Stopping Human Trafficking: Why So Little Progress?

According to the UN, human trafficking is a $150 billion dollar a year problem involving 40 million victims. How can anyone get a handle on a problem this big?

Arpitha Peteru from the Foundation for Inclusion thinks long and hard about this question. When she contemplates the many thousands of organizations combatting human trafficking and when she thinks of the almost countless number of individuals who are dedicating their lives to this cause, she has the deepest admiration for what they’re doing.

But even so, she asks herself, “Why aren’t we seeing more progress?”

Instead of Fixing Problems, Fix the System

Peteru’s answer about why there isn’t more progress is: “Human slavery is a complex system with self-perpetuating feedback loops. You can’t solve complex problems by fixing any one aspect. You have to understand how multiple aspects intersect or your solution won't work — or worse, it could have unintended consequences that harm the very people you're trying to help."

Her colleague Bob Lamb adds, "Fortunately, we have well-established tools and techniques available for understanding how people behave within complex systems. These tools haven't been used enough when it comes to dealing with human trafficking."

Among the tools that the Foundation for Inclusion uses are ones that account not just for policies and incentives but also for narratives, values, and traumas, all of which affect how people behave. The key, they argue, is to understand how all of those things work together to produce the unwanted outcomes and how they could work together differently to produce desired outcomes.

Human Trafficking in Agriculture

The agriculture industry is an example of how fixing part of a problem hasn’t resulted in stopping human trafficking. One of the factors in this problem is that profit margins in agriculture are thin and getting thinner.

That creates an incentive for plantation owners to cut labor costs. Although trafficking is illegal, in some places a system has emerged: Laborers are recruited or managed by entities outside the visibility of regulators, giving plantation owners deniability with regard to how their workers are treated and how much they are paid.

A trafficking system emerges from this. It’s a combination of profit motive, regulatory gaps, and a large pool of people living under extreme poverty, oppression, or violence. The labor of the individuals involved can be exploited by unscrupulous recruiters.

Peteru gives an example of how complex systems can work against anti-trafficking efforts. She says many organizations do important work rescuing people who are trafficked. That improves the lives of those who are rescued. It also has the potential for an unintended consequence.

“When one person is rescued, another innocent person might be doomed to take that person’s place, as long as recruiters are able to continue meeting the demand for cheap labor," she says. "When you look at the entire system, you realize that the important work of rescue needs to be supplemented by the prevention of abusive recruitment, which must be done across multiple levels, through multiple programs that don’t work against one another.”

Dealing with Complex Systems

Peteru and Lamb think about their work on complex problems in terms of intersecting challenges and collective strategies. Both have worked with communities experiencing violence and instability. They have witnessed how conflict intersects with poverty, migration, generational trauma, and other challenges.

They’ve seen how these create the conditions that make people more vulnerable to trafficking — which in turn creates more trauma and more poverty. Their energy — and their organization’s mission — is rooted in their repeated findings that the most effective strategies are those that try to break the kinds of self-reinforcing cycles that perpetuate trafficking.

Together, they have distilled decades of research, experience, and collective wisdom. The result is a set of rigorous, collaborative processes for discovering what it will take to achieve significant and lasting change on complex social challenges.

Trafficking, conflict, and economic opportunity are inextricably linked. The fervent hope is, in Peteru's words, "to democratize access to the tools to systemic change by putting transformational tools in the hands of the most affected communities that can make collective action possible."

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For more information see: https://foundationforinclusion.org.