There are three million residents of Ukraine and counting, who on February 23, 2022, were professors, hairdressers, housewives, students, bus drivers, retirees, and salesclerks—who are now refugees. Some Ukrainians have stayed to fight or provide other essential services. Whether they left or remained, the lives and livelihoods of all Ukrainian residents have changed. With disruption and danger on such a major scale, there is an increased threat of human trafficking. United Nations research conducted in 2017 and 2018 around conflicts in Syria and Libya demonstrated serious increases in trafficking and experts are seeing comparable circumstances in Ukraine, leading them to predict a similar outcome. Oprah Daily spoke with an expert on human trafficking, Claire Healy. Clare is a research officer and acting section head at the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime where she specializes in human trafficking and the smuggling of migrants. She answered our questions about what trafficking is, why conflicts like the one in Ukraine increase the danger of this kind of exploitation, and what can be done to protect those most vulnerable.
How do armed conflicts, like the one in Ukraine, make trafficking more likely?
There are various factors that increase people’s vulnerability to trafficking in a conflict situation and particular types of trafficking that are perpetrated in a conflict context. In a conflict, both children and adults, particularly boys and men, can be forced into the armed conflict itself—that’s trafficking for the purposes of exploitation in the armed conflict.
The second issue, then, is that people in the context of armed conflict have lost their livelihoods—a lot of people. There is desperation to find any means of income. And that may lead them to accept exploitative offers and end up being exploited for labor or sex.
Some people may even be in such a desperate situation that the daughter of a large family is sold into a forced marriage to somebody or trafficked for sexual exploitation in prostitution, even involving their own family members. Because it’s one less mouth to feed, and it allows the rest of the family to survive. There are a couple of other important factors of vulnerability, such as lack of access to services, and obstacles to policing and enforcing law.
What about people trying to escape the violence by traveling to another region?
By now over three million people have left Ukraine, most of them are Ukrainian. Some of them are not. We know from other conflicts that fleeing violence makes people very vulnerable. The European countries bordering Ukraine that are receiving the most people fleeing the country right now—Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia—are allowing Ukrainians to enter without requiring a visa. That means for those people, there is no migrant smuggling because there’s no irregular entry; it’s legal movement. That makes a huge difference. On the second of March, the European Union activated the Temporary Protection Directive. It’s a legal framework for the whole of the European Union to immediately provide a form of refugee status. It provides people with conditional access to the labor market, to basic services, and to education for the children.
Why does entering a country legally affect human trafficking?
People who arrived in Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and continue to arrive, all had to travel irregularly, and many had to use migrant smugglers. And they all had to apply for asylum and wait a long time to be granted rights.
The other issue that’s very pressing is around the 470,000 non-Ukrainians who were residing in Ukraine at the outbreak of the conflict. [Editor’s note: Only some categories of non-Ukrainian citizens are eligible for temporary refugee protection.] And then everyone is psychologically traumatized, and that also in itself makes people quite vulnerable to deceptive or exploitative offers.
According to Ukrainian law, men aged 18 to 60, and women whose job consists of providing services considered essential to the war effort, are not allowed to leave the country, in case they need to be mobilized. This means that the people who are leaving are women, children, elderly people, and people with disabilities and health conditions. This puts them in a situation of vulnerability. What we’re particularly concerned about is children traveling without their parents or guardians. That’s really, really worrying, and that’s happening a lot.
As you have said, there is always trafficking that goes undetected, but certain kinds of trafficking appear to be more prevalent in certain regions than others. There are regions around Ukraine where there is a record of trafficking of women and children for the sale of children into adoption. Is this conflict a context where the increased vulnerability for that occurs?
Yes. The form you mentioned is a very specific form of trafficking where there are two victims. There’s a woman or a girl who’s forced to get pregnant or who is recruited while she’s pregnant in order to then sell the baby for illegal adoption. And then the baby is the second victim. I think in this context where women and children are traveling alone, there is a high risk of this kind of trafficking. Children fleeing Ukraine—who may be any age between zero and 18—may also be targeted for trafficking for illegal adoption, as well as for other forms.
What can people who are considering adoption do to avoid participating in this abuse?
They can make the biggest effort possible in terms of due diligence to investigate every aspect of what you’re dealing with, and where the money is going. And to do it absolutely within the legal framework for inter-country adoption.
Is illegal adoption a bigger problem in this region because of a global sense of the desirability of Caucasian-complected children?
Prior to the conflict, Ukraine was an important hub for surrogacy for Westerners, so, yes, I think for that reason, Ukrainian children are also extremely vulnerable to trafficking for illegal adoption, because certain cultures attach a higher value to children who look like them.
Can bystanders learn to detect trafficking practices online?
It’s important to immediately report any online content that seems suspicious, particularly child sexual abuse imagery [child pornography], either to local law enforcement or there are mechanisms on some of the social media apps and so on to report. [Editor’s note: Even your local law enforcement should have the proper channels to report instances of international trafficking or suspicious behavior. That means your neighborhood police department.]
Is Ukraine the region Americans should be most alert to right now for human trafficking?
Every person who is trafficked is a crisis. Every person who is abused is a crisis. And every person affected by war and having to flee as a refugee is a crisis. The context, the numbers of refugees leaving Ukraine, it’s shocking. It’s sudden. It’s big. But it’s not unprecedented. Even right now. The context that we are experiencing in Central and Eastern Europe right now is similar to Turkey with Syrian refugees, Uganda with refugees from South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, or Pakistan with Afghan refugees.
What can Americans do to prevent human trafficking and support victims from Ukraine and elsewhere?
The best way to protect people in this context from trafficking is making sure that they can travel regularly. Making sure that they’re safe and they have access to employment and education when they arrive. The most important thing is for the war to end, obviously.
One of the most important ways to combat both human trafficking and migrant smuggling is ensuring that people can travel regularly and have regular status and the right to work and access services.
People could write to their congressmen, write to their senators and argue for asylum status and a refugee status for…
…Increased safe resettlement of refugees to the U.S., improve the asylum procedure, look at implementing more legal programs for labor migration, and so on. We should all be lobbying for that.
You Might Also Like
