Child Labor, Debt Bondage Still Rife at Brick Kilns - The Cambodia Daily:
Showing posts with label Debt bondage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Debt bondage. Show all posts
Friday, December 30, 2016
Sunday, October 23, 2016
FEATURE-India's children of bonded labourers use memories to...
"They are not easy to spot. Working in vegetable patches and on millet fields in India's southern state of Karnataka, farm labourers caught in debt bondage suffer mainly in silence."
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FEATURE-India's children of bonded labourers use memories to...:
(Reporting by Anuradha Nagaraj, Editing by Jo Griffin and Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Building of new city in south India raises fears of debt ...
"CHENNAI, India, Sept 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The building of a new capital city in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh will fuel demand for migrant labour and put thousands of poor workers at the risk of debt bondage, campaigners said, demanding a "dignified work policy" for them."
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Building of new city in south India raises fears of debt ...:
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Building of new city in south India raises fears of debt ...:
(Reporting by Anuradha Nagaraj, Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Friday, October 25, 2013
IRIN Global | Anatomy of modern-day slavery | Global | Human Rights
Source: IRIN Global
NAIROBI, 18 October 2013 (IRIN) - More than two centuries after slavery was outlawed, 29.8 million people globally continue to be subjected to new and diverse forms of servitude, a new index ranking 162 countries shows.
Continue here:
http://www.irinnews.org/report/98964/anatomy-of-modern-day-slavery
NAIROBI, 18 October 2013 (IRIN) - More than two centuries after slavery was outlawed, 29.8 million people globally continue to be subjected to new and diverse forms of servitude, a new index ranking 162 countries shows.
Continue here:
http://www.irinnews.org/report/98964/anatomy-of-modern-day-slavery
UK food industry unites to tackle modern day slavery | 25 October 2013 | Stock Market Wire
Source: Stock Market Wire
StockMarketWire.com - Leading organisations and industry bodies within UK food production, retail and horticulture have joined forces to tackle the scourge of modern day slavery, human trafficking, forced labour and other hidden migrant worker exploitation.
See more at:
http://www.stockmarketwire.com/article/4693333/UK-food-industry-unites-to-tackle-modern-day-slavery.html#sthash.tnMhL9Y9.dpuf
Friday, May 10, 2013
Pranitha Timothy: Supporting Former Slave Laborers in Building New Lives
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pranitha-timothy/supporting-former-slave-l_b_3142396.html?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=World
Source: Huffington Post World
04/25/2013 9:39 am
Source: Huffington Post World
04/25/2013 9:39 am
Growing up, I didn't realize that the terrible legacy of forced labor slavery endured in my country. I did not know that countless children, women and men could not choose to leave their jobs because they were trapped in abusive systems of bondage. But once I learned the truth, I could not look away.
Now, I am proud to say that my fellow Indians are beginning to demand a different future for our country. We are supported by a global justice movement of advocates, activists and ordinary people from every continent who are coming together to say: Not in our day. And with the support of this global movement, we are actually seeing things change. Because I get to see this change firsthand, I want to share about it with you.
I am privileged to serve as a social worker on a team that supports local law enforcement to rescue bonded laborers. When I meet someone new and share my occupation, people often wonder what it is like to see a person come to freedom. They want to hear about the rescue operation. Their curiosity is understandable: It's a powerful thing to watch a child, man or woman walk free from the rice mill, factory or brick kiln where he or she was enslaved. I have seen more than 4,000 freed people from forced labor through my work with International Justice Mission, and witnessing the power of freedom in its rawest form just does not get old.
But for me, the most powerful thing to witness is not the steps out of the farm or factory, but the journey that follows. As a social worker, my role is not just to support the rescue operation, but to help these freed slaves build new lives. As they find new jobs, send their children to school and begin to dream about the future, a remarkable thing happens: Over and over, we see men and women discover that they are capable of not just living in freedom, but leading in freedom.
My colleagues and I provide a program for former slaves designed to help them overcome the trauma they have experienced, and to develop the skills and the stability that will help them build secure lives in freedom. After we have worked with them for two years, the group of former forced laborers nominates and elects men and women to serve as their community leaders in the future. This is transformation! Men and women who have been told in word and deed that they are valueless -- mere chattel -- become community leaders. During a recent training for a group of these leaders, we challenged the participants to reflect on their lives in bondage contrasted with their current lives in freedom. One remarkably resilient woman, Garima, stood up and shared: "I wanted to use the image of a butterfly to depict how I am free today. When I was inside the facility, I was a slave and had no hope to spend time with my family or send my children to school. But now, I am able to do all of that. My dream is to have a house and to live happily with my family. [Despite our past suffering], we are focusing on our freedom." While their experiences have varied, each of the leaders we have trained has taken up his or her new role with the same humility and solemn resolve.
Stories of rescue are powerful. But to me, the most powerful stories are about lives that have been completely transformed in freedom -- stories like Garima's. Modern-day slavery is a terrible evil. But the truth is that change is possible. Women like Garima will tell you so. Let's seek to have her courage as we come alongside her to end it once and for all.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Shrimp exports to West tied to bonded labor
Shrimp exports to West tied to bonded labor:
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In the third chapter of my new book on bonded labour, I explore the shrimp industry of Bangladesh. Chingri (shrimp) harvesting provides a highly illustrative case study of the very powerful ways in which environmental change can directly contribute to human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labor exploitation, especially in the far reaches of the developing world.
To research the shrimp industry of Bangladesh requires a journey to the cyclone-wracked southwestern reaches of the country.
