Introduction
In the modern era, human smuggling has been a worldwide challenge and one of the most disgraceful offences upsetting the livelihoods of many individuals around various parts of the globe and robbing them of their anatomy and dignity. This crime involves the deceiving or capturing of females, males and children in all parts of the globe and pressing them into manipulative states daily (Logan et al., 2009). The attacked individuals are forced to work as enslaved people and are denied their freedom and various rights that they deserve as other human beings. Globally, a projected 40.3 million victims have been stuck in modern-day servitude, where 24.9 million people have been suspected of being manipulated for labor and 15.4 million were compelled into marriages (Steiner et al., 2018). In the United States, in 2020, there were 10583 human smuggling, which was registered to the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline involving around 17,000 victims (Centone, 2020). These numbers represent only the instances only a fraction of the actual challenges as most instances of human trafficking goes unreported. This shows that the demand for human trafficking and smuggling has been on the rise across many parts of the globe for exploitation in labor, forced marriages and sex slaves. On the other hand, human smuggling normally takes place with the agreement of the individual trafficked for reasons like seeking employment and financial opportunities, personal and family growth, escape from persecution and violence or conflict. These challenges of human trafficking, modern slavery, and people smuggling have been significant globally, affecting the livelihoods of the people and their dignities.
Challenges affecting responding to modern-day slavery, people trafficking, and people smuggling
Modern slavery has been a complex challenge to most governments across the globe, with its origin causes being poverty, war and crisis, ethnic viewpoints and lack of protective protections and protection. Inequality, discrimination, conflicts, corruption, criminality and other pressers have been the major causes of modern slavery. Children, adolescent migrants and women have been the most vulnerable to modern slavery, generating the need for the administrations to propose better protection such as family reunion plans (Farrell et al., 2012). Women have been the most vulnerable in modern servitude in household work, the sexual industry and enforced marriages. At the same time, the male refuges are likely manipulated through involuntary labor in the farming, building and production sectors. This has made various nations and the United Nations develop different policies to tame modern slavery, people trafficking, and people smuggling.
First, the major challenge policing agencies and home affairs faces challenges in monitoring the progress on the cases involving modern slavery. In most instances of modern slavery and human trafficking, the individuals are enticed by their close friends and family members who take advantage of their finances or the state of their family and entice them about getting them dignified jobs and improving their livelihoods. However, the abductors later change their motive and force them to forced labor, sexual slavery and forced marriages (Farrell et al., 2019). There is no evidence of the crimes in most instances, and tracking the crimes becomes a headache to the federal bureau agencies. The abductors are aware of the evidence used to capture them. Thus, mots tend to kill the proofs of their actions. Also, it becomes a challenge to track an individual who might have willingly got into slavery unknowing since their no instances of violence, and most tend to get into slavery knowingly through enticements from strangers, close friends and family members. The policing agents may lack the necessary resources to track the cases of modern servitude and human smuggling.
Secondly, corruption has been a significant challenge in fighting against modern slavery. According to most human activists, human smuggling in the U.K. and the US where the policing agencies receive bribes to keep away from the follow up (Jonsson, 2019). Human dignity is traded as a commodity, making it for the follow-up. Most human activists collectively agree that corruption and impunity have been critical obstacles in the international fight against contemporary servitude and human smuggling. Human trafficking and corruption have been directly connected with criminal actions whose relations are mostly referred to in a global forum. The connection between the two events and the real consequences of corruption on smuggling persons are usually deserted in developing and implementing anti-human smuggling guidelines and measures. Lack of concentration on human trafficking may have significantly undermined the measures to battle smuggling in persons and avert the customization of reactions as required. Merely after identification the presence and the outcomes of corruption in the situation of human smuggling can the disputes posed by it be me. Efforts to curb human trafficking have been affected negatively by corruption, which is a significant factor in the rising number of trafficked persons across the globe. A pursued mechanism to fight bribery in the smuggling of persons has not been formulated to integrate their work approaches.
Moreover, in spite of the shortage of certain formal data on bribery and smuggling, there are steady proof that corruptions play a significant role in enabling and nurturing the crime of smuggling in persons. Evidence and data collected, such as investigation of cases of human smuggling through credits of victims and abductors, show clearly that the corrupt actions of police force may aid smugglers engage, move and manipulate their victims. Also, unethical criminal justice experts may block the inspection and trial of cases and inhibit the enough safeguarding of victims of crime (Bus et al., 2019). Also, bribery involving the personal field such as travel groups, model agencies, marriage bureaus, restaurants, building companies, and others contributes significantly to human smuggling Tracking the patterns of corruption becomes a specific task of corrupt actions that facilitate human trafficking in person usually becomes challenging to accumulate. It becomes potential to feature some ways of bribery particular to human smuggling crimes by recognizing restricting acts of bribery connected to smuggling in person.
