With regards to the question of how quantitative research can be used to help us to understand the problem in a way that adds value, I will refer those interested in the Sentinel Surveillance report that was recently published by UNIAP. This report, which was quantitative in nature, has forced us to rethink the way we look at and understand human trafficking. The outcome will result in more focused and better planned responses to the problem — http://www.no-trafficking.org/reports_docs/2009-2010_UNIAP_sentinel_surveillance_Poipet.pdf.

I also agree that we need to use other data more regularly. For example, the HIV/AIDS sector has very interesting and worthwhile information that is often ignored. There is also a lot of labor information that is relevant.

We know from the drugs field about the push-down pop-up effect, where you push the problem down in one place and it pops up somewhere else, and have anecdotal information that this may be happening in trafficking. That is, where there have been signs of progress at local levels, the traffickers have simply responded by moving their operations elsewhere.

And we also know that there has been success against slavery in the past. The Atlantic slave trade was ended. And progress has been made against exploitative child labour in various industries, including textiles and chocolate. This progress is not linear or absolute but one thing that is notable about these examples for me is that they focus primarily on preventing exploitation at destination.

Shouldn’t our starting point be better use of the information we already have?

Many of the trafficking stories we hear today could have been written ten years ago, so where have all our efforts and interventions over the years led? It appears the ‘success’ stories are so few and sparse that they are overhwlemed by the statistics or speculation at the magnitude of the contuniung problem. More so how we have been working over the years and how to make the impact of our work count has been called into question severally and this cannot be discountenanced. Matt has certainly hit the nail on the head.

One issue I would like to add is that I perceive we have not yet made much success in linking our anti-trafficking work very concretely to the many diverse economic, political and social issues that fuel trafficking. Granted, anti-trafficking practitioners have to ‘practice our trade’ and we have to coordinate effectively with each other, but the issues we address do not exist in a vacuum and neither do we nor the people we are commited to help. National economic policies and budgets affect lives and our work; so does corruption, political or financial crises, natural disasters, epidemics, increasing migration pressures and the equally increasing obnoxious anti-migration policies springing up all aroudn us. We need to be more robust in engaging and fostering a link with these issues that will not subsume or swallow the issues of trafficking, but will ensure that they are taken into account in planning or reacting to the challenges of the world on a more broader level.

In particular, I have a fundamental problem with the term ‘root cause’ being applied to factors that affect victims and potential victims. Trafficking is essentially about the severe exploitation of migrants for the purposes of profit. The abuses against victims – rape, other forms of violence, deprivation of liberty – are not ‘caused’ by the victims, or anything to do with them. Like any crime, they are caused by the perpetrators.

I have been told more than once that this is a question of semantics. I disagree. For me, it plays into the whole discourse around prevention that essentially blames poor countries for being poor. Thus, ‘prevention’ takes place miles away from the exploitation that we are ostensibly trying to prevent. The idea that is that if victims are less poor, less gullible, better informed etc., they won’t be trafficked.

This focus on the potential victims takes the emphasis off those who are doing the abusing. I agree by the way that the dominant law enforcement approach is not working, but I don’t believe that you can necessarily extrapolate that to say that all possible law enforcement approaches are ineffective – but that’s another discussion. It also places the emphasis on source countries, not destination ones. This is quite noticeable in the TIP report for example, where most of the poor countries are in the lower Tiers and Tier I is full of richer, destination countries (Incidentally, have often wondered why, if countries are fully complying with the standards, they are still destination countries.)

So, my biggest concern is that the attribution of root causes to factors affecting victims, distracts attention from the core problem of exploitation. However, if we change the terminology from root causes to factors making people vulnerable to trafficking, I think there are still some practical difficulties.

Leaving aside the black hole of awareness raising and focusing on economic development, I think the first issues is that economic empowerment initiatives have been supported for 50 years under the general banner of development. This has failed to buttress the world against human trafficking. Suddenly re-titling these activities as trafficking prevention has not changed that.

Part of the reason for this is of course that, for many people, disparity is the key determinant of migration rather than poverty in absolute terms. Hence, in many countries there is more trafficking from relative affluent border regions. In Poipet on the Cambodian border with Thailand, the adult wage rate is around $2-3 a day – high by Cambodian standards. Children begging on the streets of Bangkok a bus-ride away can earn ten times that much. Nothing on the source side will change that in the foreseeable future.

It is true of course that some people are trafficked as a result of migration decisions taken because they don’t have enough food on the table. I spoke to a young man a couple of weeks ago in just that situation. However, I do not see that as a trafficking problem at all. It is a development problem. His being trafficked was a symptom of his inability to feed his family. So the real question for me was, how is it that in a country with literally hundreds of NGOs – there are 73 indoctrination-based agencies in one province alone – no programs had managed to reach him?

To put it simplistically, I would suggest that people undertake risky migration as the result of pull factors or push factors. Pull factors – more money, more interesting life, adventure, marrying an Italian – by and large cannot be changed in the medium term. In this instance, we need to focus on making migration more safer, including through more realistic policies. Creating disincentives for exploiters also has to be part of that.

Where people move as a result of a push factor, we need to address that for what it is, a development problem. People need help irrespective of whether there are traffickers ‘lurking in the shadows’. There are many things I would like to see done about this in the development sense – an end to agricultural subsidies in the West to allow farmers in poorer countries to compete, a Tobin Tax on financial transactions to fund cash transfers to the poor, more realistic migration regimes, enforcement of alimony laws, cancellation (not restructuring masquerading as forgiveness) of odious third world debt, capital punishment for the International Monetary Fund.

But I just don’t think that these things come under the heading of trafficking prevention. And I don’t believe that, short of undertaking the kinds of steps suggested in the previous paragraph, we can significantly impact trafficking through core development initiatives. With 3 billion people earning less than the subsidy for European cow, the potential supply pool is simply too big.

My own view is that the value added on trafficking is to focus on the exploitation, the demand if you like, rather than the supply. Ann has already asked me to write something on that and I now realize I have just blown my chance of getting out of that.

I agree with Ms Uhl’s argument that the concept of exploitation needs to be revisited in the light of labour standards that should apply to all sectors. The question remains: what route shall we take in this quest? The route of practical application and seeking to shift the ways we apply and understand the current framework seems to be the first step – and one which would not exclude the possibility of an attempt to find a new legal definition at the same time.

Klara Skrivankova, London, February 2011