Write Asclepius and Althea, LUDCI.eu Editorial team
We live in a war-torn world where civil and global conflicts have caused insecurity and poverty. While there are many countries that have recovered from the wars that pillaged their lands, countries like Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen are still actively engaged in this nightmare. This violence has resulted in increased vulnerability of children. Several families flee these zones of unrest because basic social amenities such as schools, hospitals, and water supply have been destroyed.
The UN estimates that about 50 million children have been forced from their homes. This accounts for both those who are compelled to migrate to improve their livelihoods and a growing number of forcibly displaced children. In search of sanctuary, many children either move with their parents, are sent away, or flee on their own. While making this flight with their parents or on their own, these children become extremely vulnerable to abuse, violence, and exploitation. Trafficking is especially easy in this instance because most of these migrants do not have verifiable and acceptable identity documents making them unable to access safe and legal routes.
There have been far too many cases of children being trafficked by friends, custodians, and relatives. This majorly happens in countries with weak governance when parents or primary caregivers migrate and entrust children into the hands of others. This transfer of custody usually causes a loss in authority figure and breakdown of social networks which causes children to fall victim to predators. In countries with unrest and rampant violence, the children are exposed to criminal gangs, military conscription, forced labour and coercion into prostitution.
Blockchain is a new revolutionary technology that can help save some of these children. It is essentially “a decentralised, cryptographically secured, immutable database”. Children without documentation are easy prey for predators who use fake identification documents to traffic them across borders. What blockchain could offer is a digital identity for these children. Why this solution is particularly useful is because “it is impossible for one party to add information to the chain without the consensus of the group, and all records remain on the blockchain unchanged to be viewed by participants at any time”. Essentially, immutability and transparency will make trafficking children across borders traceable and preventable as no official can be bribed to alter the child’s records. Also, digital IDs would help displaced persons who lost their belongings easily access safe interventions.
The blockchain technology is behind popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. These currencies enable people to make transactions in a virtually anonymous fashion. Even though there has been some success in apprehending criminals using cryptocurrencies, this has just led to a bigger issue. The creation of more secretive cryptocurrencies such as Monero “which has been designed to obfuscate entirely the source and destination of any transaction” poses a significant challenge to the fight against child trafficking. In this regard, the government must perform due diligence and regulate their use accordingly.
There’s something not known to many internet users and that is what is called “the dark web” or “the deep web”. This is the part of the internet not accessible by regular search engines. The dark web is home to untraceable internet activity. As you can imagine, many of criminal activities take place there including publishing child pornography and human trafficking. Cybersecurity experts like Sergio Caltagirone have shown shiny examples of how private cybersecurity experts can help in the fight against child trafficking. Caltagirone spends his spare time hunting human traffickers on the dark web. He established the Global Emancipation Network (GEN) “to analyze data to help law enforcers counter human trafficking” where other cybersecurity experts volunteer.
Conclusion:
With adequate and well structure collaboration with the private sector, federal law enforcement agencies can harness the full capacity of the cybersecurity in stopping child traffickers even in obscure places such as the dark web. United Nations has led in the adoption of blockchain in tackling child trafficking. We call on all other governments around the world to start to explore this new technology towards saving the lives of several million innocent children. We also call on the cybersecurity industry to support more and take the fight against child trafficking as a corporate social responsibility – by investing in relevant initiative; aligning with and working with law enforcement agencies to track trafficking rings sooner than later and save the lives and destinies of our children.
