Trafficking from poor to rich countries - a tolerated transnational traumatising
Sally Ramage | 14.02.2005 10:33 | Anti-racism | Migration | World
“TRAFFICKING FROM POOR TO RICH COUNTRIES :- A TOLERATED, TRANSNATIONAL, TRAUMATISING TRAVESTY”
by
Sally Ramage
ABSTRACT
This article looks at the crime of trafficking of women and
Children. In the UK, the new government agency, Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), recently gave a press release that SOCA will treat the trafficking of women and children for prostitution as serious. However, the history of trafficking to the UK and the denial of the problem for the past 50 years is recorded in history . Australia is examined as a special case because Australia has taken legal steps to curb trafficking, using immigration and nationality laws. An Australian government Official report described the prostitution as simply a way of paying back the cost of carriage illegally to Australia. , which the Australian reality is that the girls never get to repay their debt and are forced to stay in prostitution forever. The income from each transaction has to pay for food, clothes, toiletries, debt to trafficker or broker and commission to the brothel. For instance if the income per transaction is £150 , then the accommodation plus expenses are more in the region of £400 , making it impossible to ever be free from prostitution. Even if they could repay the debt, their income prospects are about £60 per week, barely less that the Social Security subsistence amount. The Paper nevertheless concludes by recommending forensic business intelligence methods that can be used on business records and accounts or on the details of a single person.
It recommends severe punishment for the organisers of trafficking, with the UK’s prison sentence of twenty three years for this offence as an example for other countries to follow, but severe punishment is also necessary for all those men in the UK, Australia, Europe and North America who abuse these persons by treating them as a commodity to be purchased for a number of minutes or hours. These poor persons are human beings and deserve all the opportunities that the demand side of this TRAVESTY expect for their own womankind. Psychologically, they demean and debase these women by buying time with them, the type of time that they do not want to see bought for their own womankind. In this respect, Holland is a good example because prostitution in Holland is legal and therefore it is not necessary to import poor countries’ womenfolk to service men in Holland; they “use” the services of their own nationality. In this respect, Holland is honest about its moral turpitude. Implementation is needed of policy solutions to put a stop to this social disease and moral lapse in modern western society. But in the very first conviction for trafficking in the UK, sentence was 23 years, while the Australian conviction was a monetary fine and a suspended prison sentence.
The United Kingdom, albeit very late in the day, is leading the way in sentencing the organisers of trafficked people; the United Kingdom needs to now lead the way in making it illegal to purchase fornication and bestiality and to make it illegal to run brothels, with severe imprisonment sentences for all the men who attempt to frequent prostitutes, British or foreign. It will soon keep these men in check.
The writer acknowledges no-one ‘s help in writing this article. All queries are to be directed to the writer herself. This Paper was conceived , researched and written by the writer with no help what-so-ever from any other person.
END.
[Eight thousand , three hundred words.]
Introduction
Trafficking of women and children is part of organised criminal activity in which these women are transported from Africa, South America, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe to Western Europe and North America to be used as prostitutes and child pornography and child prostitution, slave labour, automobiles couriers, body parts couriers, fauna and flora couriers, for stealing nuclear material , as drugs couriers , arms couriers, and eve n to learn to pick-pocket in gangs This is all part of trans-national organised crime . Facilitated through the rapid improvement in technology which criminals have exploited.
Where there used to be maritime piracy on the high seas, the trend today is rather for highly organised software piracy , part of the criminal process of producing paedophile and bestiality and perverse hard core pornography to supply the western appetite , this being a multi-billion pound pornography industry that generates huge profits. When these illicit and illegal profits are introduced into the formal economy, the conversion to legitimacy through the purchase of business properties, aeroplanes, stocks and shares and high living, is termed as 'money laundering'. Such money is also used to further develop the illegal businesses.
The women and children
Not all the women and children that are trafficked are caught and transported against their will. Some are women who pay the traffickers to get them to western countries, thinking that they would have a better life, only to be forced into prostitution with no hope of reporting it, being illegal immigrants in the new countries. For commercial sex trade, women and children are trafficked from Africa, India, Pakistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Middle East, Indonesia, Central America, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Brazil, Thailand, Philippines, Japan, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Dominican Republic.
The women and children who are the supply side of many Western brothels and who act in hard-core, bestial and perverse pornography films and other material are trafficked to Western countries, namely the Netherlands, , Western Europe , United States , Greece, Spain, Switzerland , , Australia , Germany , Austria .
