Trafficking Monitor is a blog I created and curate. It offers posts highlighting the multifaceted nature of human trafficking and forced/indentured labour. I draw on a diversity of sources for my posts. You are invited to recommend materials for posting.
Showing posts with label A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. Show all posts
The suits allege that labor recruiters and employers lured, trapped and abused foreign workers hired through federal guest-worker programs. The government charges that more than 500 Indian men hired by Signal International of Alabama for rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina were confined in squalid camps, illegally charged for lodging and food, and subject to discrimination and abuse. When they complained, the suit says, Signal agents tried to intimidate workers’ families in India. Two lawsuits filed in Hawaii and Washington against other employers make similar charges about 200 men brought from Thailand.
The United States urgently needs to strengthen protections for guest workers who are lied to by recruiters and tied to employers with too much power to exploit them. Today’s shackles are the threats of deportation and financial ruin. They might as well be iron.
A recent agreement by the federal Labor and Homeland Security Departments to work together on immigration and labor enforcement at work sites is encouraging, though there are serious concerns about Homeland Security’s past behavior. Sworn testimony in a separate civil lawsuit against Signal International charged that rather than protecting the Indian workers, immigration officials coached the company on how to silence and deport them.
Workers in the new lawsuits may win some money and be eligible for special visas for trafficking victims. But they are only a handful of workers — both documented and undocumented — stranded in a system that accepts their labor but fails to prevent their exploitation.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on May 2, 2011, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Standing Up for Guest Workers.
Posted by: ALLIES of Central Texas | March 23, 2011
Most good, human loving people will be surprised to know that they own stuff that was produced by slaves. Consumers and businesses can unite to fix this problem.
News | 3/2/10
Posted online at 11:43 PM EST on 3/1/10
"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," E. Benjamin Skinner, a journalist and senior fellow at the Schuster Institute of Investigative Journalism, told an audience of faculty and students at a Feb. 22 lecture.
Skinner spoke as a part of the Social Justice Leadership Series about his book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. Skinner said that modern slavery is defined by humans who "are forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence for no pay above subsistence."
Skinner explained that modern-day slavery is different from slavery of the 1800s. Whereas slavery had been a visible part of society in the 1800s-there were public auctions-most people know next to nothing about its modern-day counterpart, Skinner said. Yet according to Skinner, approximately 27 million humans across the globe are still being held as slaves.
The highest concentration of human enslavement is in South Asia, where the vast majority of slaves are working to pay off debts-often debts from previous generations, according to Skinner. He recalled a man he had met in India who was being forced to work because of a 62-cent debt his great grandfather had failed to repay; the man's family has been enslaved because of the debt ever since.
But slavery is not contained to South Asia, Skinner explained. Often acting undercover, Skinner witnessed slavery in 12 different countries including Haiti, Romania and even the United States. "If I'm talking here for half an hour, on average, one more person will become a slave on U.S. soil within that half hour," he said.
Skinner told the audience that Haiti, right off the U.S. coast, has one of the highest concentrations of slaves in the world and that there is no law against human trafficking there. Skinner recalled that on a trip to Haiti to investigate A Crime So Monstrous, "There were several men standing in front of this barber shop, and one of them came over and said, 'Do you want to get a person?'" The asking price for a 12-year-old girl who would do domestic labor and serve as a "partner" was $100, Skinner said. He easily negotiated the trafficker down to $50, which, he told the audience, illustrated both the simplicity of bartering with slave traders and the devaluation of human life in desperately impoverished countries like Haiti.
Skinner reassured his audience that he had not followed through with the negotiations, as paying for a human life is "giving rise to a trade in human misery." But he said that buying slaves to rescue them has been a solution adopted by some. According to Skinner, while these kinds of simple fixes are appealing, they are often ineffective. Slaves rescued in this manner often find themselves re-enslaved because the circumstances that led them into slavery have not changed, he said. Legal structures need to change to make slavery more identifiable and punishable, and the circumstances that precipitate the slave trade also need to change, Skinner said.
The event was received positively, especially in reaction to Skinner's ability to relay the realities of slavery.
Event attendee Jacob Peeples '13 told the Justice that the most significant part of the lecture to him was "increased awareness of the atrocities of modern slavery."
