The article below was written by Liam Fitzpatrick and was first published in The Irish Catholic on 14th July, 2022.
There is an underbelly of human trafficking that is not being tackled in Ireland, which has led to severe exploitation of adults and children, writes Liam Fitzpatrick
Growing up impoverished and abused in East Africa, Amelia hoped overseas work would help her escape her oppressive home. When a local woman offered her a job as a housekeeper, Amelia enthusiastically accepted the offer, pledging that she would obey the lady, pay her way in travel fees, and never tell anyone about her journey.
She never became a housekeeper.
Instead, Amelia was trafficked as a prostitute, withstanding sexual and mental abuse that still pains her to this day. She endured physical violence that should have hospitalised her and was forced to have an abortion.
Amelia was a victim of modern-day slavery in, among other countries, Ireland.
“These things are happening in Ireland, but they’re going unnoticed by people in their own communities who don’t realise that these people are being trafficked,” Mayor of Drogheda Michelle Hall said. “This is an underbelly that we don’t really understand.”
Human trafficking
It was reported in June that a woman in Drogheda approached An Garda Síochána, claiming that she was a victim of human trafficking and her organs were going to be harvested. Gardai are currently investigating her claims.
A few weeks prior, An Garda Síochána reported that a “significant number” of people working in a Meath factory were found to be undocumented victims of labour trafficking, exploited by an international crime ring.
These tales are just some of the many harrowing stories that the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) tries to prevent from happening again in the organisation’s June 21st report, titled ‘Trafficking in Human Beings in Ireland – Evaluation of the Implementation of the EU Anti-Trafficking Directive Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission’. According to the IHREC website, the 185 page report is designed to “ensur[e] that Ireland meets the European Union and other international standards on tackling the scourge of human trafficking”.
Sadly, Ireland doesn’t meet the EU’s standards on tackling modern-day slavery. In fact, Ireland’s record on human trafficking is one of the worst in the EU.
It wasn’t always like this. In 2013, the Criminal Law (Human Trafficking) Act was amended in accordance with EU standards, increasing the scope of acts that could be considered “exploitative” and allowing evidence to be given remotely, regardless of the witness’ location.
2020 saw Ireland drop to the Tier 2 Watch List level, a designation shared by Djibouti, Pakistan and Haiti, among others
The international community celebrated this victim-first approach to human trafficking legislation, and that same year the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) designated Ireland as a Tier 1 country, a designation reserved for nations that “demonstrate appreciable progress each year in combating trafficking”.
However, as time progressed, Ireland’s position as a world leader in human trafficking prevention began to decline. In 2018, the Island dropped to Tier 2.
In that year’s TIP report, the State Department made its reasoning for dropping Ireland one level clear: “The government has not obtained a trafficking conviction since the law was amended in 2013; it initiated only three prosecutions in 2017, and had chronic deficiencies in victim identification and referral”.
2020 saw Ireland drop to the Tier 2 Watch List level, a designation shared by Djibouti, Pakistan and Haiti, among others. It’s the only country in Western Europe with that designation, and one of two in the EU (Romania being the other).
Although the government did launch an anti-trafficking public awareness campaign, increase funding for training and victim assistance, and establish a national anti-trafficking forum, Ireland fell to Tier 2 Watch List level because “the government has not obtained a trafficking conviction under the anti-trafficking law since it was amended in 2013, which weakened deterrence, contributed to impunity for traffickers, and undermined efforts to support victims to testify.
“The government investigated and prosecuted fewer suspected traffickers, did not prosecute any labour traffickers, and victim identification decreased for the fourth year in a row,” according to the State Department. “The government continued to have systemic deficiencies in victim identification, referral, and assistance, and lacked specialised accommodation and adequate services for victims.”
Protecting children
JP O’Sullivan of anti-human trafficking group Mecpaths
JP O’Sullivan, network and communications manager at Mecpaths, an organisation founded by two Sisters of Mercy and dedicated to protecting children from modern day slavery, offered a long list of reasons why Ireland’s human trafficking record has plummeted.
“The reason that we’ve fallen so far over the last couple of years is under-responsiveness, lack of coordination, lack of education, awareness and training of frontline professionals, lack of coordinated policing, and lack of government responsiveness, cross-departmental responsiveness with the Department of Justice and the Department of Children,” Mr O’Sullivan said.