To stop and remember woman’s eternal plight is necessary; to remember the eternal and universal plight of women , dealing with the supremacy of men , to exploiting the predatory sexual greed of men through the ages. From the recent stalking and killing of young girls by sexual criminals for instant sexual gratification , not dissimilar to the millions of instances of a lesser violence on women when drunken men have raped wife, daughter, servant and stranger as inhibitions are unleashed, leading the circular devastation of unmarried mothers, unwanted pregnancies, silence, fear, and social out-casting of the victim women and offspring . Even in modern times of liberal laws and legal equality, women still have the added burdens of co-ordinating families, childcare , household management as well as making a living outside the domestic environment.
The United States CIA has estimated the number of children trafficked to the US in 2003 as being only several thousands, estimates from studies for UNICEF in 1997 revealed 300,000 child prostitutes in the United States. It would not be unreasonable to extrapolate that one million children are child prostitutes today, since no measures were taken to stop the trafficking between 1997 and 2004. So it can be estimated that most of the child prostitutes in non -Western countries are servicing the demand for Western tourists who travel to the children's countries to indulge their criminality, making the 1997 estimate for global child prostitution some 2 million.
The United Nations estimated that 1.2 million children are trafficked each year . This is not the total figure for all child prostitutes in the world as there are an extra estimated one million children in their own countries who are sexually exploited by tourists who travel to the children's countries for sex with children., making the probable number of these abused innocent minors about 2 million. Trafficking is part of Serious Organised Crimes and occurs for the purposes of prostitution, Slave Labour , the movement of drugs and arms, and recently for the specific purpose of using children for thieving.
Utah in America had a Pornography CZAR since 2001. They also created the office of
Obscenity and Pornography Complaints Ombudsman. . This conservative movement is echoed in other states of the US as the statute Child Online Protection Act, codified at 47 U.S.C. S 231 even though some argue that this statute violates the First Amendment.
INTERPOL said in the 1997 Report on Transnational Chid Prostitution. “.. Child prostitution over the last ten years is directly caused by the tourism trade. Child prostitution is the newest tourist attraction offered by developing countries. The parallel to this phenomenon in the Western countries is the explosion of a huge underground trade in child pornography in videos and magazines. Since laws against child prostitution are stringently enforced in most affluent countries , pornographic films and photographs often have their origin in countries where child prostitution has become a temporary escape from poverty for struggling rural people'.
International Conventions to combat trafficking
A significant number of organised criminal activities have caused authorities and non-governmental organisations to confer and create Conventions to persuade the world's countries to legislate and control such crimes. The 1949 Convention on the Suppression of Traffic of Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others is an indication of the serious situation even fifty years ago. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) pressed for the 1957 Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, an instrument which cover child prostitution as well as trafficked women in brothels. There was also the 1959 United Nations (UN) Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
The United Nations Convention of 1988 against Illicit Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances also covers money laundering and precursor chemicals and drugs. This 1988 UN Convention declares that these criminal activities need to be regulated, prohibited or criminalised and was followed quickly with the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The UN continues orally fighting for the rights of the child even though the evidence of almost 2 million children in child prostitution does indicate that this rhetoric needs vigorous and simultaneous action to put an end to it. To list the UN's efforts, there was the 1991 'End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT) a Non-governmental organisation which raised awareness of the crime. There followed the UN's 1992 'Programme of Action for the Prevention of the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography'. Also, there was the 1996 'First World Congress against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children'.
There is now a definition of the word 'trafficking' and there is progress in that. The definition of trafficking in human beings in the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children(2000) states: :
'1. (a) ’Trafficking in persons’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of threats or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments of benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purposes of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. The consent of the victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in sub-paragraph (a) have been used.
(b) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered ‘trafficking in persons’ even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in sub-paragraph (a) of this article.
(c) ‘Child’ shall mean any person less than eighteen years of age.' In Fact, the term “trafficking” was not known in the United States, although since 1988, the US was using “aggravated felony” to mean “an offence relating to alien smuggling for which the term of imprisonment imposed is at least 5 years. By dwelling on the immigration side of people trafficking rather than the organised crime ,the US has developed its immigration laws to the enactment of the United States Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 .
What are western governments doing to combat this crime?