Critic says halting human trafficking ‘takes all of us’
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard Staff Writer
Friday, February 19, 2010
Nations all over the world have to get to the root causes of human trafficking, including understanding what creates the markets that make the practice viable, said Luis CdeBaca, who directs the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Examples of modern-day slaves could be the workers who make our cotton shirts, pick cocoa for our chocolate, and harvest shrimp for our dinner plates while imprisoned aboard ships at sea. Enslaved prostitutes — more than 1.3 million worldwide — also provide the labor force for much of the world’s sex trade.
Modern slavery’s ubiquity — and our collective responsibility for it — were two of the messages driven home in an Institute of Politics lecture on Thursday (Feb. 18) at the Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.
Co-sponsors were Harvard College for Free the Slaves, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Committee on Human Rights Studies, and Harvard College Human Rights Advocates.
The man behind the messages was Luis CdeBaca, who directs the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. When he was a federal prosecutor, he sent more than 100 traffickers to prison and freed 600 sex and garment workers kept in involuntary servitude.
Trafficking in humans “is a crime akin to murder,” said CdeBaca, who seasoned his 40-minute talk with case studies and statistics. “It’s a crime akin to rape, and to kidnapping.”
Worldwide, there are more than 12 million people who exist in some form of slavery, he said, part of a shadow economy that turns a $32 billion annual profit for traffickers. About a tenth of those are in what experts call “commercial sex servitude.”
Yet in a typical year, nations around the globe initiate only 3,000 prosecutions against traffickers, “an unforgivably low percentage,” said CdeBaca.
Nations all over the world have to get to the root causes of human trafficking, he said, including understanding what creates the markets that make the practice viable. (So far, 136 countries have signed on to a decade-old U.N. protocol against slavery.) Stepping up criminal prosecutions is still a prominent key, said CdeBaca, along with a range of other strategies to “rescue and punish.”
He outlined a “3-P paradigm” for addressing human trafficking: prosecute, prevent, and protect.
Skinner’s research, conducted both in public and underground, took him to child markets, trafficking networks, illegal brothels, and other slave venues in a dozen countries in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America. Even suburban America, he discovered, contains its own parallel universes of hidden slavery.
CdeBaca’s office every year rates nations around the world on their measures to fight slavery. The 2010 ranking — called the Trafficking in Persons, or TIP, report —will include the United States for the first time. That announcement drew a brief burst of applause in the crowded hall.
To illustrate the problem in the United States, consider the case of Shyima Hall, whose story was outlined in the 2009 TIP report. She was a teenager from a poor family in northern Egypt who was moved by a wealthy Egyptian couple to work in their California home. In exchange for up to 20 hours of labor a day, Shyima was locked in a windowless garage and paid $45 a month.
CdeBaca mentioned another case, one of an “escaped slave” who fled from virtual imprisonment in an Arlington, Mass., home. Her passport was locked in a safe.
He told other American stories: about the illiterate garment workers who studied the boss’ dictionary one word at a time to compose a note that they threw over a high wall. (They were rescued.) And the woman who rushed up to a policeman in a Dollar Store with a desperate plea to escape domestic servitude: “Arrest me.”
Modern slavery will prompt “the next great abolitionist movement,” said Skinner. He provided a chilling definition of modern slaves, who are so inadequately uncovered and protected: “Those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.”
Skinner acknowledged that slavery is a “contentious term” that some Westerners even sometimes equate to the drudgery of corporate jobs, mortgages, and credit card debt. But the world’s real slaves are “people that cannot walk away from their work.”
And the commercial enterprises that underlay slavery, Skinner said, potentially involve every consumer. To address the slave trade, he said, “takes all of us.”
Understanding modern slavery also invites comparison to the U.S. war on the drug trade, which has more resources and prominence, said Skinner. The annual budget to fight slavery, he said, is the equivalent to what is spent in a single day to combat trafficking in illegal drugs.
Without disparaging the need to target drugs, Skinner asked a rhetorical question about which is more important: “Is it a 15-year-old selling pot on the street corner, or is it a 15-year-old being sold on the street corner?”
Prosecution alone is not enough to stop modern slavery, said CdeBaca, who called for protection that extended beyond the courtroom, including provisions for social services. Ignoring the victim after the crime, he said, would only “replicate” the way the victim was treated by a trafficker.
