DESPAIR’S ‘CHOICE’

Women ‘volunteering’ for trafficking to aid families – NGO

 By Jenique Belgrave

Some young women in the Caribbean are choosing to be trafficked into sexual exploitation or forced labour to support their families, according to the head of a regional anti-trafficking charity.

The women are then caught in a web of family members and corrupt officials, lawyers and doctors who facilitate their movement through the region, said the advocate.

“Poor economies, poverty, poor law enforcement, corruption – all of these things are factors, but a lot of it is people searching for a better life,” said Dr Olivia Smith, Executive Director of the Caribbean Anti-Human Trafficking Foundation.

“There is no human trafficking victim that I’ve come across that has said to me, ‘I’m happy to be doing this’. They have said, ‘I want a better life for me or my family’,” she added. “As a result, we are also seeing people volunteering.”

Smith said some family members are also complicit in trafficking relatives into forced prostitution and labour. In addition to boyfriends and girlfriends who lure victims with false promises, “we’re also increasingly seeing family members trafficking their own relatives,” she noted.

Traffickers prey on the poor, isolated and vulnerable. While often portrayed as male, Smith said there has been an “increasing number of older women involved in trafficking” who monitor victims.

Many victims endure abuse but fear reporting traffickers, she said, noting “a wide network” of enablers exist, including corrupt officials and specialists.

She said: “We have corrupt public officials. We have supporting specialists. I have found in a couple of islands, doctors and lawyers involved where these girls would be taken to them to address any issues.”

Smith said ads for jobs like massage therapists or bartenders in newspapers can signal trafficking. She argued that anti-trafficking efforts in the region have focused more on laws rather than capacity building needed at all levels.

“I’m advocating for capacity building within law enforcement, the court system, advocating that the Government partner with the communities and NGOs,” Smith said.

Addressing a weekend webinar entitled Human Trafficking, Where Are We? hosted by Soroptimist International Barbados, the anti-trafficking advocate noted that there are ways to identify where trafficking is occurring.

“In the Caribbean, we believe that it doesn’t happen here, but it does. So very often you see in your newspaper, if you look closely at the classified ads, people are recruiting people for bars or massages, and so these are usually little flags,” she said.

While the Caribbean is a known source, transit and destination hub for human trafficking, Smith admitted that due to its hidden nature, it was extremely difficult to get statistics as to how many people and in which countries are being trafficked.

The expert highlighted that recent efforts in the Caribbean to combat trafficking have mainly been legislative and through policy initiatives due to these countries having signed on to the UN protocols. She, however, noted that there are varying levels of implementation of these at the national level.

Smith said: “There are still issues regarding the definition. There are issues surrounding the TIP [Trafficking in Persons] reports by the US State Department. There are also issues surrounding the fact that many governments in the Caribbean will prefer to ignore that trafficking exists, and so the resources are not placed where they need to be in order to deal with the issue.

“And one of the things that we looked at too, in terms of the success of implementation, although not prosecuting victims for crimes is part of what they’re signed onto under the UN protocols, at the national level, we still see that victims of trafficking who commit crimes under duress from traffickers are still prosecuted.”

jeniquebelgrave@barbadostoday.bb