Use of Information Communication Technologies in Tackling Women Trafficking in Nigeria - Research Paper Example

Article 3 of UNODC Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in person defines human trafficking in persons “to refer to any form of movements in terms of recruitment, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion for the purpose of exploitation”(UNDOC Report 2005). Human trafficking refers to the act of transporting and movement persons by employing forceful methods. Such persons are exploited in most cases. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that a large number of men, women, and children are victims of traffickers every year in either their home countries or abroad.

Human trafficking is poignant in every country in the world. In recent years, ‘international human trafficking’ has featured prominently as one of the recent additions to the ‘dictionary of global woes’ (Agbu, 2003:1). With an annual estimate of close to one million people being trafficked globally, the phenomenon has rapidly become one of the ‘most prolific areas of international criminal activity’ (Siskin and Syler, 2010:1) with ‘immense implications for global security and societal cohesion’ (Okonofua et al, 2004:1316).

Of the close to one million people trafficked globally per year, Nigeria has been identified often as a ‘major source, destination and transit for the trafficking of persons, particularly women and children’ (Elechi et al, 2007:1; see also Okonofua et al, 2004). In its most recent report on the state of global human trafficking, the US State Department noted that in 2010 alone, the Nigerian authorities identified a total of 932 trafficking victims and that in September 2010, in a story which captured the dynamics of human trafficking from Nigeria, officials traveled to Mali to investigate reports that 20,000 to 40,000 Nigerian women were being held there in forced prostitution’ (US State Department, 2011).

Such incidents of women as victims of trafficking further underscored observations that human trafficking is ‘highly gendered’ (Hodge and Lietz, 2007:163) and reignited calls to the Nigerian government for more proactive strategies to tackle human trafficking both within and out of Nigeria.