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.
I'm a writer at Justmeans in the Health category. I am also currently the Director of Biomedical Research and Development at Gallifrey Systems. I finished my PhD in experimental psychology in 1997 and have worked covering legislative initiatives, building statistical models and in technology development. I'm an expert in the areas of health behavior and health policy. I'm a huge proponent of c... Read More
This is the second part of a three-part series focusing on human trafficking from a public health perspective.
Malaria affects over six million people per year. Worldwide, more than two million individuals are infected with tuberculosis. Each year, there are about two - three million new people who are newly infected with HIV. Each disease is considered a public health problem and is preventable. The World Health Organization estimates that up to four million people are direct victims (captives) or indirect victims (for example, affected by disease or family member loss) of human trafficking. If 16,000 US citizens died from an epidemic, there might reasonably be national outrage. However, 14,500 - 17,500 individuals, including children, are estimated to be illegally brought into the United States per year for the purposes forced labor, among other crimes. It is even more difficult to estimate how many people once within US borders are moved between states and communities without leaving the country. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are direct victims.
The standard governmental model for handling criminal behavior includes punishment for offenders, protection for victims and despite best intentions, preventive measures come last. Human trafficking is a complex social and economic problem, much like the war on drugs. Similarly, it cannot be stopped by single, law-enforcement focused approach. Criminal law tends to address events after they have occurred rather than through encouraging attitudinal and behavioral change. To abate human trafficking, it might be time to change tactics to put a premium on prevention.
Even if one does not view human trafficking as a public health problem, there are aspects of the model that fit well in this fight. Public health is a unique field among the health professions. There is a focus on populations rather than individuals and prevention rather than cure. It is a scientific, evidence-based endeavor with a firm link to government and politics. Additionally, outcomes of violence prevention initiatives benefit from a public health model, so it seems reasonable to extend this methodology to human trafficking.
Following the model proposed by the Center for Disease Control for preventing violence, there are four steps that must be fulfilled. The root cause of trafficking must be understood. This means a scientific analysis that evaluates individual risk factors, social relationships that increase personal risk, the role of the local environment and community and finally sociocultural standards.
Public health campaigns must bring the problem to a level of social consciousness. According to the report "U.S. Awareness of Human Trafficking: Executive Summary of Survey Findings", most Americans are quite unaware that the United States is affected. Individuals, communities and non-governmental organizations can, if motivated, provide government officials with feedback about what efforts work well for the local population, what resources are necessary and generally guide lawmakers on how government can effectively intervene rather than government blindly and unwisely throwing resources at the problem.
Finally, at the level of personal responsibility, each person should be able to see how even small actions can help ameliorate the issue of human trafficking. Just in the same way that people learn how diligent hand-washing and how to properly "cover and cough" can help prevent the spread of colds and the flu, small efforts can make a difference. The next posting in this series examines one person's efforts to raise awareness about the problem of human trafficking and how to combat it.
By Niki King • nking@courier-journal.com • January 20, 2010
Amy Turner, 27, of Polo Fields, was riding through the red light district of Calcutta, India, two years ago when a young girl tried to hand her a baby through the window of a taxi cab. Translating, the driver said the girl was pleading for her to take the baby and give it a better life.
“That was the moment I realized I had to do something,” Turner said.
Last year, Turner began a locally based effort called RescYou to help women and children who have been victims of human trafficking in India. So far, she's raised $2,000 through the sale of T-shirts specially designed for the cause. The money will sponsor children born in brothels to go to school.
“We want to provide them with education so they can come back and rebuild their communities,” Turner said.
RescYou is made up of Turner, two friends and five board members. Turner is putting an application together for a 501(C) 3 status so the group can become an official nonprofit organization.
T-shirt sales are just the beginning, group members say. They want to create other ways to raise money and awareness for an issue they care deeply about. The group's mission statement is “turning off the lights in the red light districts around the world.”
The U.S. State Department's 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, citing United Nations figures, estimated there were nearly 1.4 million victims of “commercial sexual servitude” worldwide.
Turner, a graduate student in art therapy at the University of Louisville, has seen the problem firsthand.
In 2008, she went on her first trip to India with Faceless International, a nonprofit group that organizes trips for people to learn about social justice issues. Turner was one of 25 who visited smaller villages and the larger cities of Visakhapatnam and Kurnool. While there, they met missionaries and others who were working on issues such as poverty, HIV/AIDS and human trafficking.
