The New Zealand branch of a non-governmental organisation, which aims to combat the sexual exploitation of children, wants a dedicated helpline set up for trafficking victims.
ECPAT, which is an international NGO formerly known as End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, says it is the only organisation in Aotearoa whose sole purpose is to combat the sexual exploitation of children, including trafficking.
It is advocating for a dedicated helpline for trafficking and exploitation so victim-survivors can get information, disclose their situation, and formally report.
ECPAT has a campaign on Action Station calling for the dedicated trafficking and exploitation helpline which it sees as an important first step.
ECPAT’s deputy director, Synteche Collins (Ngāti Pikiao, Te Arawa), said victims of trafficking needed to be able to access information to understand their circumstances and have a referral mechanism to disclose and report to.
“First and foremost we need to establish that. Secondly, as part of that, we need to have adequate victim-survivor support service in place,” she said.
Collins said going through sexual violence support services was not adequate and victim-survivors needed trauma-informed specialist support specific to trafficking.
She said trafficking was a spectrum of exploitation, which was a unique form of abuse involving some form of commodification of people.
“We have different types of trafficking: the kinds that you see in the movies like Taken, which is the classic cross-border kind that I think most people are familiar with. The other kinds of trafficking that exist are things like domestic trafficking,” Collins said.
Labour exploitation and debt bondage
Collins said a common form of human trafficking in New Zealand was labour exploitation in hospitality, agriculture and a range of other areas.
She cited migrants forced into labour to pay off debt bondage which is where someone was given an opportunity to migrate to another country in exchange for a debt they had to pay off, which they can only pay off by forced labour.
They might be in brutal circumstances where the exploiter provided basic needs of shelter, water, food, which added to the original debt which, ultimately, they could never pay off.
Debt bondage maintained forced labour and had been described by the United Nations as the most prevalent form of “modern-day slavery” prohibited by international law.
Collins cited migrants in New Zealand who were put into forced criminality by working on illegal cannabis farms to pay off their debt bondage.
Collins said those cases were mostly under the radar. She said there had been cases of people confined to one room without food or water, which were signs human trafficking was happening and neighbours might be suspicious but often it went unreported.
From June 2023 to May 2024 there were over 1000 allegations of trafficking made to Immigration New Zealand, which resulted in 378 cases. She said this didn’t include the child exploitation referrals ECPAT gets from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US - 200 a month.
Survival sex among Māori
She said a local example of trafficking was survival sex where someone engaged in forced sexual activity in exchange for money, goods, services, protection or housing.
Collins said Māori encountering sex trafficking was more common in whānau and hapori and ECPAT also saw gang involvement and substance abuse keeping people trapped in situations of trafficking.
There were also instances where victims were forced into criminality and Collins said once a trafficking victim was convicted, it was really difficult for them to recover and reintegrate back to the community. She said this was common among Māori survivors who had been trafficked since childhood and were only reporting now in adulthood.
Lack of data for trafficking
She said ECPAT was getting data through the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, “mainly through the immigration side, because there’s an official helpline, but we don’t have a dedicated national helpline for any form of exploitation”.
But it often got data and cases referred from the US because rangatahi and tamariki in Aotearoa called or used a help box online about their case, which was then transferred to New Zealand.
“That’s showing that there’s data captured but it’s not through our systems. Our systems aren’t effectively collecting that data and really the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has made that recommendation time and time again that we have get adequate data collection on child exploitation and we still don’t have that.”
New Zealand’s progress
The Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report is the US government’s principal diplomatic tool, which engages foreign governments on human trafficking. It is a global reporting mechanism which measures countries’ efforts to counter trafficking.
The countries are ranked in a four-tier system. Tier 1 means the country complies with standards for elimination of severe forms of trafficking, and then there are Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List and Tier 3.
For 2024 New Zealand ranked at Tier 2, which it has been for four years. At one point the country was at Tier 1 but Collins said that was when trafficking was under the radar.
“Tier 2 means we have taken some steps to mitigate trafficking, to put a system in place but we don’t actually have a formal mechanism for everyone to refer or report or disclose and we don’t have any victim support services available for victims of trafficking and exploitation,” Collins said.
Where to from here ?
Collins said while it was difficult to take recommendations from the US especially when it had its own issues with trafficking, she said the recommendations provided in the report still stood.
“We do need a formal mechanism to capture all of the types of exploitation,” she said.
ECPAT also has a young survivor engagement project it is piloting in South Auckland.
The pilot aims to help victim-survivors experience post-traumatic growth and to recover and reintegrate back into their communities.