"The restavek culture is being exported from Haiti to other Caribbean countries. It is very much slavery and I think it's going to increase exponentially now."
-Aaron Cohen
I WOULD wager that few Bahamians lose sleep contemplating the tortures endured by an 11-year-old girl forced into the sex trade, or imagine themselves in the shoes of a young boy, barely a toddler, sold to strangers and forced to work tirelessly for his survival.
For most people, the ability to empathise with extreme suffering decreases in proportion to its distance from their normal experience, and most of us in the Bahamas are thankful these scenarios play themselves out elsewhere.
However according to one human rights pioneer, we are fooling ourselves - modern day slaves are being trafficked in this country right under our noses and the trade may be set to explode.
American activist Aaron Cohen is widely considered to be the world's foremost expert on modern-day slavery. He is credited with rescuing numerous young girls from enslavement as sex workers and many young men from child soldiering camps.
He travels the world to shed light on the reality that the trade in human beings is alive and well in virtually every modern society. He notes that with 27 million slaves worldwide and another million sold into slavery each year, there are more enslaved people now than at any time in human history.
When I spoke with Mr Cohen, he was leaving New York after giving a speech at the UN on the status of women. Later this month, he is off to Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic to talk about what he considers an issue of the utmost urgency - the fallout from the earthquake in Haiti, which was until recently a central hub for the trafficking of humans.
Mr Cohen told me he believes the disaster in Haiti has severely curtailed the ability of organised crime to use that country for the transshipment of domestic and sex slaves, and that other countries in the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica and the Bahamas, are prime candidates to take up the slack.
He said: "I think the effect of the disaster on slavery in the Caribbean is going to be this: number one, there is going to be more poverty in Haiti and therefore an exodus; that's already being witnessed statistically.
"Second, in the past, in human trafficking just like in drugs and arms trafficking, you have criminal organisations that use countries of origin, transit and destination to operate their illicit businesses. Haiti previously was both a destination country and a transit country. Girls coming out of the Dominican Republic were transited out of Haiti to Europe, to the Bahamas, to Jamaica, to the United States. What's going to happen now is, because of the increased scrutiny in Haiti because of the international presence, we're going to see this transit business spread to the nearby Caribbean."
As proof, Mr Cohen pointed to what happened after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a capital of organised crime, drug and human trafficking.
"When the disaster occurred, there was an 80 per cent increase in murders in Houston, Texas. There was the same increase in human trafficking, and now Houston is the hub of human trafficking in the United States. I would imagine that's what's going to happen to the Bahamas," he said.
Mr Cohen noted that the existing culture of illegal immigration from Haiti makes the Bahamas a particularly "soft target" and therefore an ideal replacement as a transit location for captive people.
"It is highly probable, if not statistically provable, that the Bahamas will have an increase in human trafficking from the disaster in Haiti," he said.
According to Mr Cohen, what makes modern-day slavery particularly insidious is the fact that it is largely invisible.
The transatlantic slave trade, while monstrous, was at least tangible and had limits, could be argued against and protested.
Now, slavery is a covert phenomenon, and those who take part in it - either by smuggling someone else's children or selling their own - may only do so once or twice in their lives out of financial necessity. It is governed by no rules or central authorities, respects no treaties or boundaries, and is immune to rational or moral entreaties.
"You can buy crystal vases in a store and they are very transparent, but paper cups aren't, and they're disposable," Mr Cohen said. "Slavery is like that -- it is no longer an item that stays in the family for a lifetime; it's a disposable commodity, so it's very hidden."
He noted two additional factors that obscure the signs of human trafficking in the Bahamas in particular. Firstly, the reluctance of law enforcement to aggressively tackle prostitution - which often relies on foreign women tricked or forced into the sex trade. The occasional raids aside, virtually every resident of Nassau can name at least one brothel operating without interference from the police.
The second factor is the introduction, through illegal immigration, of the Haitian "restavek" system.
Restavek - which means in Creole "one who stays with" - is a system whereby poor rural families send their children to stay with and work for urban families as domestic servants. They are usually between the ages of five and 14, as Haitian law requires workers 15 and older to be paid. Sometimes the children are sold, but sometimes no money changes hands.