Meantime, there is the third “P,” said CdeBaca: prevention, which remains “an afterthought” to most nations. Real prevention means more than policy pronouncements, public-awareness advertising campaigns, or “interesting documentaries,” he said. It means stopping human trafficking at the source, in part by understanding the demands behind forced labor and commercial sex.
Stopping trafficking at the source is also a matter of awareness, said CdeBaca in discussing the imprisoned shirt-makers and shrimp fishermen. Just as people are now aware of their carbon footprint, he said, they should be aware of their “modern-slavery footprint.” That means taking a critical look at the goods and services they buy.
“The prevention-P,” said CdeBaca, “is where every American can play.”
By NINA RIZZO • FREEHOLD BUREAU • December 10, 2009
MIDDLETOWN — E. Benjamin Skinner has witnessed the sale of human beings on four continents. He ventured to the underworld, where modern-day slaves are kept hidden by violent traffickers and cruel masters, in order to tell their heart wrenching stories.
Skinner, an independent journalist who wrote "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery," talked about his first book to a large gathering at Brookdale Community College Wednesday night as part of the college's Visiting Writers Series.
Skinner said he infiltrated trafficking networks and slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels to find his subjects. He even went undercover in Haiti to negotiate the sale of a 12-year-old girl who would serve as a domestic and sexual slave. The price was settled within two minutes, he said, for $50.
"I know it's not an easy subject to talk about, but it is greatest human rights challenge of our generation," he said.
Skinner noted the International Labor Organization — a function of the United Nations — estimates there are 12.3 million forced laborers in the world today. He believes the number is closer to 27 million, the estimate provided by Free the Slaves, a Washington-based nonprofit group that works to liberate slaves around the world.
Undisputed, it seems, is that there are more slaves today than at any other point in history, although they represent a smaller percentage of the world's population than in the past.
"Although it's miserable to talk about and the scale seems overwhelming it's a problem we can overcome in our lifetime," he said.
Skinner tells one story of a man named Gonoo who was born into slavery. He was forced to work in a quarry in India because his grandfather couldn't repay a 62-cent loan. If he tried to leave, Gonoo said he would be beaten or killed if recovered by the master.
When asked why he didn't try to leave, Gonoo answered: "Where would I go? Where would I eat?"
Skinner said understanding the co-dependent relationship between master and slave is critical to eradicating bondage.
Slavery, he said, continues in places where corruption thrives and poverty and isolation are left to grow.
"The end of slavery can't wait until the end of poverty," he said, noting that 1.1 billion on the planet live on less than $1 per day.
In South Africa, Skinner met a group of girls who were forced to work as prostitutes near the World Cup stadium. They were given only enough food to stand and enough clothes to cover their bodies. When one of the girls got sick, she was cast aside.
Skinner met the 17-year-old sick girl in a hospice, where she was three months pregnant and suffering from tuberculosis and full-blown AIDS. She asked Skinner to take care of her body when she died because her family didn't know where she was. A week later she was gone.
A woman from a neighboring village had sold this girl and her best friend to Nigerian traffickers for $35 and a bag of crack.
Skinner said he was able to intervene and save the 15-year-old friend from a similar fate. She was the only one of that group of eight girls who wasn't HIV positive. She is now back with her family and attending school, he said.
"It's not just a question of liberation. It's a question of enabling slaves to become survivors," he explained, adding that they can then become good citizens who can develop into abolitionists who lead the charge to end slavery.
'We must listen to them. We must break the cycle of slavery for those still held in bondage," he said, adding that Free the Slaves spends an average of $400 to free and rehabilitate each slave. "It's a profound moment in human history when we have a chance to end slavery."
Skinner, 35, was raised in Wisconsin and northern Nigeria, where his father had served as a British colonial administrator. He came from a long line of abolitionists and first learned about slavery as a child in Quaker meetings, according to his Web site.
A graduate of Wesleyan University, Skinner is a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He now lives in Brooklyn.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f30301bb-cf7f-4473-9085-8cd2be404698)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=bff1135f-5a6c-4f76-80e4-9494775f9439)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=2aa894f8-e60a-4c6b-bb68-03637289d925)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b7f59ebc-c4b9-48bf-9d15-ed1ffd36445b)