Here, one finds four stages to Bangladesh’s shrimp industry supply chain: 1 shrimp fry (baby shrimp) collection, shrimp farming, the distribution to processors, and shrimp processing. Each one of these stages is tainted by some form of severe labor exploitation.
Bangladesh’s shrimp industry is relatively new, and the recent shift from traditional agriculture to shrimp aquaculture in southwestern Bangladesh is primarily a result of climate change.
Beginning in the 1990s, farmers began to notice more and more saline shrimp in their irrigation channels, primarily due to rising sea levels.
Bangladesh is within close proximity of several multi-billion-dollar shrimp exporting nations such as Thailand, India, and Vietnam, so landowners quickly did the math and realized that low-intensity saline shrimp would generate far more profit than rice or potatoes ever would.
They rapidly transformed the area from freshwater agriculture to saline aquaculture. Now there are more than 170,000 hectares of saline shrimp farms (ghers) along the southwestern coast of Bangladesh (and more than 400,000 hectares of freshwater ghers further north). Nothing else can grow here, and no animals can graze.
“Our children have no vegetables to eat, no fresh water, and no milk,” a shrimp farmer named Aziz told me. “It is terrible here, but we have no choice. We are lucky to have this gher; otherwise what would we do?”
Aziz was a former agricultural bonded laborer who managed to transition to bonded labor for shrimp farming.
Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forcibly displaced by the shrimp farms, because shrimp harvesting requires vastly fewer people than agricultural crops. Many of these peasants were trafficked to India and Southeast Asia for labor exploitation.
Those that remain eke out a destitute existence of bondage.
Children are also heavily exploited by the shrimp sector of Bangladesh. Thousands of children wade into the muddy, parasite-infested rivers near the Sundarban mangrove forests to catch baby shrimp in small blue nets.
As one of these children named Mohammed explained: “None of us are in school. I wish I could be in school, but I must do this work or else we cannot earn enough money…This entire area is for shrimp farming, so there is no other work for us.”
Once caught, the baby shrimp spend three to four months growing into full-grown shrimp in farms like Aziz’s, after which they are distributed to processors who de-scale, de-vein, and/or behead them before freezing them for export.
Almost all shrimp exports from Bangladesh are bound for the U.S., the EU, and Japan. This processor stage is rumored to be replete with forced labor, but I had little success in accessing the plants as I was angrily turned away at gunpoint from all of them except one.
By my calculation, roughly one out of every 57 shrimp consumed around the world are tainted by forced labor, bonded labor, or child labor from Bangladesh alone.
As the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately two kilograms of shrimp per year, this means that each American eats roughly one to three pieces of tainted shrimp each year, just from Bangladesh.
While a low cost of production in countries like Bangladesh has helped shrimp become the top seafood commodity in the world, it is vital to remember that as with so many other commodities sourced from the developing world, this same low cost of production is a direct function of immeasurable human exploitation and environmental harm.
Read more about bonded labor in Asia.
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In the third chapter of my new book on bonded labour, I explore the shrimp industry of Bangladesh. Chingri (shrimp) harvesting provides a highly illustrative case study of the very powerful ways in which environmental change can directly contribute to human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labor exploitation, especially in the far reaches of the developing world.
To research the shrimp industry of Bangladesh requires a journey to the cyclone-wracked southwestern reaches of the country.
Here, one finds four stages to Bangladesh’s shrimp industry supply chain: 1 shrimp fry (baby shrimp) collection, shrimp farming, the distribution to processors, and shrimp processing. Each one of these stages is tainted by some form of severe labor exploitation.
Bangladesh’s shrimp industry is relatively new, and the recent shift from traditional agriculture to shrimp aquaculture in southwestern Bangladesh is primarily a result of climate change.
Beginning in the 1990s, farmers began to notice more and more saline shrimp in their irrigation channels, primarily due to rising sea levels.
Bangladesh is within close proximity of several multi-billion-dollar shrimp exporting nations such as Thailand, India, and Vietnam, so landowners quickly did the math and realized that low-intensity saline shrimp would generate far more profit than rice or potatoes ever would.
They rapidly transformed the area from freshwater agriculture to saline aquaculture. Now there are more than 170,000 hectares of saline shrimp farms (ghers) along the southwestern coast of Bangladesh (and more than 400,000 hectares of freshwater ghers further north). Nothing else can grow here, and no animals can graze.
“Our children have no vegetables to eat, no fresh water, and no milk,” a shrimp farmer named Aziz told me. “It is terrible here, but we have no choice. We are lucky to have this gher; otherwise what would we do?”
Aziz was a former agricultural bonded laborer who managed to transition to bonded labor for shrimp farming.
Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forcibly displaced by the shrimp farms, because shrimp harvesting requires vastly fewer people than agricultural crops. Many of these peasants were trafficked to India and Southeast Asia for labor exploitation.
Those that remain eke out a destitute existence of bondage.
Children are also heavily exploited by the shrimp sector of Bangladesh. Thousands of children wade into the muddy, parasite-infested rivers near the Sundarban mangrove forests to catch baby shrimp in small blue nets.
As one of these children named Mohammed explained: “None of us are in school. I wish I could be in school, but I must do this work or else we cannot earn enough money…This entire area is for shrimp farming, so there is no other work for us.”
Once caught, the baby shrimp spend three to four months growing into full-grown shrimp in farms like Aziz’s, after which they are distributed to processors who de-scale, de-vein, and/or behead them before freezing them for export.