This lack of education and coordination extends to the private sector, where more than 70% of trafficking victims are exploited, according to data from Human Rights First, an American advocacy organisation. Industries with the highest rates of labour trafficking include domestic work, agriculture, sales, foodservice, and health/beauty services.
Undermine the confidence of a non-EU national who is working illegally to report an exploitative employment situation to a WRC inspector
However, the Workplace Relations Committee (WRC) has routinely failed to both recognise instances of human trafficking and report them to the Garda National Protective Services Bureau (GNPSB), according to the report.
In 2021, the WRC carried out almost 5,000 less inspections than the committee did in 2020, with many of the 2020 inspections being criticised by non-profit groups for engaging in joint inspections with Gardai that could “undermine the confidence of a non-EU national who is working illegally to report an exploitative employment situation to a WRC inspector”.
Only two-thirds of inspectors are trained to recognise trafficking, and the industry with the highest rate of trafficking, domestic work, only had two inspections over the year.
Mr O’Sullivan recommended increased education, calling for mandatory training for the warning signs of human trafficking to include all sectors where workers might interact with victims, rather than just the police force.
“At the moment, An Garda Siochona are the only designated authority that can formally identify a victim of trafficking,” Mr O’Sullivan said. “That needs to be broadened out to include all frontline professionals, the people that will be interacting with potential victims of trafficking, so everybody from social workers to medical staff, private security, and transport networks.”
Female victims
Although labour trafficking is majority male, sexual exploitation “almost exclusively affects women (96%),” according to the report. As such, the Department of Justice reported that, since 2009, female victims comprise over 70% of those trafficked to Ireland.
“Women are always more vulnerable, more prone to poverty… obviously in a patriarchal society, we’re under the influence of male violence,” Ms. Hall said.
In Ireland, there is no gender-specific housing for victims of trafficking, meaning the male violence Ms. Hall fears not only exists, but runs rampant in those centres.
“[Me] and the kids are living around so many things like, domestic violence, like men beating up women in the centre, people just getting to other people’s rooms to steal money and belongings and we are just living around all of this,” an anonymous survivor wrote. “Even the kids they are really, really upset.”
Dr Yonkova, head of the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit of the INREC, believes this cannot stand.
“We have to include a gender-specific accommodation for victims of human trafficking,” she said. “It is absolutely substandard what is happening now with accommodating victims of trafficking.”
Sexual assault survivors often face secondary victimisation, or exposure to further emotional harm because of institutional factors like repeated visual contact between the trafficked and the trafficker, unnecessary forced recounting of traumatic events for evidence and in a trial, and aggressive interrogation about the facts of a victim’s exploitation.
These triggering aspects of the justice system outraged Judith Lewis Herman, an American psychiatrist who wrote in her article ‘Justice from the Victim’s Perspective’ that “if one set out intentionally to design a system for provoking symptoms of traumatic stress it would look very much like a court of law”.
“The cross examination is extremely tough, bordering on re-victimisation,” Dr. Yonkova said. “People who are coming forward to give testimony have to be really well-supported to endure, to not fall apart from the process of the criminal justice system.
“Some survivors report [cross-examination] is so tough, they compare it to the whole ordeal of human trafficking,” Dr. Yonkova said.
In the IHREC report, survivors recalled mixed interpretations of An Garda Síochána’s role in preventing or causing their secondary victimisation:
“The first date they had my interview I spent about 5 hours 30 minute […] It brought back everything that[I] was running away from, you know,” one survivor wrote. “But they wanted me, there was this kind of, I would say there was a force in it. Like, they wanted to have every detail as soon as possible.”
“They [An Garda Síochána] did an extremely excellent job I would say… I loved the fact that everyone, they were understanding you know, they were patient,” another survivor recalled.
Even though An Garda may have the best intentions, a lack of empathy and training among guardsmen risks exposing victims of human trafficking to situations in which they are forced to relive horrific, traumatic circumstances. That said, An Garda has taken steps to “build and improve trust” between officers and victims of sex trafficking, a move that the organisation hopes will lead to increased identification of victims and awareness about trafficking more broadly.
