GPS Tracking Could Help End People Smuggling (Human Trafficking)
GPS tracking systems have helped police agencies conduct numerous different types of surveillance missions over the past decade. Whether tracking systems are used for following the routes of drug dealers or other serious crimes, there is no denying that technology has played a critical role in helping investigations. With GPS monitoring devices being commonly associated with various Homeland Security Department and Border Patrol applications, many people in support of the fight against human trafficking want to see tracking devices used more to end the increasingly global problem of human trafficking.
What Is Human Trafficking?
Essentially viewed as a crime against humanity, human trafficking involves the process of kidnapping, enslaving, harboring, and transporting people through force, persuasion, or some other avenue with the intention of exploiting the individual. Human traffickers commonly will recruit children or teen girls and forcefully relocate them to a different and oftentimes international location where the victim is forced to comply with the human trafficker’s demands. Human traffickers will often use children or young teen girls as prostitutes as a means to generate income. Human traffickers use psychological manipulation, drugs, and physical abuse to make victims of human trafficking feel helpless and alone.
How GPS Can Help Stop Human Traffickers
GPS vehicle tracking technology is one of the sophisticated ways that both police and government agencies conduct research investigations on criminal activity. This is because GPS car tracking systems offer police a unique way to remotely view the location of potential drug traffickers and human trafficking suspects.
Imagine you work for a police department and receive a tip about a group of mafia members of people who have been transporting young girls from Mexico into the United States for the purpose of prostitution. Not only is prostitution illegal, but so too is the transportation of illegal aliens and human trafficking, making this situation a very serious concern for law authorities. Looking to gather evidence and compile a strong case, you and your police colleagues choose to place tracking devices on the vehicles of all the suspects in order to monitor their movements remotely from a computer. After a few weeks or few months, you discover that some of the men are traveling to Mexico and making consistent stops at several locations in Arizona and southern California. Once you investigate those locations or stops recorded by the GPS tracking systems, you uncover what looks to be an international prostitution ring. With the evidence acquired from the GPS car trackers, you and your police force are credited with ending a human trafficking and prostitution ring, allowing freedom to all of the girls in captivity who were tortured and forced into a life they did not ever choose.
Although the problem of human trafficking is a much larger issue for countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, that does not mean that the United States is not being affected by the problem. Nearly 20,000 people, primarily women, and young children have been illegally trafficked into the United States annually! Hopefully, with diligent law enforcement work and GPS tracking technology, human trafficking victims can be granted freedom, and the people responsible for the trafficking of human beings are placed behind bars for life.
Source: Wikipedia
Matthew is a freelance writer who is passionate about technology, music, photography, and decentralized finance.