Cultural standards are of course relative - as seen in the International Labour Organisation's condemnation of the use of packing boys in Bahamian supermarkets - and in Haiti, the system is seen as a normal facet of society.
But anti-slavery campaigners like Mr Cohen emphasise that the lack of regulation means these children are often subjected to severe abuse and exploitation. "I don't even like to use the term domestic servants," he said, "because it conjures up an image of some moral, legal employment model and that's not what we're talking about."
He added that the likelihood of physical and sexual abuse increases when the system is transplanted outside Haiti, particularly to countries like the Bahamas, where the immigrant population is subjected to discrimination and often treated as subhuman.
Jean-Robert Cadet, founder of the Restavek Foundation which works to raise awareness of this phenomenon, was once a restavek himself. He says that as a "domestic slave", he endured years of physical and emotional abuse, working seven days a week with no pay and no time for recreation or rest. According to his website, restavekfreedom.org, there are an estimated 300,000 restavek children in Haiti.
Mr Cohen is eager to investigate the extent of the problem here, but as a rule does not request government co-operation for his investigations, as authorities in many countries are themselves tied up in the trafficking of drugs, arms and people.
His organisation, Causecast, tries instead to work with non-governmental organisations and human rights activists to identify, interview and hopefully rescue victims of human trafficking, while gathering sufficient evidence to prosecute offenders. Unfortunately, he says, the modern slave trade is hidden in the Bahamas to such an extent that even local activists are unaware of it.
He said: "One of the reasons we chose not to come to the Bahamas is because although we know the restavek culture has spilled over to that country and the sex trafficking trail (leads there), I don't have an organisation there that I can partner with as far as infrastructure and support.
"I spoke to a number of activists who told me there is no slavery, and I sort of took a step back when I heard that. I thought, 'My goodness, even some of the activists who are interested in combating this problem think that there is no slavery'.
"But there is no way around the fact that slavery is the fastest growing illegal enterprise in the world. It has already passed arms sales to become the number two illicit business in the world, period.
"The fact that the restaveks are there would indicate to me that there is an enormous amount of exploitation going on in the Bahamas and the country is at risk of falling into the tentacles of organised crime in the Caribbean.
"When someone says there is no slavery, it's because they haven't educated themselves on the issue properly."
So, is Mr Cohen right? His views are certainly supported by the United States government.
The US State Department's 2009 Trafficking in Persons report states that "Haitian women, men, and children are trafficked into the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, the United States, Europe, Canada, and Jamaica for exploitation in domestic service, agriculture, and construction. Trafficked Dominican women and girls are forced into prostitution."
The report further notes that the Bahamas is a destination country for "men and women trafficked from Haiti and other Caribbean countries primarily for the purpose of forced labour, and women from Jamaica and other countries trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation."
In 2008, parliament passed the Trafficking in Persons Prevention and Suppression Act which sets out penalties for offenders that range from three years to life imprisonment.
The State Department's report acknowledged this, but criticised the continuing tendency of law enforcement to conflate human trafficking with human smuggling - the transportation of persons engaging in illegal immigration voluntarily.
It also said the Bahamas failed to take steps to identify the casualties of the trade among vulnerable populations - such as foreign women and girls engaged in prostitution or women and girls intercepted while being smuggled in for this purpose - preferring to repatriate them as violators of immigration laws rather than offer them help as victims.
According to Mr Cohen, addressing this last point is vital. He said: "The average age of a woman who is prostituted is 11 years old. That makes them victims. They should not be treated as the criminals.
"The Bahamas needs to wake up and move towards the model the Scandinavians have created. Here's how it works: they have criminalised the demand, but they recognise that you cannot arrest a prostitute who is 14 and servicing a client who is 42 and then treat her like the criminal and let him go free. Yet that's happening even in the United States. The women, the victims, should be decriminalised and receive services and the Johns should face criminal prosecution."
He feels that treating such women merely as illegal immigrants - not to mention the children we send back to Haiti on a regular basis without inquiring about their identity or circumstances - amounts to punishing slaves for their condition of slavery and heaping further misery upon people who have already endured unimaginable suffering.
What do you think?
Email:
pnunez@tribunemedia.net
The Tribune
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