Almost all shrimp exports from Bangladesh are bound for the U.S., the EU, and Japan. This processor stage is rumored to be replete with forced labor, but I had little success in accessing the plants as I was angrily turned away at gunpoint from all of them except one.
By my calculation, roughly one out of every 57 shrimp consumed around the world are tainted by forced labor, bonded labor, or child labor from Bangladesh alone.
As the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately two kilograms of shrimp per year, this means that each American eats roughly one to three pieces of tainted shrimp each year, just from Bangladesh.
While a low cost of production in countries like Bangladesh has helped shrimp become the top seafood commodity in the world, it is vital to remember that as with so many other commodities sourced from the developing world, this same low cost of production is a direct function of immeasurable human exploitation and environmental harm.
Read more about bonded labor in Asia.
Bonded labor stretches from third to first world
Bonded labor stretches from third to first world:
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In September 2010, I met a young girl named Nirmala in the remote western Terai region of Nepal. Nirmala is one of the thousands of internally trafficked domestic slaves in Nepal, called kamlari, who belong to the outcast Tharu ethnic group.
Agents recruit Tharu girls as young as eight to work as servants in upper-caste homes. Aside from room and board, the children receive little to no payment for up to 10 years of work. Kamlari girls often suffer extreme abuse and maltreatment.
“I did all the work,” Nirmala explained, “cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, washing dishes. I woke each morning at 5 a.m. and went to sleep at 10 p.m. I slept on the floor…I did this work seven days a week. Sometimes the wife would beat me. The husband in the home would rape me. I did not want to be in that home.”
Nirmala’s situation is representative of a typical South Asian debt bondage arrangement: food and shelter as credit in exchange for slave-like labor exploitation.
The upper classes of Nepal see this arrangement as completely justified because the alternative for a low-caste girl such as Nirmala would be worse: destitution in her village or trafficking to India for forced prostitution.
My new book, “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia” provides the first comprehensive overview of the unconscionable system of bonded labor in South Asia.
In a series of articles for the CNN Freedom Project, I will describe the system in more detail and outline how we can best tackle this brutish mode of servile labor exploitation.
The issue of bonded labor may receive marginal attention globally, but bonded labor is the most extensive form of slavery in the world today.
There were approximately 18 to 20.5 million bonded laborers in the world at the end of 2011, almost 90% of whom were in South Asia.
This means that approximately half of the slaves in the world are bonded laborers in South Asia.
More importantly, the products made by bonded laborers touch almost every aspect of the global economy, including frozen shrimp and fish, tea, coffee, rice, wheat, diamonds, cubic zirconia, glassware, hand-woven carpets, limestone, salt, cigarettes, apparel, fireworks, sporting goods, and many more products.
Virtually everyone’s life, everywhere in the world, is touched by bonded labor in South Asia.
Bonded labor basically involves the exploitative interlinking of labor and credit agreements between parties.
On one side, a party possessing an abundance of capital and power provides credit, food, or tenancy to the other party, who, because he lacks almost any assets or capital, pledges his labor to work off the loan.
Given the vast power imbalances between the parties, the laborer is often severely exploited. Bonded labor occurs when the exploitation descends to the level of slave-like abuse.
The borrower is often forced to work at pathetic wage levels to repay the debt. Exorbitant interest rates are charged (up to 20 percent per month), and money lent for future needs is added to the debt.
Sometimes these debts last a few years, and sometimes they are passed on to future generations if the original borrower perishes without having repaid the debt.
Centuries ago, debt bondage existed across the world from the American South to Medieval Europe to Tokugawa Japan. Social revolution and transition to market economies largely dissolved the system throughout the world, except for South Asia.
There, the system persists due to a highly pernicious cocktail of forces, including immense poverty, acute caste and gender discrimination, social apathy, corruption, and a global economy that scours the globe for the lowest cost of production possible.
The desperation of the bonded laborers I met across South Asia is acute.
Anguish to be rid of these debts leads to desperate measures, including the sale of kidneys, the sale of children to human traffickers, or suicide.
For the sake of the millions of outcast and destitute debt bondage slaves in South Asia like Nirmala, the need to eradicate this feudal system of slave-like exploitation could not be greater.
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In September 2010, I met a young girl named Nirmala in the remote western Terai region of Nepal. Nirmala is one of the thousands of internally trafficked domestic slaves in Nepal, called kamlari, who belong to the outcast Tharu ethnic group.
Agents recruit Tharu girls as young as eight to work as servants in upper-caste homes. Aside from room and board, the children receive little to no payment for up to 10 years of work. Kamlari girls often suffer extreme abuse and maltreatment.
“I did all the work,” Nirmala explained, “cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, washing dishes. I woke each morning at 5 a.m. and went to sleep at 10 p.m. I slept on the floor…I did this work seven days a week. Sometimes the wife would beat me. The husband in the home would rape me. I did not want to be in that home.”
Nirmala’s situation is representative of a typical South Asian debt bondage arrangement: food and shelter as credit in exchange for slave-like labor exploitation.
The upper classes of Nepal see this arrangement as completely justified because the alternative for a low-caste girl such as Nirmala would be worse: destitution in her village or trafficking to India for forced prostitution.
My new book, “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia” provides the first comprehensive overview of the unconscionable system of bonded labor in South Asia.
In a series of articles for the CNN Freedom Project, I will describe the system in more detail and outline how we can best tackle this brutish mode of servile labor exploitation.
The issue of bonded labor may receive marginal attention globally, but bonded labor is the most extensive form of slavery in the world today.
