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.
In 2009, America's Trafficking in Persons Report, published by the State Department, downgraded Hong Kong from its Tier 1 status (fully compliant with the US trafficking legislation's minimum standards for prohibiting, punishing and eliminating severe forms of trafficking) to Tier 2 (not fully compliant, but making significant efforts), and the 2013 report, issued last June, reconfirmed that grading.
The latest report, moreover, described Hong Kong as a destination and transit territory for people "subjected to sex trafficking and forced labour", and Luis CdeBaca, who heads the department's human trafficking office, has pointed to recent cases of domestic helper abuse, as evidencing forced labour.
A group of Chinese children waiting to reunite with their parents after police rescued them from human traffickers in Guizhou province, Oct. 29, 2009.
AFP
For strategic or other reasons, the United States may have been giving special treatment to major powers China, Russia, and India when evaluating their human trafficking record in a bid to avoid imposing sanctions on them, according to some American lawmakers and former government officials.
In a clash between priorities of national security and foreign policy on the one hand and human rights on the other, U.S. authorities have let even Uzbekistan off the hook apparently because of the repressive nation's cooperation in getting supplies to American troops in Afghanistan, they said.
As Washington assesses steps taken by governments across the world in combating human trafficking, allies Iraq and Thailand too have seen their potential ranking downgrades delayed while Vietnam has won a premature ranking boost allegedly due to strategic considerations, the legislators and ex-state officials charged at a U.S. congressional hearing last week.
The U.S. State Department gives rankings—from Tier 1 to Tier 3—to more than 180 countries every year in its annual report on the state of human trafficking across the world, and the rankings are acclaimed as the international gold standard for anti-trafficking accountability.
Tier 1 countries are judged as fully meeting the minimum standards established by the law. Tier 2 nations may not fully comply with minimum standards, such as protection, prosecution, and prevention, but are seen to be making a significant effort to comply.
Those listed on the worst Tier 3 ranking are open to sanction by the U.S. government.
But much of the ranking controversy revolves around the second-lowest tier—the Tier 2 Watch List created a decade ago in a bid to encourage countries that take anti-trafficking steps late in the evaluation year, especially those countries that took last-minute measures to avoid a Tier 3 designation.
Some countries have exploited a loophole by, in the words of a lawmaker, "gaming the system"—making a habit of last-minute efforts and failing to follow through year after year.
So, in 2008, a law was created for an “automatic downgrade” for any country that had been on the Tier 2 Watch List for two years but had not taken anti-trafficking measures significant enough to move to Tier 2.
The U.S. President can however waive a Tier 3 downgrade for two additional years if there is “credible evidence” that the country has a written and sufficiently resourced plan to meet the minimum standards.
Automatic downgrade
It has now been four years since the two-year limit, or four-years-with-a-waiver limit, was instituted and all eyes are on the State Department's 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) to be released in June with the new rankings.
Six nations face a potential automatic downgrade from Tier 2 Watch List to Tier 3 with possible sanctions—China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Republic of Congo, Iraq, and Azerbaijan.
They have now had at least four full years of warning that they would face downgrade to Tier 3 if they did not make significant efforts to prosecute traffickers, protect victims, and prevent trafficking.
"The 'parking lot' is now closed: The [U.S.] Administration can no longer avoid telling hard truths about politically sensitive countries by keeping them indefinitely on the 'Watch List,' which was not part of the original, three-tier structure established [under the law]," Ed Royce, Chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, told the hearing.
"If time-limited countries have not made significant efforts to comply with minimum trafficking standards, they must be downgraded to Tier 3 status," he said.
Another House lawmaker, Chris Smith, said that if the six countries "have once again failed to make significant efforts to meet the minimum standards, the State Department must downgrade them or risk undermining the credibility and demonstrated power of the TIP Report."
He said he is particularly concerned about China's human trafficking record, saying China has been on the Tier 2 Watch List for eight consecutive years but not been making significant efforts to comply with the minimum standards of the law.
It also continues to forcibly repatriate North Korean trafficking victims who face severe punishment, including execution, upon return to their country, said Smith, a rights-crusading lawmaker.
