Throughout my professional career, I have been engaged directly or indirectly in protecting vulnerable and maltreated women and children. My latest book—Wednesday’s Child, to be published shortly—contains some research pertinent to the subject and which should give a moment of pause to anyone who cares about the humanitarian crisis that exists in the darkness of our world and in our ignorance or unwillingness to comprehend it. In the book, I put the following researched information into the mouths of some of my characters; and I would like to share them with you:
“Traffickers make an estimated $52 Billion annually; with that kind of money coming in, they are immune to any kind of moral, ethical, and even legal persuasion—much like our ever escalating illicit drug problem.
“An associated area of crime is child pornography—please don’t say ‘kiddie porn’; that trivializes the problem or makes it sound cute. It is anything but cute; child pornography destroys the lives of our most vulnerable citizens and wrecks the lives of many families. The monsters who make this hideous footage have the children hold homemade placards bearing the pseudonyms of the makers of the films. What follows is ghastly: children pleading for help, being sexually tortured, infants being used as sex toys, and on and on beyond any imagination you and I might have. Every bit of it is vile, and every bit of it is lucrative.
“These are the commodities of the Dark Web. In 2013, we [the FBI] made 7,386 arrests. Last year it was 8,992. That figure climbs every year, and we only catch a small percentage of the criminals involved so far as our nation’s sixty-one Internet Crimes Against Children task forces and the NCMEC [Exploited Children Division at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children] can determine. Every day, parents report with pride and photographs—even images of sonograms–that they have ‘another baby to add to the game’. Our best estimate is that there are well over 50,000 adults in America who trade such horrifying images among each other at any given point in time. The traffickers in this filth have national—even global–encrypted IP addresses, password-protected sites, and huge hidden clearinghouses.
“Law enforcement has cyber-policing tools such as IACA [Internet Crimes Against Children Cops] used to break distribution rings and to track the child victims. We can now virtually map the locations of suspects and follow their internet transactions in some cases. We can often zero in on suspects 24/7 who are actively downloading material at the moment to their individual computers. We have disrupted rings of as many as 2,000 distributors with our electronic policing capacities. All of this comes at a huge cost, not the least of which is the terrible emotional impact on the investigators, many of whom have young children of their own. There is a very large turnover. Many people we train simply cannot bear to see the images any longer; and no one can blame them; but the costs of training them goes to waste. We try to teach them to look without looking; but that is probably naïve; and many of our best people become alcoholics or need treatment for depression.”
DFBI Crutchfield describes in detail the massive effort the bureau and other American law enforcement agencies are putting into the interdiction of trafficking of all kinds. He applauds the efforts of everyone in the room and all of the police forces around the world who are involved, but…
“My friends–my fellow Americans–we do not have sufficient resources or sufficient manpower—even as agencies of the federal government–to make even a dent in the horrors of this new slave trade. No country alone or even in combination can eliminate this horrific scourge on civilization that organized crime is perpetrating. We must have a public and private cooperation and will power. We are met here tonight to ask you to help us by contributing as generously as you can to making our efforts effective. Staff people are now passing out brochures detailing the activities of involved organizations and pledge cards. Please be generous.”
Crutchfield resumes his seat and the Deputy Director of UNODC [United Nations Office on Drug and Crime] takes the podium.
“UNODC manages the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Human Trafficking–especially women and children. The fund was launched in 2010 by then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The Trust Fund supports the provision of on-the-ground humanitarian, legal, and financial aid to victims of trafficking, and provides members of the public an avenue through which they can donate to this important cause. I echo my counterpart tonight–Director Crutchfield–in my appeal for your help. As the only United Nations entity focusing on the criminal justice element of these crimes, the work that UNODC does to combat human trafficking and the smuggling of migrants is supported by the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols on trafficking in persons and migrant smuggling. And as fine and generous as the United Nations is, we need more help.
“It is the goal of my office to make the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, an early and persevering success. While the best-known form of human trafficking is for the purpose of sexual exploitation, hundreds of thousands of victims are also trafficked for forced labor, domestic servitude, child begging, or the removal of their organs. Cases are seen in all parts of the world and victims are targeted irrespective of gender, age, or background; although, of course the poor and defenseless are most often targeted. Children are trafficked from Eastern to Western Europe to be used for begging or as pickpockets; young girls from Africa are deceived with promises of modeling, acting, or au pair jobs. But they find themselves trapped in a world of sexual and pornographic exploitation or in other servitude from which they cannot escape.
“Again, victims of trafficking are most often enslaved for vile sexual purposes, but they are also found in kitchens, cleaning guesthouses, restaurants, and bars, or toiling in subhuman agricultural slavery. Tourism infrastructure creates markets for forced and exploitative begging, street hawking, prostitution, and other illegal activities. Children–especially those young enough to be virgins–are usually trafficked from diverse countries to the Gulf States–in particular Saudi Arabia—where virginity has a premium; and once robbed of virginity, the child may service dozens of men a day. Children are also kidnapped or sold by their parents from rural areas to urban centers for forced labor or sexual exploitation. Migrants smuggled from the Horn of Africa rely on the assistance of criminal networks to enter Yemen. They are all vulnerable to being robbed and exploited; and when they arrive in Yemen, they are very vulnerable to becoming victims of TiP [Trafficking in Persons] with all of the attendant evils and crimes.
“We in the United Nations worry about the increase in the number of girl victims, who now make up two thirds of all trafficked children. Girls now constitute 15 to 20 per cent of the total number of all detected victims–including adults–whereas boys comprise about 10 per cent. Perhaps our worst fears should be for the large percent of children held in captivity who are never detected. This observation is based on carefully gathered data supplied by 132 countries.
“The 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons released by UNODC has revealed that the per cent of all victims of human trafficking officially detected globally has been increasing by seven to ten percent a year.”