By Anika E Kentish - Tuesday, March 6th, 2012.
Yasmin Solitahe Odlum (left), a Caribbean specialist at the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM), believes tourism-dependent countries are not quick to acknowledge the realities of human trafficking. She was speaking along with her CIM colleague Hilary Anderson during a media tour in Washington, DC (Photo by Anika Kentish)
WASHINGTON, DC – A spokesperson on women’s affairs within the Organisation of American States (OAS) has called for a comprehensive study of the presence of human trafficking and its subsequent effect on the region.
“I think there is need in the region for serious empirical studies to determine the scope, the breadth, the depth, the mapping of what we consider trafficking in the region,” Yasmin Solitahe Odlum, a Caribbean specialist at the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) told a team of journalists on a tour focused on women’s empowerment.
Odlum, who once served as a diplomat for St Lucia, acknowledged that while human trafficking is monitored by various international agencies, including the OAS, there is still a gray area where a definition as concerned.
The OAS, like the United Nations, views human trafficking as a means of exploiting human beings for revenue through sex, forced labour and human organs. However other organisations and governments may vary their definition.
Odlum explained that tourism-dependent countries, like those within the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), are not quick to acknowledge the presence of trafficking in the sub-region.
“We know that these exotic bars etc, etc, are cover-ups for some very brutal existences that women are undergoing as sex workers, as exotic dancers, as people who are in massage parlours and things like that. So I think there is a whole discourse which needs to be had honestly and sensitively where the OECS Caribbean nations are concerned,” she said.
CIM, as an organ of the OAS, has specific responsibility for women’s issues. Established in 1928, it was the first inter-governmental agency established to ensure recognition of human rights of women. Though the agency no longer has direct oversight for human trafficking, it remains a relevant organisation in the overall campaign against the illegal activity. Oversight now rests with the OAS’s public security division.
“CIM actually pioneered the work in trafficking at the OAS and that is a major feather in the cap for CIM …,” Odlum said.
“CIM no longer had exclusive rights to that topic and that, in effect, has impacted the work that CIM could have continued doing in that area. However having said that, I have to say that we have very tight connections with the public security department and so we are usually included in terms of the direction the public security is doing in trafficking.”
The issue of human trafficking is particularly topical as the March 8 observance of International Women’s Day approaches. This year’s theme is: “Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures.”
Image via Wikipedia THERE are reports of people from small Caribbean islands being held as virtual slaves in homes in Trinidad, said Foreign Affairs Minister Surujrattan Rambachan.
"From time to time, you hear in this country, up to this day, about people who are virtually slaves in homes of people in this country. Who have been brought from Guyana... (or) other small islands and working as supposedly maidservants in homes, their passports taken away and they cannot get out of their homes and begging people to get out of the country," Rambachan said.
He was speaking in Parliament on Friday during debate on the Human Trafficking bill at the Red House, Port of Spain.
He said in a United States 2010 trafficking report, Trinidad and Tobago was described as a destination for forced prostitution of women and children and forced labour for men.
Rambachan said in 2007, 71 women and children in Marabella were held by authorities, many with fraudulent passports and some had previously been deported from T&T.
On the issue of smuggling, he said there were reports of people being smuggled into this country through Moruga, Carli Bay and Cedros. He also noted that many people from Asian countries were setting up businesses in T&T, advising that immigration officers look into whether there were any situations of forced labour.
"Chinese labour," Minister in the Ministry of Labour Rudy Indarsingh chimed in.
Rambachan also read from media reports about human trafficking in Trinidad and wondered what the People's National Movement (PNM) did about it and why legislation was not brought to Parliament. He said the previous administration "always had an excuse" and downplayed the problem.
Point Fortin MP and former foreign affairs minister Paula Gopee-Scoon said the PNM government had ratified an international protocol on human trafficking, drafted legislation, set up a multi-agency task force and had authorities being trained by the International Organisation for Migration.
She said while Trinidad and Tobago was on the international Tier 2 Special Watch List in the June 2010 report for not having legislation to address human trafficking, it also noted that this country was making significant efforts.
Rambachan said the PNM had delayed for years to bring human trafficking legislation and it was this Government that implemented it in ten months. "Action was required and the People's Partnership is about action," he boasted.
He said the conservative estimate globally of human trafficking at any one time was 2.5 million, and profits from the illegal trade generated tens of billions of dollars. He said there were also reports that people were being trafficked into this country to serve as sex slaves or used as pay-offs for drug lords.