'Pulls punches'
Mark Lagon, a former head of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons which publishes the annual global trafficking report, acknowledged that "at times" the department "pulls punches" with some countries.
He cited India, "the demographic epicenter of human trafficking in the world," saying the State Department upgraded it from Tier 2 Watch List to Tier 2 in the June 2011 report in a move that "may have had even more to do with strategic relations with India than the merits."
Lagon, who was the head of the anti-trafficking office from 2007 to 2009, also said that he himself had "learned of a Tier 3 ranking being overturned by the very highest level of State Department leadership just days before" he was confirmed to his post.
The State Department declined to comment on the issues raised at the congressional hearing ahead of the publication of the annual human trafficking report in June.
"We can't comment on this year's country assessments before the 2013 TIP Report is released this summer," Luis CdeBaca, Ambassador-at-Large at the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said in response to a query from RFA.
"State Department staff are working with a wide range of partners to ensure this year's narratives are thorough and take into account all available information," CdeBaca said.
Battles
Lagon also cited battles between diplomats and anti-trafficking experts within the State Department over the issue of labor camps in China.
A "sizable portion" of the world's 2.2 million victims of forced labor "compelled by governments, militaries, and armed groups" is represented by those political prisoners in the laogai, or “reeducation through labor” prison camps, in China, according to published data.
"Those responsible for East Asia in the State Department actually temporarily fought with the TIP Office when I was its director as to whether the laogai—documented publicly in the annual Department Human Rights Report —would be considered trafficking victims, as they are," he said.
Lagon, now an international affairs professor at Washington's Georgetown University, was particularly vocal about Uzbekistan's human trafficking record, describing it as "the most appalling case in the neighborhood of the former Soviet Union."
"Let me be plain: There are loud voices within the U.S. Government who say the U.S. must downplay any distraction which might upset Uzbekistan’s cooperation in the Northern Distribution Network getting supplies to troops in Afghanistan," he said.
"China, Russia, and India may predictably avoid downgrades as great powers. But if as unreconstructed and unrepentant an autocracy as Uzbekistan is let off the hook because of a supply mechanism for troops being winnowed from Afghanistan anyway, it would be a travesty."
David Abramowitz, a former State Department official and congressional staffer, said the “automatic downgrade” provision for the trafficking rankings "was viewed with some alarm" among many in the State Department and a number of important countries, such as India, Thailand, China, and Russia that are perennial members of the Tier 2 Watch List.
Abramowitz, now vice-president of Humanity United, a California-based philanthropic organization, warned of "the risk that national security and foreign policy perspectives will trump the human rights considerations that should always be at the forefront of this issue."
July 7 -- The United Nations says that the world’s media coverage in reporting human trafficking is woeful.
The topic was the focus of a panel held last month in New York and organized by the UN Office for Drugs and Crime, the United States Mission to the UN and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
“You asked me how I will rate media performance,” said under secretary-general Antonio Mario Costa, executive director of the UN Office for Drugs and Crime. “I don’t think at this point it is either A or B. It’s maybe a C or even less than that.” Costa was responding to a question by the panel’s moderator, Lynn Sherr, a former ABC correspondent and now a blogger with The Daily Beast.
“I believe that the media needs to be able to mobilize society at large against human trafficking,” Costa said. “This is not happening. The media has failed to create a sense of anger in the population.”
12 Million People Trafficked
Prostitution in Havana, Cuba. According to a recent report from the UN, some 80 percent of human trafficking is sexual exploitation. Unicef Photo
Human trafficking is a huge global problem, said Nan Kennelly, deputy director at the US Department of State’s office to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, at a separate briefing recently in New York. And UN agencies, governments and nongovernmental organizations are working to eradicate it and punish traffickers. In 2009, about 50,000 victims were identified worldwide with more than 4,000 traffickers successfully prosecuted, according to the State Department’s 10th annual trafficking report, released on June 14.
The media has also focused on the problem, sensitizing the public on the menace, uncovering trafficking rings and highlighting the sufferings of victims. Indeed, the panel consisted of Costa and journalists who have covered the topic.