There were approximately 18 to 20.5 million bonded laborers in the world at the end of 2011, almost 90% of whom were in South Asia.
This means that approximately half of the slaves in the world are bonded laborers in South Asia.
More importantly, the products made by bonded laborers touch almost every aspect of the global economy, including frozen shrimp and fish, tea, coffee, rice, wheat, diamonds, cubic zirconia, glassware, hand-woven carpets, limestone, salt, cigarettes, apparel, fireworks, sporting goods, and many more products.
Virtually everyone’s life, everywhere in the world, is touched by bonded labor in South Asia.
Bonded labor basically involves the exploitative interlinking of labor and credit agreements between parties.
On one side, a party possessing an abundance of capital and power provides credit, food, or tenancy to the other party, who, because he lacks almost any assets or capital, pledges his labor to work off the loan.
Given the vast power imbalances between the parties, the laborer is often severely exploited. Bonded labor occurs when the exploitation descends to the level of slave-like abuse.
The borrower is often forced to work at pathetic wage levels to repay the debt. Exorbitant interest rates are charged (up to 20 percent per month), and money lent for future needs is added to the debt.
Sometimes these debts last a few years, and sometimes they are passed on to future generations if the original borrower perishes without having repaid the debt.
Centuries ago, debt bondage existed across the world from the American South to Medieval Europe to Tokugawa Japan. Social revolution and transition to market economies largely dissolved the system throughout the world, except for South Asia.
There, the system persists due to a highly pernicious cocktail of forces, including immense poverty, acute caste and gender discrimination, social apathy, corruption, and a global economy that scours the globe for the lowest cost of production possible.
The desperation of the bonded laborers I met across South Asia is acute.
Anguish to be rid of these debts leads to desperate measures, including the sale of kidneys, the sale of children to human traffickers, or suicide.
For the sake of the millions of outcast and destitute debt bondage slaves in South Asia like Nirmala, the need to eradicate this feudal system of slave-like exploitation could not be greater.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Sex trafficking is America's cause célèbre. But does it miss the point? | Alaska Dispatch
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/does-us-fight-against-sex-trafficking-miss-point |
Alaska Dispatch
Stephanie Hanes | The Christian Science Monitor | Sep 10, 2012
Alaska Dispatch
Stephanie Hanes | The Christian Science Monitor | Sep 10, 2012
During a diplomatic visit to Calcutta, India, in May, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stopped at a shelter for young women and girls. It was not an ordinary shelter, but one with a specific mission – a mission Ms. Clinton wanted reporters to broadcast to Americans back home.
It was a shelter established to help victims of human trafficking, an international crime that Clinton and other international players have called one of the world's largest and most pressing human rights concerns. It was also, primarily, helping girls who'd been trafficked for sex.
This is a key cause for Clinton. In recent years, she and other international figures – from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to British Prime Minister David Cameron – have raised the alarm about human trafficking, a practice involving forced labor, from mining to domestic work to prostitution.
"These victims of modern slavery ... their stories remind us of what kind of inhumane treatment we are still capable of as human beings,"
Clinton said in June upon the release of the annual State Department report on global human trafficking. "Traffickers prey on the hopes and dreams of those seeking a better life, and our goal should be to put those hopes and dreams back within reach."
Moreover, Clinton and others have said regularly, human trafficking is also an American problem. It doesn't just take place in the sweatshops of impoverished Indian villages or in Thai brothels, but on US streets from San Francisco to New York. The federal government has estimated the number of domestic trafficking victims to be in the tens of thousands annually. Victims range from Southeast Asian indentured nail salon manicurists to Mexican agricultural workers to underage American prostitutes.
Many advocates say this last group, made up of American girls – and a relatively small number of boys – victimized in America, is the primary trafficking problem in the United States. "Sex trafficking," as this particular strain of human trafficking is called, has become a national human rights crisis, they say, and deserves a huge public outcry.
Indeed, domestic sex trafficking has become a high-profile cause. Celebrities from Jada Pinkett Smith and Salma Hayek to former couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore have picked up the bullhorn of the anti-trafficking movement, with a focus on sex trafficking.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's crusade last spring against domestic sex trafficking and the online marketer Backpage.com, which he accused of helping sell underage girls into sex slavery, prompted a widespread movement against the website and its owner, Village Voice Media. Many advertisers in Village Voice Media – including Starbucks, AT&T, and Best Buy – cut ties with the company.
There have been local benefit concerts against sex trafficking and, recently, even a Tennessee church rodeo to raise awareness about the issue.
Federal prosecutors have also increased their efforts against human trafficking – with a primary focus on sex trafficking. The Department of Justice prosecuted only two human trafficking cases in 1998; in 2011 it charged 120 defendants with human-trafficking crimes. The bulk of cases were related to sex trafficking.
"For years, whenever we talked about sex trafficking in America the reaction was surprise," says Andrea Powell, executive director and cofounder of FAIR Girls, an anti-trafficking organization based in Washington, D.C. "The perception was that it happened to girls in foreign countries.... We've seen the beginning of a shift in the attitudes in the US, and that has to do with public awareness."
On one level, the new and growing focus on domestic human trafficking seems straightforward. Clearly, enslavement of individuals, and sexual exploitation of children, is cause for concern. But when the international issue becomes a domestic one, and when forced labor starts to involve sex, there also comes an emotional debate about where the real problem ends and where hype and sensationalism begin.
