Unfortunately child slavery, isn’t isolated to a few countries like Haiti and Camboida, but is instead a problem worldwide (UNICEF). There are numerous organizations trying to improve the lives of these children and to help prevent human trafficking in general. This global tragedy will take a global effort to try and prevent it. Below is information about current U.S. laws and policy regarding this issue:

“The Office of the Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs, headed by Dr. Paula J. Dobriansky, coordinates U.S. foreign relations on a variety of global issues.” One of the offices she coordinates is the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (G/TIP), headed by Amb. Mark Lagon. That office “provides the tools to combat trafficking in persons and assists in the coordination of anti-trafficking efforts both worldwide and domestically.”

There’s a lot of information on G/TIP’s website about United States policies and efforts in this area. Here are a few excerpts.

In 2003, the United States strengthened its ability to fight child sex tourism by passing the Prosecutorial Remedies and other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today (PROTECT) Act and the Trafficking Victim’s Protection Reauthorization Act. These laws increase penalties to a maximum of 30 years in prison for engaging in CST. Since the passage of the PROTECT Act, there have been over 20 indictments and over a dozen convictions of child sex tourists. The Department of Homeland Security has also developed the “Operation Predator” initiative to combat child exploitation, child pornography, and child sex tourism. The United States is also funding the NGO World Vision to conduct major public awareness and deterrence campaigns overseas that include public service announcements, internet messaging, brochures, posters, and billboards.

Facts About Child Sex Tourism

In addition to enforcing these laws, the United States also issues a report each year in which it ranks countries into 3 tiers. The tiers represent how well the country is combating human trafficking.

The Tiers

TIER 1 Countries whose governments fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards TIER 2 Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards TIER 2 WATCH LIST Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards AND: a) The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing; or b) There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or c) The determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional future steps over the next year TIER 3 Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so

Countries in Tier 3 can be subject to certain sanctions by the US.

The annual Trafficking in Persons Report serves as the primary diplomatic tool through which the U.S. Government encourages partnership and increased determination in the fight against forced labor, sexual exploitation, and modern-day slavery.

This problem is global and children in the United States are at risk as well.

Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, Title III. Sect. 2(5)

5) No known studies exist that quantify the problem of trafficking in children for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation in the United States. According to a report issued by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, as many as 300,000 children in the United States are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation, including trafficking, at any given time.

Global Law Enforcement Data

The Trafficking Victims Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2003 added to the original law a new requirement that foreign governments provide the Department of State with data on trafficking investigations, prosecutions, convictions, and sentences in order to be considered in full compliance with the TVPA’s minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking (Tier 1). The 2004 TIP Report collected this data for the first time. The 2007 TIP Report data shows for the first time, a breakout of the number of total prosecutions and convictions that related to labor trafficking, placed in parentheses.

Year	Prosecutions	Convictions	New or Amended Legislation
2003	7,992	2,815	24
2004	6,885	3,025	39
2005	6,178	4,379	40
2006	5,808	3,160	21
2007	5,682 (490)	3,427 (326)	28

The numbers in parentheses are those of labor trafficking prosecutions and convictions.

An excerpt from an “Interview of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell” by Chris Hansen of Dateline, Dec. 11, 2003, Washington, D.C.

MR. HANSEN: Why should Americans be concerned about the sex trade in Cambodia?

SECRETARY POWELL: How can we turn away? If we want to have friends in the world, if we want to have better relations with the countries of the world, we have to help them with this kind of problem.

You know, can you imagine the spread of disease that is taking place with this kind of activity? Can you imagine what will happen to these girls when they’re 15 or 20?  What will become of them?  They’ll have no education. They will be — they will have been used and tossed away and ruined.

And that affects not just these girls, it affects that country.  It affects the family life in that country, it affects society development, it affects income, and, therefore, it affects foreign policy.

So, as the Secretary of State, why is the Secretary of State worried about trafficking in persons?  Because it deals with foreign policy.  It deals with economic and social development within a country.  And a country that does not treasure its youth and protect its youth is not going to be moving in the right direction in the 21st century.

And a nation such as ours, which says we are a moral nation, and that we have a value system, that we would allow our citizens to go over and fuel that trade, by their presence and by their money and by their rotten exploitation of these children, we wouldn’t be living up to our values if we didn’t do something about it.

MR. HANSEN:  What can you do to crack down on the countries involved?  What kind of sanctions would you levy?