Germany's ‘Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men’ organised a colloquium in November 2002 and discussed trafficking of women and prostitution and studied the Dutch legalised prostitution industry as one direction they might take. The Netherlands' solution to trafficking is to make prostitution a legal business activity. This means that prostitutes in that country must pay taxes and will be entitled to state benefits. More importantly, it means that it is now mostly women who are legally domiciled in that country, who can work in the prostitution business, cutting the need for trafficking. Research needs to be conducted and business data collected to discover exactly what proportion of its Gross Domestic Product is contributed by the sex sector.
The United States, in statistics estimated by government intelligence, state forty or fifty thousand women and children were trafficked there for prostitution, the 1997 US illegal immigrants figure being 100,000 from China ,so it is reasonable to assume that this figure is now 500,000 to 1,000,000.
The United States has recently passed two laws, the United States Pledge Protection Act 2004 (to prosecute American citizens who travel abroad to procure sex with children) and the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2003 (to use new methods against those countries who do not discourage trafficking by withdrawing aid and other sanctions). The US government has committed $50 million to support this programme. The EU has not pledged any money but has recently appointed a Trafficking Monitoring officer, having realised that child trafficking has become serious in the EU.
Neither has the UK pledged any money to combat trafficking. The United Kingdom has never acknowledged “prostitution through trafficking. Rather, successive governments have seen the victims as illegal immigrant prostitutes, and sought to deport them. The situation has not been addressed and so there are no statistics on the subject, incomplete or estimated. The recent Proceeds of Crimes Act includes brothel-keeping and describes it as a criminal activity. The UK government has made overt condemnation of prostitution, yet ignores the social and moral decay of its citizens whose demand for prostitutes is the driving force .The traffickers merely supply. Both the UK and USA have recently implemented draconian laws to tackle trafficking and this indicates a reaction to an enormous problem. Although UK anti-prostitution laws were passed in 1898, 1908, 1912, 1922, and 1956, they did not collate information nor address trafficked prostitutes. The UK Sexual Offences Act 2003 allows a maximum punishment of 14 years imprisonment for 'facilitating prostitution within the United Kingdom complete with legal definition of the word 'prostitute'.
The writer observes that the UK police seem to have a ‘blind spot’ as far as prostitution is concerned. There has been more than one Chief Officer in the Police who has made statements to the press of their total acceptance of prostitution if only it could be made legitimate. Records show that the trial for the murder of many young girls at the hand of Fred West in North England reveals that local police often frequented the establishment, yet none suspected any foul play. The English attitude to prostitution and sex in general is entrenched in the culture as history reveals that children have been abused in English society since the 12th century. Since 1275 English law stated that men could have sex with a child over the age of twelve. This age limit was raised to thirteen in 1885 and by 1802, English society’s attitude was very accepting of the situation, even when a 12 year old was found strangled and dead and in m1742 when a 9 year old was raped so brutally that she died of internal injuries caused by rape,
The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and the Sexual Offences Act 2003 are the means by which UK trafficking is to be dealt with. Section 145 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 covers the offences of arranging or facilitating the arrival, travel or departure of a person in the UK for the purpose of control over prostitution. Section 143 of this Act states that the penalty for this offence is a maximum of fourteen years imprisonment. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 deals with trafficking within and out of the UK for the purposes of sexual exploitation and the maximum sentence for such offences is also fourteen years. The Sexual Offences Act also has measures against buying the sexual services of a child, and causing, facilitating or controlling the commercial sexual exploitation of a child in prostitution or pornography. This Act came into force in May 2004 . .There is also the Criminal Justice Act 1987, section 2, which can be used by the Serious Fraud Office for compulsory questioning if trafficking involves serious financial fraud. Also, the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 can be used to conduct financial investigations into suspected traffickers’ financial affairs and to seize assets. Part VII of the POCA contains the money laundering offences. The definition of money laundering now extends to include proceeds of all crimes and section 329 states that the possession of criminal assets constitutes money laundering and there is the Extradition Act 2003 to return offenders. Yet the UK police in 2003 claimed that trafficking is very rare and that the majority of these women have come voluntarily to the UK to work as prostitutes .
The UK’s ‘Children’s Bill’ reached Parliament on the 21st October 2004 and deals with informants who are concerned with a child’s welfare. It will not impact upon trafficked children, unless a kind hearted client reports the matter to the police.
If migration to forced prostitution is merely the result of lack of prospects in the country of origin, unemployment and lack of education and these results in trafficked women and children, then those economic issues must be addressed. In 2003 the UK police made co-ordinated raids on several 'brothels' in the north of England, arrested the prostitutes and deported those with incorrect papers. The UK is the one country that does not have apparent regard for the fundamental human rights of such trafficked humans. As regards immigration laws, together with Australia, the UK neglects to consider the rights of children born to trafficked women. The right to family life is a human right (article 8) and a child born in a jurisdiction should be treated as every other child born in the jurisdiction.