As with anything that involves the letters S, E, and X, academics, advocates, and the general public are emotional and divided. Dig beneath the surface of the anti-sex-trafficking movement and there are ambiguities and confusions and facts and fictions.
Are all prostitutes really sex-trafficking victims? Does Internet porn or sex tourism encourage trafficking? Are underage prostitutes always exploited by pimps?
Rather than being a black-and-white, good-and-bad issue, trafficking touches on some of the most uncomfortable and conflicted areas of American public discourse. The resulting debate is about sex and abuse and human rights, for sure. But it's also about prostitution and attitudes toward commercial sex overall. It is a conversation about the sexualization of teens and social responsibility for troubled youth, even the tenuous relationship with cheap labor.
Understanding these interrelated issues, say many who have long worked against human trafficking in all its forms, is necessary for coming up with the most effective solutions. They contend that celebrity videos and sloganeering – even from the highest-ranking policymakers – oversimplify the problem.
Responding to reality or hype?
One of the most public campaigns against domestic trafficking was launched last year by the philanthropic foundation of Ms. Moore and Mr. Kutcher. It was called "Real Men Don't Buy Girls," and used a campy, interactive video format that enlisted other celebrities, such as Justin Timberlake and Eva Longoria, to raise awareness about "child sex slavery in the US."
Moore and Kutcher gave interviews, made T-shirts, and rallied the Twitterverse to the cause. One of the most troubling statistics they shared was that there are 100,000 to 300,000 sex slaves in the US – figures repeated by interviewers, blogs, TV hosts and other movie stars.
The problem: The statistics are wrong.
Those figures came from a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study ("The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico") that estimated that there might be 100,000 to 300,000 children at risk of becoming trafficked prostitutes because of an array of negative circumstances, from homelessness to drug addiction. The number of actual sex-trafficking victims has been estimated by the US government to be in the tens of thousands, but even those numbers have been criticized as unfounded and far too high; between 2008 and 2010, federally funded human-trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation. Among those cases, only 248 suspected sex-trafficking victims under the age of 18 were identified.
Anti-trafficking advocates acknowledge the goof but say the celebrities' point is still accurate: Far too many young girls are sold for sex in the US. The Department of Justice numbers, they say, reflect a fraction of the real victims.
But the misstep, say critics, is a prime example of the problem with how American activists have started to tackle the real problem of trafficking. Hype over such high and inaccurate numbers of "child sex slaves" leads to a misguided response at best, they say. At worst, it siphons financial resources away from preventing other sorts of human trafficking. These critics worry that the growing – alarmist – focus on sex trafficking in America, bolstered by this sort of sensationalism, undermines solutions to problems, such as poverty and homelessness, that lead to exploited youth in the first place.
One such critic – Ann Jordan, director of the program on trafficking and forced labor at American University's law school in Washington, D.C. – has watched the US anti-sex-trafficking campaign with dismay.
A longtime advocate against human rights violations associated with various types of forced labor globally – such as indentured servitude, debt bondage, and slavery – Ms. Jordan says the anti-domestic-sex-trafficking movement "just took off and created its own industry," in part because it touched upon a conservative social nerve.
"Everybody wants to save the virgins, right?" she states. The hype, she says, ends up sidelining other concerns – such as the broader categories of human trafficking or even forced labor, which do not have to involve sex. "You need to tailor your response to the reality. You should not tailor your response to the hype."
What exactly is 'sex trafficking'?
When nonprofits and celebrities and even sex-worker advocates throw around the term "sex trafficking," what do they mean?
Some are referring to girls and women who are enslaved, transported from country to country, and forced to work in brothels. Others mean girls who are essentially kidnapped, shuttled from motel to motel, sold for sex and subject to violence from pimps and johns.
But federal law defines sex trafficking broadly to include all children involved in prostitution with a pimp. Some even interpret the law as covering all minors involved in prostitution at all. This includes girls who seek out a pimp for work, who are engaged in prostitution in their hometowns, whose families know about their prostitution, and even those who turn down opportunities to leave their "traffickers." In some ways, sex-trafficking laws are similar to statutory rape laws – the government has determined that a minor simply cannot consent to being involved in this sort of commercial sex.
The law upon which much of the US anti-trafficking work is based, and to which many advocates trace the start of the domestic anti-trafficking movement, is the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000. The UN adopted its own anti-trafficking protocol the same year.
At first, the US law focused primarily on problems abroad. This made sense, according to those who worked on the legislation. The international numbers for human-trafficking victims were – and are – high: The UN has estimated human trafficking to be a $32 billion global industry; in 2008 it estimated that 2.5 million people from 127 countries were trafficked – 79 percent for sex, the rest for other forms of labor, from farm work to sweatshops. Many are children.
(These numbers vary tremendously from agency to agency and year to year; they are also far lower than the 21 million to 27 million global trafficking victims reported by the US State Department and, recently, the International Labor Organization. The discrepancy depends on whether "trafficked" involves all forms of forced labor or a subset of situations, usually in which a person is actually moved from place to place. Some UN groups say that it is impossible to calculate an accurate number of victims.)
The US law required the State Department to include an analysis of trafficking in its annual country human rights reports and ordered the US Agency for International Development to put together programs to combat trafficking abroad. The law also established a new form of visa for trafficking victims as a way to encourage them to cooperate with law enforcement without fear of deportation.
But the federal law also gave a new definition of sex trafficking: "the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age." The law states that coercion includes threats of physical or psychological harm to children, and that any person under age 18 induced to participate in commercial sex is a sex-trafficking victim.
