Overview

 

RATIONALE

Criminal trafficking and slavery are growing national, regional, and global problems.These illicit activities damage and destroy millions of lives.Most victims are vulnerable women and children.Efforts to eradicate this blight appear to be losing ground to criminal elements.The latter profit from, and propagate the expansion of, what amounts to a globally dispersed system of exploitation with differential impacts — all pernicious and heinous — across nations and regions.These complex, webbed systems of global crime violate fundamental human rights; threaten the security and welfare of national and international civil societies; and undermine the authority and capacity of national governments to protect their populations.

Not enough is known about these darker sides of migration across regions and within nations.The proposed conference, outlined below, under the sponsorship of the International Programs and Studies of the University of Illinois and its cooperating regional and global centers, promises to add significantly to academic and public understanding of T/S systems; to stimulate and enlarge public debate; and to contribute importantly to the development of national and international policies to contain and eliminate these scourges.

This conference aims to (1)  advance knowledge about their underlying causes; (2) evaluate current local, regional, and global efforts — governmental and private —to eradiate or limit their spread; (3) identify feasible cross-national strategies that, if implemented, would strengthen law enforcement to cope with T/S; and (4) assess not only the scope of T/S exploitation and their multiple forms — to put a human face on T/S — but also the adequacy and capacity of national, regional, and global programs to address the physical and psychological needs of victims and to recover and protect their human rights.

The conference develops these four dimensions of the T/S problem across the principal regions of the globe, including North America. The T/S problem will be viewed both as a global system and as a derivative of the regional sub-systems, which are nested within this larger complex. The papers and presentations to be commissioned by leading experts would be directed to address these four areas. This approach ensures probing discussion that joins the major issues posed by T/S at regional and global levels and that encourages a more coherent and comprehensive grasp of the T/S problem as well as feasible solutions than would otherwise be possible by a more diffuse and unfocused discussion.While each of the interventions at the conference can not be expected to cover all four areas, original insights are expected to emerge from the conference, as participants are disciplined to address the themes of the conference to facilitate cross-regional comparisons and generalizations across these regional cases from a global level.