Hope for Justice is proud to have been invited to speak at the OSCE 25th Alliance Against Trafficking in Persons Conference.
We joined anti-trafficking experts and leaders in calling for the 57 participating states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to take urgent action on child trafficking.
This global crisis has tripled in the past 15 years, with traffickers increasingly using online and digital platforms to recruit, manipulate and exploit victims.
Elaine Jones, Chief Operating Officer, and Phillipa Roberts, Head of Policy and Research, were representing Hope for Justice at the conference in Vienna this week.
Phillipa Roberts said: “Child trafficking is a rapidly evolving landscape and we must do more to work together and innovate our responses to protect children from harm. As one delegate stated, it takes a village to raise a child but it takes a global village to protect children.”
Hope for Justice spoke at the event via what is known as an intervention. We focused on prevention, specialist protection and support, and ethical survivor and community inclusion across all anti-trafficking efforts.
Elaine Jones made a number of recommendations, including: preventing child trafficking by innovating and strengthening child protection systems and equipping communities to recognise and respond to it.
She emphasised the need for holistic, child-centred, trauma-informed and human rights-based approaches to address the unique needs and recovery of each child. She called for every survivor to have access to an accredited independent advocate and child guardian as recommended by the OSCE/ODHIR National Referral Mechanism Handbook. Her intervention also urged countries to adopt rigorous survivor care standards that guarantee access to high quality care.
Finally, we called for ethical survivor and community inclusion across all counter-trafficking efforts. We emphasised the crucial role of people with lived experience in contributing to and developing effective responses. We also recommended that all Governments establish survivor councils.
Elaine’s intervention concluded with the moving words of Nelson Mandela: “Children are our greatest treasure. They are our future. Those who abuse them tear at the fabric of our society and weaken our nations.”
The OSCE conference is an opportunity to hear from other countries, survivors, survivor leaders and practitioners on good practice and to share learning.
Jane Lasonder, Vice Chair of International Survivors of Trafficking Advisory Council (ISTAC) and Chair of our Survivor Leadership Council, was also in attendance. She spoke on a panel as Vice Chair of ISTAC, highlighting the importance of understanding the non-verbal communications of child survivors. The OSCE recently issued this ground-breaking guidance on survivor-informed indicators for identifying victims and survivors of human trafficking.
This year, the event spotlighted the issue of trafficking for the purposes of criminal activity, noting that forced criminality has risen across the OSCE region from 2% in 2015 to 24% in 2020. There was also a focus on orphanage trafficking and the ways that crises such as conflict, climate change and natural disasters increase the risk of children being exploited. The OSCE recently launched policy guidance on the role of participating states in combating this issue.