Guy Jacobson, a filmmaker and activist, recently received the US State Department’s Global Hero Award for his efforts fighting child sex trafficking. His latest film, “Holly,” which explored sex trafficking in Cambodia, premiered in New York City in June.
Mike McGraw, a reporter for The Kansas City Star, was part of a team that produced an award-winning series in 2009 that exposed the flaws in US efforts against trafficking and slavery.
And Noy Thrupkaew, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, has written on trafficking for The Guardian, The Nation and The American Prospect.
Costa said at the panel discussion that the work done by these journalists and others had not been far reaching enough to rouse societies to action. He wants the media to assume an advocacy role and mobilize people to shoot down the crime with every resource possible.
Not a Smart Argument
But Claus Mueller, a journalist and professor of sociology at Hunter College in New York, said that Costa’s comments were “naïve and lacking in intelligence.”
“Though journalists can certainly be advocates if the objective base of their reporting permits so,” Mueller said in an e-mail to UNA-USA, “You cannot assign to them the priori role of advocates. That is a personal decision.”
George Daniels, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, also defended the media, saying that Costa should not blame journalists for failing to attract enough media attention to this cause.
“The media reflect the realities of society,” Daniels said in a telephone interview. “There are very many important issues in societies and advocates of certain causes have to work hard to claim media attention.”
Like Costa, Like CdeBaca
Luis CdeBaca, an ambassador at large who directs the US State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, also spoke at the panel, rating the media low on the subject.
“When I was at the Justice Department, there were times when I had to keep explaining to people that no, you can’t come and write about it as we rescue these women because the last thing they need is to have a camera on their face,” CdeBaca said.
Some journalists on the panel agreed with Costa and CdeBaca on some points. The Schuster Institute, for one, asked the moderator to read a statement from its office to the audience, accusing the media of failing to “report thoroughly and accurately” on the subject. And Thrupkaew of The Nation condemned how some journalists who write on human trafficking “mine the psyche of the traumatized for salacious details.”
Throughout the discussion, Sherr supported her profession. “I think we will all agree that the reporters here have done an extraordinarily good job in exposing the truth of what we are talking about,” she said at the end of the event. “I think we should do this again because we deserve better than a pass or fail. We deserve better than a C.”
Musikilu Mojeed,an intern in the UNA-USA Publications Department, is an International Ford Foundation Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and has written for newspapers in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria.
Keywords: human trafficking, slavery, UN Office for Drugs and Crime, Luis CdeBaca, Antonio Mario Costa
Critic says halting human trafficking ‘takes all of us’
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard Staff Writer
Friday, February 19, 2010
Nations all over the world have to get to the root causes of human trafficking, including understanding what creates the markets that make the practice viable, said Luis CdeBaca, who directs the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Examples of modern-day slaves could be the workers who make our cotton shirts, pick cocoa for our chocolate, and harvest shrimp for our dinner plates while imprisoned aboard ships at sea. Enslaved prostitutes — more than 1.3 million worldwide — also provide the labor force for much of the world’s sex trade.
Modern slavery’s ubiquity — and our collective responsibility for it — were two of the messages driven home in an Institute of Politics lecture on Thursday (Feb. 18) at the Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.
Co-sponsors were Harvard College for Free the Slaves, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Committee on Human Rights Studies, and Harvard College Human Rights Advocates.
The man behind the messages was Luis CdeBaca, who directs the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. When he was a federal prosecutor, he sent more than 100 traffickers to prison and freed 600 sex and garment workers kept in involuntary servitude.
Trafficking in humans “is a crime akin to murder,” said CdeBaca, who seasoned his 40-minute talk with case studies and statistics. “It’s a crime akin to rape, and to kidnapping.”
Worldwide, there are more than 12 million people who exist in some form of slavery, he said, part of a shadow economy that turns a $32 billion annual profit for traffickers. About a tenth of those are in what experts call “commercial sex servitude.”
Yet in a typical year, nations around the globe initiate only 3,000 prosecutions against traffickers, “an unforgivably low percentage,” said CdeBaca.
Nations all over the world have to get to the root causes of human trafficking, he said, including understanding what creates the markets that make the practice viable. (So far, 136 countries have signed on to a decade-old U.N. protocol against slavery.) Stepping up criminal prosecutions is still a prominent key, said CdeBaca, along with a range of other strategies to “rescue and punish.”
