Mobile technology is becoming an essential tool in the effort to combat human trafficking. That’s why in late 2011, Kavitha Sreeharsha and colleague Kelly Heinrich left their positions with the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice to join the fight.

In October, the pair began the anti-trafficking group, Global Freedom Center, which focuses on harnessing the growing potential of smartphone technology to spread the word about human trafficking.

“Computers aren’t the only way to stay connected,” Sreeharsha said. “More and more people … are getting smart phones. A group in India can easily communicate with a similar group in West Africa, and our network wants to make this even easier.”

Recent statistics show roughly 35 percent of all Americans own a smartphone, which they use to access the Internet at least once per day. Worldwide, users of smartphones and tablet devices are expected to top one billion by 2015, with some 300,000 applications now available.

One of those, FREE2WORK, developed by the Bay Area-based organization Not For Sale, allows consumers to scan a product’s barcode before purchase, accessing information and ratings on what—if anything—the manufacturer is doing to combat forced and child labor.

The ratings are taken from the U.S. Department of Labor’s List of Goods Produced With Child Labor or Forced Labor, which—as the name suggests—reveals those companies using or suspected of using child labor in their supply chains, or of exploiting workers.

Tech giant Apple, for example, received a ‘D’ for releasing details only about its final line of production, not where the company secures the raw materials it uses to produce its popular iPhone and iPad devices.

An attorney by training, Sreeharsha has spent years working with the South Asian community in and around the Bay Area, focusing on issues of domestic violence. She says that with more information made more readily accessible, average individuals will be more inclined to get behind the fight to end trafficking, and perhaps recognize its signs.

“In their professional life, a health-care worker probably isn’t going to be constantly coming into contact with trafficking victims,” she said. “But they might have a patient who they suspect to be trafficked, which is why they need to be educated to recognize the signs and help them.”

So far, 128 countries have introduced penalties that criminalize trafficking. The California Trafficking Victims Protection Act makes trafficking a felony, requires restitution to the victim, establishes a victim-caseworker privilege and allows the victim to bring a lawsuit against their trafficker. The state also created the California Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery, which monitors trafficking across the state and advises the government on trafficking policy.

Sreeharsha said that the Global Freedom Center is planning to make short video clips that discuss the many issues surrounding trafficking and how viewers can help potential victims available online. The center also plans to offer online classes and “Webinars” open to the general public.

The center has honed in on eight core areas: education, health, labor and employment, immigration and migration, criminal justice, social services, journalism and the corporate world. Plans are now in the works to recruit experts for each designated field.

Another area of concern involves media portrayals of what trafficking is, something Julietta Hua, who teaches Women-Gender Studies at San Francisco State University, said leads to a false perception that trafficking only involves women.

“Sex trafficking stories are more tantalizing, so to speak, so they make better news stories and thus appear more prominently and frequently than stories that don›t involve sex work,” Hua said.

Sreeharsha gives as an example a recent report from American University’s The Human Rights Brief, involving 19 Hungarian men who were taken to Canada with the promise of “high-paying jobs” but were promptly locked in below-ground basements and forced to work.

She says cases like this often go underreported, as most people believe men are more likely to play the role of trafficker rather than that of trafficking victim. For the 19 Hungarian men and others like them, such misperceptions make it more difficult to seek justice.

According to the United Nations, trafficking is considered “an underground or invisible” activity, which Hua said makes it nearly impossible to gather accurate data on the size and scope of the practice. Those cases that do find their way to court are often the only ones counted with any reliability.

A report by the US Department of State showed federal law enforcement in 2010 charged 181 individuals, and obtained 141 convictions in 103 human trafficking prosecutions, 32 of them involving labor trafficking and 71 involving sex trafficking.

Hua said the problem is clearly larger than the numbers reflect but adds that, “you can’t really poll for trafficking.”
With the right tools, maybe you don’t have to.