Rwanda National Police

The term ‘trafficking’ was first formally defined within the terms of Article 3 of the Protocol that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly at Palermo, Sicily in December 2000 as…”the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having the control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation”.

Over the course of the last decade, human trafficking has become a truly global phenomenon. Statistically, the numbers involved with this latest version of human slavery are enormous. The 2005 US Trafficking in Persons Report for estimated that approximately 800,000 people are trafficked globally each year.

In the same year, UNICEF estimated that more than one million children are trafficked annually.

The crime is increasingly being taken over and controlled by organized, trans-national criminal networks (fortunate enough we have no network operating in Rwanda) and the reasons for this are quite simple; human trafficking is a ‘high-profit - low-risk’ form of criminality in which the traffickers can generate vast profits from the exploitation of their victims in the current knowledge that, in many parts of the world, the chances of detection and conviction are extremely low, and that even if this were to occur, the current level of punishment is also generally low.

Trafficking is constantly evolving as economic, demographic and other geo-political factors generate changes in the origin - transit - destination structure. Internal trafficking from rural to urban areas continues to increase.
The average ages of the victims continues to become lower as more and more children are targeted by the traffickers.

Other forms of non-sexual trafficking, such as labor exploitation, slavery, organ removals are now more widely recognized and are growing.
The scale and impact of the different forms of exploitation changes depending upon market demand and conditions.

Taking a global view and incorporating both internal and external trafficking, it may be more accurate to regard trafficking for the purpose of various forms of labor exploitation as the single largest category.

Unless we all stand up against it, our girls, children will continue to face this modern-day slavery.

Talk to your children, your neighbor, pupils and students. It’s not easy to combat but it becomes a bit easy dealing with it with two hands.