The all-encompassing definition of victimhood, say social workers and advocates, is important because it doesn't matter how or why young women first begin "working" in prostitution. Often, girls who end up in prostitution are already vulnerable – they are abuse victims, come from unstable homes, have run away, or suffer mental impairments. Others are simply naive, susceptible to manipulation of a pimp, who often pretends at first to be a boyfriend.
"Pimps are professional exploiters," says Ms. Powell of FAIR Girls. "They know how to find their product, i.e., a young girl, and they know how to sell [her]. And girls are very easily lured if they are at risk. They're looking for love and attention and pimps know that."
Once girls have started working with a pimp, advocates say, they often feel trapped. They can be beaten, raped, or threatened with violence if they try to leave; they can simply feel they have nowhere else to go. But never, advocates say, are they wanting to be sold for sex to dozens of clients a night.
"A lot of people are calling sex trafficking 'modern-day slavery,' " says Megan Fowler, director of communications for the Polaris Project, a US anti-trafficking organization that runs the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hot line. "But it's not that physical chained-in-the-basement coercion. It's psychological coercion."
A case in point is the federal prosecution of Jose Ciro Juarez-Santamaria, a Salvadoran MS-13 gang leader in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., who became the pimp of a 12-year-old runaway. She had sought him out at a Halloween party for help.
He told her to see him the next day, and he began taking her to "customers." For the next three months, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Juarez-Santamaria plied the girl with alcohol and marijuana, sold her for sex multiple times a day, and offered her to other gang members for sex, free of charge. He also had sex with her himself.
During his trial in July 2011, Juarez-Santamaria offered the defense that the girl knew what she was doing – that she wanted to work as a prostitute for the money. Indeed, when US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers entered the Oxon Hill, Md., apartment where the girl was staying with Juarez-Santamaria, she denied she'd been prostituted; and when agents took her to a shelter, she quickly ran away and back to Juarez-Santamaria.
But, of course, "as a legal matter, the law does not recognize the defense that [an underage girl] did this willingly," says Neil MacBride, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia whose office prosecuted Juarez-Santamaria and has brought 16 human-trafficking cases over the past year or so. "And when you look at the facts of these cases, no reasonable juror would conclude that these girls were doing it willingly and voluntarily. They were lured in with promises."
The jury agreed and convicted Juarez-Santamaria of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of a child, transportation of a minor to engage in prostitution, and sex trafficking of a child.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
A former prostitute's perspective
But here is where the concept of sex trafficking gets more controversial: If psychological coercion is at the root of the "slavery" aspect of sex trafficking, then it is only logical, many advocates say, to apply the "trafficking" label to adult prostitution, as well.
A number of studies put the average age of entry into prostitution in the teenage years; 13 is a regularly repeated – though disputed – age. Many researchers also estimate that between 60 to 70 percent of prostituted women were sexually abused as children. And while studies about this are both few and hotly contested, a high percentage of prostituted women in many research projects say they're unable to change their situations. Even policymakers and academics who argue that adult prostitution is a choice acknowledge that many women in the commercial sex industry suffer regular violence from pimps, johns, and others.
"Ultimately, pimp-controlled prostitution is trafficking," Ms. Fowler says.
This is what an activist who goes by the name of Stella Marr believes. Ms. Marr was 20 years old when she first entered, as people involved call it, "the life." Today she helps run a group called Survivors Connect, which encourages sex-trafficking survivors to take a leading voice in the anti-trafficking campaign, and writes a blog at "My Body The City: The Secret Life of a Manhattan Call Girl."
Although Marr says her profile was somewhat atypical, the way she entered prostitution was not. Impoverished and trying to find a place to live and work in New York City, she was disowned by her troubled family, who pulled her out of Barnard College. She found herself on the streets, sleeping in apartment and academic building lounges. She was so broke, she said, she would walk from 120th Street down to Midtown to save subway fare.
And pimps, she says, noticed: "I was a sitting duck."
One day a man came up to her and told her that one of his friends needed a roommate, and that another friend owned a restaurant and could get her a job there.
It was a ruse. The friendly man soon turned violent, Marr recalls. And eventually he told her she could not leave. For the next decade she worked as a call girl, living in an apartment-turned-brothel. But even when she moved into her own apartment, she didn't dare leave the business. Her pimps told her that she would suffer if she tried to escape. Having been beaten up regularly, and having witnessed violence against other prostitutes, she believed them.
Now, she says, living in the suburbs, with a husband and a dog, she realizes that her traffickers weren't, in fact, omniscient. But at the time it was impossible to find rationality through the trauma, she says. And she understands why others don't leave.
"It's Stockholm syndrome, traumatic bonding," she says. "You bond with people who are hurting you, to survive. Most women in prostitution have no other place to go. They don't have a safety net…. And after a while, it seems like it's the only thing you're good for.
"Anyone who has been in prostitution doesn't really see a distinction between trafficking and prostitution," she says. "In my lifetime – I'm in my 40s – I want there to be a time when a woman can say 'I was domestically trafficked' and it will be like saying 'I had breast cancer.' "
Evolution of the term 'trafficking'
Stories such as Marr's help improve the understanding of trafficking and the commercial sex industry, says Danielle Palmer of the Child Rescue Association of North America, a group that works to eliminate child trafficking in the US and Canada, with a focus on sex trafficking.
"A big part of the problem is that we've viewed women in a sexually exploitative way for so long," she says, adding that her organization hopes to mold a generation of young people who will understand that commercial sex is far from victimless.