He outlined a “3-P paradigm” for addressing human trafficking: prosecute, prevent, and protect.
Skinner’s research, conducted both in public and underground, took him to child markets, trafficking networks, illegal brothels, and other slave venues in a dozen countries in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America. Even suburban America, he discovered, contains its own parallel universes of hidden slavery.
CdeBaca’s office every year rates nations around the world on their measures to fight slavery. The 2010 ranking — called the Trafficking in Persons, or TIP, report —will include the United States for the first time. That announcement drew a brief burst of applause in the crowded hall.
To illustrate the problem in the United States, consider the case of Shyima Hall, whose story was outlined in the 2009 TIP report. She was a teenager from a poor family in northern Egypt who was moved by a wealthy Egyptian couple to work in their California home. In exchange for up to 20 hours of labor a day, Shyima was locked in a windowless garage and paid $45 a month.
CdeBaca mentioned another case, one of an “escaped slave” who fled from virtual imprisonment in an Arlington, Mass., home. Her passport was locked in a safe.
He told other American stories: about the illiterate garment workers who studied the boss’ dictionary one word at a time to compose a note that they threw over a high wall. (They were rescued.) And the woman who rushed up to a policeman in a Dollar Store with a desperate plea to escape domestic servitude: “Arrest me.”
Modern slavery will prompt “the next great abolitionist movement,” said Skinner. He provided a chilling definition of modern slaves, who are so inadequately uncovered and protected: “Those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.”
Skinner acknowledged that slavery is a “contentious term” that some Westerners even sometimes equate to the drudgery of corporate jobs, mortgages, and credit card debt. But the world’s real slaves are “people that cannot walk away from their work.”
And the commercial enterprises that underlay slavery, Skinner said, potentially involve every consumer. To address the slave trade, he said, “takes all of us.”
Understanding modern slavery also invites comparison to the U.S. war on the drug trade, which has more resources and prominence, said Skinner. The annual budget to fight slavery, he said, is the equivalent to what is spent in a single day to combat trafficking in illegal drugs.
Without disparaging the need to target drugs, Skinner asked a rhetorical question about which is more important: “Is it a 15-year-old selling pot on the street corner, or is it a 15-year-old being sold on the street corner?”
Prosecution alone is not enough to stop modern slavery, said CdeBaca, who called for protection that extended beyond the courtroom, including provisions for social services. Ignoring the victim after the crime, he said, would only “replicate” the way the victim was treated by a trafficker.
Meantime, there is the third “P,” said CdeBaca: prevention, which remains “an afterthought” to most nations. Real prevention means more than policy pronouncements, public-awareness advertising campaigns, or “interesting documentaries,” he said. It means stopping human trafficking at the source, in part by understanding the demands behind forced labor and commercial sex.
Stopping trafficking at the source is also a matter of awareness, said CdeBaca in discussing the imprisoned shirt-makers and shrimp fishermen. Just as people are now aware of their carbon footprint, he said, they should be aware of their “modern-slavery footprint.” That means taking a critical look at the goods and services they buy.
“The prevention-P,” said CdeBaca, “is where every American can play.”
Luis CdeBaca
Director, Office To Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
Washington, DC
February 3, 2010
MR. TONER: Good afternoon. Today, Secretary Clinton will chair the President’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. She’ll be joined by fellow cabinet members as well as other task force representatives. This meeting, which is required under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, is the first under this Administration and will discuss steps taken by our interagency partners in the last year as well as map out coordinated strategies across the Obama Administration to confront modern slavery.
Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, the Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, is here to provide a preview of that meeting. Ambassador CdeBaca serves as the chair of the Senior Policy Operating Group, which oversees the day-to-day implementation and coordination of the Administration’s interagency trafficking – anti-trafficking policies.