Rambachan described human trafficking was a "grievous sin" that should be wiped from the face of the earth. "Can you imagine... the pain, the agony, that a child who has been snatched would be suffering as a victim of human trafficking?" he asked.
Gopee-Scoon said she believed the bill was brought to Parliament because the results of the Human Trafficking in Persons Report 2011 are to be released by the US in June 2011. She said if the legislation was not brought, this country will be downgraded to Tier 3, which has "serious consequences", including reduced assistance grants.
She said the Opposition will support the legislation.
Nicole Phillips '99 (left) and Professor Dolores Donovan (right) in Haiti.
The University of San Francisco School of Law’s Center for Law and Global Justice is set to launch human rights courses focused on preventing child trafficking at several Haitian law schools.
The new program, “Students Speak Against Trafficking,” is supported by a $750,000 grant from U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
The law school is partnering with the State University of Haiti in Port-au-Prince to educate more than 1,000 law students. The Haitian law students, in turn, will educate thousands of secondary and primary students on the human rights violations inherent in human trafficking and mobilize them against the practice.
The goal, according to law Professor Dolores Donovan, director of the Center for Law and Global Justice who is overseeing the new program, is to create a human rights culture that opposes child trafficking and bring about legal reforms. “The grant contemplates advocacy for legal reform of Haiti's anti-trafficking laws,” Donovan said. “The major type of trafficking targeted is labor trafficking of children, which, in plain English, means the sale of children to work as domestic labor in the homes of Haiti’s upper classes.”
The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons estimates that there are 225,000 child trafficking victims in Haiti, with another 3,000 Haitian children trafficked into the Dominican Republic. Worldwide, experts estimate that 10-30 million people are held against their will as modern-day slaves.
Most Haitians don’t consider labor trafficking as criminal, Donovan said. “Almost no one in Haiti comprehends that this practice violates basic human rights, including the right not to be held in conditions of involuntary servitude.”
The devastating earthquake last year has exacerbated the problem. The number of children sold into servitude has soared, and gender-based violence is also on the rise. “As Haitians seek to escape the devastation wrought by the quake, they have become easy victims for those who profit from labor and sex trafficking,” Donovan said.
USF’s Students Speak project will focus initially on Port-au-Prince, which is the country’s major source, transit point, and destination for trafficked persons. In its second and third years, the project will expand throughout the country.
Donovan and others from USF are writing textbooks to be used in the program and will train both Haitian law professors and the Haitian law students how to teach interactively.
The project is an extension of the center’s ongoing work in Haiti. Last year, USF sent law students on a human rights mission to investigate conditions in Port-au-Prince displacement camps. Their work was complemented by research performed by USF students in the School of Law’s Haiti Virtual Internship. Students will return to Haiti this summer for additional human rights fieldwork as part of the law school’s “Haiti and the Rule of Law” course, which will be taught by Nicole Phillips, assistant director of Haiti programs for the Center for Law and Global Justice.
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By Megan Rivers-Moore
Latin America and the Caribbean are characterised by a long history of migration into, out of, and within the region. The Caribbean diaspora is surely one of the most significant in the world, marked by complex ties across nations and within families.
This is the case of those who would be included under the ‘free movement of skilled nationals’ provisions, as well as the working class and poor men, women, and children who move in search of survival and improved life chances. It is within this context of migration and diaspora that we must place discussions of trafficking, a much talked about but often poorly understood topic that is at the forefront of concerns about migration, labour, and sexuality.A key problem in so many discussions of trafficking was reproduced in an October 15th article in the Stabroek News, titled ‘Sex tourism growing in favoured destinations in Caribbean’, namely, that sex tourism and trafficking are conflated, as if they were one and the same.
The Organisation of American States (OAS) co-ordinator of the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Unit in the Department of Public Security, Fernando Garcia-Robles, reportedly noted that several tourist destination countries in the Caribbean have a growing sex tourism industry, and acknowledged “concerns that the Free Movement of Skilled Nationals in Caricom could result in increased human trafficking.”
Tourists travel to the Caribbean for many reasons, including in search of sexual experiences with local people, sometimes explicitly commercial, sometimes a much more ambiguous exchange of gifts, affection, and sex.
This complex phenomenon is made possible by a variety of factors, including tourism dependent economies, global inequalities of wealth and mobility, and problematic ideas about the race and sexuality of people in the Caribbean.
