Often victims do not recognize that they are being trafficked until their situation has become very dire. Therefore, it is important to recognize human trafficking in order to avoid becoming a victim or to help victims of human trafficking.
What constitutes human trafficking?
Human trafficking is a way of exploiting people by selling, buying, or trading them as commodities. It usually entails recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or reception of persons, including the exchange or transfer of control over those persons.
example Control over persons may entail physical restriction of movement or a refusal to return identification documents.
Human trafficking is undertaken to exploit the trafficked person for profit. The exploitation may include prostitution or another form of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery, servitude, exploitation for criminal activities, removal of organs, as well as other forms.
example If your employer practically enslaves you by making you work without free time and does not allow you to leave the premises, you may have become a victim of human trafficking.
example If your employer refuses to pay you your previous month’s salary or refuses to grant you a vacation, this may constitute a violation of labour rights. However, these are not usually signs of human trafficking, as your employer is not trying to seize control over you.
How can people become victims?
Human traffickers may use various means of coercion and deception to achieve power over another person. Abduction, the use of force, the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability to achieve the same goal, can all be signs of human trafficking.
example Human traffickers may use fraudulent employment agencies promising great job opportunities to trick and coerce their victims.
Physically aggressive recruiting is uncommon in Lithuania. Recruitment practices may seem to be friendly. However, they are categorized as emotional abuse and manipulation if several vulnerable features of a victim are exploited. Many victims may have been deceived by promises of a better life, but then been controlled through violence and abuse.
example Where a woman is offered a job in another country as a bartender, but when she arrives at the destination country, she is told that there is no bartending job. In fact, she is told that she must work in a brothel and that the owners will beat her if she does not do as they say. Such actions constitute human trafficking.
The consent of a trafficked person can be irrelevant in determining whether a particular activity is human trafficking.
example If a woman is struggling to pay rent, and she decides to earn extra money through prostitution due to her partner’s insistence. Even though she had “consented” to be in prostitution, her vulnerability was used. Therefore, such actions by her partner do fall within the definition of human trafficking.
Who can become a victim of human trafficking?
Anyone can become a victim of human trafficking, but people in vulnerable situations like relative poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, or difficult household conditions are at greater risk of suffering from it. Human trafficking is often considered to be a form of violence against women and children, as they make up the greatest number of victims of human trafficking.
Lithuanian Law
The Lithuanian Criminal Code encompasses many forms of trafficking, including cases where a person sells, buys or otherwise transfers or acquires, recruits, transports or holds a person captive by physical violence or threats, or by otherwise depriving him of the possibility to resist or by using the victim's dependence or vulnerability, or by using deceit, or by taking or paying money, or by receiving or providing other benefits to a person who actually controls the victim. Human trafficking is criminally punishable.