In the summer of 2009, she returned and spent six weeks at the Destiny Center in Calcutta, where women rescued from the sex industry live while they receive job training and independent living skills. She also spent time at another shelter for children of sex workers in the heart of the city's red light district, where Turner said there are thousands of girls working, some young as 9 years old.
She learned the vast majority of women and children had been sold into prostitution by poverty-stricken families or stolen from their homes. The women make little to no money and are punished severely by their pimps and brothel owners if they try to escape, Turner said. She said organized crime lords are often involved, and the police are often complacent.
When she got home, she contacted Abigail Stoutimore of New Hampshire and Kris Byerly of Florida, two participants from the Faceless International trip, and asked them to help her start RescYou.
“How could I resist?” Byerly said. “Once you've seen what real poverty, what real anguish, looks like, it changes you.”
Byerly, a graphic artist, designed a T-shirt logo, a woman's face that appears to be disappearing. Spend Yourself, an apparel company in Middletown that sells T-shirts to raise money for selected nonprofits, produced and sold the shirt. They've sold 100 for about $20 each. Turner said she's giving the money to the shelter in Calcutta, which will use it to sponsor children's education. She said it will pay for about seven children to go to school for a year.
The group is planning a return to India in October. They'll visit the shelter and re-establish contact with the missionaries and others they've met. They are now brainstorming ways to expand their mission.
“I feel personally responsible. I've met someone who had been trafficked. I know their name,” she said. “If I can help in some shape or form, then RescYou has accomplished what it set out to do,” she said.
Reporter Niki King can be reached at (502) 582-4248.
At the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, 80,000 slaves were transported from Africa to the new world. Now, New York Times human rights columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that more than 10 times as many women and girls are being forced into brothels or other forms of slavery.
In their new book, Half the Sky, Nicholas and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, investigate the causes and the very achievable solutions to putting an end to this form of modern-day slavery. "If you begin to think of your own child not in middle school, but being locked up in a brothel, then it suddenly becomes pretty real," he says.
Children like Long Pross, kidnapped from her Cambodian village at age 13, are forced into a terrifying world of prostitution. She had not yet had sex or her first period. "The fear was overwhelming," she says. "In a room they tied your hands, and outside there was a guard. If you resisted, they electrocuted you. Sometimes they electrocuted me twice a day if I argued too much."
As a virgin, Pross was a profitable commodity. Nicholas reports that virgins bring in hundreds of dollars for brothel owners. Virgins are also in high demand by men with AIDS who believe having sex with a virgin will cure them. By the time she escaped, her virginity had been sold four times. "They stitched me up three times," she says.
Enslaved girls are also forbidden to request condoms, leaving them vulnerable to STDs, AIDS and pregnancy. Pross says she became pregnant twice. "The second time they waited until I was four months pregnant before they gave me the abortion," she says.
Pross says when she asked for a few days of rest, her eye was gouged out with a piece of metal. When her eye became infected, the brothel considered her too mutilated to be worth anything and left her on the streets. An organization called Somaly Mam Foundation, founded by a former sex slave, stepped in to help Pross reclaim her life. Pross also received an operation to repair her eye. It was not successful, but there is hope for another surgery. "Pross is just such an incredibly courageous, inspiring woman," Nicholas says.
In 2004, Nicholas was so moved by the plight of two teenage prostitutes that he purchased their freedom. After paying the brothel owners $353, Nicholas returned the young girls to their Cambodian villages.
Later, Nicholas returned to Cambodia to find, one of the women married and expecting a baby. The other woman, however, had developed a drug addiction and returned to the brothel just days after she was freed. "It just broke my heart when she went back, but the brothel gave her meth. It was a way of controlling her," Nicholas says. "The underworld these women inhabit is complex and layered. Rescuing them involves so much more than just opening a door."
Still, there are signs that things are changing. "We tend to think that this is an absolutely hopeless problem, but I've watched Cambodia over the years. Because there has been pressure—the police demand more in bribes—some of the brothel owners go from dealing in girls to dealing groceries or stealing motorcycles or selling pirated videotapes," Nicholas says. "We can make them change the kind of business they do."
In centuries past, slavery was abolished thanks to the efforts of everyday people starting grassroots movements. Nicholas says it's time to start another. "People want to help if they think they can make a difference," Nicholas says. "They get involved, and they just find it incredibly fulfilling and enriching for themselves. The truth is trying to help other people has a mixed record, but invariably you end up helping yourself."
Find out how you can help girls like Pross from your living room. Visit our For All Women Registry and take action today.
