Write Althea and Asclepius, LUDCI.eu Editorial team
Trafficking in human beings is a widespread and highly profitable crime. It is reported to be the third-largest criminal activity in the world, behind drug trafficking and counterfeiting. Human trafficking as a business involves low cost and significant profit. This is sufficient for criminals to continue with this heinous activity. In addition, the likelihood of identifying, prosecuting, and sentencing these predators is very low.
The global prosecution rate of traffickers between 2015 and 2018 decreased by 42%. This demonstrates the impunity with which human traffickers operate with very little resistance from security systems to expose and prosecute them. Misuse of technology has further widened the already large divide between the high profitability of trafficking and the impunity of criminals. The perpetrators of human trafficking employ technology in the many stages of their trafficking operations.
It is in the recruitment stage that the video gaming industry comes in.
Online gaming has become part of the 21st-century youth culture. It is not only a platform for fun but also a billion-dollar industry. Some gamers on YouTube earn as much as $10 million a year and can pull as much as 20 million subscribers. Electronic Sports (eSports) is valued at $43 billion. While children and adults play video games, the percentage of adults playing is negligible. Of young people engaged in online gaming, 97% are males.
These online gaming platforms provide chat rooms and virtual identities for players to communicate. This is where traffickers target these children and lure them to physical meetups. These chatrooms pose the greatest threat of child trafficking in online gaming as criminals can have hundreds or even thousands of gaming profiles with false identities and perpetuate their crimes anonymously. Popular messaging apps feature end-to-end encryption technology thus ensuring that communication between the trafficker and the victim cannot ever be known to third parties.
The St. Petersburg case presents a practical example. Two teenage boys were kidnapped and at least one of them was recruited via the online gaming app Discord. Seven men were arrested after a long investigation and one confessed to earning his victim’s trust overtime via the app. Of the two victim’s in this case, the younger boy, a 16-year old had been kidnapped for over a year and repeatedly abused sexually. Following these arrests, a certain Broward County was arrested for engaging in sexual activity and solicited pornographic photos and videos from children. He was reported to have contacted them through the online game Fortnight. The Florida Attorney General believes that there could have been as many as 20 more victims. Broward allegedly “groomed the 17-year-old victim using cash and gifts, one of which was a mobile phone which allowed him to contact the child”.
Dotti Groover-Skipper, Florida’s Anti-Trafficking Director for The Salvation Army, said “law enforcement is always playing catch-up with new technology and the hundreds of apps that come out every day”. This puts the responsibility of safeguarding our children in the gaming industry. As much as parents have the responsibility of educating their children, the truth is that just like cops – they are always playing catch and tell up with new tech. The gaming industry must, therefore, take the first action while developing games to ensure that children are not exposed to predators. They must not just be concerned about the profit that online multiplayer games can generate. They must take responsibility for the threat these platforms pose to the safety of our children.
BBC says that the NSPCC had warned earlier about the threat that Fortnight posed. Fortnight obviously did nothing about this warning and there is no indication that they now have. It is these kinds of negligence that cost innocent children their lives and bring untold sorrow to their parents. Game makers must begin to take precaution and put measures in place that protect the children that play their games. They must work with law enforcement agencies and anti-trafficking experts to create safer games.
Game makers should also follow the footsteps of games like Missing: Game for a Cause, Act!, BAN Human Trafficking! and Slavery Footprint. These games raise awareness of child trafficking. And the fact that they are video games, they present education to children in their natural environment. Top game companies in the industry could put some of their ingenuity into creating games that teach children to recognise all the stages of trafficking and how to act should they ever be contacted.
