From Catholic News Service

Church helping human trafficking victims

By Barbara J. Fraser, Catholic News Service

LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- In many countries, the Catholic Church is playing an increasing role in helping victims of human trafficking -- a crime that has spread to nearly every country in the world, according to a new report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

"There's been a really significant upswing in the response by the Catholic Church and other churches," said Mary DeLorey, Catholic Relief Services adviser on Latin American issues, in an interview with Catholic News Service. "Women's religious orders are definitely in the lead."

When victims of trafficking manage to get away from the criminal organizations that have enslaved them, "they are so traumatized and brutalized that they need a secure place" that is often provided by church organizations, said DeLorey, who also advises on migration and trafficking for CRS, the U.S. bishops' international development and aid agency.

The U.S. State Department estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders worldwide every year, with between 14,500 and 17,500 entering the United States. If those trafficked within their own countries are added, the number increases to between 2 million and 4 million.

People from Latin America and the Caribbean are trafficked mainly to the United States and Western Europe for the sex trade or other types of labor. Of the 127 nations identified in the report as points of origin for trafficking, five in Latin America and the Caribbean -- Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and the Dominican Republic -- rank as having a high incidence. Seven others -- Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Peru and Venezuela -- are ranked as medium.

Latin America has lagged behind other parts of the world in addressing the problem, DeLorey said, "because it is overshadowed by massive migration flows."

Experts draw a distinction between the smuggling of migrants and trafficking. Smugglers are paid to take people without legal documents into another country. Once there, they often abandon their "clients." Traffickers often promise their victims jobs and safe passage, but once they reach their destination they keep the victim's identity documents and force the person to work in the sex trade or as a laborer, supposedly to pay off travel expenses.

Nevertheless, the line between smuggling and trafficking can become blurred.

"Labor exploitation is not (necessarily) trafficking, but at some point it can meet the criteria -- when there's no exit from the job or when the person is not getting paid," DeLorey said. Traffickers often prey on people who live in desperate poverty or who have been uprooted by violence or natural disasters. Refugees, of whom a "disproportionate number" are women and children, DeLorey said, are also targets.

Children who have been orphaned by AIDS "are being targeted because they have no support structures," DeLorey said. "And kids are being trafficked (for the sex trade) because they're less likely to be HIV-positive."

Experts are increasingly concerned about children from Latin America who are not accompanied by relatives and who are slipping across the border into the United States to be reunited with parents who have already migrated.

While they start out the journey with smugglers, "those kids are much more vulnerable to being trafficked, and some of them are disappearing" along the way, DeLorey said. "There have been a few documented cases and a number of suspected cases of kids ending up being trafficked."

In April, the Inter-American Center Against Disappearance, Exploitation and Trafficking, based in Lima, Peru, launched a Web site that enables people in Latin America to report missing persons and cases of suspected trafficking. The information can be submitted anonymously, and police in nine countries have been trained to follow up on trafficking cases.

The U.N. drug office report, "Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns," noted that trafficking is rarely prosecuted successfully. DeLorey said that an increase in prosecution would be a sign that Latin American countries are taking the problem seriously. The report said another way to combat trafficking is to reduce the demand for the victims' labor.

"A main challenge is to reduce demand, whether for cheap goods manufactured in sweatshops, or for underpriced commodities produced by bonded people in farms and mines, or for services provided by sex slaves," the report said.

It also called for targeting "the criminals who profit from the vulnerability of people trying to escape from poverty, unemployment, hunger and oppression." According to the report, traffickers are often part of well-organized international criminal bands that deal in people, drugs and weapons.

Economic hardship often pushes people to take the first step toward becoming victims of trafficking.

"People are going to make desperate choices that they know to be dangerous, and other people are going to profit off that," DeLorey said. "If you care about trafficking, you've got to care about economic policies. You've got to care about trade policy that displaces people. You've got to care about providing for aid in emergencies. You've got to care about migration policy. They're not divorced from each other."

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