Fighting human trafficking during the pandemic: a look at the Human Trafficking Institute's work in Uganda

As the pandemic keeps affecting us all, we want to keep hearing from our partners who work in places that were already vulnerable to human trafficking before this year and see how their work has been impacted by the global crisis. 

We reached out to Tyler Dunman, who was hired by Freedom For All’s partner, the Human Trafficking Institute, to work on human trafficking cases as special counsel to Uganda’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Tucked in between the DRC, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and South Sudan, Uganda is a country where a lack of employment opportunities has resulted in a high vulnerability to human trafficking. The Human Trafficking Institute is helping the Ugandan government strengthen its criminal justice system so that it is able to deal with cases of human trafficking. For about a year, Tyler and his team have trained prosecutors and police officers across the country. 

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“Frankly, in a lot of ways, COVID has helped push things forward here in Uganda in our domestic trafficking work,” says Tyler. “It was incredibly important and needed.”

Before joining Uganda’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in November last year, Tyler was a state criminal prosecutor in Texas for 13 years. There, he worked primarily on cases of child trafficking, online sexual exploitation, and domestic violence. He is now part of Uganda’s anti-trafficking prosecutors’ office, which sits within the larger Human Trafficking Department formed by the Ugandan government in close collaboration with the Human Trafficking Institute (HTI). In 2017, at the invitation of the Chief Justice, HTI led a large-scale training for 175 police, judges and prosecutors, and has since been training and assisting police officers and prosecutors across the country. 

“Historically, I would say that the government’s focus has been on transnational cases, meaning Ugandan nationals being trafficked out of the country, which is an important issue, but which somehow overshadowed a significant amount of domestic trafficking cases that weren’t being addressed,” Tyler says. “As we went into a lockdown this year, we started to see that the number of domestic trafficking cases was spiking heavily. Because of the coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent closure of borders, the government was almost forced to look at this load of domestic cases and deal with it.” 

As in many other developing countries, the poverty created by the pandemic has allowed for trafficking, and child trafficking in particular, to soar in Uganda. Child sacrifices, child marriage and online child sexual exploitation have increased. A recent report from the NGO Global G.L.O.W in Uganda shows that the “incidence of early-childhood marriage is on the rise as poverty caused by the pandemic has forced families to marry off their daughters to help alleviate financial burdens.” 

“Because of the lockdown, the economic situation for a lot of families and individuals is worse than it was before COVID,” adds Tyler. “People are looking to improve their situation and provide for their families. Children are being sold to traffickers or for marriage in order for the rest of the family to survive.”

In May this year, UNODC was already saying that “dramatic increases in unemployment and reductions in income, especially for low wage and informal sector workers, mean that significant numbers of people who were already vulnerable find themselves in even more precarious circumstances.” In July, UNDP stated that “approximately 1.9 million people are likely to have fallen into poverty as a result of eight weeks of lockdown alone” in Uganda.  

The work that HTI has been doing in Uganda in previous years laid the ground for a better response to this emerging caseload of domestic child trafficking incidents. Since 2016, HTI has developed relationships with government officials and done assessments with police and immigration officials to know where to focus their efforts. 

“What we’ve learned this year, as we’ve enhanced our operations,” says Tyler, “is that we have a lot of officers and prosecutors who are not familiar with the provisions of the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, which was passed in 2009. It is a very well written, very effective piece of legislation but it is under-utilized because police and prosecutors are not familiar with it. Many offices do not hold a copy of the law. So we started by distributing copies of the act.”

HTI’s and Tyler’s work in Uganda involves making police officers and prosecutors aware of the legal framework surrounding trafficking work. 

“The assessments done by HTI have revealed that there was a lot of confusion in police stations and prosecutors’ offices about what trafficking is and how to properly identify it,” says Tyler. “Most of them had witnessed cases of trafficking before, but it had been misidentified or mislabelled and only rarely analyzed through the trafficking lens. The training we lead involves studying the law, identifying trafficking, and then applying the law, which means actually building an investigation and charging people based on the elements of the offence.” 

Despite the pandemic, Tyler and his team have been able to continue training prosecutors this summer. 

“The great thing about the specialized Human Trafficking Department is that we now have a team that is well trained and has the ability to identify human trafficking cases better than their peers. In addition to that, they are also able to put more time and attention into these cases. If it weren’t for the specialized department, many cases would end up going nowhere, simply because there is so much that pulls on the attention of the police and prosecutors. As we are generating more volume in terms of trafficking cases, we are seeing more police and prosecutors integrated in the specialized unit.”

Tyler with Ugandan judges and judicial officers at a training on trafficking in persons.

Tyler with a team of Ugandan prosecutors at a training this summer.

There is still some work to be done in order for Uganda to be fully equipped to prosecute trafficking. One of Tyler’s goals is to enhance victim protection in a country where the government has not historically been investing resources on ensuring the safety of those who come forward after being trafficked. 

“What we do, so far, is rely on our partnerships with social workers and NGOs that are doing work on the ground to provide victims with shelter, food, or medical support,” says Tyler. “We’ve seen good results from these partnerships, but we need to make sure survivors’ needs are being met over time. Otherwise we risk losing traction in many cases.”

Victim assistance and protection is crucial to get them to cooperate with the prosecutors. In many cases victims and/or witnesses are “reluctant to give information and evidence because of perceived or actual intimidation or threats against themselves or members of their family,” as UNODC states in a brief on victim assistance and witness protection. In Uganda, child trafficking is one of the most prevalent forms of trafficking, with an estimated 7,000-12,000 children being exploited in sex trafficking. 

According to the UNODC brief, “victims who receive appropriate and adequate care and support are more likely to cooperate with the criminal justice system in bringing perpetrators of crime to justice.” Partly to ensure a more efficient victim protection service, Tyler and his team have started implementing prosecution-led investigations, which allow for police, prosecutors and care providers to work hand in hand from the very start of an investigation. 

“Prosecution-led investigations, as a model, are absolutely critical in trafficking cases,” says Tyler. “In its simplest form, all that it means is that police and prosecutors begin working on a trafficking investigation from the very beginning. Usually, as it is in the US and in most parts of the world, including here in Uganda, when a victim presents themselves at a police station, or is being rescued from a brothel for instance, an investigator is assigned to the case. After what can be days, weeks, or months, that investigator will present their file to a prosecutor, who will maybe ask for more evidence to be collected, or to re-interview witnesses. This often turns out to be impossible because a lot of time has passed since the investigation started. If the police and prosecutor can work together from the moment the case comes in the door, we avoid that problem. We can also coordinate to get the survivors other help they need. With this approach, everything goes better.”

So far, Tyler and his team are seeing results with this approach. In 2019, the Ugandan government reported investigating 30 domestic trafficking cases. This year, despite the lockdown, the work of the specialized teams has led to 68 trafficking cases being prosecuted, which resulted in 92 victims being rescued from brothels or pulled out of their trafficking situations - 52 of them being children. Out of those 68 cases, 63 were domestic cases. Working on those cases led to the arrest of 72 suspects. Most of these cases have risen from regions where Tyler and his team have conducted police and prosecution training. 

“I’m very optimistic,” concludes Tyler. “Now that they know how to file and charge cases, police and prosecutors are being very effective in dealing with trafficking cases. I’m confident that we are going to see more and more cases being filed and exposed.”

Text by Chloé Perceval. Pictures courtesy of Tyler Dunman.

Many thanks to Tyler, Kim and Kelli at HTI for their time and enthusiasm!