UN says more children and men falling prey to traffickers amid migration crisis

The Guardian
Ben Quinn

Children sit on a windowsill at a makeshift camp for refugees and migrants at the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, in May. Photograph: Kostas Tsironis/Reuters

Study by UN Office on Drugs and Crime finds that global movement of refugees and migrants has left men and boys more vulnerable to exploitation

The number of children and men who fall prey to traffickers is rising, a UN study has found, with the global movement of refugees and migrants a major contributory factor.

Although women and girls account for more than 70% of human trafficking victims, the largest increase in the number of refugees and migrants since the aftermath of the second world war has left children and men more vulnerable to exploitation, according to the report.

Yury Fedotov, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the UN body charged with tackling the problem, warned that the average number of convictions for the crime remains low.

“As this crisis has unfolded, and climbed up the global agenda, there has been a corresponding recognition that, within these massive migratory movements, are vulnerable children, women and men who can be easily exploited by smugglers and traffickers,” wrote Fedotov in a foreword to the study.

Children account for almost a third of all human trafficking victims worldwide, according to the UNODC’s global report on trafficking in persons (pdf), with the number rising to about two-thirds in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America and the Caribbean.

While women and girls tend to be trafficked for marriage or sexual slavery, the report found that men and boys are typically exploited for forced labour in the mining sector and also as porters, soldiers and slaves.

The number of men detected among trafficking victims globally rose from 13% in 2004 to 21% in 2014. The number of trafficking victims pressed into forced labour also rose, accounting for 38% of all trafficked people identified in 2014 (as opposed to 32% in 2007). Of that 38%, almost two-thirds were male.

The flow of trafficking victims from sub-Saharan Africa and east Asia was more globally dispersed than elsewhere, for instance in eastern Europe and Central Asia, South America and south Asia. However, most trafficking flows are largely a regional and local phenomenon rather than a global one.

When it comes to trafficking into key destinations such as richer European countries, flows from the continent’s south-eastern regions were the most prominent for a number of years and continued to increase.

Fedotov said there had been a “huge improvement” in the number of countries criminalising human trafficking, which has increased from 18% to 88% since 2003. But conviction rates remain far too low, he said, with victims not always receiving the protection and services countries are obliged to provide.

Fedotov added that people escaping from war and persecution are particularly vulnerable to trafficking: “The rapid increase in the number of Syrian victims of trafficking in persons following the start of the conflict there, for instance, seems to be one example of how these vulnerabilities play out.”