HIV/AIDS has been multiplying human misery across the world. It obstructs development efforts. The infected become a burden on their country. In Bangladesh, Haiti, India, and Nepal - no more than half of the women population has heard of AIDS. Out of ignorance, people indulge in risky behaviour, increasing the risk of infection. A comprehensive awareness drive can ensure better protection from infection.
Trafficking and gender violence increase the risks of AIDS infection as do dowry, early marriage and polygamy. According to a research done by Bangladesh Extension Education Services (BEES), poverty, illiteracy, food insecurity, lack of healthcare, and disempowerment of women can be contributing factors in the spread of HIV infection. Addressing these social issues requires integrated training programmes to suit the needs. Life skills training for the underprivileged should ensure that the message is conveyed to the target groups in the way they understand it. They should be encouraged to participate in training programmes for prevention of HIV/AIDS. What is more is that there should be enough efforts to provide timely life-skills training to prevent infection.
Social mobilisation is important to make HIV/AIDS prevention training programmes effective. It makes the programmes cost effective and helps achieve the desired outcome. Social mobilisation stimulates the people in a community to participate in reproductive health awareness. It can strengthen the programme by generating interest among the participants. Utilisation of local resources would make the prevention programme more effective.
Case studies would motivate the trainees on how to gain from the life-skills training programmes to overcome social disparities. HIV positive person could be invited to training sessions as resource persons to share their experience. Advocacy sessions would be useful for the training programmes. Doctors, teachers, marriage registrars, social workers, community-based organisation leaders, local government representatives and other influential persons can be local policy makers. The HIV prevention programme will gain from their involvement. They should be properly oriented on the social issues to contribute to prevent the spread of HIV infection and reduce the vulnerability of the people in local communities.
The vulnerable people could be turned into potential human resources by raising their awareness on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. Motivation and awareness would develop their coping ability to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. According to a research on reproductive health literacy done by Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallayan Foundation in 2008 both in rural and urban areas of Bangladesh, awareness of AIDS is, by and large, lower among rural men and women than among urban men and women.
Awareness of AIDS is poorer among men and women with little or no schooling and training than those with more schooling and training. That is why, there is an urgent need to improve the knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) of the disadvantaged community people especially in rural areas. In this regard, behaviour change communication (BCC) should be brought about through integrated training activities. BCC can encourage the core groups in a community to leave their bad practices and gather and update knowledge and information needed to prevent HIV/AIDS.
The writer, a deputy director, Bangladesh Extension Education Services, can be reached at e-mail: anirudhaalam@yahoo.com
Lured from the hills of Nepal, Nisha found herself sold to a brothel in Mumbai at 11. Two years later, she had contracted HIV. She had been entertaining five to ten customers a day for those two years.
At 19, the slightly-built Rakhi is the mother of a three-year-old. She conceived her daughter when she was sold to a brothel in Mumbai. She also contracted HIV. Nisha and Rakhi shared their stories at the South Asia Court of Women on the Violence of Trafficking and HIV/AIDS in Dhaka held a few years ago. And they are among the thousands of women, who are victims of both trafficking and HIV in the South Asian region. It is now being increasingly realised that trafficking for sexual exploitation is tied up with increased vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.
But why haven`t South Asians nations been able to tackle the two together? Regional experts and representatives of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and UNAIDS believe that the questionable quality of interventions, poor outreach and lack of procedures like counselling are the reasons for the proliferation of both trafficking and HIV/AIDS.
According to Vandana Mahajan, Senior Programme Officer, UNIFEM India, "Strong linkages exist between these issues. Trafficking for sexual exploitation is tied up with increased vulnerability to HIV/AIDS... and the HIV/AIDS epidemic intensifies poverty, which increases vulnerability to trafficking. Both issues have roots in poverty and gender inequality. Clearly, we have to devise integrated strategies, which can make an impact on trafficking as well as on HIV/AIDS."
There is growing recognition among nations that human trafficking needs to be tackled as a specific crime. The UN Protocol on `Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children`, 2000, which is implemented by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), offers practical help to states with drafting laws, creating comprehensive national anti-trafficking strategies, and assisting with resources to implement them.
Even the SAARC Secretariat has created a Regional Task Force to implement Conventions relating to trafficking of women and children, providing a forum for discussion and planning to integrate trafficking, women and child welfare, and HIV/AIDS in the domestic and foreign policies of South Asian countries. The UNIFEM has formed a South Asia Anti-Trafficking Think Tank, that comprises governmental representatives, NGOs, UN agencies and inter-governmental organisations, to engage in dialogue, raise key cross-border issues and help coordinate policy and implementation in the region.