Thirdly, there is a challenge of failure of the law enforcers. The law enforcement agencies such as police officers and the federal bureau of investigating have a significant legal and practical role in identifying and investigating cases of human trafficking. The law enforcers could fail to make arrests of the individuals involved in human trafficking due to neglect or lack of basic skills and training to arrest those involved in crime (Nguyen et al., 2020). According to global statistics has shown than in the past two years, there were about 25 million labor trafficking victims in the world where 3.8 million of whom were forced into the sex trade. The law enforcers such as the police play a significant role in identifying and investigating human trafficking. Most law enforcers lack adequate skills and know-how of what human trafficking is and how to control it. The law enforcers tend to view human trafficking as prostitution and sexual exploitation alone while missing the prevalent types of trafficking like labor and forced marriages (Petter et al., 2020). Also, the officers tend not to be well equipped with the necessary technological, combat and human resources to interact with the trafficking victims. The victims of human trafficking usually feel abused and exploited in their interaction with police as they do with the abductors. The unequipped officers typically fail to follow the criminals involved in human trafficking since the criminals are better equipped than the law enforcers. Lack of modern technological equipment results in poor tracking of the abductors, often leading to wrongful arrest. Poor persecution due to lack of crucial evidence necessary for a court of law to make the arrest; results in challenges when curbing human trafficking; the criminals feel more powerful than the government officers since they become hard to hurt.
Globally, law enforcement has poor performance on human smuggling, which shows the necessity to tactically reconsider the type of tutoring in this field for law enforcement and other agencies. Training enforcement officers does not necessarily take much consideration in training officers who will take and investigate effectively on matters related to human trafficking. The police have little skill in tracing and tracking the whereabouts of those abducted for human slavery (Farrell et al., 2014). The law enforcers lack the technological ad strategic skills to put those suspected or investigate the cases related to human trafficking, usually run by well-equipped and trained personnel who benefit from the illegal acts. In most instances globally, the law enforcers have failed to follow the criminals due to a lack of modernized training. The criminals also tend to use modernized tactics and equipment to capture and enslave people across the globe. Thus, the law enforcers training should be modernized, strategic and standardized at all levels to curb the instances of human trafficking (Tsegaw, 2019). Lack of specialists to deal with human trafficking problems is also a significant contributor to the challenges that affect the policing of human smuggling. Human smuggling should be deliberated a severe crime, just as drug trafficking crimes, which have special units to deal with cases related to drug trafficking. Human trafficking crimes should have their force that socializes with those crimes to develop a workforce that should be trained on human smuggling and should be incorporated into the curriculum at the police force academics and be taught to all law enforcement staff. Also, the regular police should be equipped with training in human trafficking crimes as they are the first responder and general investigators. Thus they should know how to predicament and react to human smuggling. After all, they are the ones who are most probably to come into connection with latent victims in the route of their regular obligations.
Additionally, human trafficking policing has been faced with the lack of passing of supportive regulations and laws against human trafficking. The government’s legislative body is responsible for passing the rules that are meant to regulate, control, and stop various acts. However, they have failed to pass strong laws intended to curb the spread of human trafficking by developing and passing supportive regulations to support the law agencies. However, some rogations and laws have been passed meant to cur human trafficking where the traffickers have been violating the rule of law, threatening the national jurisdictions and international laws (Querns, 2019). The legislative bodies have failed to create and pass regulations meant to deal with the issues that increase the rate of human trafficking. Raising awareness among the people, conducting a thorough audit about the people, and developing a coordinated transnational response has been significant issues leading to increased human trafficking. In most instances, human trafficking is always an organized crime. It becomes a challenge to deal with it since the planners considered all the aspects before engaging in the crime. Also, the failure of the passage of laws about criminalizing inequality and discrimination has been a challenge as most of the human trafficked individuals are abducted by people through enticing them with job opportunities and taking advantage of their financial conditions.
Many nations have adopted regional initiatives meant to curb human tracking. However, at both the state and the regional stage, there is little steadiness in the core definition of tracing in persons, and federal lawmaking frequently cascades little of the broad provisions of the procedure. Some nations tend to refer to saleable sexual manipulation or the smuggling of women and girls while not considering involuntary labor (Barrick et al., 2014). The regulation that currently exists tends to protect children below the age of 18 years and fails to consider the other older people who still suffer from modern slavery. Such lack of definitional clarity poses a significant threat for policing and international cooperation in the combat against modern slavery.
