Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery

Defining Human Trafficking

In addition to being a violent crime, human trafficking is a public health concern that impacts individuals, families, and entire communities across generations. It requires training and a response from communities, social service providers, health care providers, and other first responders.

Human trafficking is a form of modern slavery. It occurs when a trafficker exploits an individual with force, fraud, or coercion to make them perform commercial sex or work.

There are various forms of human trafficking:

• Bonded Labor or Debt Bondage - One form of coercion used by traffickers in both sex trafficking and forced labor is the imposition of a bond or debt. Some workers inherit debt; for example, in South Asia it is estimated that there are millions of trafficking victims working to pay off their ancestors’ debts. Others fall victim to traffickers or recruiters who unlawfully exploit an initial debt assumed, wittingly or unwittingly, as a term of employment.
• Child Sex Trafficking - When a child (under 18 years of age) is recruited, harbored, transported, provided, obtained, patronized, or solicited for the purpose of a commercial sex act, proving force, fraud, or coercion is not necessary for the offense to be prosecuted as human trafficking.
• Domestic Servitude - Involuntary domestic servitude is found in distinct circumstances—work in a private residence—that create unique vulnerabilities for victims. It is a crime in which a domestic worker is not free to leave his or her employment and is abused and underpaid, if paid at all.
• Forced Child Labor - Although children may legally engage in certain forms of work, children can also be found in slavery or slavery-like situations. Some indicators of forced labor of a child include situations in which the child appears to be in the custody of a non-family member who requires the child to perform work that financially benefits someone outside the child’s family and does not offer the child the option of leaving, such as forced begging
• Labor Trafficking - Individuals are compelled to work or provide services by force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to compel someone to work. Once a person’s labor is obtained by such means, the person’s prior consent to work for an employer is legally irrelevant: the employer is a trafficker and the employee a trafficking victim.
• Sex Trafficking - Adults are compelled to engage in commercial sex by force, fraud, or coercion. Minors are compelled to perform a commercial sex act regardless of the presence of force, fraud, or coercion.

• Unlawful Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers - Child soldiering is a manifestation of human trafficking when it involves the unlawful recruitment and use of children—through force, fraud, or coercion—by armed forces as combatants or other forms of labor. Perpetrators may be government armed forces, paramilitary organizations, or rebel groups. Many children are forcibly abducted to be used as combatants. Others are made to work as porters, cooks, guards, servants, messengers, or spies. Young girls may be forced to “marry” or be raped by commanders and male combatants. Both male and female child soldiers are often sexually abused or exploited by armed groups and such children are subject to the same types of devastating physical and psychological consequences associated with child sex trafficking

The legal definition of human trafficking describes three facets of the crime: an action, a means, and a purpose. For example, if an individual is recruited by fraudulent means for the purpose of forced labor, that individual has experienced trafficking.