Human Trafficking in China

I. Current situation

No matter in which country, human trafficking is an unlawful behavior. Human traffickers abduct mainly children, teenagers, and women, who are relatively vulnerable. In Asian countries, some poor people, especially those in the remote places, who do not have wives or children would illegal “buy” wives or children from human traffickers. On the other hand, some people would buy organs from human traffickers. Furthermore, some traffickers would use children as tools to beg money on the roads.

Even if in the modern society, social media makes us closer to each other and get more information than before, however, according to Global Times, about 70,000 children under 18 years old were trafficked in China. Comparing to the United States, in 2011, US Department of Justice statistics shows that around 797,500 teenagers and children would be kidnapped or trafficked every day. But 98% would be found back.

II. USA’s experience

There are three experiences China or other countries could learn from the United States.

Firstly, improve the relevant laws and regulations. President Reagan announced May 25th as the “National lost Children’s Day” and introduced the “Lost Children Assistance Act”, the bill advocates free alarm helpline for lost children across the United States, in addition, it builds up a center for lost children’s information collection and selection. This foundation is solidly built nationwide.

Secondly, FBI established the national service center for lost and exploited children. Multiple languages helpline is available 24 hours everyday. Try to rescue abducted children in the shortest time.

Last but not least, make use of “Children safety alarm system”. In the late 1980s, Wal-Mart firstly launched the system, named Code Adam, to keep children’s safety. If found children lost, parents could ask for launching the Code Adam and the supermarket’s entrances would be all closed at once. If children were not found within ten minutes, the police would intervene immediately. Besides, according to Abou Alert’s official website in 2013, about 97% information could send to the residents whose children lost.

Nevertheless, China did not have a complete relevant law system. Besides, social assistance service mechanism has not been established, resulting in only police try to crackdown human trafficking. At the same time, lack of help for street children and weak population and DNA databases also hinder the rescued children to find their families.

III. What data do I need?

1.Name. Name could narrow down our searching scope for the first selection.

2.Ages. Ages could narrow down the scope fatherly and analyze through the trend and make some relative protection for this range of ages children. Up to 90% of abducted population are under six years old.

3.Gender. It is very important when comparing with ages. Usually, under 14 years old, males have a higher portion in the human trafficking. While, 14-18 years old, female take up the main portion.

4.Where are they abducted and where did they go (more specific, better). By analyzing these data, we could find which states are the most popular area and could put more effort on.

5.Current situation of these children and teenagers. We have to know the purpose of human traffickers and the demand of their customers. Thus, we could pay more attention to the places and the occupations.

6.The rescued route. We know that most of rescued route and efforts are from police. Very few are from other executive departments and community or volunteer. Through this data, we could find out the trend and any improvement we could make.

7.Human traffickers’ relationship with the abducted children. In China, around half of human traffickers have blood relationship with abducted children. They build up complete mutual benefit chains and become some organizations. Therefore, they would have powerful network chains with the providers, brokers, and customers. If we have some key people in the organizations, through social network analysis, we could dig out the whole chain and secure the abducted children effectively.

8.The placement of rescued children. We have to get this data in order to know where and how do we deal with the rescued children. Even if we built a complete rescued method to find every lost child, the final goal is to help them to find their families or secure their rest of life.

V. How could we use SNA to solve the problem or improve the current situation?

Just because these data are hard to find now, the amount of abducted children are increasing in recent years. In order to get these data, we have to build a complete law to regulate the market. Besides, the most effective way would be social network methods. Through social network methods, everybody could participate into the process and everyone could come up ideas or use their own efforts to help. I suggest three social network methods.

We need to find the above data as much as can and then upload it into UCINET. Because human trafficking is mainly go through organizations, using different attributes help us find subgroups. We have to use in-degree, out-degree to find who are the traffickers and who are the customers. Besides, we need to use Girvan-Newman to find out subgroups in an organization, to find who are the center or broker among different subgroups. If we could find these person, we could find all the subgroups. Furthermore, we have to find the people who have most connections with most key people because crack down the leaders would collapse the organization completely.

Besides, I believe social media's power is getting stronger. Through Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, Sina Weibo, and so many different tools, we could post and transfer information in different subgroups. Not only to find abducted children, but also to show the public the traffickers' result and the placement of rescued children. Furthermore, we could raise people's awareness of protection and safety. 

In conclusion, this problem is hard to solve without social network. We have to make full use of social network analysis and tools to crack down criminal organizations and find abducted children and teenagers to avoid tragedy and build a harmonies society.


Qiqi Diao
MIB 2016
Hult International Business School
#HultSNO2016