Furthermore, during the policing of human trafficking and smuggling, there is a challenge that affects the law enforcers and the government agencies at large, lacking understanding about human trafficking. In criminal psychology, for the law enforcer to prevent crimes, they must first understand the offence well. Most law enforcers do not clearly understand the crime of human trafficking. When the law enforces arrest criminals involved in human trafficking crimes, they fail to prevent others from committing the same crimes and even more severe crimes in human trafficking in future (Ambagtsheer, 2020). The police fail to understand how the human trafficking criminals think, which would help them understand why they are committing the crimes and stop it from happening. Most law enforcers confuse human trafficking crimes with prostitution and women sexual trade, which is different. This affects how they take the seriousness of human trafficking, which they take as a minor crime. Therefore, police officers and public members should be educated about human trafficking crimes to develop better strategies to curb them (David, 2007). A better understanding of the causes of the crime allows the federal, state and local policymakers to combat human trafficking. Also, it would help minimize the instances of victimization of the victims saved from human trafficking and ensure the criminals are brought to book under the criminal justice system, and penalties are efficient to prevent others from engaging in the crime in the future. The understanding is that criminals involved in human trafficking crimes are only interested in making money and access to cheap labor and sex. The law enforcers can develop strategies and critically investigate those who commit human trafficking crimes.
Moreover, there is difficulty identifying victims of human trafficking and extracting information from them. Letdown to correctly recognize a trafficked person is likely to deny the person’s right further. It is always hard for the law enforcer to remember the fatalities of human trafficking due to their movement; the victims are likely transported from one nation to the other to prevent law enforcers from identifying them. Due to the lack of proper training for the law enforcers, it always becomes a challenge to remember the fatalities of trafficking, which is a crucial identification (Cockbain, 2018). Failure of the border officials to nurse the rights and the dignity of the migrant is respected. Although, at times, they may identify the victims, they tend to be given bribes to allow the transportation of the immigrants. Lack of proper equipment and training also makes the law enforcers make wrong identifications of the victims, which negatively affects the crimes.
In most cases, the law enforcers lack enough proof and reasonable ground to prove that someone is a victim of smuggling. Sometimes the victims who are not identified may face prosecution for crimes committed during their manipulation, and others who are irregular migrants may be deported to their home countries. At the same time, some may fail back under the control of traffickers, and it may become a challenge to help them.
Additionally, there is a problem in dealing with human trafficking crimes due to the failure of the law enforcers and the entire criminal and justice system to take human trafficking crimes seriously. In most instances, law officers are informed about the incidence of human trafficking and fail to report to those areas since they do not consider human smuggling a severe crime (Farrell and Kane, 2020). As earlier mentioned the law enforcers, in most instances, tend to confuse human trafficking crimes with prostitution and fail to see it critically as a severe crime that leads to forced labor, sexual assault and forced marriage. Even during the investigation, the police officers tend to take the matter as a minor crime and fail to conduct an analytic investigation that would lead them to identify the criminals and the victims. In the court of law, the judicial officers also tend to fail to understand the weight of the human trafficking crimes, whereby they tend to give the suspects small bonds and release them. The criminals pay the bonds and continue with their human trafficking crimes, which generate more finances. Also, the government does not take human trafficking as severe since the law enforcers are not equipped with the necessary skill to combat human trafficking crimes. Failure by the government to establish a special force within the police to be dealing with human trafficking is a major underestimating of the human trafficking crime, which is seen to affect millions of people across the globe yearly and where most of the instances they are not reported.
Finally, during the policing of human trafficking, the officers face the challenge of the new technology used by the criminals. The criminals of human trafficking tend to use modern communication and transport to deal with their illegal business. Traffickers tend to use the contemporary transportation system such as trains, cars, aircrafts and vessels to transport the victims by concealing them in apparent sight. It becomes challenging for the police officers to identify the victims being transported to various destinations (Okeshola and Adenugba, 2018). The use of private jets, vehicles and ships becomes a significant task to investigate and examine all the passengers travelling. Through those private and public transport modes, the victims are transported from one nation to another even before the matter is reported to be police about the whereabouts of the victims. Thus, the modern transporting system has been a significant threat in curbing human trafficking crimes. Also, the criminals use modern communication methods such as emails, mobile phones, and online platforms, which enable criminals to have international access to communication, making their business thrive, leading to more instances of human trafficking (Petter et al., 2020). Without modern communication, criminals would find it hard to make deals involving human trafficking.
Conclusion
The crimes of human trafficking, modern slavery and human smuggling have been on the rise in the past decade owing to the contemporary communication and transport system, which have eased the dealings of the traffickers. Lack of awareness among the law enforcers and the community has also been a significant trigger to the increasing number of human trafficking crimes. Failure to take human trafficking crimes seriously has also been a substantial contributor to the increase in human trafficking crimes. Thus, to control the rate of human trafficking, the law enforcers should be equipped with skills to curb crimes related to human trafficking, equipped with the necessary resources and be made informed of the human trafficking crime and what it entails. The members of society should be made aware of these crimes, and various regulations against human trafficking should be passed.
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