FAQ

Human trafficking involves recruitment, harboring, or transporting individual/s into a situation of exploitation through the use of violence, deception, or coercion and forced to work against their will.

Human trafficking and smuggling are not the same. Human trafficking is exploitation-based and does not require movement from one place to another. An individual can live and be trafficked in the same neighborhood. Smuggling refers to illegally transporting or moving an individual transnationally.

Human trafficking is primarily dependent on playing on the vulnerabilities of the person. Human trafficking is done for various purposes:

– Economic exploitation

– Sexual Exploitation

– Forced Labour

– Organ Trade

– Forced Marriage

Anyone can be trafficked, it could be a male, female, adult or child. Yet there are certain sections of the population who are the greater risk of getting trafficked by the virtue of their gender, age, caste, class, economic status, and educational status.

Consent does not legalize exploitation. Traffickers often target vulnerable individuals who consent to jobs others who are less vulnerable would not.

While the term “human trafficking” brings up pictures of individuals being abducted or kidnapped, these are the exception rather than the rule. Traffickers frequently target vulnerable people and build connections with them (and occasionally their families) in order to mentally influence and coerce them into labour and/or sex trafficking.

Human trafficking affects every business and economic area. Agriculture or horticulture, construction, the fabric and textile industries, catering and restaurants, domestic labour, entertainment, and the sex business are high-risk areas where victims are most commonly discovered.

The main international legal instrument is the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000. The Trafficking Protocol, which supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, is the only international legal instrument addressing human trafficking as a crime. The purposes of the Protocol are to prevent and combat trafficking, protect and assist the victims, and promote cooperation among countries that have ratified the Protocol to meet these objectives. The Trafficking Protocol provides the world’s first definition of human trafficking, and it requires ratifying States to criminalize such practices.

India has ratified the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organised Crime (UNCTOC) which has as one of its Protocols Prevention, Suppression and Punishment of Trafficking in Persons, particularly Women and Children.

Apart from that, the laws of the nation criminalize all forms of Human Trafficking under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956.