More support sought for victims of human trafficking in Aotearoa – Te Ao Māori News

The New Zealand branch of a non-governmental organization that aims to combat the sexual exploitation of children wants a special helpline set up for victims of human trafficking.

ECPAT, an international NGO formerly known as End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, says it is the only organization in Aotearoa whose sole purpose is to combat the sexual exploitation of children, including human trafficking.

It calls for a dedicated human trafficking and exploitation hotline so that victim survivors can get information, make their situation public and formally report crimes.

ECPAT is running a campaign on Action Station calling for the dedicated human trafficking and exploitation hotline, which it sees as an important first step.

ECPAT Deputy Director Synteche Collins (Ngāti Pikiao, Te Arawa) said victims of trafficking should have access to information to understand their circumstances and have a referral mechanism to disclose and report information to .

“First and foremost, we have to determine that. Secondly, as part of that, we need to have enough victims–survivor support service is in place,” she said.

Collins said it was inadequate to provide support for sexual violence and that victim-survivors needed trauma-informed specialist support specific to human trafficking.

She said human trafficking is a spectrum of exploitation, a unique form of abuse that involves some form of commercialization of people.

“We have different types of human trafficking: the types you see in movies Taken, That’s the classic transgressive kind that I think most people are familiar with. The other types of human trafficking that exist are things such as domestic human trafficking,” Collins said.

Labor exploitation and debt slavery

Collins said a common form of human trafficking in New Zealand is labor exploitation in hospitality, agriculture and a range of other areas.

She mentioned migrants forced into labor to pay off debts, where someone was given the opportunity to migrate to another country in exchange for a debt to pay, which they can only pay off through forced labor.

They may have found themselves in brutal conditions where the exploiter provided the basic needs of shelter, water and food, adding to the original debt that they were ultimately never able to pay off.

Debt slavery perpetuated forced labor and was described by the United Nations as the most common form of “modern slavery” prohibited by international law.

Collins cited migrants in New Zealand who turned to crime by working on illegal cannabis farms to pay off their debts.

Collins said these cases largely flew under the radar. She said there have been cases of people being locked in one room without food or water, which were signs that human trafficking was taking place and that neighbors may have been suspicious, but that this often went unreported.

From June 2023 to May 2024, there were more than 1,000 allegations of human trafficking at Immigration New Zealand, resulting in 378 cases. She said this does not include the child exploitation referrals that ECPAT receives from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US (200 per month).

Survival sex among Māori

She said a local example of human trafficking is survival sex, where someone is forced to engage in sexual activity in exchange for money, goods, services, protection or housing.

Collins said Māori exposure to sex trafficking was more common in whānau and hapori and ECPAT also saw gang involvement and substance abuse trapping people in trafficking situations.

There were also cases where victims were coerced into crime and Collins said once a trafficking victim was convicted, it was very difficult for them to recover and reintegrate back into the community. She said this was common among Māori survivors who had been trafficked since childhood and were only now coming forward in adulthood.

Lack of data on human trafficking

She said ECPAT was getting data through the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, “mainly through the immigration side, because there is an official helpline, but we don’t have a dedicated national helpline for any kind of exploitation.”

But it often received data and cases referred from the US as rangatahi and tamariki in Aotearoa called or used a help box online, which was then transferred to New Zealand.

“That shows that data is recorded, but this is not done via our systems. Our systems do not collect that data effectively and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has recommended time and time again that we need adequate data collection on child exploitation, but we still don’t have it.”

New Zealand’s progress

The Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report is the U.S. government’s primary diplomatic tool that engages foreign governments in the fight against human trafficking. It is a global reporting mechanism that measures countries’ efforts to combat human trafficking.

The countries are ranked in a four-tier system. Level 1 means that the country meets the standards for the elimination of serious forms of human trafficking, and then there are Level 2, Level 2 Watch List and Level 3.

For 2024, New Zealand will be at level 2, which it has been for four years. At one point the country was at Level 1, but Collins said human trafficking was under the radar at the time.

“Level 2 means we have taken some steps to reduce human trafficking, put a system in place, but we don’t really have a formal mechanism for anyone to refer, report or disclose, and we don’t have victim services available to victims of human trafficking and exploitation,” Collins said.

Where to from here?

Collins said that while it was difficult to adopt recommendations from the US, especially when the country had its own problems with human trafficking, she said the report’s recommendations still stood.

“We need a formal mechanism to capture all forms of exploitation,” she said.

ECPAT also has a pilot project for young survivor involvement in South Auckland.

The pilot project aims to help victim survivors experience post-traumatic growth, recover and reintegrate into their communities.