Source: HagarInternational
11.22.12
Written by Talmage Payne, CEO
The perpetrator is followed as he drives a young girl to a seedy hotel room and locks the door. The NGO tracking the known sex offender has already called their police counterparts. An arrest is imminent.
But they wait. Not seconds or minutes but a full half hour. Confident that the rape is well enough along to cover her body and the room with forensic evidence, the door comes down and the child is “rescued”.
In a neighbouring country a different girl sits in court as her trafficker’s sentence is read aloud. The newspaper will report that another perpetrator has been help accountable. But it doesn’t end there, because the victim is also charged. A canning is ordered and then she’s placed in detention for illegal migration- without the right to any council.
Across the ocean in a wealthy country another rescue takes place. The boy has to make a frightening choice: If he cooperates with the police he will be given protection but they won’t be able to protect his family back home. If he doesn’t cooperate, he’ll be deported and vulnerable to his abusers.
Today, the anti-trafficking community organises interventions around the “three P’s”- Prevention, Protection and Prosecution. The “justice” conversation largely revolves around the idea of “prosecution” and the measure of effectiveness is perpetrators convicted. I asked one embassy official last year in Kabul what change they most wanted to see and the answer was an unequivocal ‘perpetrator conviction’.
Certainly we all celebrate when justice is served to abusers and traffickers. Hagar lawyers spend thousands of hours each year as victim advocates in criminal proceedings. But it seems somehow that the focus on counting convictions has lost sight of what really matters to victims.
The stories above, unfortunately, are not untrue.
We need a wholistic and victim-centred view of justice. A bill or rights that say they have a right to be safe regardless of criminal proceedings. That governments should safely return trafficking victims to competent care in their home country. Protection of survivor’s identities from the public media and greedy NGO marketing. The right to competent council and care. The right to have their voice heard.
Hagar was called by the authorities to take custody of the girl in the first story. Staff arrived at the police station to find the child and perpetrator in the same room while she was interrogated in front of several officers. Hagar staff tried to intervene and insisted that the perpetrator was moved to a cell. It all got complicated and loud. I was out on a date night with my daughter when I was called to come over and help out.
An hour later, just after midnight, the three of us were sitting on the pavement outside a clinic as a staff arranged for a properly trained and court-appointed physician to take forensic evidence. My daughter and the victim were about the same age and were getting to know each other over noodles from a late night food hawker.
I wondered if the response would be different if it was my daughter. Would they have stopped the crime or let it happen to secure a stronger conviction?
Sadly, in our current anti-trafficking world, no one gets credit for the uncommitted crime and so our view of justice is “arrest the bad guy and refer the child to a child welfare organisation”.
It’s time for a wholistic, victim-centred approach to justice.
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