Products from forced labour enter the global economy, and countries need to cooperate to nail traffickers
Updated 01:56 PM Oct 25, 2011
I am looking into the eyes of Mr Siddharth Kara (picture), the former investment banker who walked away from a lucrative career in finance 10 years ago to dedicate his life to fighting people trafficking and sex slavery.
Photo by SION TOUHIG
Copyright © MediaCorp Press Ltd
There is sadness in them and he looks as though he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Both characteristics almost certainly emanate from the horrors he has witnessed during his research.
These scenes are etched into his mind forever and sometimes, he says, trying to make a difference is like pushing water upstream.
But for the moment this Fellow of Harvard University, who advises governments and lawmakers around the world on trafficking policy, is determined to fight on. Explaining that all of us have a part to play in fighting the underground slave trade, the 36-year-old American academic says: "The process of acquiring and transporting individuals into some kind of coerced labour touches our lives more than we think because these people are put to work on all kinds of products which enter the global economy.
"So we may consume, on the other side of the world, unknowingly and unwittingly, but at some point in that supply chain it could be tainted by child servitude or human trafficking or some other kind of forced labour."
Mr Kara was recently invited by the United States Embassy in Singapore to enlighten academics, politicians and schoolchildren to the evils being committed by modern-day slave-drivers and how unsuspecting consumers are fuelling the process. His daring research in the field has seen him recognised as the world's leading authority on illegal slave trade and he is in constant demand from both the US government and the United Nations.
He says that much of the media spotlight focuses on the illegal sex trade, especially prevalent here in South-east Asia. It is a massive problem which, although involves a tiny proportion of trafficking victims, maybe only 4 or 5 per cent, generates as much as 40 per cent of total profits from forced labour.
"Sex trafficking gets the preponderance of the attention for obvious reasons," he concedes. "But while it's true that more people are trafficked into other forms of labour, sex trafficking is by far the most profitable form of human trafficking. A distant second might be organ trafficking."
"When you coerce a young woman, or even a boy, into 10, 15 or more commercial sex acts a day, day after day, month after month, year after year, the profits can be staggering. If you are exploiting someone through agriculture, mining or manufacturing, you can certainly make a lot of money but that rapid turnover of revenue generation only exists in forced prostitution.
"But I have investigated numerous industries. For example, fish and frozen shrimp are tainted throughout South-east Asia. Countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand and China are involved. Rice, sugar, pig iron, mining for minerals throughout the Congo, these minerals which end up in our electronic devices, these mines are often tainted by forced labour; your granite work-tops could come from a mine in South-east Asia. The list of items and products is often endless," he says.
Mr Kara's biggest fear is the authorities are failing to nail the big bosses behind these scams and do not have the investigative or legislative firepower to cope with these fast-evolving systems.
He explains: "The criminal penalties for human trafficking are disproportionately anaemic to the benefits you can enjoy. It may be very short prison terms but, more importantly, small economic penalties. And human trafficking, like slavery, throughout history is an economic crime - people seek to maximise their profits by eliminating the cost of labour.
"In terms of organised crime networks, at most we are sometimes catching the finger of the hand, and the organisms still exist and can still function quite well."
Last year, Mr Kara wrote his first book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, and next year, he hopes to launch the first fully-equipped research and policy centre for people trafficking at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government.
But he warns: "The traffickers are continuing to evolve and they are co-operating with each other very effectively. What's alarming to me is that Albanian mafia are cooperating with Italian mafia, who are working with Nigerian mafia, who are working with Chinese mafia to acquire people, move them into areas of exploitation, very seamlessly and effectively.
"It's far more sophisticated and complex now than when I started my research. We are numerous steps behind them in terms of international cooperation. They keep moving forward in their ability to do this internationally and we are stuck arguing on borders and jurisdictions, and in the meantime people are suffering."
Paul Gilfeather is the principal correspondent at Today.
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