Ambassador.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Thank you. As Mark said, I’m Luis CdeBaca. I’m the Ambassador-at-Large for the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking. Today, Secretary Clinton will chair the President’s interagency task force. She’ll be joined by other members of the task force, including the Attorney General, the secretaries of Labor, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services; the USAID Administrator, the Director of National Intelligence, as well as representatives from the White House, Department of Defense, Education, Agriculture, and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
This meeting, which, as Mark said, is mandated under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, is the first held under the Obama Administration. In today’s meeting, we will look forward to a very candid and progressive discussion that highlights the work that each agency is conducting individually as well as collectively to combat modern slavery. In addition, it’s a chance to preview the anti-trafficking efforts in the days, weeks, and months ahead as we work together to make measured progress against every form of exploitation, including forced labor, peonage, and sexual servitude, in response to the President’s declaration of January as Human Trafficking and Slavery Awareness and Prevention Month.
To put this issue into broader context, the crime problem of human trafficking has crosscutting implications across U.S. Government policy lines, and that’s quite evident by the participation of the stakeholders who we will see today. Just one example of how coordination works in the real world and how human trafficking affects American communities: Yesterday afternoon, a jury in Dallas-Fort Worth convicted two defendants of enslaving a woman as their domestic servant in a scheme that lasted almost a decade. To bring these perpetrators to justice and to make sure that their victim was safe and cared for took the efforts of many different agencies working in concert. Just as we worked to rescue one individual Nigerian woman from servitude in Texas, we have to combine our individual mandates and skill sets in a manner that enables a whole-of-government response equal to the scale of this problem. Because to confront modern slavery, we must act in a manner commensurate to the sophistication and tenacity of our adversaries, the traffickers, while honoring the bravery and humanity of the victims.
With that, I will answer any questions you might have.
QUESTION: How pervasive would you say the problem of human trafficking is worldwide?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: There are a number of different estimates and it’s a pretty broad estimate, depending on the methodology. The International Labor Organization estimates that there are around 12.3 million persons laboring in bondage around the world. And some of the other estimates from other organizations are higher, up to 27 million. Some of it ends up, again, coming down to methodology. But certainly, 12.3 million is – we think that that’s a pretty accurate number.
QUESTION: And what are the demographics?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: According to the ILO, it’s around – and I apologize if I don’t have the exact number. We can get that for you. But according to the ILO, I want to say it’s around 50 to 60 percent female, that by their numbers, it’s somewhere around 9 to 10 million in forced labor situations and 2 to 3 million in sex trafficking situations.
QUESTION: The impression we sometimes get is that this is carried out by organized crime groups. Can you set us straight on who exactly is doing this? Is there an international worldwide network of people? What’s the homegrown part of it?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Exactly. We’ve seen all of these different manifestations, and I think this is one of the challenges of this crime, is that for every case that you have like the one in Dallas yesterday, where a man and a woman acted upon their own to bring a servant from their home country and enslave her in their house, you also have cases such as a case that I prosecuted when I was in the Civil Rights Division, for instance, in Michigan and another one in Illinois, in which you had more traditional Russian organized crime types of figures who were recruiting people in Ukraine, in Lithuania, Latvia, et cetera, bringing them over as something that would be, I guess for lack of a better word, the stereotypical type of case that you describe. And so as a result, you end up having to have a response that finds those individual actors and at the same time is able to go after the cartels.
One of the things that we’ve been very successful in doing in the past year during the Obama Administration is working with the Government of Mexico so that, for the first time now, we have cases that are being investigated and prosecuted both at the beginning of the case in Mexico and in the United States, the first case recently that was brought kind of simultaneously in Atlanta and in the state of Tlaxcala in Mexico. We think that that’s probably the way to go when you’re dealing with these – more of the international crime rings is to do that simultaneously in both countries.
QUESTION: So where are these people taken? I have an image of a map around the world. Where do they come from? Where do they go?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: A lot of the cases are actually people who are enslaved in their own country. And it – I don’t think we have good data as to whether that’s the norm or whether transnational movement for the purposes of exploitation is the norm. Certainly, again, the conception that I think a lot of people have on this is that this is a phenomenon of movement and migration which is not required by the United Nations protocol, it’s not required by U.S. law.
