Dear Editor,
US human trafficking policy, is a product of religious leaders, neo-conservatives, and abolitionist feminists. It was Michael Horowitz from the Hudson Institute who set up a coalition of evangelicals to advocate for the legislation that became the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA); the legislation received approval from the US House of Representatives by a 371-1 vote, and by the US Senate by 95-0 vote, and was signed into law by President Clinton on October 28, 2000.
The TVPA’s aims are to prevent human trafficking overseas, protecting the victims of traffickers, and prosecuting traffickers. A singular dimension of TVPA has to do with the US’s demands on overseas countries to enact preventive measures against sex trafficking.
This TVPA as a matter of policy requires the State Department to effect an annual assessment of other countries’ anti-trafficking efforts, and to evaluate each country on the basis of its procedures undertaken to combat trafficking. For this reason, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons with the State Department executes its work through a mandate from Congress to produce annual Trafficking in Persons (TIPS) reports that ranks each country’s progress to end trafficking.
The US keeps awarding itself a Tier 1 status, meaning it is making sufficient efforts to end trafficking; countries that do not do well in US judgment are labelled Tier 2 or Tier 3.Tier 3 countries could receive sanctions from the US.
If you look carefully, you will see that Tier 3 countries are countries that may be more concerned about paying no mind to this US programme, rather than their efforts to end trafficking. Some recent Tier 3 countries are Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Indonesia, India, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Lebanon, Sudan, Qatar, Turkey, etc. These are countries not comfortable with US imperialism, where Enloe (2000) argued that the US sets itself up as “a model to be emulated” and performing the role of “global policeman.”
Trends in Organized Crime (2006) noted that the US State Department’s justifications for its ranking awards to countries that do not satisfy minimum standards to end human trafficking, are deficient, and the State Department’s report is applied patchily to establish government-wide anti-trafficking programmes and projects. Some of the minimum standards are subjective, and the report fails to delineate how these standards were applied, reducing the report’s integrity. For instance, country narratives for Tier 1 countries do not make clear compliance with the second minimum standard pertaining to approved penalties for sex-trafficking crimes.
The US itself has to address domestically the problem of about 200,000 children at risk for human trafficking each year, and it would serve that country well to effect some house cleaning there, as that problem has begun to fester. And instead of sitting in judgment over other countries’ issues on trafficking, there may be better outcomes if all the affected countries worked in unison to stamp out this evil trade.
Yours faithfully,
Prem Misir