The Insufficiency of a Traditional Security Approach to Human Trafficking
Human trafficking is a global human rights challenge best addressed through the expansion of rights and protections geared toward the empowerment of women, children, and vulnerable populations. It is also a global human development challenge best addressed through policies and development programs that target structures exacerbating poverty, inequality, displacement of people, and other conditions that prevent people in source countries from living in freedom from want and freedom to live in dignity.
Author Ionescu, recommends using Ramcharan’s classification to distinguish between the conditions that contribute to human trafficking:
Economic factors like poverty, inequality, unemployment, and indebtedness; Socio-cultural factors like violence against women and children, gender and ethnic discrimination within the home and society; Political and legal factors like armed conflict, weak and corrupt governments, lack of appropriate legislation to punish traffickers; and International factors like the growing feminization of labor migration, increasingly restrictive migration policies, as well as rapidly expanding global sex trade and the growing political and economic power and involvement of organized crime.