Basically, what we see though is trafficking flows – when it is a movement crime, trafficking flows mimicking the broader migration flow. So, for instance, if you look in Western Europe, traditionally a lot of the people who have been held in servitude have been from Eastern Europe, but now they’re starting to see a number of cases involving Chinese children and other Asian folks brought in – again, not always for sex, but sometimes for forced labor, starting to get begging rings with kids from Africa and things like that in a number of European cities. And that really is following the broader migrant flow, so it should be no surprise to people that here in the United States, a lot of our cases involve people from Mexico and Latin America because just, again, the basic percentage of migrants in this country is predominantly Hispanic.
QUESTION: Is this simply taking advantage of people who are in dire economic straits, or do you see an uptick when there is some sort of natural crisis such as an earthquake, a tsunami, something of that sort?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: I think that part of what we’ve seen is that the traffickers end up taking advantage of whatever vulnerability is in front of them. So, for instance, there was a case that was prosecuted a couple of years ago in Kansas where the victims were white American citizens but who were made vulnerable to enslavement because of mental illness, schizophrenia, et cetera.
Usually, the vulnerabilities come from race, class, migratory status, unfamiliarity with the language or the culture. And certainly, we see this notion of displacement, whether it’s in conflict areas, the women and children enslaved in the Eastern Congo and in other places in Africa to do what’s called euphemistically artisanal mining, scratching the precious minerals from the earth that can then be used in our cell phones and other things like that, tantalum and cobalt, but also the notion of the predators coming in to – whether it’s refugee camps, whether it’s into other places where we’ve seen that kind of displacement.
And just as we’ve seen the refugee camps in the wake of the Kosovo intervention and in Bosnia and in those areas becoming a place where human traffickers go to try to find their victims, obviously, that’s something that we’re looking at in the last three weeks in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti.
QUESTION: Can you explain --
QUESTION: Can you be more specific about Haiti and whether you – what you’ve seen and whether you’re just worried about it in general or whether you’re actually seeing it, and are there any cases aside from the dozen Americans in the case that’s pending down there?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, I won’t address the dozen – the Americans in the case that’s pending. I think that you’ve heard about that from the podium through some other folks. But the – we are hearing anecdotal evidence from certainly, obviously, UNICEF, which is the head of the child cluster there in Haiti, and other NGOs about the notion of recruiters or others in some of these camps. I think that some of that’s been reported.
QUESTION: What was the name of that organization? UNIT?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: UNICEF?
QUESTION: Oh, from UNICEF. Okay.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Yeah. But some of the other organizations that are there. We have begun to – we’ve actually got funding out the door already to a group called Heartland Alliance that’s part of the child cluster that’s one of the more experienced U.S. countertrafficking organizations. They work with a lot of the trafficking victims in the Midwest. They’re out of Chicago. But they also do countertrafficking projects for – with grant money from us around the world. And they’re stepping up their activities in Haiti.
One of the things that we’re responding to is not necessarily that there is one particular case that’s triggered this or one particular allegation that’s triggered this, but rather the notion that when you have a refugee situation or you have a natural disaster, et cetera, especially in the 10 years now since the adoption of the United Nations Protocol Against Trafficking in Persons, there’s a recognition that you have to build that into your response, just like you’d build – if you were going to have a major sporting event, you’d have to build in how many ambulances do you need if somebody’s going to have heart attacks, what do you do about terrorism.
I think now we’re starting to see that countertrafficking responses need to be built in from the beginning, and especially in a place like Haiti, where, as our report in 2009 pointed out, there was a large child trafficking problem before the earthquake hit. And so I think that the unique situation that we have with Haiti means that it’s even more pressing on the part of donor communities and governments like the United States, who are working on the ground there.
QUESTION: Do you have any statistics on how many – on the problem in Haiti before the earthquake, numbers? And then also on that whole total of 12.3 million persons, how many of those were children, roughly?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: We’ll have to, I think, circle back with you on the ILO study. The ILO study, just so you have it, the name of that was called the Cost of Coercion. And I --
QUESTION: The what?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: The Cost of Coercion – in which the ILO not only did a snapshot of the problem in the world but also did some economic modeling in which they’re estimating that it’s about 31 billion profit to the traffickers annually, and about 20 billion opportunity cost losses to the victims on top of that, so it’s about a 50 billion industry worldwide.