SECRETARY POWELL:  Well, there’s a lot of things we can do.  We can withhold foreign assistance money, we can make them not eligible for certain programs that we have, and the law requires us to look at these kinds of remedies.  And what we have found with this Tier 1, 2, 3 system, as time comes every year for the report to be written, a lot of countries want to know, what Tier are we in?  We’re not going to be in Tier 3, are we?  It’s a heck of a stigma to suddenly show up in Tier 3.

Now, we also recognize that there’s trafficking in the United States.  There is exploitation taking place in our own country.  So we’re not totally clean on this and we make that clear.  And the kind of exploitation that you’re talking about in this piece that deals with the sexual exploitation of children, there’s lots of other exploitation that we’re worried about, a lot of other tracking in persons:  for sweatshops, to go in the mines, young people who are not getting an education but are being exploited for their manual capacity as young people, and they’re being ruined just as well as these young people in the sex trade in Cambodia or elsewhere in the world.

The newest Trafficking in Persons Report released in June 2008 has detailed descriptions of what countries around the world are doing to help stop human trafficking. Here is an excerpt from Cambodia’s section of the report:

The Royal Government of Cambodia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. Cambodia is placed on Tier 2 for the first time since 2004 due to the government’s increased engagement in combating trafficking in persons over the previous year. The government created a national anti-trafficking task force to improve the interagency response to trafficking and coordination with civil society, increased law enforcement action against traffickers and complicit officials, and undertook prevention activities. In February 2008, Cambodia’s new Law on the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation was promulgated and went into effect immediately. This legislation provides law enforcement authorities the power to investigate all forms of trafficking and is a powerful tool in efforts to prosecute and convict traffickers and have them face stringent punishments. High-level government officials have spoken publicly about a “zero-tolerance” policy for officials profiting from or colluding in trafficking in persons.

This is a major global problem. How would you rate the actions of the U.S. so far in addressing it? The State Department website leaves me with the impression that the U.S. is taking significant action to help these children, however, the Nightline, Dateline, and other (here, here, and here) reports make me wonder if U.S. and other nations’ policies have had much effect at all. How effective do you think these policies are and what more should American and other countries be doing to help put an end to this tragedy?

Becker’s recent post Paying the Poor to Improve their School Performance-Becker highlights anti-poverty programs that pay poor parents to keep their children in school, presumably alleviating the pressure to have those children quit school in order to work to contribute to the family income. Posner’s reply Paying Children to Go to School–Posner’s Comment considers the perverse incentives such plans might induce and concludes that they are a “band-aid approach at best,” advocating increased competition among public schools to increase the value of an education instead.

The success of such a program seems highly situational - Becker and Posner discuss similar plans in Mexico and in New York, and while no conclusion emerges, the analytical approaches of both prove to be worth the price of admission.

The New York Times reports on a growing problem of child labor in China’s rapidly industrializing economy - Child Labor Rings Reach China’s Distant Villages:

The mud and brick schoolhouses in the lush mountain villages of this remote part of southwestern China are dark and barebones in the best of times. These days, they also lack students.

Residents say children as young as 12 have been recruited by child labor rings, equipped with fake identification cards, and transported hundreds of miles across the country to booming coastal cities, where they work 12-hour shifts to produce much of the world’s toys, clothes and electronics.

The article points to to a combination of the desperate poverty in the Liangshan province where many of the children are from and manufacturers in the coastal areas squeezed by increasing costs, a shortage of adult labor and stricter enforcement of labor laws. Once out of the province, the Li children are particularly susceptible to mistreatment and deception because they often don’t speak Mandarin.

…residents of Liangshan say abject poverty, drug abuse and a lack of jobs have forced many children to head for factories. Sometimes it is with their parents’ permission. Other times, children disappear, on their own or with job recruiters, and then call home from a factory dormitory, hundreds of miles away.

“When our daughter left, we were quite worried,” said 42-year-old Qi Ji Gu Xi, whose 14-year-old daughter left last February. “We didn’t know where to find her. Then she called us and told us she’s a migrant worker in Guangdong.”

This focus on China’s internal child labor problems highlights and old and relentless blight on many of the world’s economies - the use of child labor perpetuating a vicious cycle that cripples the coming generations through a lack of education and opportunity and prevents the local economy from developing sustainable local industries in any other capacity. China is far from alone, UNICEF estimates “158 million children aged 5-14 are engaged in child labour - one in six children in the world.”