break that down a little bit for you. So human trafficking affects people of all backgrounds and people are trafficked for a variety of purposes. Men are often trafficked into hard labor jobs or the military, while children are trafficked into labor positions in textile companies, agriculture, or fishing industries. Women and girls are typically trafficked in the commercial sex industry, although there's been a major change of that in the Middle East and also here in the United States of America. Now, both genders have been trafficked in about equal proportions up until just recently. A recent UN report came out and said because of the unrest in the Middle East, what we're seeing now is that children now account for about 30% of people trafficked. Of the remaining 70%, 38% are men. that are forced into labour. An example of this is something I read recently about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So they've got these cobalt mines over there, and the average wage in those cobalt mines is about $1.30 US per day. So in those mines, 60% of the people in those mines have been human trafficked. 80% of that number are men. Of the remaining 40%, they're children as young as 4. Now out of that children, 90% of those children are little boys. So when they get this cobalt out of the ground, which is now considered more precious than gold, they sell it to Chinese and Indian consortiums, and then they take it and they put it into the very cell phones and the laptops into lithium-ion batteries that you're now watching this presentation on. And this is where it gets very challenging to us, that if we're going to do something about human trafficking, then it's going to have to be like the blood diamond situation, where you're going to have to make commercial and personal choices which are going to affect you. This is so much more than a website or a rally. You need to understand that I'm filming this on an iPhone, and you might be watching this on an iPhone, Those iPhones buy lithium-ion batteries from a consortium that get their cobalt from somewhere in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the little boys and little girls, the men and the women are being trafficked for our convenience and our comfort. So when we really want to do something about trafficking, we're going to have to look at how it, how it has impacted and filtered into many areas of our life. So next post, I'll talk about sex trafficking, the difference between human trafficking and sex trafficking, and what is sex trafficking per se. Thanks very much.