Sweden prohibits the purchase of sexual servitude
In 1999, prostitution in Sweden became unlawful. In 2002 , the trafficking of women for sexual servitude became unlawful also. As a consequence there are 60% less women in prostitution in Sweden . Sweden has decriminalised the supply side of the sex industry, and this is the crux of the change needed globally. Sweden realises that what poor women need is cure for sexually transmitted diseases, rehabilitation counselling for rape trauma, violence and torture., and comprehensive job training.
Practical steps to combat trafficking in any country.
The accountancy profession , with their recording and auditing functions, can help to detect trafficking by being vigilant on the Pay-As-You-Earn taxation side, spotting large trenches of very low-paid workers in the accounts records, spotting payments to lorry companies in a non-transport company’s records , spotting one-off payments to someone abroad, spotting mass purchase of cheap clothing and footwear, spotting money being deposited in many different branches of the company’s bank , far away from the place of business, spotting sudden rises in income and spotting different modes of personal drawings.
One exception to this is Australia , where recent Empirical Data in a study of 500 companies revealed that when companies experience financial difficulties, they hardly ever go into liquidation because there is no cash to finance an investigation of the company. Companies in Australia rely 100% on auditors to steer them away from trouble. They would like the auditor alone to bear the responsibility.Australian companies are ripe pickings for fraud and trafficking as is reflected by an Adelaide liquidator: “One of the Hallmarks of corporate collapses has been the one-man rule situation.
There is no doubt that the chairman-CEO role, which is common on founder driven companies, tends to be followed for better or worse. The use of audit committees puts a check on the authority of that person. It is a useful role if it works.”
What sort of accounts can reveal such organised crime? Any. From newsagents, tobacconists, doctors’ accounts (sudden increase in patients), family firms with many low paid workers or much regular cash withdrawals, companies suddenly renting large cheap accommodation on the pretext of storage, sudden large purchases of cheap foodstuffs, clothing and footwear, sudden rises of income in any business from pornography retail outlets, massage parlours, market traders to new small subsidiaries abroad.
More Questions
How can such crimes be covered up in large companies’ reports and access? It is well known that as companies grow larger, it becomes necessary to have several “books” instead of just one ledger and as companies grows even larger, these “books” are further sub-divided and one such “book” is the petty cash book. Whilst the petty cash account has advantages of handling and recording small cash payments by junior personnel and posting monthly entries to the main Profit and Loss account, it also has the disadvantage that the audit misses the significance of payments out of the petty cash account. This is where trafficking expenses might be legitimised through a large company’s accounts. So a large well-known, decent, incorporated company may be involved in illegal activities such as trafficking for arms or drug courier purposes or for Value Added Tax frauds by using petty cash accounts. A well known example is of companies using people to but cigarettes and alcohol in Europe for personal use but in fact they are sub-dividing the transportation of corporate stock to avoid Value Added Tax.
Techniques of Data mining and accounting data-bases - useful for flagging up hidden trafficking.
For accountancy and management purposes, computer programmes are written to make it easy for data to be processed. For example, the accounting programme is written so that when an item is posted to an account, it may give you the running total to date, the account reference number and the budgeted figure for that expense. Such accounting software can be programmed to also include a flag-up of a creditor previously unknown to it. So if an engineering business starts to pay rent for premises elsewhere, it can be flagged up and checked. Like tackling other frauds, the accountancy software programme can be written to also flag up extra-ordinary items, for example, if there is a limit on how much stationery, say, can be bought from a certain supplier to a maximum of £200 per transaction, and the programme spots that the whole budget for the year has been spent in transactions of £200 in twelve transactions in January, it will flag that up. Money to facilitate trafficking can be hidden by such a means and the audit would not spot it unless the limit was broken or the total amount was much more than last year’s figure.
Documentary Evidence
Another way that traffickers can use expense transactions is to create a highly paid fictitious person in the Payroll account in order to send steady large amounts of money to the trafficker’s bank account to be used for his illegal purposes. Companies that end up in administration, though not traffickers, sometimes have similar types of fraud perpetrated in them. For instance, when the English company Finelist Group plc went into administration in October 2000, various huge payroll discrepancies were found, amounting to millions of pounds . In general, personnel signs would be employee numbers and locations, categories of employees (full or part time), methods of compensation (eg, salaried, weekly, hourly, piece-work, overtime, holidays, bonuses, commission).