Yet despite all these measures at a recent `Regional Consultation on HIV/AIDS and Anti Human Trafficking` in New Delhi, Dr Munir Raza Ahmed, Social Mobilisation Adviser, UNAIDS, Bangladesh, confessed, "The quality of our interventions is still questionable. We have sex worker programmes covering brothels, hotels and home-based sector, but the outreach is poor. ...We have no comprehensive database or monitoring system on trafficking." On the positive side Ahmed described the services the government and NGOs are trying to provide to MARPs (Most At Risk Populations) that aim at prevention through measures like improving the health system, integrating gender awareness and providing youth-friendly services. But he was quick to add, "We have not yet situated these programmes in the context of poverty. The demand for trafficked persons comes from affluent sections, yet we have no behaviour change programmes targeting these sections."
Bangladesh is not the only nation at fault. The fact is that none of the countries have even begun tackling the problem from the demand side: They are just beginning to realise the need to target the `MMM` - Mobile Men with Money - who are the basic category of buyers of trafficked women and children. Tackling the MMM will in itself have to be a transnational campaign, since the richer countries, particularly the US and several European countries, are typically destination countries, while the Asian and African nations are typically the areas of origin.
Vulnerable countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka have instituted legislation that targets trafficking - which is vital to tackle the problem - but there is a lack of enforcement.
Nepal has a Human Trafficking (Control) Act, 2007, and Women and Child Service Centres in over 25 police stations across the country. Yet, in 2006, the police registered only 97 cases of trafficking and 36 convictions took place. According to Sangeeta Thapa, Country Programme Coordinator, UNIFEM Nepal, though public policy in Nepal is sensitive to gender, not much impact has been made in challenging patriarchy and gender inequality in the country. "The vulnerability of women to trafficking and HIV/AIDS is not clearly understood. Female sex worker are looked at more as vectors, than as victims. Economic disempowerment and the lack of inheritance and land rights are not being sufficiently addressed. We have significant seasonal migration within Nepal, but the linkages between migration, trafficking and HIV/AIDS are not fully understood. But we do have opportunities. A new Constitution is being evolved with non-discrimination as one of its central values," she said.
Besides a lack of understanding, experts at the regional consultation also expressed logistic problems. Saghir Bukhari, Programme Specialist, UNIFEM Pakistan, felt that due to security issues it is difficult for organisations to reach out to approximately half of Pakistan. Here, too, a gender scan of programmes has indicated the need to integrate gender issues, but the way to do it is not clear. "Women", he noted, "are mostly invisible in the programming. We have a strategic framework, but it has yet to be translated into action. Gender-based violence and trafficking are not being addressed at all in the context of the national HIV/AIDS programmes..."
However, Pakistan has made some headway by passing a Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance (PACHTO), in 2002; its Federal Investigation Agency registered 1,826 cases under PACHTO between 2003 and 2006. But of these cases, only 254 have been decided, with 222 sentences and 32 acquittals.
Even in India - considered a destination country for cross-border trafficking - while 12,665 persons were arrested for trafficking, 7,075 were convicted in 20005 under the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act (IPTA). Some 26,000 women were sheltered in Swadhar short-stay homes - run by NGOs and as part of the Ministry of Women and Child`s Swadhar scheme - but these are inadequate in terms of numbers as well as quality of services provided. Only, four states have set up Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTU) - Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Goa and West Bengal.
In the absence of comprehensive tracking, it is impossible to get definitive statistics. But these numbers are, most likely, barely the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, in countries like the Maldives, trafficking is not even recognised as a specific offence. According to Anna Liboro-Senga, UN Coordination Specialist, Maldives, a significant degree of internal migration exists within the country, with reports of trafficking, but no steps have yet been initiated in public policy. Though Afghanistan has undertaken some policy and implementation, with 287 victims identified in 2006 and 370 persons convicted for trafficking of persons, Sri Lanka has a law on Prevention of Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution (2005) but no arrests or convictions have been made so far. In Bhutan, where the Penal Code identifies trafficking of a person `for any purpose` as a crime, there has so far been no arrests or convictions.
The `Global Report on Trafficking in Persons` (UNODC February 2009) notes that, worldwide, nations are just starting to view trafficking as a specific crime, and public policy as well as judicial systems are struggling to match up to the need. As UNODC`s Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, put it, "The crisis we face of fragmented knowledge and disjointed response intensifies a crime that shames us all."