As far as Haiti is concerned, last year in the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, Haiti – and again, this is a wide range of estimate – the high-end estimate is 300,000 children who are in the restavek system in Haiti, with an additional potential of 3,000 who may have been taken to the Dominican Republic for use.
And the restavek system, for those of you who are unfamiliar with that, it’s a – basically a system of fostering out children who then are working as child domestic servants, often abused, often exploited. They tend to age out because the Haitian law requires employers to pay domestic workers over the age of 15. And so one of the things that we’re concerned about and that we raised in the report last year was the notion that many of the street children – whether it’s girls in prostitution, whether it’s boys engaged in crime, et cetera – are basically restaveks who were disposed of by the families who had had them before. So that’s that that notion of kind of the child domestic servant, often enslaved, usually given to the person because of promises that the child would be cared for, sent to school, et cetera. So that’s one of the things that we are very concerned about is that as we rebuild, as we start to enter the rebuilding stage, that the child safety response is in place so that we don’t see an even bigger increase in that restavek population.
QUESTION: Last year’s report refers to --
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: I promised him that I would come to him.
QUESTION: You’ve got a specific question on Haiti?
QUESTION: No, go ahead and, I’ll come back to that.
QUESTION: Those figures are from 2008, though, right?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Yes, and the 2009 numbers actually should be coming in. We’ve – we’re in the middle of our reporting period right now, so we’re looking for our reporting cables. Obviously, we’re going to have to see how much of the data is going to be collectible in Haiti right now, given what’s going on with the government and its ability to give us any kind of data on this.
QUESTION: Just two things. One, you said that you’re hearing anecdotally about the notion of traffickers in Haiti. What do you mean by “about the notion of”? I mean, are you hearing anecdotes that there are actually traffickers or --
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: For – just one for instance. There’s been reports, that I think have been reported on in the news as well, of men coming into some of the camps, using offers of food or water to get girls to leave with them in trucks. Now, obviously, we don’t have any hard evidence as to what’s happening to those girls once they leave with those men, and so that’s why the term “the notion of” trafficking.
When we look at human trafficking, as far as what the crime phenomenon would be, we’re looking at somebody who’s being held in compelled service. So we can suspect that that may have been the case that they might have been recruiting those girls for prostitution and that, because they’re under age, could be a trafficking situation, but we don’t have the hard information yet as to what’s happening down the road. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re going to be looking to work with the Haitian police as they, again, move out of the immediate disaster response and go back to reconstruction and governance. We’ll be wanting to work with them as far as how do you set up detective squads and child protective folks that can then go and look downstream as far as that’s --
QUESTION: That was exactly my next question, which is: Can you describe for us, other than detective squads, what are the kinds of specific, practical steps that one should set up? The same way that you try to estimate how many ambulances you need for a sporting event, what are the kinds of things you need to put in place in this kind of a – after such a natural disaster or a war or whatever?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, before the earthquake, we had about $500,000 worth of programming in Haiti itself, and those were largely about child trafficking. It was a couple of projects that were working with protecting escaped restaveks and seeking reintegration, either back with their families or with families who could foster them, who wouldn’t abuse them, to improve and instill greater public awareness about human trafficking within Haiti.
So it was something that then you’d see legal reforms or bigger resources being put it into it by the government, and also to provide direct services to victims, whether it’s men, women or children, in Haiti.
We also have some projects in the Dominican Republic, who are working with the Haitian community there, some of whom are in exploitative conditions, whether it’s in farming or whether it’s in the sex industry. And so there’s a project that we’re working on with the Solidarity Center, working on how to get information out to those communities.
What we’ve done in the last three weeks is we’ve repositioned a number of those projects. In the Dominican Republic, for instance, we’re working with the Solidarity Center so that we can try to turn that project around a little bit and have it catch, if there are folks that are coming over the border in search of jobs, in search of work, that they know their rights, that they know that they shouldn’t put themselves into a situation where they can be exploited.
So we’re working on the Dominican side with that project, and then we’re also moving money into Haiti as far as trying to build up those child protection brigades, as far as working with the groups such as the Jean Robert Cadet Restavek Foundation and others to try to make sure that we can have some things in place to protect those children.
