United Nations must ‘do more’ to combat child sex slavery

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called for greater international efforts to combat human trafficking networks engaged in child sex slavery and other forms of human slavery in her speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.

Meloni told international leaders gathered in New York that the United Nations “must do more” to tackle criminal networks that use illegal migration as a means to spread modern forms of slavery, including the sale of children into sex slavery.

“The United Nations must do more, because these criminal organizations are re-imagining slavery, in other forms – understood as the commodification of human beings – in which this Assembly played a fundamental role in other times, to eradicate it definitively. There is no way back,” the Italian leader said, according to Italian broadcaster RAI.

The Conservative prime minister said “defeating the slave traders of the third millennium is possible” if police, intelligence and judicial authorities work together in an international effort to use the “follow the money” formula invented in Italy in the 1980s to tackle the Sicilian Mafia by pioneering judges such as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Meloni said Rome plans to share the knowledge and methods used to combat human traffickers in Africa with other countries, particularly in Latin America.

“There is a common thread that connects organizations that speculate on human trafficking in Africa with those who manage the drug trade in Latin America, or the horror of those who kidnap children to make them into sex slaves for unscrupulous rich men, robbing them of their present and their future,” she said.

While historical examples of slavery, such as the transatlantic slave trade, receive much attention in Western academia, media and politics, the ubiquity of modern slavery is often overlooked.

According to the International Labour Organization, an estimated 49.6 million people worldwide were in some form of modern slavery in 2021, 12 million of whom were children. The ILO said some 27.6 million people were in situations of forced labour, while some 22 million were in forced marriages, which international organisations recognise as a form of modern slavery.

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimates that human trafficking generates $150 billion in revenue for criminal networks. UNICEF has also found that human trafficking is the second most profitable black market in the United States, behind only the illegal drug trade.

The UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Violence Against Children said last year that child slavery generates $39 billion a year for human trafficking networks.

“Despite all the work done over the past two decades, child trafficking remains a high-yield, low-risk crime based on the principles of supply and demand. Children are treated as commodities to be bought, sold, traded and used over and over again,” the UN body said.

In her address to the General Assembly on Tuesday, Prime Minister Meloni also emphasized her government’s policy of working with African countries on development projects to reduce the flow of illegal migrants across the Mediterranean Sea, an often deadly journey organized by unscrupulous human traffickers and facilitated by NGOs that advocate open borders.

Meloni said Rome has developed strategic partnerships with nine African countries to facilitate the inflow of investment and capital for projects supporting energy development and food production in exchange for greater cooperation in combating illegal migration.

“I want to emphasise again that our aim, now that tens of thousands of people are desperately trying to enter Europe illegally, is first of all to guarantee their right not to have to emigrate, not to have to cut off their roots because they have no other choice,” she explained.

Although the Italian prime minister initially faced criticism from populists for deviating from the hardline approach she adopted before taking office, such as imposing a naval blockade of the Mediterranean to stop boat refugees, her diplomatic approach is now starting to pay off.

According to figures published last month by the Italian Interior Ministry, Meloni’s government has reduced the flow of illegal migrants by 64 percent compared to last year, thanks to agreements reached with North African countries such as Libya and Tunisia to tackle local human trafficking networks.