Crime Reduction Toolkits

Trafficking of People

The extent of Coercion and Deception

A range, and variety of forms, of coercion are used by traffickers. These commonly include forms of debt bondage (whereby the trafficked person or their family in the country of origin owes the trafficker money for arranging the transport and employment), removal of documentation and demands for more money. They may limit the victim’s personal freedom. They may threaten the victims and their families. They may subject them to physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

In recruiting their victims, the traffickers will typically employ various degrees of deception.

There are at least five common patterns of recruitment of women into trafficking for sexual exploitation:

• complete coercion through abduction or kidnapping;

• deception by offers of employment with no sex industry connotations;

• deception through offers of marriage;

• deception through offers of employment in entertainment, dancing etc.;

• deception about the conditions in which the women will undertake prostitution.

Women who are recruited through deceptive methods are typically led to believe that they can travel to a western country and earn large amounts of money in a short space of time, or establish a different life through marriage. Women believe that such offers represent the only possibility through which they and their families can move out of poverty and despair. As a result, the women end up being exploited through their initial willingness to undertake the journey, due to the fact that most of them are totally or partially unaware of the real prospects awaiting them.

In some cases the women have an intimate relationship with someone in the trafficking network, or related to the network, or feel loyalty, gratitude or at least dependency on an individual related to her “captive” situation. In other instances they have been attracted by an apparently legitimate organisation – an employment or travel agency – which in fact acted as a front to a trafficking organisation.

Children and young people are recruited into trafficking in the same ways as adults. Often they will be seeking to escape poverty, without appreciating the risks to which they are exposed. There may also, however, be specific elements that apply in the case of children relating to the contributing role played by their parents. Thus the child victim may have been deliberately ‘sold’ to the trafficker by a family member, either as a matter of simple profit or removal of an uneconomic family burden, or both. The child or young person may or may not know the planned outcome, but the family member conducting the sale will be aware or simply reckless as to the planned exploitation. In many situations, parents part with their children believing that they will be offered a better life or opportunities in the place they are being taken to.