Writes Althea, Content Writer, Headline Diplomat eMagazine, LUDCI.eu
‘We’re turning the tables on the traffickers. Just as they are now using technology and the Internet to exploit their victims, we’re going to harness that technology to stop them.’ – Barack Obama.
Over 10 million children are estimated to be trafficked each year, making up one out of every four individuals who experience human trafficking – and the rise of social media in the digitised world has contributed to the facilitation of this practice internationally.
Between 2015 and 2018, nearly 1000 potential sex trafficking cases were investigated as a result of calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. All the cases were reported to have been recruited through social media platforms – namely, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, as well as through online dating sites and Craigslist.
In 2020, these numbers are higher, as there has been an increase in reports of online exploitation since the outbreak of COVID-19, Forbes reports.
Lawyer Annie McAdams was quoted by the Telegraph, admitting that ‘social media was present in almost all’ of the sex trafficking cases she had dealt with, whether the victims she represented were underage or adults. She also revealed that Facebook was dealing with three lawsuits related to the practice of human trafficking, but highlighted that a number of her clients were also trafficked using Instagram and Snapchat.
It’s unanimously agreed that, since the rise of social media on the web, the child trafficking problem has exacerbated, since targets can be more easily obtained and ‘sold’ through these sites – in some cases, traffickers never need to make face-to-face contact with their targets, in order to make money from them.
In recent years, however, social media has been used as a tool to increase awareness around a number of issues, especially those relating to sexual harassment and assault, sex crimes, and – more and more – child and human trafficking.
To combat the rising child trafficking problem on their platforms, various social media are taking a number of measures to ensure children’s safety on their site.
A spokesperson from Facebook said that they have ‘a safety and security team of 35,000 working on these issues’, as well as technology to ‘remove [inappropriate] content’ of underage individuals, and partnering with the Blue Heart Campaign, an international trafficking program first established by the UNODC in 1997.
In 2019, after a period of relative silence on the data front, Facebook began to release figures relating to the extent of child nudity and sexual exploitation on their platform, after pressure from a number of organizations to improve their transparency around these issues – a move deemed necessary by multiple organizations, in order to be able to assess the extent of the problem online.
Likewise, Snapchat claims to ‘work proactively with the government, law enforcement, and other safety organisations to ensure Snapchat remains a safe and positive environment’, though they allude to no specific measures. Unfortunately, Snapchat’s private model of operating tends to work in the favour of the traffickers, since people are able to be granted access on an individual basis, so payments can be asked for before they are able to gain access.
It has been the role of third-party organizations – independent of these social media platforms – to improve the detection, and capture rate, of traffickers and child trafficking cases online. A prevalent example in the US is the foundation Thorn, which has produced two products that have helped in identifying over 15,000 cases of child trafficking. The latest product – Safer – has been developed so that companies can integrate it with their platform, to ensure that child abuse material is identified, removed, and reported quickly.
On the government end, MEP Catherine Bearder was at the head of the most recent anti-trafficking campaign, which stressed that ‘the internet plays a key role in facilitating THB’, and helped with ‘the recruitment of victims both within and outside the EU through false job offers’, as she called on the Member States to improve their anti-trafficking policies to take this into account.
On the user side of the equation, those who use social media can help to identify cases of child trafficking by looking for key features in pictures posted by minors. According to Spectre – a software start-up company, and consultant on online child trafficking in the US – social media users should look for: signs of emaciation, tattoos, bruises, poor lighting, and if their face is turned away from the camera. Moreover, there are certain tell-tale hashtags to advertise trafficked minors to buyers, so social media users should stay up to date on what these are in their region.
In 2019 – as part of the response to this problem – Facebook banned a hashtag in Arabic which, when translated, read #maidsfortransfer.
Users of social media can help to identify cases of child trafficking by spreading awareness of its continued prevalence in the modern world, especially online, so that others may be able to spot the signs of human trafficking if they come across cases in the future.
While social media platforms are beginning to turn the tide against traffickers in the war against child trafficking – and social media platforms, government organizations, and non-profits alike are doing all that they can to identify and rescue victimized children – the world is still far from being free of this breed of modern slavery.
If you believe that a child might be being trafficked – online or otherwise – you should call the national trafficking hotline, and make sure that you report any exploitative content that you see on social media to the platform.