Sex tourism is not, however, the same as trafficking. Trafficking refers to the use of violence, coercion and exploitation to recruit and transport workers across borders to carry out various kinds of work.
Most crucially, trafficking does not just include sex work, but rather all kinds of labour, including domestic and agricultural, for example. Yet trafficking is often simplistically equated with commercial sex and sexual ‘slavery.’ The use of the term ‘slavery’ so loosely should give us pause, as it is a concept fraught with history and emotion, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America, where it calls to mind the brutalities of the middle passage, plantation economies, and the outright ownership of human beings.
In fact, the little reliable research that has been done suggests that trafficking more often resembles debt bondage, and unfair and exploitative contact labour. There is of course a long history of these kinds of labour practices in the Caribbean as well, but this is an important distinction in terms of how this work takes place within labour markets and their relationships to the global economy.
As last week’s article attests, men, women, boys and girls are all trafficked for many ends to, through, and from the Caribbean region and around the world. Significant numbers of women are indeed coerced into the sex industry, but the conditions of their lives are similar in many ways to the lives of other migrant women who struggle to get by in a world where racialized and gendered inequalities help to structure a lack of viable options and opportunities.
Because of the ways in which trafficking is often mistakenly assumed to mean sexual slavery across border, it is crucial to acknowledge that not all migrant sex workers are trafficking victims.
Sex work is often one of many strategies that women engage in for economic survival and advancement. Because few countries classify sex work as work, women tend to migrate in other immigration categories (for example, on tourist or domestic work visas) and then make their way into the sex industry. Others pay smugglers, often agreeing to or finding themselves in situations of debt bondage or indentureship.
One of the consequences of seeing migrant women who work in the sex industry as trafficking victims is that concerns about trafficking can be used for immigration control. By conflating trafficking with sexual slavery, women can be ‘saved’ by deporting them. This allows governments to appear benevolent, it deals with xenophobic fears about immigration, but it also conveniently ignores the massive violations of the human and labour rights of sex workers that take place with impunity throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. One wonders, then, about the wisdom of the OAS focusing on strengthening the capacity of law enforcement officials, immigration officers, judges, and prosecutors. The relationship between sex workers and police has been notoriously difficult in much of the world, and indeed, a great deal of the violence that sex workers face comes from the state. Because of their experiences with state violence, sex workers are not likely to report abuse from clients or management, and most importantly in terms of trafficking, sex workers’ are cautious about voicing their concerns about the use of force or coercion against migrants in the sex industry. This is especially the case when migrant sex workers face deportation upon discovery. These women are unlikely to testify against those who transport undocumented workers, as many trafficking victims who have been ‘saved’ go on to use these same networks in order to cross borders undetected once again.
We must pay attention to the broader conditions that make men, women and children vulnerable to smuggling, deception, and coercion in migrating, including the ever increasing demand for cheap, exploitable labour and the dire economic contexts that make precarious and dangerous choices for survival attractive or unavoidable. By defining sex work as a form of labour, alongside other kinds of labour like domestic and agricultural work in which workers potentially face unjust and unsafe working conditions, we can begin to explore ways of addressing these issues without resorting to fear mongering, alarmist and largely unsubstantiated claims about sexual slavery.
Sex Tourism and Trafficking: Not one and the same - Stabroek News - Guyana
A number of Caribbean countries which are favoured tourist destinations are now the centre of a growing sex tourism industry, an Organisation of American States security expert said yesterday, and he also warned about concerns that the Free Movement of Skilled Nationals in Caricom could result in increased human trafficking.
Fernando Garcia-Robles
According to the OAS Coordinator of the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Unit in the Department of Public Security, Fernando Garcia-Robles, a 2005 study done by the OAS and the International Organisation for Migration revealed that trans-border human trafficking exists in many Caribbean member states and many other countries interconnected with the region are also affected as source, transit or destination countries.
Garcia-Robles, who was at the time addressing a two- day workshop on human trafficking at the Regency Hotel yesterday, said that although mainly a source region, the Caribbean is also becoming a transit point for trafficked women and men en route to Europe, Asia and/or more economically developed countries in the Western Hemisphere.
“Studies in the region have revealed that every year men but particularly women and girls are recruited, transported, marketed and purchased by individual buyers, traffickers and members of the transnational organized crime syndicates, who operate within Caribbean countries with the main purpose of sexually exploiting them,” Garcia-Robles said.
