Human Security

Human security is the best approach to eliminating human trafficking because it combines and builds on the strengths of national security, human rights, and human develop approaches and discards any weaknesses within those three approaches. Its principles are clear and provide scholars and practitioners with guidelines for studying and responding to human trafficking. Human security is a comprehensive yet coherent people- centered framework that aims to address structural causes of human trafficking through context specific preventive and protective policies, developed by multiple stakeholders including those it proposes to protect. Prevention policy aims transcend tackling immigration and organized crime. Protection policy would not entail rescuing victims only to return them to the same or worse conditions from which they left. Trafficking is complex and thus we need a framework that is better able to operate within that complexity. This is where human security outpaces other security or international affairs approaches. Only an integrated, multilateral and multidisciplinary perspective of human trafficking and its complexities enables us to develop the tools and responses necessary to curb and ideally end human trafficking one day.