An exciting recent approach to combatting trafficking.

By Mitzi Perdue MPA

• Human traffickers prey on both adults and children alike, generating $150 billion a year.
• Traffickers use violence to terrorize victims into silence, making the chances of a trafficker doing jail time less than 1 in 100.
• Anti-money laundering organizations have begun to find and seize traffickers’ illegal profits, but their efforts are under-funded.

Human trafficking is one of the darkest, ugliest activities on the face of the earth. Is there something that can be done about it? Are there new approaches that could attack the root of the problem and truly make a difference?

Fortunately, the answers to these two questions are yes, and absolutely yes.

Before examining how to help stop human trafficking, here’s a quick look at just what human trafficking is, and how extensive the problem is.

What Is Human Trafficking?

Human trafficking is modern-day slavery. It includes:

• Adult Sex Trafficking: When an adult engages in a commercial sex act as the result of force, fraud, coercion, or any combination of these, that person is a victim of trafficking.
• Child Sex Trafficking: When a boy or girl under 18 years of age is recruited, enticed, harbored, transported, or solicited to perform a commercial sex act, according to the US State Department, this is human trafficking. The State Department states, “There are no exceptions to this rule; no cultural or socioeconomic rationalizations alter the fact that children who are exploited in prostitution are trafficking victims.”
• Forced Labor: When a person, against their will and typically with no compensation, is forced to work, this is forced labor. The coercion may take the form of beating or starvation, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive methods.
• Debt Bondage: This is the world’s most widespread form of slavery. People incur a debt and are then forced to work to pay off the debt. Typically, the employer makes sure the employee isn’t able to work off the debt and remains perpetually in bondage.

How Big Is the Problem?

According to the United Nations, there are more than 40 million people trafficked today. That’s the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in the state of California.

Human trafficking is the second biggest source of revenue for organized crime. Only the illegal drug trade is larger.

Human trafficking is a $150 billion a year enterprise. As Tim Ballard, founder of Operation Underground Railroad says, “To illustrate just how big it is, imagine this: With the money made in human trafficking every year, you could buy every Starbucks franchise in the world, every NBA team in the nation, and every Target store across the globe.”

More than a million children are sex slaves. For a clue as to how evil this is, typically a 12-year-old girl who is sex trafficked will be forced to have sex with strangers 10 times a night or more. Her life expectancy is less than seven years. She’ll die of suicide, overdose, disease, or she’ll be murdered for her organs.

The Evil Equation

The key to stopping this monstrous activity is knowing what motivates the traffickers. The trafficker’s motivation is money.

Human Trafficking’s Evil Equation is: Obscene Profits + No Punishment = Unimaginable Suffering

The trafficker’s profits are, frankly, extraordinary. As an example of how lucrative human trafficking is, let’s take the case of a trafficker in New York City.

If he has four girls in his “stable,” he can easily have an income of a million dollars a year. That’s tax-free. The girls probably see none of this money, and he can control them by beatings, starvation, torture, or threats of murder.

Lt. Christopher Sharpe, from the NYPD says, “The pimp can control his victim with either the threat or the fact of personal physical harm.”

Sharpe has seen that pimps will do the following to put their victims in fear of talking about their lives as trafficked people:

• Break their arms
• Burn them with cigarettes
• Brand them with tattoos
• Cut their faces

And by the way, the girls are forced to act with their clients as if they’re enjoying what they’re doing. They’re highly unlikely to let a client know what they’re going through.

Traffickers are so adept at controlling their victims that it’s rare to find a victim of trafficking who will testify against his or her trafficker. By some estimates, worldwide the chance of a trafficker doing jail time for this crime is less than one in 100.

The Good News: There’s a New and Realistic Way to Stop This

Since it’s known what motivates those in the trafficking industry, namely money, there is an exceptionally useful way to attack the industry. If anti-trafficking authorities can find and seize the traffickers’ illegal funds, authorities can use this vulnerability to help drive the traffickers out of business.

Polaris, one of the largest and most effective US anti-trafficking organizations, is working with other anti-human trafficking organizations to do exactly this. They’re partnering with anti-money laundering professionals and financial services businesses, to make trafficking less profitable, and more dangerous for the traffickers.

Anti-money laundering professionals have an array of tools for finding illegal money flows. They have high-tech, dark web expertise. They can track the electronic movement of money. They regularly use artificial intelligence and big data.

Fortunately, banking officials have a strong incentive to cooperate with authorities when there’s hot money involved. If the bankers don’t cooperate, they face the possibility of fines or being shut down.

Since human trafficking is a $150 billion a year industry, there are a lot of rich targets for the anti-money laundering professionals. However, it’s reasonable to ask that if this is such a target-rich environment, and we already have tools to deal with it, why hasn’t this approach already been used on a global and seriously impactful level?

The answer is, up to now, the funding hasn’t been there. The men and women who have these skills often earn in the range of $250,000 a year.

Ideally, these anti-money laundering efforts will be funded on an ever-larger scale. Attacking the profits of human trafficking is an effective way of attacking human trafficking itself.

Author and speaker Mitzi Perdue is the Founder and President of Win This Fight, Stop Human Trafficking Now! The organization raises funds and awareness for other anti-trafficking organizations.

Originally published at Psychology Today