Camelia-Teodora BUNEA

Micu Bogdan Foundation

Romania

Prevention Against Human Trafficking as Developed by

Micu Bogdan Foundation
I will start my presentation from a very negative sentece which has serious implications on Romanian culture and life-style:
There is no such thing as a tradition of prevention in Romania, or, if it is something that could
seem like it, it is definitely not too old.

Our political and socio-cultural background shows most of the Romanians adults that public speaking seminaries are a waste of time. Why? Because most of the societies (if not all off them) that experienced SOCIALISM in its different phases (National-socialism, Communism) have developted
what the Dutch sociologist Cas Wouters an emotional habitus1 of what I called skepticism towards
prevention as 1). information received from outside sources /unknown sources and 2). publicly
meetings on general topics (coming from their childhood and adult experience of community and
communitarism.

socio-political background
/
lack of time

I
causes
ADULTS
I
I

(lack of ) good education

SKEPTICISM

I
children / adolescents
I
globalization
informatization
/
\
individualism
(philosophical current transgressed into cultural and social phenomenon, following the idea that there is no place for the value of interdependencies2)
Cas WOUTERS in the article Formalization and Informalization:Changing Tensions in Civilizing Processes included
in the third volume of Theory, Culture & Society, pp. 1-18.
1

This concept of interdependences is Norbert Eliass (German sociologist) way of seeing the relationships between
individuals and society as interdependent in the sense that none of them can exists without the other.

On the one hand, there is the adult generation which comes from a background of animosities and,
on the other hand, the new generations of children and youngsters that grew up in this very infromaticized world where they had unlimited acces to information so as they think they know it all, or
at least, they can inform themselves about anything. This phenomenon appears to be something I
called the know-it-all skepticism.

They point is, leaving apart the tremendous lack of ethics that lets Human Trafficking( HT) still exists one the cause of HT is actually, the best irony of our era, lack of education at different levels: 1)
vulnerable people that are easily proffited from and 2) consumers.

It all floats around the grounds of education and, in the last two years, we were faced with different
examples of skepticism from both parties - some adults that manage educational institutions and
some students and pupils that think they know everything.

Moreover, we came up to the conclusion that, somehow, everything starts inside the families, because parents are the most influential element over the life of their own upbringings. But education
wasnt compulsory untill after the 90 when the Communist Regime came down.

Nowadays, our national educational system has implemented the right for education in terms of 10
mandatory years.But even in this situation, you are faced with children that are not included in the
national educational system, because they dropped out of school or because uneducated parents interdict them to go (back) to school and oblige them to work. That is the moment when you actually
realize that the bigger picture in Human Trafficking ends up to be a vicious cirlcle of needing which
starts from poverty and the vulnerabilities that come along with it making people easy targets.

What we are actually trying to do in schools is based on a movie, a documentary of some cases of
Human Trafficking presenting the stories of girls that had the rare opportunity to get out of this horrible experience of HT, even though they were vulnerable enough to be caught in such problematic
situations. The movie is called HOPES, FOR SALE3 .

http://www.sperantelavanzare.ro

Our approach is called WPW - Whole/Part Analysis - which is an interesting combination of both
microscopical analysis of different specimens/individuals followed by a comparatistic analysis of
all these different specimens with the finality of finding a common pattern of behaviour.

After watching together one or two testimonial we start discussing the problem of Human Trafficking marching from INDIVIDUAL CASES to talk about the phenomenon in general terms following different stages: DEFINITION, TYPES of HT, CAUSES, SOLUTIONS. We try to make our
audience see what are the causes of Human Trafficking (from the individual causes to a broader
context).

DEFINITION - WHAT IS THE COMPLETE DEFINITION OF HT?

Human Trafficking or Trafficking in Persons represents the recruitment, transportation, transfer,

harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion,
of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the
giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over
another person, for the purpose of exploitation.4

TYPES OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING

There are, as shown above, different types of explotation:

- sexual exploitation which is not the same thing as prostitution

- work exploitation
- identity theft, theft, begging exploitation
- selling of drugs
- selling of different human organs

definiton cf. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-trafficking.html

CAUSES

Most of the analysis of the subject matter show that poverty and low standards of education (or low
acces to a decent educational system) are the most serious factors to take into account which inflence people causing them to develop different and complex vulnerabilities ( affective vulnerabilities or economical vulnerabilities).

SOLUTIONS

We also try to make he audience acknoledge that there are several solutions to olve this types of
problems involving Human Trafficking situations, there are actions that they can approach if something happens to them or to the people around them or only if they feel they are trapped in a dangerous situations.

- inside the country, they have our gouvernamental agency - ANITP5 (Agenia Naional de lupt
mpotriva Traficului de Persoane) that has a green number where one can call and ask for help in
all sorts of situations & also the more common option as calling (and announcing) the police.
Moreover, they also have the option which does not involve legal authorities - meaning some specialized NGOs like us or ADPARE ( Bucharest).

- outside the country, they have several NGOs & also other other governamental institutions like
The International Organization For Migration

PREVENTIVE ACTIONS

The best piece of advice that we give to people is to be more curious, to be really informed about
the background of their friends and their lives and, for the parents, to be a active part in the lives of
their children in order to know whom are they interacting with, what are their dreams and expectations.

the National Agency against Human Trafficking

We also TELL OUR AUDIENCE it is not advised to:

- give anyone your original papers -ID, plane tickets and so on.
- get out of the country without a correct and thorough informing session ( about the location, the
legal institutions and how they work in that specific country where you are travelling to, useful
numbers and so on)
- to believe the information which is easily uploaded on online platforms about WORKPLACES
abroad - be focused on details - final employers versus intermediate contractors.

Human Trafficking is a process that happens on STAGES: knowing ones situation and vulnerabilities, gaining ones trust, moving the victim to a specific location (inside/ outside the country), delivery/ arrival to the specific location and the real exploition.

What we do is, from the very beginning, is to point out that we will not tell them a lot of new pieces
of information, but rather help them connect the dots between what they already know so as they
can be able to protect themselves against the different types of human trafficking. This is very important because we do not need them to feel that they are somehow inferior to us or to other children their age. It is just a usual prevention campaign which proves to be useful in the given social
conditions.

Last, but not least, the point we need to transmit to the audience is the fact that HT happens all
around us and, even though it sounds scarry, we need to accept that in order to get to the next step
and infrom ourselves about the phenomenon. It is also important to see that HT is a process in a
continous and diversified development - it changed a lot in terms of methods used (it can be seen
an increase in the number of victims that were fooled and lied to and a serious decrease in the number of those who were abducted).