But this is a highly contested point. Many groups that serve sex workers say that for many, prostitution is a choice, and that lumping the commercial sex industry with sex trafficking is inaccurate and adds to the hype.
It is such a contested issue that several academics with expertise on prostitution contacted for this article declined to speak with the Monitor, pointedly saying their studies are about sex work, not trafficking.
"To throw the net and label all prostitution as trafficking is too broad," says Sienna Baskin, codirector of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, a group that provides services to commercial sex workers – those who have been trafficked as well as those who say they were not manipulated into prostitution. "It doesn't recognize that people have a really wide array of experiences in commercial sex; it also means that you're trying to put the same solution on a bunch of different problems."
Equating commercial sex with trafficking, says Ms. Jordan, the American University law professor, is the most recent in a series of morally based antiprostitution campaigns in the past century and a half, starting with a campaign by educated British women during the 1800s protesting white prostitutes following men to the colonies. "The middle-class and upper-class women didn't like it," she says. "They called it the 'white slave trade.' "
More recently, she says, was a 1980s feminist effort to label pornography and prostitution as trafficking: "They were talking about prostitution and nobody was paying any attention. Then there were all these women flooding out of Eastern Europe, China opened up, women were migrating and ending up in debt bondage situations. They would escape, run away, and end up at women's organizations asking for help. People started calling it trafficking, and ... antiprostitution campaigns adopted the term."
Sometimes the portrayal of sex slavery was accurate, Jordan says, sometimes it wasn't. But the term stuck, and got even more attention under the George W. Bush administration.
The semantic fine lines, say advocates such as Marr, miss the point. If it weren't for the growing awareness of domestic sex trafficking within the US – if not for the Ashton Kutchers and Nicholas Kristofs and the many organizations explaining the background behind young girls on street corners – Marr says that she'd still feel ashamed, and hundreds of young women wouldn't feel they deserve to seek help.
Without "this new recognition of sex trafficking, I don't know if I'd have the courage to be speaking to you today," she says.
Funding at stake
But equating prostitution with sex trafficking isn't the only trouble with the domestic anti-sex-trafficking movement, critics say.
The focus on domestic underage prostitution diverts attention – and funding – from equally exploitative, but less sensational, forms of forced labor and slavery. These forms of human trafficking can just as easily happen in the US as elsewhere – an immigrant housekeeper without a passport whose employers force her to work, for instance, or an illegal immigrant smuggled into the country to work in a nail salon or on a farm and who is neither paid nor allowed to leave. Although estimates for these sorts of victims in the US are also in the many thousands, federal anti-trafficking task forces opened investigations into cases involving only 63 suspected victims between 2008 and 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"I think information is good," says Bridgette Carr, who directs the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. "But I worry ... that sound bites are harmful. They don't portray everything. If we're only talking about sex trafficking of children, we're not talking about the adults. If we're talking about sex trafficking, we're not talking about forced labor."
She tries to use the attention on sex trafficking as a way to educate people about the wider array of human-trafficking crimes, but she recognizes that there is a long way to go.
Although the number of US human-trafficking prosecutions has increased, the majority of those cases are focused on underage sex trafficking. Only 1 in 10 incidents of suspected human trafficking is labor trafficking, according to the Department of Justice Bureau of Labor Statistics. And some critics have claimed that too few of the new visas designed as an incentive to get human-trafficking victims to work with law enforcement have been issued. The State Department reported that these "T visas" were granted to 557 victims in fiscal year 2011.
And funding is diverted, too. The US State Department distributed tens of millions of dollars to support nonprofits working with domestic sex-trafficking victims, but the federal government in 2010 suspended a federal program to reunify human-trafficking victims with their families abroad. And while there has been an increase in private and government funds to help sex-trafficking victims, advocacy groups say prevention gets short shrift: Children most at risk of becoming trafficked – runaways and homeless – have difficulty getting help.
"Another issue throwing trafficking protections off balance is the [US] policy which focuses government trafficking efforts on eradicating prostitution, which it conflates with sex trafficking," said the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, a humanitarian group associated with the International Rescue Committee, in the 2007 report "The U.S. Response to Human Trafficking: An Unbalanced Approach." "Efforts at addressing contributing factors to trafficking are laudable but should not be pursued to the exclusion of other efforts. There is a need for immigration and labor reform that would yield dramatic results in protections for trafficked and exploited persons in the informal economy."
For Mr. MacBride, the prosecutor of the Virginia gang leader, though, the debate of which sort of harm is worse, and which deserves more attention, is beside the point. He sees both forms of trafficking as law enforcement priorities. "All crime is bad, but I think [human trafficking] is particularly heinous, with traumatic implications for victims."
Not all law enforcement officials have taken the same position. There has been a shift to federal prosecution of sex trafficking – with a focus on pimps as the main criminals rather than prostitutes or even johns. But many local law enforcement vice squads still approach commercial sex crimes with the long-standard approach of raids and sweeps, where everyone involved is arrested as a criminal.
Advocates say substantial changes in the way underage prostitutes are treated in the US – whether they're called trafficking victims or not – will take more than celebrity campaigns. It will require getting closer to the source problems of poverty, vulnerability, and demand, and will require changing attitudes and behaviors.
"A lot of people are talking about it, and some states are passing good laws," Ms. Carr says. "But it's going to take more than that to overcome decades of criminalizing prostitutes. We're not seeing fundamental shifts in the way people who are being sold for sex are treated."