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This article appeared in the October 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.
October 8, 2009
This is the second installment of a two-part series. The first part, "The Crusade Against Sex Trafficking," was published in the October 5 issue of The Nation.
Drifting down Junquera Street after nightfall with your car doors unlocked is an unwise proposition. Pimps dart out from street corners and pound on the windows of passing cars--sometimes they are so eager to provide the services of their "girls" that they pry open car doors to make a more direct appeal. Visitors who make it out of the car unscathed face another gantlet at the main entrance of Kamagayan, one of the main red-light districts in Cebu City, the Philippines. Descend past the jostling throng and the howling of the karaoke bars, and the pathway wends toward brothels and alleyways strung with dim red lights, where customers come to find the underage prostitutes that Kamagayan is notorious for providing--along with drugs and gambling opportunities. Out of plain sight, in an alleyway, is a cluster of girls with puppyish, knobby knees. Their garish makeup stands out like neon on their young faces, adding to Kamagayan's air of desperate pageantry.
Like Cambodia and Thailand, the Philippines suffers from a significant problem with child sex exploitation. But the Philippines provides more fertile ground for US work on anti-trafficking--the majority-Catholic country is more in ideological harmony with the abolitionist attitudes that hold sway in Washington. As Jean Enriquez, executive director of the Coalition Against the Trafficking in Women-Asia Pacific, asserted, "All prostitution is forced rape"--an idea that has great ideological and political resonance in the Philippines. Enriquez's group is one of the main anti-trafficking organizers in the Philippines and a beneficiary of US government funds on the issue; the organization also helped draft the Philippines' anti-trafficking legislation.
In the Philippines the International Justice Mission found a hospitable home for its work. IJM draws on the services of evangelical lawyers, law-enforcement officers and social workers, who enlist local counterparts and police to combat human rights abuses in the developing world. In the Philippines, as in India, Cambodia and, in the past, Thailand, IJM conducts "brothel raids"--its most controversial and best-known work--by providing evidence of trafficking to local police, collaborating on "interventions" to remove victims from the establishments and working to ensure the arrest and prosecution of their abusers.
For IJM, the lack of highly vocal sex-worker organizations or HIV NGOs--the traditional critics of IJM's work--has meant a smoother reception for the group's work in the Philippines. The organization has also been able to avoid the considerable friction that has resulted in other countries from the deportation of women netted in raids--most of the trafficking that occurs within the Philippines concerns domestic movement. And the organization has found willing government partners and a network of shelters run by Christian organizations. One aftercare shelter in partnership with IJM, Happy Horizons, offers "daily, Bible-based counseling to restore the self-esteem and confidence that comes with the realization that one is a precious, beloved child of God.... When the restoration process is completed, children rescued from the sex trade in Cebu City will be able to lead happy, productive Christian lives."
IJM has had some notable successes in the Philippines--where it has a presence in Manila, Cebu and its new State Department-funded office in Samar--particularly in the realm of prosecutions. One case involved a shyly smiling young woman who identified herself as Cris, in tribute to the social worker who had counseled her. Cris and her friends were deceived by one of the friends' relatives. Promised jobs as waitresses, they had traveled with her to Batangas, where they were apprehended en route by police trained by the Visayan Forum, an organization that works on domestic labor abuses and trafficking prevention. IJM won the case against Cris's trafficker in 2008.
IJM's office in Cebu expanded upon the organization's previous work--perhaps partially because of input from its influential funder. Supported by a $5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Project Lantern, based in the Cebu office, was designed to create a replicable model of countertrafficking work. An additional benefit, IJM claimed, would be a reduction in HIV infection rates--rescue would remove trafficking victims from potential infection, and successful prosecution of traffickers would reduce overall numbers of potential victims. But questions abound about the counter-trafficking approach embodied by Project Lantern and whether it is, in fact, a model that ought to be replicated.
According to the grantmaker who signed off on the Gates funding, Project Lantern was an attempt to create harmony between IJM's criminal-justice approach and one that was more centered on community development and women's empowerment. "We weren't necessarily encouraging [IJM] to do anything but what their model does," says Helene Gayle, former director of the Gates HIV, TB and Reproductive Health program and current president/CEO of Care USA. "But we wanted to see...is there a way of pulling them into the family?"
