Human trafficking has taken a mammoth shape in the United States of America, but hardly resonates over the human trafficking records of the state and regional law enforcement. According to a professor of Northeastern University, Amy Farrell, the records do not reflect even 10% of the victims located in the area.
Farrell traced the root of the issue and concluded that most of the state and local police are not trained well enough to locate human trafficking. This is one of the most serious problems facing the structure of crime reporting in the US.
However, it has been noticed that even if the police officers are adequately trained, they cannot persuade the victim of human trafficking to collaborate with them as they investigate. Farrell suggests that it happens maybe as the victim is more concerned about their more primitive and urgent needs.
According to reports of crime statics of FBI, there have been over 1200 cases of human trafficking reported in the US. Farrell and her associates investigated the process of crime reporting in three police jurisdiction in the country to examine if police officers have been trained correctly to locate human trafficking.
They found out that the police investigating team lack proper tracking system to investigate the crime. This is an eminent problem even when the victim is willing to cooperate with the investigation. When the FBI started to check the record for sex and labour trafficking in each state, they found that the local police could not classify it as a crime.
Farrell says, “If a state crime reporting system literally doesn’t have a box to check that classifies something as human trafficking, all those crimes have to be classified as something else.”
This signifies, therefore, that sex trafficking is often mistaken for prostitution and the victims maybe treated as criminals.
To solve this issue, Farrell and her colleagues have suggested to train and educate the law enforcement on how to deal with crimes like human trafficking, especially labour trafficking. They also suggested that sharing of information about trafficking crimes among cross state police jurisdiction can often help.
Farrell is optimistic about the whole situation and thinks that it’s a matter of days till this issue is out of the way, moving in the right path.
Subarna Basu