9 - Preventing Human Trafficking

Summary

Since the international community adopted the UN Trafficking Protocol nearly two decades ago, our approach to the problem of human trafficking has shifted significantly. With too few traffickers prosecuted and too few victims protected, there is growing recognition of the need for more robust efforts to prevent trafficking in the first instance. Trafficking is not simply the product of deviant, criminal behavior that once rooted out, can be easily eliminated. Also to blame are deeply embedded societal structures that facilitate, and even reward, exploitation – in particular, weak labor and migration frameworks that perpetuate precarity for migrant workers in their search for economic opportunities. Because worker exploitation and trafficking differ in degree, not in kind, addressing worker exploitation more broadly can help prevent the abuses from escalating into trafficking. This Chapter explores how emerging global governance over labor migration – with the recently-adopted UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and the now-elevated role of the International Organization for Migration – could play a role in preventing human trafficking.