Recognizing Persons Trafficked for Forced Labor as Victims of Human Trafficking: Rethinking Victimhood

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

The stereotypes of human trafficking held by large sections of the public and law enforcement officers in the United States today only identify young, and in most cases, white, girls who are sexually exploited as victims of human trafficking. This ignores more covert instances of human trafficking for forced labor. North Carolina ranks in the top eight states in the country for factors conducive to trafficking in persons. These factors include the state’s strategic location on the Eastern seaboard, the number of major interstate highways traversing the state, the large agricultural economy, the number of military installations and the number of ports located in the coastal region. These conditions make North Carolina a prime target for traffickers, whether the commodity is drugs, weapons or human beings. A recent study conducted by RTI International, NC finds 373 victims of forced labor trafficking in just eleven out of the hundred counties in North Carolina. Law enforcers are often unable to acknowledge these persons as victims of labor trafficking because of their assumptions which dictate who can qualify as a human trafficking victim.

These assumptions include the belief that the victim must have been forcibly abducted, and more relevant to the case of farmworkers, that undocumented immigrants ought to primarily be treated as criminals who need to be deported. This is closely related to the inability to distinguish the act of smuggling from that of trafficking. Smuggling consists of the facilitation, transportation, attempted transportation, or illegal entry of a person(s) across an international border in violation of one of more countries’ laws, either clandestinely or through deception. Whereas smuggling includes two willing parties engaged in payment for transportation with the relationship ending upon reaching the destination, the purpose of trafficking is to exploit a victim through fraud or coercion about the purposes of their movement and exploitation of the victim continues after the period of movement. While these are distinct activities, law enforcement officers are unable to recognize that they can occur simultaneously and therefore ignore this trafficking issue as merely a smuggling problem.

Lastly, the nature of the crime itself makes it hard to be detected. Victims unable to identify themselves as victims as per the country’s laws or because of the nature of dominance exerted by the trafficker or owner are two contributing factors. The second factor is often understand as an instance of Stockholm syndrome. Many labor trafficking victims are also unwilling to openly identify themselves as victims due to a fear of deportation.