The Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimates that  there are between 800 and 1,200 people trafficked into Canada every year. Many NGOs put the figure far higher. Often these victims are women being trafficked into sexual exploitation. Now, member of parliament Joy Smith has introduced a private members bill which seeks to establish a national strategy to fight against human trafficking. Smith was motivated to bring the bill after she discovered that one of her former students had become a victim of such sexual exploitation. Smith said that the process towards a strategy on human trafficking was too slow at the moment and she also expressed concerns regarding the Winter Olympics to be held in Canada in 2010, which may act as a magnet for human traffickers. To read more about this and related subjects, please visit the Globe and Mail by clicking here.

Experts from the Council of Europe have declared that human trafficking has reached “epidemic proportions” and now estimate that the total revenue for criminals may be £22 billion globally every year. Marta Requena of the council’s directorate general of human rights said “It is much easier to cross borders with persons than with drugs or weapons. The profits are very high, and the risks are very low.”
Officials from the Council of Europe were speaking at a conference in Greece where they were urging governments to sign, ratify and enact the Council’s convention against human trafficking which insists not only on adequate law and law enforcement, but also a minimum standard of care for the victims of human trafficking.
Athanassia Sykiotou from University of Thrace said at the conference “Trafficking is a crime of indifference.We are all responsible.”
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Although many children are trafficked from Haiti into the Dominican Republic, the International Organisation for Migration has also highlighted a huge problem of internal trafficking into domestic service in the country. One of the 71 children helped to return home by IOM and their partners said “I want to go back home because there, I did not have any scars on my skin.”. Extreme poverty had forced his parents to give him to unpaid domestic labour. He had to prepare the school uniforms and lunches of the children in the house, but was not allowed an education himself. Now, with the help of IOM he will have some support to go to school. The IOM estimates that between 176,000 and 300,000 children between the ages of 5 and 17 have been trafficked within Haiti, 60% of whom are girls.
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A report by the Indonesian Ministry of Women Empowerment has said that efforts to rescue children from baby trafficking cases have been seriously flawed. The report claims that;
“The baby trafficking cases in Indonesia are not comprehensively handled as human trafficking crimes,”
“The cases in which the (perpetrators) were caught and brought to law were the cases where they were caught red-handed.”
The report also revealed that one woman in South Jakarta had been found to have sold 880 babies, and another group in the same area had sold 80 babies abroad. Again in West Java a man had admitted to selling 300 babies to foreigners.
UNICEF child protection officer Anna-Karin Jatfors said sexual exploitation of children was a “major and growing issue”.
To read more on this and related subjects, please visit The Age by clicking here.