Justice for Who? | International Site

http://hagarinternational.org/international/justice-for-who/

Source: HagarInternational

11.22.12

Written by Talmage Payne, CEO

The perpetrator is followed as he drives a young girl to a seedy hotel room and locks the door. The NGO tracking the known sex offender has already called their police counterparts. An arrest is imminent.

But they wait. Not seconds or minutes but a full half hour. Confident that the rape is well enough along to cover her body and the room with forensic evidence, the door comes down and the child is “rescued”.

In a neighbouring country a different girl sits in court as her trafficker’s sentence is read aloud. The newspaper will report that another perpetrator has been help accountable. But it doesn’t end there, because the victim is also charged. A canning is ordered and then she’s placed in detention for illegal migration- without the right to any council.

Across the ocean in a wealthy country another rescue takes place. The boy has to make a frightening choice: If he cooperates with the police he will be given protection but they won’t be able to protect his family back home. If he doesn’t cooperate, he’ll be deported and vulnerable to his abusers.

Today, the anti-trafficking community organises interventions around the “three P’s”- Prevention, Protection and Prosecution. The “justice” conversation largely revolves around the idea of “prosecution” and the measure of effectiveness is perpetrators convicted. I asked one embassy official last year in Kabul what change they most wanted to see and the answer was an unequivocal ‘perpetrator conviction’.

Certainly we all celebrate when justice is served to abusers and traffickers. Hagar lawyers spend thousands of hours each year as victim advocates in criminal proceedings. But it seems somehow that the focus on counting convictions has lost sight of what really matters to victims.

The stories above, unfortunately, are not untrue.

We need a wholistic and victim-centred view of justice. A bill or rights that say they have a right to be safe regardless of criminal proceedings. That governments should safely return trafficking victims to competent care in their home country. Protection of survivor’s identities from the public media and greedy NGO marketing. The right to competent council and care. The right to have their voice heard.

Hagar was called by the authorities to take custody of the girl in the first story. Staff arrived at the police station to find the child and perpetrator in the same room while she was interrogated in front of several officers. Hagar staff tried to intervene and insisted that the perpetrator was moved to a cell. It all got complicated and loud. I was out on a date night with my daughter when I was called to come over and help out.

An hour later, just after midnight, the three of us were sitting on the pavement outside a clinic as a staff arranged for a properly trained and court-appointed physician to take forensic evidence. My daughter and the victim were about the same age and were getting to know each other over noodles from a late night food hawker.

I wondered if the response would be different if it was my daughter. Would they have stopped the crime or let it happen to secure a stronger conviction?

Sadly, in our current anti-trafficking world, no one gets credit for the uncommitted crime and so our view of justice is “arrest the bad guy and refer the child to a child welfare organisation”.

It’s time for a wholistic, victim-centred approach to justice.

Related articles

• Laos: 20 Held for Girls' Smuggling
• Leila De Lima: Government making steps to combat human trafficking | Sun.Star
• Expanding the Global Anti-Trafficking 'Tool Box'

The many forms of exploitation - CSMonitor.com

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/editors-blog/2012/0909/The-many-forms-of-exploitation

Source: CSMonitor.com

Across the world, women, children, and men are forced or pressured into jobs that keep them in modern-day servitude. Some involve sexual exploitation. Millions more are central to the goods and services the developed world enjoys.

By John Yemma / September 9, 2012

14-year-old Rihana serves lunch at her home near Kabul, Afghanistan. she and her family 

are forced to work at a brick factory to repay a $900 debt.

Rahmat Gul/AP

Milions of people worldwide are trapped in what amounts to modern-day slavery. 

John Yemma

Editor, The Christian Science Monitor

John Yemma has been a foreign correspondent, Washington reporter, political editor, and has covered economics, science, and culture in 38 years as a journalist. He has worked for The Dallas Morning News, The Boston Globe, UPI, The San Antonio Express-News -- and since 2008, he has been Editor of the Monitor. The Monitor publishes international news and analysis at CSMonitor.com, in the Monitor Weekly newsmagazine, and in an email-delivered Daily News Briefing. 

Shackles and whips are seldom used, but individuals desperate for money are lured into jobs in which they work for meager wages, live under the threat of violence, are subject to sexual abuse, and constantly fear arrest or deportation. 

Of all the ways that workers are exploited, the most poignant stories tend to be those of women caught up in sex trafficking. A recent report by the Britain-based Anti-Slavery Internationalgroup, for instance, notes that many women leave impoverished homes “with dreams in their eyes, fear and excitement in their minds at what awaits,” but too often are duped into a life of prostitution, where they are intimidated, abused, and blackmailed. A woman who manages to break free might still be charged with prostitution or illegal immigration. If she returns home, she faces shame. In some cultures, she faces death.

Stephanie Hanes’s Monitor cover story examines this difficult subject. She makes clear that forced prostitution must be combatted for the crime that it is. But because of the age-old human fascination with sex, it is all too easy to focus on that problem and overlook the many other ways that women, children, and men – as many as 27 million, by some estimates – are exploited in global industries built on cheap, often forced, labor. Everything from the produce we eat to the mineral components in our cellphones, from the clothes we wear to the unskilled workers cleaning our buildings, may be part of this system.

Forced prostitution is one of many forms of exploitation. And even it is nuanced. Sometimes the force is overt. Sometimes it is psychological. And sometimes prostitution is a choice.

Please understand: Pointing this out is not meant to minimize the problem. The United Nations estimates that at any one time as many as 2 million sex workers are under coercion. Celebrities, activists, religious officials, politicians, and concerned citizens rightly decry the practice. But the compelling nature of the problem of sexual exploitation often diverts attention and resources from other forms of forced labor.

What can any of us do? 

For one thing, we can be alert to situations in which women, men, and children are living in the shadows. We can also be more conscious of choices we make that feed the demand side of human trafficking. Cheap goods are great, but what are the conditions of the workers who made them? You can get an idea of how what we buy affects human trafficking by clicking here. There's also a link to a website that can help you understand what steps you can take to lessen that effect.