Finally, we can say that electronic documents can be forced to be disclosed such as e-mails, spreadsheets, presentations and word processing documents. Such electronic documents hold the key to tracing traffickers and since ninety seven percent of all business document are electronic. The metadata which computers automatically create and store about each document and this can track the changes in a document, those who have had access to it or have changed it such as the cc on an email...
The Front Business? Questions that must be asked.
Are these regular for the type of business that this business purports to be? If a photography business is formed as a limited company and makes good net profits of over £100,000 each year, you would expect that it has regular corporate clients, contract work and staff. If you find that this photography business is a one man company with a private aeroplane and that this company director then starts a second business which is a retail sex outlet, it might raise alarm bells that maybe this director is peddling more than photos, and if not, what type of photos is he producing and who audits his accounts, if indeed they are audited?. For indeed, even if this is a registered company, the rules are that an unqualified accountant, not an auditor, may prepare and submit accounts for small companies, those incorporated companies with a turnover up to 5.6 million pounds (see UK Statutory Instruments 2004, No.16, Companies Act 1985 which came into force in January 2004 and is know as the audit exemption threshold of 5.6 million pounds sterling) And such a preparer of accounts has no compliance accounting standards , no body to disqualify him. Could he be sued? The person perpetrating the illegal trafficking would not sue him. If they have a contract, it would be to fool financial bodies in order to facilitate money borrowing. An innocent preparer of such accounts for an illegal activity could not be sued by the lending bank for negligence under tort. If an accountant made an error in judgement and was ignorant of the real activity of such a business, then he could not be sued in negligence. In Whitehouse v Jordan [1980] 1 All ER 650, Lord Denning said that an error of judgement did not in fact constitutes negligence.
New Disclaimer by UK Accountants against negligence :
In January 2003, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales issued a technical release, recommending auditors to include a disclaimer in their report and accounts: “This report is made solely to the issuer’s members, as a body, in accordance with section 235, Companies Act 1985. Our audit work has been undertaken so that we might state to the issuer’s members those matters we are required to state to them in an auditor’s report and for no other purpose. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we do not accept or assume responsibility to anyone other than the issuer and the issuer’s members as a body, for our audit work, for this report, or for the opinions we have formed.” This recommendation appears to be a move towards the German contract law instead of the English tort law that auditors’ liability at present come under. If damages caused by a wrong audit are recoverable under an implied contract between auditor and shareholder, the auditor is usually liable for simple negligence. There is general agreement that pure economic loss has to be compensated under contract law as the cost of protection is internalised in the contract. Auditors have recently lobbied the Department of Trade and Industry to amend section 310, Companies Act to allow auditors to negotiate a cap on their liability but the Office of Fair Trading Report of 5th August 2004 stated that a cap would not prevent the collapse of an accountancy firm and that, anyway, there is professional indemnity insurance and that accountants can form limited liability companies.
Example of Front Business: Photographic shop or Hard-core Pornography film studio?
If an auditor is not thoroughly familiar with the nature of the business, he cannot spot fronting arrangements that hide trafficking offences. This means that the auditor should really know the type of business he is auditing, the key business activities, the products, the service, the customers, the industry and the competitors. This is not as easy as it sounds because a company can have whatever name it chooses, apart from the prohibitions under the Business Names Act 1985 sections 2 and 3, and Companies Act section 26. For example, the sex shop outlets which are on some UK High streets and are known as “Private “ shops, are franchised from the American organisation which boasts in its annual report that it is “a purveyor of Hard Core Pornography”. These Private shops, if formed as limited companies in the United Kingdom, can be registered at Companies House, Cardiff under a name other than “Private”. Registered companies do not always declare their true business to Companies House. Also, there are broad categories for registration and there are no categories for sexual retail outlets, massage parlours, etc. Those will be registered under “other retail business” category and criminals can tick the wrong box because there is NO audit of the registration documents.
The business conditions in Australia remain good for the people trafficker, as the situation there remains bad and corruption and serious fraud remain much the same as for the UK, although Australia already has a definition of fraud in which dishonesty is the key attribute that distinguishes fraud from innocent conduct. Commercial developments of companies can be tracked to disclose any illegal offences such as trafficking. These include change in activities, product history (for example, are they selling private hairdressing to hotel room occupants or are they selling sex? are they transmitting soft pornography films in night clubs as a service activity or are they filming paedophiles in action? Both activities would need projectors, film, storage premises, staff, but the latter would have purchase of equipment for perverse purposes, food items purchased clothes purchases, transport costs, aeroplane tickets, etc.)