In Project Lantern, IJM has refined its techniques, but problems with police corruption and insufficient economic alternatives to prostitution persist--problems that illustrate the ways that IJM's model may be insufficient to overcome systemic issues, including spotty "aftercare" infrastructure. IJM's raids overwhelmed the shelter and social-services capacity of Cebu, for example. In addition, a number of the women and girls who could be housed at the government centers would stage risky escapes, illustrating the failure of post-raid services to ameliorate immediate economic and familial pressures and address the ways rescue could feel like a form of detention, according to human rights critics. Less drastic and more family-focused interventions, critics argued, would be a more effective way to help minors out of the commercial sex industry.
For Project Lantern, IJM made a number of notable improvements, conducting the organization's first official baseline study to assess pre-existing levels of trafficking. It has also been working to integrate trafficking victims' families and economic needs into aftercare. The organization reached out to social-service groups like the Cebu City Health Department, which conducts HIV-screening for sex workers, and even set up a meeting with an association of brothel owners in order to explain the anti-trafficking law to them. And it also seems to be conducting more tightly focused stings--in which pimps or traffickers bring minors to hotel rooms or other off-site locations--rather than conducting large, wholesale raids.
Noy Thrupkaew: Do brothel raids help trafficking victims escape abuse, or skirt the reality that makes recovery so difficult for the "rescued?"
"It's good to hear about these improvements," said Françoise Girard, director of the Open Society Institute's Public Health Program. Girard had met with IJM's president, Gary Haugen, in 2007 to discuss her concerns about the group's counter-trafficking work. "But really, shouldn't they have been doing all these things before? They didn't have baseline information [about] whether their actions had any effect on numbers of trafficked women after doing this work for all these years?"
"There's real tension in their model," she continued. "Are we here to rescue individual girls, or test the theory about how the criminal justice system could create a disincentive for trafficking? When I pressed them about which to choose, they went with individual girls. There's always a reason to raid in that case--and we know what kinds of problems with deportation, detention and brutality the raids can bring."
IJM has also struggled with state corruption, including bribes, extortion and sexual coercion or complicity on the part of the police. The group won a landmark case this past September against a police officer for trafficking minors into the sex industry--the first conviction of a public officer for this crime in the Philippines. But the problems remain deeply entrenched. In 2006, before the advent of Project Lantern, the Cebu City government passed an ordinance that police were not allowed to have sexual intercourse with suspected trafficking victims when performing stings. "That was very bad," said police inspector Enrique Lacerna. "One police officer was caught on CCTV during a raid. Yes, having sex with the trafficking victim during the sting."
Despite the ordinance, another policeman confirmed that law enforcement agents still insisted on the performance of sexual services when conducting anti-trafficking raids. Nervous sweat beading his brow, he also asserted that a number of men in his unit received 10,000 pesos per month for protecting brothels and tipping off owners in the case of an impending raid. Considering that the starting monthly salary of a police officer was 9,500 pesos, it was no small haul. Fearing reprisals from other police officers, he spoke on condition of anonymity, as did a government official who indicated that "there is a concern among partners in the region about the involvement of police in trafficking, and a concern that they may use the anti-trafficking campaign to exert pressure on brothel owners for their personal benefit." The official declined to speak about specific incidents.
As in Cambodia and Thailand, some IJM rescuees did not want to stay rescued. At IJM's site in Cebu, young women and girls removed an air conditioner and jumped from the second floor of HerSpace, a processing center that IJM built, some incurring injuries. Others walked out of another center, which was undergoing construction to increase security. And still another group attempted to burn down a facility--luckily, no one was injured.
In the Philippines, I made numerous attempts to find and speak with "the one" rescued in an IJM intervention, as I had in Thailand and in Cambodia. The closest I came in any of the countries was a 19-year-old woman who had returned to prostitution after being caught in a 2008 IJM-initiated raid and escaping from Cebu's Department of Social Welfare and Development processing center. But, traumatized by the raid-and-rescue experience, she refused to speak to me in person, and only asked if I was from an NGO like IJM.
"She says she will never talk to anyone from an NGO ever again," my translator relayed, "if that is what they do."
The director of Cebu's Department of Social Welfare and Development, Teodulo Romo, admits, "We were not ready when we stepped up the rescue operations.... Aftercare was the weakest link." Hence, the escapes. HerSpace, he noted, is "surrounded by a high fence and barbed wire to prevent people from the outside coming in." After the air conditioner escape, "We had to reinforce the perimeter, and so far there have been no more escapes since that happened in May." IJM helped to improve security at another facility, called The Haven, as well, by building higher walls and fences--ostensibly meant to protect the women and girls but perhaps even more effective at making sure they couldn't leave the shelters.