He noted that although quantitative information is not always available from different regions, the Caribbean reflects several trends that might increase its vulnerability to human trafficking. He further pointed out that the Caribbean is a region of extensive migration, with a rate of movement in relation to population that may be one of the highest in the world.
“Three migration flows occur in the Caribbean; internal migration, intra-regional and outward migration. The most influential factors affecting these migration flows are socioeconomic inequalities, tourism, and human trafficking,” he said.
‘Strengthening Capacity of Law Enforcement officials, judges, and prosecutors in the Caribbean to identify and combat trafficking in persons, especially women and children,’ is the theme under which the workshop is being held. The participants are drawn from the police, forestry and mining and also include a number of other key stakeholders.
The two-day forum could be considered apt, since according to Garcia-Robles trafficking in persons is the fastest growing transnational criminal activity in the world, and the Caribbean region is not an exception. He said while the concept of human trafficking might still be new to some societies, the international community believes this criminal activity is present, through various forms of exploitation, in all regions of the world.
Enslaves
“This crime that enslaves millions of persons in the world every year targets for the purpose of labour and commercial sexual exploitation the most vulnerable populations,” he said.
It is estimated, he noted, that at least one million and quite possibly up to four million men, women, adolescents, boys and girls are victims of trafficking at the global level. To combat this rising crime, the OAS security expert said that it is necessary to go beyond the countries of origin, transit and destination, and it is also vital to address more than just the recruiters, transporters, exploiters, clients and beneficiaries. He said essentially it is a job which requires coordination at the inter-institutional and multi-dimensional levels, taking into account the prevention, prosecution of criminals, and the protection of victims.
To this end, he said justice operators, among others, law enforcement officials, immigration officers, judges and prosecutors play a decisive role and their coordinated efforts are paramount in making sure that when a potential victim of human trafficking is identified, the victim receives proper attention and the criminal investigation procedures are conducted in a professional and coordinated manner.
“To this end, basic interviewing guidelines are essential. In other words appropriate treatment and adequate response will determine the extent to which a victim may successfully begin recovery from the ordeal of the trafficking experience, but also will assist in any investigative procedures or other aspects of the judicial process, including acting as witness,” Garcia-Robles said.
The security expert also mentioned the cunning ways traffickers use to attract their prospective victims by convincing them to migrate voluntarily to economically developed countries with false promises and offerings of well-paid jobs such as waitresses, models, dancers, domestic workers, and nannies, among others. They advertise their fake work offers in local newspapers and marriage agencies.
In some cases they directly contact the victims and/or their families to offer the jobs abroad or in urban centres in the victims’ own countries. Frequently, the victims have to pay large sums of money for services issued by the traffickers and even their own maintenance once they arrive at the destination, making the exploitation never ending.
Meanwhile, Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee pointed out that trafficking in persons is a very lucrative industry as according to estimates by researchers it is now the fastest growing criminal industry in the world and globally it is tied with the illegal arms trade as the second largest illegal industry behind the drugs trade.
It is estimated that its annual income globally is between US$5B and US$9B.
Locally, the minister said, the administration has adopted a number of measures to combat trafficking in persons, including the development of an adequate legal framework to address the issue, the passage of the 2005 Trafficking In Persons Act, the creation of the ministerial task force which meets on a monthly basis to plan and monitor national responses, and the national action plan to combat trafficking in persons was revived, among other initiatives.
Police officers, prosecutors and immigration personnel have also been trained to identify trafficking victims and to prosecute while cross-border cooperation with Brazil and Suriname was implemented.
And Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Labour, Human Services & Social Security, Trevor Thomas said that while there has not been a large number of victims, as a ministry one victim is too many and as such any initiative to respond to trafficking in persons is one that is welcomed.
“We believe that if our response is vigorous and robust then we need to have an integrated and coordinated approach to human trafficking,” Thomas declared, adding that the workshop would help in strengthening the national response.
The participants yesterday were expected to look at the distinction between trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants, two different but interrelated criminal activities. They were also expected to briefly touch on the demand and gender sides and to look at the human rights dimension of trafficking and move to see the criminal investigation and crime scene. Today the emphasis will be on the victim’s identification and ethical interviewing and protection. Close attention will also be paid to child trafficking as a particularly vulnerable group in modern times.
Sex tourism growing in favoured destinations in Caribbean - Stabroek News - Guyana
