Ryan Ba­choo

The Counter Traf­fick­ing Unit (CTU) of the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the In­ter­na­tion­al Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Mi­gra­tion (IOM) held its first Stake­hold­er Work­shop, last Fri­day at the Cas­ca­dia Ho­tel and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, Port of Spain, themed, “Part­ner­ing to Com­bat Traf­fick­ing in Per­sons”.

A sig­nif­i­cant out­put of this work­shop was the con­struc­tion of a com­pre­hen­sive Re­fer­ral Map to fa­cil­i­tate an in­te­grat­ed ap­proach to vic­tim care. The map stream­lines the process for vic­tim as­sis­tance, by out­lin­ing clear path­ways for re­fer­ral and sup­port ser­vices, across gov­ern­ment and non-gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies.

Di­rec­tor of the Counter Traf­fick­ing Unit, Mr. Al­lan Meiguel em­pha­sized that the Re­fer­ral map would, “serve as a vi­tal tool in fa­cil­i­tat­ing an in­ter-agency ap­proach, to en­hanc­ing the vic­tim-care process” and im­me­di­ate­ly, “pro­vide a clear path­way for vic­tims to ac­cess the sup­port and as­sis­tance they ur­gent­ly need.”

He fur­ther gave the as­sur­ance that, “Through our col­lec­tive ef­forts, we can en­sure that no vic­tim falls through the cracks and that every in­di­vid­ual re­ceives the care and pro­tec­tion they de­serve.”

Deputy Di­rec­tor of the Counter Traf­fick­ing Unit, Ms. Dane-Marie Mar­shall al­so urged that it was through, “col­lab­o­ra­tive ini­tia­tives such as this work­shop”, that the re­gion, in­clud­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go, “can forge ahead to­wards a fu­ture free from ex­ploita­tion and in­jus­tice."