Throughout the drafting process, gender was not successfully
included within the Protocol until the seventh revision. By ratifying the
Palermo Protocol, nation states are legally obligated to provide or
strengthen law enforcement training on the problem of human
trafficking." The requirement that the training needs to incorporate
gender-sensitive awareness is diluted to a mere recommendation. The
degradation from nation states "shall" provide training to "should . . .take into account the need to consider"" amounts to not much more
than window-dressing. Nation states are essentially able to decide for
themselves if addressing the gender of the victim is worth including in
the training of their officials. Arguably, in countries where more males
are trafficked than females this could be the case. However, the problem
occurs in nations in which both males and females are trafficked, because
the predominant focus is on women, at the expense of men who are
trafficked.