Noy Thrupkaew: Do brothel raids help trafficking victims escape abuse, or skirt the reality that makes recovery so difficult for the "rescued?"
One NGO, called Bidlisiw, takes a drastically different approach to its counter-trafficking work. Huddled in the shadow of a bridge overpass, the Bidlisiw building houses a classroom with a green chalkboard and rough chairs, and a staff office with wooden desks crowded in rows, as in a schoolhouse. The floor of the office runs down at a slant, with the effect of making one feel a bit drunk when traversing the room. Bidlisiw was once funded by USAID but saw its funding dry up when that organization began to shift from its safer-sex approach to a more abstinence-based policy in 2002 and 2003. European funders then stepped in to support the organization's work.
Over the course of twenty years Bidlisiw has developed a rigorously holistic program for children in the commercial sex industry. It reaches out on all fronts--offering the families and children comprehensive psychosocial counseling, livelihood initiatives, microloans and tutoring and vocational training. It also educates clients on the anti-trafficking law and HIV prevention.
Last year 140 families graduated from the program--preliminary indicators show that 30 percent of the children have left prostitution. "That's a lot for us. If we can't stop them, at least they can help themselves a little bit more with our support," says executive director Lolita Ganapin.
Under Philippine law, every one of Bidlisiw's clients would be considered a trafficking victim--all of them are underage children in the sex industry. Ganapin finds an organization like IJM useful for the most extreme cases--"when we know the child is in clear bondage or is being abused or severely taken advantage of by pimps"--and has also discreetly reported such cases to the police. However, she doesn't advocate for wholesale rescue operations to remove the majority of her organization's clients from the sex industry. Cebu province doesn't have adequate facilities for all of them, she said, and "after [the children are] released, they will go back. It's better...to proceed to a more planned-out intervention that has a longer impact."
A few women involved in Bidlisiw outreach programs filter through the office--20-year-old Maricel, stout, smiling, in a red shirt; Ronalin, 24, who speaks excellent English and worked for the organization as a peer educator; and Grace. Immensely pregnant, Grace has huge sloe eyes and a downturned mouth--she is snacking on a stick of grilled meat and slurping from a glass Pepsi bottle. Grace and Ronalin both started working the bars when they were teenagers--Ronalin was deceived by a friend; Grace was not. Maricel, however, claims she just started sex work two months ago, when her mother suggested she work the streets so they'd have enough money for rice. Her military boyfriend is her "manager" and that of Grace as well, who works in a friend's house along with five other girls.
As we continue talking, however, some of the stories begin to unravel. At first Maricel says she was caught in a police sweep just this year, as was Grace, who was then released because she was pregnant. Have they been caught in raids before? Maricel shakes her head vaguely. Grace snorts and says, "Stop lying! She was captured in a raid much earlier--when she was 12. She was lying to you before, you know. She's one of the runaways who escaped from a shelter."
Maricel speaks with her gaze in her lap. "It's true. I didn't want you to think badly of me. I've been working the streets a long time. But I'm good, you know. I always use condoms."
Another snort. "Liar! You don't. I know you want to get pregnant," says Grace. "You don't even go for the health checkups at the government clinic."
A hullabaloo breaks out. After five or so minutes of frantic gesticulating and rapid-fire Cebuano, Maricel has promised to talk over her decision to abandon condoms with a Bidlisiw staff member, who will also accompany her to the clinic the following Monday. Grace looks sideways at Maricel, gesturing with her now picked-clean kebab stick, and says, "Take a good bath before, because otherwise the nurse will get really mad and stick a ladle in you instead of a speculum." The group screeches in laughter. According to the Bidlisiw staff, Grace has a strong, salutary effect on the younger girls, pushing them to take care of their health, trying to encourage them to go back to school--so much so that the organization's leaders were eyeing her as a future peer educator. "But then, there's the baby," says Bidlisiw staff member Pam. "So who knows if she would have the time. But they really listen to her."
Maricel refuses to reply. She stands up, brushes off the top of her pants and announces she is going home to shower before going out to meet customers.
The Bidlisiw staff have a tour in mind. We head out to a clutch of red-lighted bars, karaoke clubs, a host club full of grinning, pirouetting men who cater to foreign tourists--women and men--and "carton city," a weed-ravaged field where women used to provide sexual services on flattened cardboard boxes before a police raid earlier that year.
Noy Thrupkaew: Do brothel raids help trafficking victims escape abuse, or skirt the reality that makes recovery so difficult for the "rescued?"
