Last week, a 22-year-old Rwandan woman narrated a painful ordeal of how she escaped a human trafficking ring in Uganda. Most of the victims of human trafficking are women who are usually lured by promises of a better life and good jobs forcing some of them to abandon their own children. The perpetrators of these crimes prey mostly on young victims who don't carry out due diligence to establish who is behind the promised jobs and why it is being done discreetly. Human trafficking is a global problem involving several players, fighting it requires more effort from the public and law enforcement agencies. What makes human trafficking hard to detect is because in most cases the perpetrators are known to the victims- usually friends and relatives. Even if it is a friend or relative promising a nice job, and only asking a person to process travel documents, people, especially females should be suspicious and immediately alert the authorities. The motives of human traffickers are always sinister. In most cases, people who are trafficked to countries mostly in the middle East, always end up in serious problems like being subjected to sexual exploitation and slavery. There is no success story from people who have been trafficked, the world over. However, for this vice to be stamped out, the public must work closely with law enforcement agencies like Police. Statistics from the Ministry of Justice show that between 2018 and October 2022, 879 suspected cases of human trafficking were thwarted, and 67 per cent of these involved female victims. This shows that security agencies and other stakeholders have done a good job in trying to curb the crime but this shouldn’t mean that the perpetrators will give up, and the public should also be an important player in trying to eradicate the vice.
