National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) has tasked journalists to take responsibility and be change agents in the fight against human trafficking.
Josiah Emerole, Director, Public Enlightenment, NAPTIP, at the ongoing 3-day Training and Capacity Development Orientation of Standard Reporting Template for Members of the Trafficking in Persons Media Core and Officers of Press and Public Relations Unit Agenda, taking place at Keffi, Nasarawa State, pleaded with the media to be agenda setter for both NAPTIP and the government.
He urged the media to take the fight against human trafficking as a responsibility to save Nigerians from the hands of traffickers.
Emerole, who spoke on the topic “Emerging Tricks and Trend in TIP,” said traffickers had invented new means of carrying out recruitment of victims.
He said the social media and new technology had become fertile grounds for human traffickers.
“This has become avenue to recruit victims. They have integrated technology into their business model at every stage in recruitment,” Emerole said.
He said that “some of the traffickers come in a subtle way on Facebook wall by requesting for friendship, and once accepted, the trafficker would work on the victim.”
The good news, however, he said was that NAPTIP had entered into partnership with Facebook to help profile suspected traffickers.
Emerole also said that over 15,000 youths had been trafficked through promises of helping them to find club abroad only for them to be abandoned once they leave the shores of this country.
Another emerging trend of recruitment by traffickers, according to him, “is through surrogacy.”
“This is when teenage girls are impregnated and children taken away from them at birth,” he explained.
Another way traffickers recruit nowadays, he noted, “is through orphanage homes where owners bring in children from all over the country and then use them for menial jobs and even recruit them into stealing.”
Arinze Orakwe, Director, Training and Manpower Development, NAPTIP, in his “Overview of TIP in Nigeria,” said about $150bn was estimated to be realised from human trafficking in 2014.
He said most victims were recruited through coersion, persuasion, deception, and promises of better life, among others.
Olubiyi Olubiyi, Director Research and Programme Development, NAPTIP, who spoke on the Global Perception of TIP, said the main purpose of human trafficking was for sexual exploration, force labour, criminal agents, child soldier, among others.
Earlier, declaring the programme open, the Director-General, NAPTIP, Dr Fatima Waziri-Azi, urged participants to join hands to “crusade and wage war against human trafficking.”
The DG, who was represented by Orakwe, said “the criminal human trafficking network is so neatly woven that needs joint and collaborative efforts to counter.”
NAPTIP DG said the “need to interface with the media and media executives is very apt now more than ever as our agency is more determined, than ever, to take the battle to the domains of the criminals.”
The workshop will end on Friday.
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