Transnational crimes are considered violations of the law that involve more than one country in either impact, planning, or execution. Transnational crimes are distinct from global crimes, which entail crimes against humanity that may not involve many countries. Transnational crime has gained a significant threat to global security with implications on public safety. Human trafficking, one of the most common transnational crimes, has been rising in underdeveloped and developed countries. Human trafficking entails transportation, or unlawful entry of an individual or individuals across global borders, in violation of one or more countries’ laws through deception or clandestinely. The entry into borders may include evasion of the border control or utilization of fraudulent documents. This paper will focus on human smuggling in China and United States and compare the two countries with the crime rates and tools used to measure human trafficking.
China is one of the most populated cities but has the second-highest human trafficking victims. Chinese Criminal law defines human trafficking as buying abducted children and women, depriving them of their rights physical freedom, and injuring them to sell (Shuai and Liu, 2020). Some of the offenses linked to human trafficking are abducting children and women, coercing kidnapped women into commercial sex, and kidnapping children or women forcefully and selling them. One of the major reasons behind human trafficking in China is the one-child policy. The one-child policy focused on controlling the population growth. This has led to few marriageable women and purchasing of wives and children through human trafficking. Another major cause of human trafficking in China is the growing rate of unemployment in rural areas and the lack of enforced laws and government to punish human traffickers. Chinese women are trafficked into countries such as the United States and Europe. Data shows that over 3.8 million people experience human trafficking in China annually (Zheng, 2018)
United States Department of Criminal Law defines human trafficking as actions that involve fraud, use of force, and coercion to obtain some form of labor. The traffickers utilize fraud, force, and coercion to lure their victims and force them into labor. In the United States, human trafficking is prevalent in the states of New York, Texas, California, and Florida (Denton, 2016). Some of the major causes of human trafficking in the U.S are the local conditions that make people want to migrate as they look for better conditions due to instability caused by poverty lack of economic and social opportunity. The victims of human trafficking include women and children induced into forced labor and commercial sex. Approximately 50,000 individuals are trafficked into the United States each year, most often from the Philippines and Mexico (Cockbain and Bowers, 2019).
The United States Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 has been the U.S cornerstone effort to combat human trafficking. The main components of this act include prosecution, prevention, and protection. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 developed approaches of prosecuting traffickers, eliminating human trafficking, and protecting survivors and victims of trafficking (Judge and Boursaw, 2018). China combat human trafficking through laws that protect the rights and interests of women and children. However, the major limitation of Chinese laws prohibiting human trafficking is that only children and women can be legally recognized as trafficking victims.
Crime statistics are high in China as compared to the United States. One of the major reasons for the high rate of human trafficking in China is that the government fails to meet the minimum standards for eliminating trafficking. China has been one of the worst offenders for permitting modern slavery to flourish within its boundaries with low efforts to punish traffickers and protect the victims.
