Author: Vassilia Orfanou, PhD, Post-Doc
Headline Diplomat eMagazine
Education is empowerment. It leads to informed decision-making, better confidence, and sharper intuition against danger. Therefore, educating the family, children, students and community alike creates a metaphorical barrier protecting the world’s children from future exploitation.
Child trafficking is an epidemic. Law enforcement dedicates resources to combating it, as over 1.2 million children fall victim to traffickers yearly, according to Sunrise for Children.
While police and multiple organizations work tirelessly to apprehend predators before they acquire new victims, sole practical tips exist to help reduce child trafficking. These suggestions target the gruesome act at the root of the cause, making it difficult for traffickers to coax and exploit children.
This article discusses such practical tips, allowing law enforcement, charity organizations, and members of the public to minimize children’s vulnerabilities to trafficking.
Read on!
1. Educating about the Child Trafficking Epidemic
Understanding the definition of child trafficking and indicators of such illegal exploitation can help parents, guardians, and members of the public prevent further victim recruitment. For maximum efficacy, education should reach three core groups, including:
Parents
Parents and legal guardians have control over their children’s actions, associations, locations visited, and more, making them effective in preventing trafficking. When equipped with knowledge of child trafficking, its signs, and ways children can become victims, victimization becomes minimized.
Parents, should understand the definition of child trafficking; common tactics recruiters use on children (online and offline), and ways to protect their children and that of their network. It’s also necessary to discuss some myths and misconceptions about child trafficking to create a concrete understanding of the subject and its severity.
Children
Empowering potential victims with knowledge of the impending doom is an effective way to minimize trafficking among children. Parents, guardians, schoolteachers, and community members should present openly and harshly all the implications resulting from trafficking.
Children should be aware of child trafficking as well, its physical and psychological effects, and the tactics traffickers use to recruit victims to be abreast of the circumstances that could potentially violate their lives. Such information should be conveyed in a manner that’s easy to understand since children may struggle to digest such complex topics.
Community
One common misconception about child trafficking is that offenders are strangers to foreigners. However, police reports show that family members and close friends can still be part of child trafficking rings for monetary purposes.
This fact makes it difficult to rely primarily on the child or parents to prevent child trafficking, thus, necessitating the community’s intervention. The public should be educated on everything about child trafficking, alongside the signs of a child trafficked by close friends and family members as it such a crime could easily happen under their noses, in their own neighbourhood.
2. Reporting Abuse and Trafficking Activities
Education is an empowering way for members of the public and even potential victims to combat child trafficking. However, without quick action to report signs of trafficking, the goal is defeated.
Children, parents, and public members should not hesitate to contact law enforcement once any hint of child trafficking and abuse surfaces. Whether it’s a stranger or family member, law enforcement and other appropriate authorities should be aware of the occurrence immediately.
It’s worth mentioning that traffickers have employed new tactics via the internet to target victims, especially for sex trafficking. In fact, the internet, dark web, social media harbor child traffickers with or without their knowledge. For instance, due to the unfortunate demand for child pornography, traffickers coax children via social media to send sensitive pictures of themselves, which is further used to blackmail them into sending more.
Therefore, fake social media profiles, accounts brandishing or hinting at paedophilia, or one proposing an inappropriate relationship with a minor should be reported to the authorities immediately.
Quick action ensures these potential victims are spared trauma, and offenders face legal repercussions for their malicious actions.
3. Donate to Organizations Combating Child Trafficking
Hundreds of organizations worldwide work alongside law enforcement to save current and future victims and apprehend traffickers. These establishments employ a variety of tactics like building sophisticated technologies to identify traffickers, providing opportunities for victims to escape, helping survivors with support and resources, etc.
These organizations are working hard to minimize trafficking activities, with many significantly impacting the space. It’s also worth mentioning that these establishments are non-profit, dedicating all their resources to liberating victims and convicting offenders.
You can indirectly minimize children’s vulnerabilities to child trafficking by donating to these organizations. Your financial input can provide these establishments with the resources needed to combat child trafficking.
If you’re unsure which organization to donate to, consider reviewing a list of organizations combatting child trafficking or at a mere minimum donate to our cause to continue raising awareness about it. Subscribe today to support our work.
Conclusion
Around 25% of human trafficking victims are children, with young people subjected to forced labor, sexual exploitation, begging, crime, forced marriage, etc. For this reason, we urge members of the public, parents, teachers, professors, company professionals, independent contractors and even children to receive education on Child Trafficking and its signs to further empower and push for further understanding, immediate reporting, donating and support efforts to stop it from its root causes.
Featured Photo: Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz, Pexels