Saturday, February 4, 2012
The Role of the Nurse in Combating Human Trafficking : AJN The American Journal of Nursing
http://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Fulltext/2011/02000/The_Role_of_the_Nurse_in_Combating_Human.25.aspx
Click on URL to go to the full article
AJN, American Journal of Nursing:
February 2011 - Volume 111 - Issue 2 - pp 28-37
doi: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000394289.55577.b6
Feature Articles
Sabella, Donna PhD, RN
Author Information
Donna Sabella is an assistant clinical professor in the College of Nursing and Health Professions at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She is the founder and director of Project Phoenix, an organization serving prostituted and trafficked women in the Philadelphia area, as well as director of education for the National Research Consortium on Commercial Sexual Exploitation. Contact author: ds842@drexel.edu or projectphoenix_inc@hotmail.com. The author of this article has no significant ties, financial or otherwise, to any company that might have an interest in the publication of this educational activity.
Abstract
Overview: Human trafficking, also called modern slavery, happens worldwide—and the United States is no exception. Within our borders, thousands of foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, many of them children, are forced or coerced into sex work or various forms of labor every year. Nurses and other health care providers who encounter victims of trafficking often don't realize it, and opportunities to intervene are lost. Although no one sign can demonstrate with certainty when someone is being trafficked, there are several indicators that clinicians should know. This article provides an overview of human trafficking, describes how to recognize signs that a person is being trafficked and how to safely intervene, and offers an extensive resource list.
Monday, August 22, 2011
The modern day slaves GreaterKashmir.com
Entire families working at brick kilns are trapped in debts that they can never pay off
SALMAN NIZAMI
The man and his four sons squatting in the dirt, mechanically kneading mud, and making line after line of dull gray bricks. It all is done under the vigilant gaze of the boss. “See, there’s a sad story,” the boss said as he pointed to the eldest son, 18. “The young man had twice escaped, but when his father needed another loan from the owner, he forced him to bring his son back.” His father came to me asking to borrow more money. I told him: ‘No. You must bring your son back here. Or else return the money you owe me and leave the house I have provided you.” The young boy listened impassively to the tale of his unhappy return to the Pulwama District of Kashmir province. “I was 7 years old when I started this work,” he said later, when the boss was gone. “My family owed 5,000 rupees then. Today, we owe 50,000 rupees.”
They are indentured servants, bought and paid for by Gul Mohammad, who purchased their contracts from a kiln owner in Bandipora, where they had been living in the rental house. Like tens of thousands of Kashmiris, they are trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty that keeps them indebted to their employers, a situation common at many dusty brick kilns that dot the countryside, as well as in some other industries, particularly in rural areas. Banks have high interest rates and the people who labour at the kilns would almost surely be too poor to qualify for loans. They thus borrow from their employers. For a vast majority of workers, there is no escape. Neither for their children who are bound by their parents’ contracts. Their best hope is that the boss will sell their contract to another kiln, where they might be paid more. No matter what, the loan will follow them.
At the kiln where Ashraf works, his father, 55, is haunted by the guilt that his children would inherit his debt. His two youngest sons, 7, and 8, worked beside him in the mud as he spoke. Their hands work with astonishing speed. But the boy looks worn down, exhausted. They have to work for 12-hours a day. “I want to go to school,” says the elder one.
There are 20 kilns in the Pampore District alone, with an average of 150 to 200 children working at each one, according to an owner of a kiln. “These children work in the state of near slavery,” said Sharief Bhatt, Programme Manager Save the Children. “Not only do they suffer from the extreme weather, they are breathing in the smoke from the kilns every day,” Butt added. “It leads to one of the highest death rates in the country from pneumonia and acute respiratory infections.” Farooq Ahmed’s troubles began 20 years ago when he took a loan from a kiln owner for marriage. (The elaborate marriage and funeral ceremonies expected by Kashmiris frequently cost several years’ worth of wages, forcing many people to draw loans that they must work off.) Farooq soon realized that his weekly earnings in the kiln left little or no money to pay down the principal. As his family grew, he like other workers here, found himself having to borrow more money to pay for medicine for his children and other basic needs. His debt to the owner grew greater by the year. The kiln owner pays Farooq and his four sons about Rs 200 for the 1,000 bricks they make a day. The owner can usually make Rs 5000 selling those bricks. The kiln manager and labour boss defend their practices, saying they have helped many workers. “They were begging in Srinagar streets ,” says the owner. “I paid their loans and brought them back to their own place. Once they finish their loan, they can leave to any other place .” He also noted that owners provided houses, electricity, beds, blankets, water and cash for workers’ family expenses, and served as a safety net with more loans when family members fell ill. The workers say the houses and handouts are a blessing and a curse, keeping them alive but eternally bound to the kilns and the difficult, low-paying jobs. “We are slaves here because when you owe someone money, you’re a slave. If we try to raise our voice, then the owner will simply tell us to leave.” says a child. “A high level official who was recently transferred to the area and was not familiar with the conditions of the workers estimated that at least 2,000 children worked in the kilns in his district. “I know this is not good for kids, but the work provided income for the children’s families; so it is not that simple.” Even Ezabir Ali associated with ATHWAS agrees, to this point. “It is easy to say, take them out from the kilns. If you take away income from a poor family, then that has to be replaced with something.”
A young boy working in a Kiln wants to get married soon. But he looks at his father, trapped in debt cycle for 30 years. “I will have to borrow money to get married. But I am afraid if I borrow money from the kiln owner, I will have to work here forever.”
Feedback at salmannizami@gmail.com.
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