In recent years, traffickers have found a new, innovative, and harder-to-track method of recruiting victims, particularly child victims, and exploiting them – the internet
“National, intelligence-led operations such as these are of course necessary for detecting perpetrators of trafficking but most importantly they are essential in proactively detecting and identifying victims of trafficking,” the report stated.
Children also face specific challenges from human trafficking. The Irish Government has not identified a victim of child trafficking in the last two years– raising concerns that poor identification practices and possible errors in data collection may allow children subjected to exploitation to remain undetected.
“We clearly are faced with the possibility that we under-identify, or do not identify sufficiently, robustly, minor victims of human trafficking, which is very dangerous because the consequences for child victims are severe,” Dr. Yonkova said.
“Children are innately vulnerable,” Mr O’Sullivan said. “Anywhere vulnerability exists, so too will somebody seeking to exploit that.”
In recent years, traffickers have found a new, innovative, and harder-to-track method of recruiting victims, particularly child victims, and exploiting them – the internet.
“Internet platforms are now a central part of the modus operandi of traffickers,” Dr. Yonkova said.
Children
Children are particularly at risk, said Mr O’Sullivan and Dr. Yonkova, calling out the rise in internet use among children during the Covid-19 pandemic and the dangers of online predators. The report notes that children are at higher risk of trafficking when contacted through social media sites because of the “relatively higher level of anonymity” the sites afford traffickers.
“We’ve seen a 1,000 percent increase in the use of the internet since the outbreak of COVID, and as we know, children have moved into online learning spaces and those predators are circulating within those spaces also, to groom and to exploit,” he said.
“If human trafficking was to be disrupted, the COVID restriction would have disrupted it significantly,” she said. “And it didn’t. This means that the online dimension of human trafficking is thriving, and the traffickers are becoming even more proficient in exploiting the loopholes, the lack of regulation, and the freedom of expression, all of this for their gain.”
The FBI estimates that around 500,000 child predators lurk on the internet every day – with some estimates claiming that figure could be as high as 750,000.
The report specifically calls out the ‘Dark Web’ and difficult-to-find online advertisements as two main methods traffickers recruit victims and find those wishing to exploit them, especially across the Irish/Northern Irish border.
However, some online efforts by traffickers operate in plain sight. Using “legal and well-known holiday accommodation platforms (Airbnb, Booking.com),” traffickers can set up “temporary brothels” to exploit their victims.
Mr O’Sullivan reiterated his position on education as one of the most important steps the Irish Government can take to end trafficking
“How could internet providers, internet platforms, how could they be involved in the fight against human trafficking instead of being seen as facilitators of trafficking in human beings?” Dr. Yonkova asked.
Though the report acknowledges that “Ireland is a mixture of both insufficient and promising practices,” there are steps the Irish Government can take to combat human trafficking on the island, both by enacting sweeping policy reform and taking ground-level action against the crisis.
Brussels called for renewed action against migrant smuggling, increased communication between EU and non-EU countries, and enhanced cooperation with Europol.
“[T]he commission sets out a renewed commitment and a strong policy framework to protect vulnerable individuals from being trafficked, to empower victims, to bring perpetrators to justice, and to safeguard our communities,” one EU communication stated “Women and children are at the centre of this commitment.”
Mr O’Sullivan reiterated his position on education as one of the most important steps the Irish Government can take to end trafficking.
“In terms of prevention, it’s very much about education, training frontline professionals,” said Mr O’Sullivan.
Dr. Yonkova believes that developing “innovative measures and approaches,” including a “national referral mechanism,” is Ireland’s best chance at reversing course.
Referral mechanism
“My number one recommendation now would be to replace the old national referral mechanism with a new, modern one that reflects the realities – is adequate to the realities [of human trafficking],” Dr. Yonkova said.
Though there is a lot of uncertainty around human trafficking in Ireland will finally bring much needed justice to the victims of trafficking.
“We hope this report acts as a catalyst for change and look forward to working to bring about the reforms that are so necessary to: prevent trafficking; ensure perpetrators are held accountable, and; that supports are improved for all victims to assist them in their recovery from this awful crime,” the report stated.
To view this article in The Irish Catholic, please click here.
Communications
