Protection
The Togolese government demonstrated modest efforts to protect trafficking victims over the last year. Togolese law enforcement officials regularly referred trafficking victims to government authorities or NGOs for care. The Ministry of Social Affairs, the Ministry of Child Protection, and The National Committee for the Reception and Reinsertion of Trafficked Children assisted victims primarily by alerting two NGOs in Lomé that provide immediate victim care, and by working with these organizations to return victims to their home communities. In 2007, however, the Minister of Child Protection also established a vocational training center for destitute children where the government has placed some trafficking victims before returning them to their families. The government reported that it referred 224 trafficking victims to one NGO in Lomé during the year and that 56 Togolese victims trafficked abroad were intercepted and repatriated in 2007. Neither the government nor NGOs provide any care for male victims older than 15 years. The government sometimes encourages victims to assist in trafficking investigations or prosecutions on an ad hoc basis. The government does not provide legal alternatives to the removal of foreign victims to countries where they face hardship or retribution; however the majority of victims are Togolese. Victims are not inappropriately incarcerated or fined for unlawful acts as a direct result of being trafficked.
Read more about this topic: Human Trafficking In Togo
Famous quotes containing the word protection:
“The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father’s advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Without infringing on the liberty we so much boast, might we not ask our professional Mayor to call upon the smokers, have them register their names in each ward, and then appoint certain thoroughfares in the city for their use, that those who feel no need of this envelopment of curling vapor, to insure protection may be relieved from a nuisance as disgusting to the olfactories as it is prejudicial to the lungs.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)