According to the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime (UNODC), human trafficking is the recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the
threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of
deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the
giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person
having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Those
activities had been facilitated by the introduction of the internet in our
society. By different means, it is used by traffickers to extend their
networks. It is a tool, like any technology, that definitely helps human traffickers.
However, on the other hand, even
if the internet is increasingly used for crime, it also contributes to help
states and human rights organisations to fight against human trafficking by
giving them new instruments to respond. Internet is definitely a Double-Edged
Sword. It offers new opportunities to
traffickers to extend their influence. However it also provides to the global
anti-trafficking community new ways to investigate, to fight, to cooperate and
to prosecute trafficking.
It
is obvious that traffickers take advantage from globalization. They are clearly
benefiting in their criminal activities from advances in new technologies,
especially the internet, which makes it more profitable, faster, easier to
conduct and organize all kinds of transactions. Internet is certainly the most
powerful weapon and useful tool for them.
Internet, by contrast to the old school methods, enables criminals to distance
themselves more efficiently and easily from the crime they commit. Emails, for
instance, can be routed through different countries and different time zones.
It is easy to create an email box in a cyber coffee, with false names and
change every day. It is also easy to create a web site hosted in another
country than the traffickers. Internet is used as well in order to exploit
victims, particularly for sexual exploitation. It is used as a commercial tool
in order to generate profit by selling pornographic images or services.
Traffickers in this particular case are using chat rooms, websites, newsgroups,
File Transfer Protocol, Peer to Peer networks (transmissions are not logged or
traceable), bulletin boards or web message (spams etc...). For instance, the
UNODC revealed that in 2000, Japanese women were trafficked in Hawaii for the
purpose of sexual exploitation.
Nevertheless,
new technologies and, particularly this very one, have influenced the fight
against human trafficking lately. The Convention on Cybercrime has been crucial
for that issue: it was signed in November 2001 and came into force in July 2004.
Its purpose was not just to fight human trafficking, but it was part of it and
especially because of its link with the Convention on Action against
Trafficking in Human Beings. It mainly focuses on child pornography as far as
human traffic is concerned. It is actually the first international treaty on
crime that took effect on the internet. Traffickers can use internet to
communicate information to each other very easily and rapidly so that the
mainly concerned countries can investigate and arrest traffickers but also help
victims. In addition, a European program named “SAFER INTERNET PLUS” has been
created in order to prohibit abusive contents. It is the case for well-known
and very often used websites such as “Youtube”, “Facebook”, “Myspace” or many
others. When entering or trying to upload a video, users are told that any
hateful or sexual content will be deleted or reported. This can be very
dissuasive. However, we can wonder what the limit between abusive and
non-abusive is.
In
conclusion, Internet has positive and negative effects. It increases human
trafficking by helping traffickers to coordinate their actions, to seek
victims, to exploit them or to ensure their transactions. But, at the same time,
it erases boarders between states in the fight against
cybercrime, it allows information to be easily and quickly located, it provides
new traps, it increases prevention tools and helps people sharing information.
The
only solution for the fighters of human trafficking is to cooperate, and to
hire competent people, able to think like traffickers.The fight in the field of human
trafficking, between traffickers and states and NGOs is definitely affected by
the technological power of each actor. The fight against human trafficking
would lead to a more secure world only if anti-traffickers develop new forms of
technologies, able to stop the escalation of human traffick.
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