The history of ownership/control and other significant events, for example major acquisition and disposals and major disputes can be the tell tale signs of other activities. The location of the business is important as is the description of properties occupied.
As in all things, preparation is the key to success. To stop trafficking in its steps, to catch traffickers in the early stages, to stop even the formation of such corporations, an accountant appointed to a new audit can pay particular considerations in a new engagement and must familiarise himself with the client's business, recording background information on the permanent notes file. He must obtain all necessary documents well in advance of the commencement of the first audit.
Profiling the trafficker; knowledge database that can be created and used by other countries
Profiling techniques can also be used to detect money laundering and thus trafficking. Bank statements of criminal suspects can be examined to identify cash deposits, unusual transactions, gross income, female dependant, nature of personal transactions, standard of living, taste in entertainment, internet transactions, transfers of moneys to large corporations, etc. The person can be checked against Companies’ House records for director disqualification. An internet search might reveal some past criminality. His credit reference may be sought.
Unorthodox ways to combat people trafficking
A few countries use other ways by which to bring this dastardly offence to book. Some countries use kidnapping laws and prostitution statutes to prosecute traffickers. No country has used their fraud laws; the UK has never used the Criminal Justice Act 1987 for securing evidence for human trafficking, nor has any country used their OECD instigated Corruption laws. No country has established monitoring systems to which they could channel data to be processed. The UK can use its abduction laws to have children returned to their parents.. Furthermore, Article 12 of the Hague convention scheduled to the 1985 Child Abduction and Custody Act provides: ‘Where a child has been wrongfully removed or retained…and, at the date of commencement of the proceedings before the judicial or administrative authority of the contracting state where the child is, a period of less than one year has elapsed from the date of the wrongful removal or retention, the authority concerned shall order the return of the child forthwith…The judicial or administrative authority, even where the proceedings have been commenced after the expiration of the period of one year… shall also order the return of the child, unless it is demonstrated that the child is now settled in its new environment….’ The offence of aggravated felony in the US can be used to deport a trafficker. The offence comes under the US Anti-Drug Abuse Act 1988… It can be used for deporting for serious crimes.
Conclusion
The writer leaves this concluding comment. Modern society has produced this peculiar variety of professional criminals. There are tremendous financial gains in the pornographic businesses. Even on a few products surveyed, it is clear that the margins are of the scale of nearly 900 percent and more. The Annual Report of the 'Private' sex shop franchise business declares extremely healthy profits from this 'purveyor of hare-core pornography, as the report describes the business. Governments, despite their protestations, will do nothing to harm businesses; the health of the economy depends on businesses and the blur of the transition of trafficking to legal is very fuzzy. Many have been waiting for fifty years to stop the uncouth and savage act of sex exploitation. Now at last the European Commission have announced plans for a concerted effort against it and the newly formed United Kingdom Serious Offences and Crimes Agency
(SOCA) has announced its priority of combating trafficking for prostitution.
But taking criminal action in the area of fraud and white-collar crime is not easy or quick. One Australian study revealed that such actions take an average of four years; governments that wish to dispose of illegal immigrants quickly will balk at such lengths of time. This report did not attempt to tackle the separate subject of child exploitation for computer pornography but plans to do so soon.
Cases
Whitehouse v Jordan [1980] 1 All ER 650
Attorney-General’s Reference 6 of 2004 [EWCA] Crim 1275
Statutes and Conventions
Business Names Act 1985 UK
Companies Act 1985 UK
Criminal Justice Act 1987 UK
Extradition Act 2003 UK
ILO Convention 180 International
Immigrant Responsibility Act 1996 US
Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2000 UK
Proceeds of Crimes Act 2002 UK
Pledge Protection Act 2004 US
Sexual Offences Act 2003 and Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act.
UNITED NATIONS CONVENTIONS
1949 Convention on the Suppression of Traffic of Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution.
1957 Abolition of Forced Labour Convention.
1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Child,
1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances
1992, Programme of Action for the Prevention of the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.
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Internet references:
Anti-Slavery International
http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/antislavery/trafficking.htm
Coalition against Trafficking in Women.
http://www.catwinternational.org
US Department of State
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/
Sally Ramage