So serious is the Jamaica government about ridding the country of the scourge of human trafficking that the topic will be integrated into subjects taught in secondary schools across the island from the upcoming academic year.
Teachers are being trained through the Ministry of Education, in preparation for the introduction at Grades Seven to Nine in pilot schools next month.
The curriculum, which was developed by the National Task Force Against Trafficking in Persons, is geared towards helping schoolchildren see the issue as a global crime, as well as getting them to identify means of preventing it and helping to reduce the vulnerability of people, especially children and young people.
Human trafficking is considered a modern-day form of slavery involving victims being forced, defrauded or coerced into exploitative circumstances.
Assistant chief education officer in the Core Curriculum Unit Dr. Clover Hamilton-Flowers said her department had identified areas in Social Studies, Religious Education, Information and Communication Technology, Physical Education and Sports, as well as in History, in which topics from the human trafficking curriculum will be integrated during lessons.
Statistics from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) show that nearly half of the 1.2 million children trafficked worldwide each year are from Latin America and the Caribbean.
The National Task Force Against Trafficking in Persons in the Ministry of Justice says trafficking victims in Jamaica are predominantly females (79.3 per cent) between the ages of 18 and 24 years, have secondary education (89.7 per cent), and are from the working-class or a poor background (86.2 per cent).
The efforts being made to increase awareness about the crime, from secondary school level, comes against the background of United States (US) authorities maintaining a Tier 2 Watch List ranking for Jamaica in its 2015 Trafficking in Persons Report which was released last Monday.
The ranking means that Jamaica does not comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, but it is making significant efforts to do so.
The US State Department said Jamaica’s ranking remained unchanged because the government “did not demonstrate evidence of overall increasing anti-trafficking efforts compared to the previous period”.
The Portia Simpson-Miller administration said it found that conclusion “perplexing” and “unfounded” and it was deeply disappointed with some aspects of the report, including allegations that sex tourism is a problem in Jamaica’s resort areas and that policemen were complicit in prostitution rings which recruit children and coerce adults into the sex trade.
