Human trafficking will be a defining issue of the 21st century and especially in Africa where there are so many youth without access to jobs and a living wage, said Dr. Louise Shelley who spoke at the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) headquarters on May 26, 2011.

Shelley, a professor from George Mason University and author of the 2010 book "Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective," addressed AFRICOM staff as part of the Commander's Speaker Series, an initiative to bring in speakers with diverse viewpoints to the command to share ideas and thoughts.

According to Shelley, human trafficking often starts off as human smuggling because people want to be moved, as in the case of when people were trying to escape the instability in Tunisia or the violence in Libya by going across the Mediterranean to Europe.

"It's hard to call it smuggling because the charges that individuals are being forced to pay are so high," she said, "that many of them cannot afford to pay initially and wind up in a traffic situation when they get to Europe."

Shelley stated that the most visible side of trafficking or when most people think of human trafficking, they often think of the sex trade.

"You have problems of individuals coming from wealthier countries to enjoy what would be called sex tourism," she said, "this has been a problem in Egypt."

According to Shelley, every type of human trafficking known to mankind exists across the African continent. She went on to discuss the different forms of human trafficking found in Africa which include trafficking for domestic servitude, adoptions, trafficking for organs and child soldiers.

"A large proportion of the child soldiers in the world -- children who are trafficked into military service are in Africa," said Shelley.

Worldwide, human trafficking is one of the most profitable activities of crime organizations, but according to Shelley, the profits from trafficking in Africa are the lowest in the world.

"That's not because there are not people being trafficked," she said, "but the amount of money that's associated with this is so minimal that people earn the cost of exploitation -- the personal costs are high and the profits are low."

Some contributors to the human trafficking problem include poverty and famine, large numbers of children without families who are living on the streets, large numbers of refugees, individually displaced persons, and poor governance and corruption.

"When you have this much corruption that drains any possibility of human development," she said, "this helps contribute to human trafficking."

Shelley ended by saying that it is a must for personnel in AFRICOM to begin to understand the problem [of human trafficking] so that they can devise strategies to address this issue.