Our final stop is the town square, where many of the city's underage prostitutes are waiting for customers. An oddly named Orange Brutus lords over one corner of the square--evidently Orange Julius had been shanked long ago--along with an immense church, a raggedy park and an amphitheater. No less imposing is Grace, who is presiding over the scene.
Pam introduces me to a young girl Bidlisiw is trying to reach out to--M, a 16-year-old with hair so thick and curly that it seems like it has drawn all the vigor from her too-slight shoulders. Perhaps five feet tall, M is dressed in an ashy-pink one-piece, her small feet slipped into rubber flip-flops, her dark eyes alternately careless and curious. She started working the streets when she was 15. "My boyfriend took my virginity, and then left me," says M. Her voice is unexpectedly deep, a husky alto. "So what else was I good for after that? Anyway, boyfriends don't pay." She drags on her cigarette and then flings it into the street.
M has six siblings--most of them live with her mother and father, but she, as the oldest, lives with her grandmother. She went to school for a while, and liked it, before money got too tight and she had to quit. Working the streets isn't so bad, she says--she has her friends, the 'manager' who finds customers for her and another girl, and the small room they rent together for encounters with clients. She spends her days in the streets or the square, which she prefers--the open-air restaurant down the road has a jukebox, and she can listen to music. "I'll play my favorite song for you," she says, taking a few pesos from Pam. She runs over to the restaurant and returns to explain the lyrics of the song, "Sana." "It's about love, how you lose it but have to keep enduring." Her eyes turn toward a small boy who is frog-hopping near her, jumping but careful to keep a purple ice-cream cone from falling to the pavement. "My brother," she says. "I can actually pay for him to go to school--he's in first grade now, and if we keep it up, maybe he can actually finish..." Her eyes shine with pride, and she smiles down at him.
The look on M's face strikes me as familiar. It mirrors the IJM staff's faces when they speak of the symbolic culmination of their work: looking into the face of a rescuee, "that 15-year-old girl," whom M had been when she started working the streets. While the rescuers would never claim to impart a godly gaze, the moment of looking into that rescued girl's face seemed to reflect their own relationships with the divine--the desire to see and be seen in the light of goodness, healed and saved in the loving gaze of their creator. Each rescue was the proof of the goodness of God; each rescue described as the turning point in a life of possible redemption. The moment was a transcendent one--one that redeemed the law from being a tool in the hands of clumsy, imperfect humans and made it one that flowed out of divine authority, a moment that enabled the rescuers to feel as though they could save a girl from being an empty vessel or a dismembered body and restore her essential dignity as a child made in the image of God.
But the look on M's face also reflects the intensity of conviction with which IJM staff have spoken of their work. Her mission is to care for her brother, just as their mission is to try to save her from doing so by making a grievous choice no child could consent to under international law. They would try to offer her the safety and stability of a shelter, but it did not seem likely that she would accept rescue should it jeopardize the welfare of her family, or that she would settle for being a witness to the rescuers' good deed, or a witness in a case. The stories both the rescuers and their would-be rescuee tell about their respective roles in alleviating suffering are powerful and difficult to relinquish. M was the closest person to "the one" I would find, but her face held a tale her rescuers would be hard-pressed to unravel--the ways she'd struggled to find meaning in her own life, and sacrificed herself to become a rescuer in her own right.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091026/thrupkaew
Noy Thrupkaew is a freelance writer based in New York City.
Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
A letters exchange about Noy Thrupkaew's two-part report is featured in the November 16 issue.
Saving Sex-Trafficking Victims
By Our Readers & Noy Thrupkaew
This article appeared in the November 16, 2009 edition of The Nation.
Washington, D.C.
Noy Thrupkaew's two-part series, "The Crusade Against Sex Trafficking" [Oct. 5 and 26], focuses on the work of the International Justice Mission (IJM). Unfortunately, the articles present almost none of the facts or views shared with her in more than twenty hours of interviews conducted with IJM senior staff in three countries. In addition, they contain numerous inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of IJM's work. In the interest of a fair and informed dialogue about sex trafficking, I offer the following clarifications:
§ Today virtually every credible anti-trafficking organization--including UN agencies, NGOs and responsible governments--agrees that engagement with law enforcement is the best and only sustainable way to protect victims and apprehend perpetrators of sex trafficking. Corruption within police forces should not be a reason to deny trafficking victims the enforcement of laws designed to protect them, as the article suggests; it should be a strong argument to train and build capacity (as IJM has done for hundreds of officers around the globe).
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