Globalization Human Trafficking

The Globalization of Human Trafficking:
How Globalization has facilitated the Expansion of Human Trafficking and the idea of a Fourth World.
As time goes on we can evidently see how globalization is developing the world to become more integrated through a global economy. As the world around us is continually growing smaller, we can see an almost global community becoming apparent. It is a community that allows for the transfer of people both voluntarily and otherwise. Globalization has both positives and negatives. There are people who say Globalization is a completely positive phenomenon and those who say it is the opposite, a completely negative one. Of course many people accept that globalization has both its positives and its negatives. For this essay, while I am a firm believer that globalization is overall a positive phenomenon; I am going to focus on a major downside of it. This essay is going to focus on how globalization has led to human trafficking becoming a worldwide occurrence as well as a worldwide problem. The essay will discuss and highlight how globalization has allowed human trafficking to become a massive economic industry worldwide and in doing so has made it a problem that will be very difficult to get rid of. It is my belief that globalization is why human trafficking has grown into a hugely lucrative and extremely fast growing criminal economic activity. In regards to human trafficking I will be focusing on the sex trade predominantly. I will illustrate how criminal gangs have built empires upon selling and trading in sex. I will use arguments and research already in circulation to show how globalization has contributed and continues to contribute to the crime of human trafficking. Globalization is seen all over the world by the development of an integrated global economy market. This global market is built on the foundations of free trade, the free flow of capital and the tapping of cheaper foreign labour markets that transcend nation state boundaries. It is these foundations of a global market that allow for humans to be trafficked by criminal gangs with relative ease. Of course it must be stated that forms of slavery and human trafficking have long been in existence, even before globalization. It is however, my argument that globalization has allowed human trafficking to spread throughout the world and in doing so has allowed the problem to become so big, it is now almost impossible to properly solve it. Human trafficking is very difficult to define. We all have a similar idea of what it entails. However there is not total agreement on how to define it. I will use the UNs definition to show what it broadly is.
“Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control, over another person for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation should include at a minimum, … the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour of services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. (UN, 2000, art.3)
Basically human trafficking is the trade in human beings, the most common purpose being sexual slavery, forced labour or the extraction of organs or tissues. We are all aware to some extent of human trafficking but as people in the Western world we do not give it much attention as we are not directly affected. This is not exactly through. Due to globalization human trafficking has been facilitated all over the world. It is generally the poor countries where most of the victims originate and the rich countries where they are trafficked to. So how does globalization facilitate human trafficking? To show how globalization has directly affected human trafficking we will begin by discussing how the opportunity to traffic humans arises. To see this we must look at a human trafficking in terms of economic globalization. Like any trade, human trafficking begins with a demand for people. In the sex trade, it is pimps looking to fill the demand for prostitutes by placing orders for women with traffickers. This is where the whole globalization aspect comes into play. As the whole global economy is now more interlinked the transferring of people from country to country is much more evident. Globalization has meant that national borders are loosened and transferring goods and services licit and illicit is now a lot easier. My main example of origin countries (these are countries where the victims of human trafficking generally come from) will be Eastern European countries, Ukraine being the main example. Prostitution has become very much a central feature of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Since communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Western Europe has expanded economically. This has led to Eastern European countries becoming poverty stricken with very few job prospects within these nations. As the Eastern European people are socio-economically disadvantaged, they struggle to find a way to earn a decent living. In most societies throughout the world, women and children are the most vulnerable. In a socio-economically disadvantaged area such as Eastern Europe, children and women are even more vulnerable. This is where the traffickers come into play. Chief among traffickers are organized criminal syndicates that capitalize on a very lucrative sex-trafficking industry. The human trafficking industry represents an estimated $32 billion per year in international trade. Human trafficking is very much an organised crime. As an organized crime it has found it very easy to expand its operation and its global scope by embracing the phenomenon of globalization.
Criminal gangs that deal in human trafficking are notorious for finding women who are at their most vulnerable. These women usually tend to be poverty stricken and envisage the idea of better life for themselves. They observe how wealthy countries such as those in Western Europe appear to be offering a chance of a better life. It is this offer of a better life which brings the vulnerable women and children in, but of course this offer never comes to fruition. Once the people being trafficked arrive in their destination country it is often too late for these vulnerable women and children to escape. These victims get caught up in the web of lies and deceit that was created by traffickers and find it nearly impossible to get out. Once these victims are in the hands of the traffickers, the women are ‘broken’ in a way that forces them to accept their life as a sex slave. The women are degraded, abused and humiliated in an attempt to break their will. The traffickers also take the womens passports off of them making escape difficult. This confiscating of their passports also contributes to the women firstly losing their identity in the eyes of other people but after time losing their self-identity. A key feature of globalization is transnationalization. This is defined as a social movement grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the loosening of boundaries.