But I think that what we see as far as the bigger macro issue is that it’s – the response to human trafficking is not the first week or two’s response; that’s the immediate shelter needs, immediate medical needs, et cetera. Then it’s starting to overlay in, do you have protection, do you have police, do you have social workers, et cetera, and that’s where we’re trying to move with this.
QUESTION: And how are the child protection brigades different from police or social workers? I mean, what are they?
AMBASSADSOR CDEBACA: They’re a little more akin to the folks here in the United States who are the child protective services --
QUESTION: Okay.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: -- folks, so it’s kind of half police, half social worker in the best of all possible worlds. And that’s what we’re going to be engaging with the Haitian Government on as to what’s their vision that we can come in, supplement that, professionalize it, and make sure that there are enough folks in the child protection brigades to actually go out now that we’ve got so many children who will need to be reunited either with their families or with the orphanages that they were in before, et cetera.
QUESTION: Can you explain exactly what this meeting is today about – this afternoon? I mean, you made reference several times to the fact that it’s mandated. I mean, is there any reason other than the fact that it’s mandated that it’s happening today? Is there anything to announce coming out of it? Is there any new strategy, any new policy that’s going to arise? Or is this just kind of a get-together and look at what we’ve done over the past year?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: I think what we’ll see out of this is we’ll see – there’s a little bit of bringing everyone together, which is what Congress set up the task force to do. But I think that one of the things that we’ll see is a commitment from the cabinet to actually go out and then implement what the President called for in his declaration on January 4th.
QUESTION: Well, wasn’t there already that commitment?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, that commitment was there, but as far as the task force officially declaring it moving forward, what comes out of today will actually, I think, give us a roadmap that we can use for the interagency coordination through the President’s Interagency Task Force and the senior policy operating group. And so --
QUESTION: But wasn’t that being done last year as well?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: It was being done last year, but --
QUESTION: Okay. So what’s different? I guess I’m just trying to figure out what the point of this meeting is. I mean, it sounds as though it’s just kind of a review and like, yay, let’s everyone get onboard, but not much substance.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, I think that what we’re seeing is that the way that Congress set the task force up was that the task force has a coordinating function through the senior policy operating group – and that meets quarterly – that’s where we look at the particular substance, we feed that up to our principals, decisions can be made. Today is the principals meeting, so it’ll be giving us the marching orders for what we do at the more substantive level going throughout the next year.
QUESTION: You asking for more money for Haiti? You said that previously you had about $500,000 a year in projects. And I know you guys have – don’t have yet an exact sum for assistance for Haiti. But do you plan to ask for additional money to combat these kinds of – to combat trafficking in Haiti?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Well, we have 500,000 to begin with. We will reposition about another a million, taking that from other projects, frankly. And so we need to look at how we make sure that those projects, which – the money of which hasn’t gone out the door yet. And those countries don’t necessarily (inaudible) or not, now that we’re looking at the Haitian side.
Obviously, we’re looking at what the long-term funding needs are. We have about $20-, $22 million in grant funds that we administer in the Trafficking office. We work with our partners at USAID and at the International Labor Affairs Bureau over at DOL, and we are shaking the trees right now to figure out what money there is in this year’s budget, as opposed to looking into the next year.
QUESTION: Right.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: I know that Deputy Secretary Lew was in talking budget issues with you guys earlier this week. Right now, we’re shaking the 2010 trees to try to figure out what monies we have available right now. And as we do that, obviously, we’ll be looking at the budget needs going forward.
QUESTION: And the additional 1 million that’s been repositioned is all FY2010 money, correct?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: I want to say it’s – there might be a little bit of unspent 20 – 2009 money --
QUESTION: Okay.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: -- that hasn’t gone out the door yet --
QUESTION: Okay.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: -- but it’s not new money --
QUESTION: Right.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: -- from a new place yet.
QUESTION: Thank you.
QUESTION: One more question on funding. The people from – who are going to be working with Haiti or with any country on these projects, are they U.S. Government employees or are they NGOs who have applied for grant money from the federal government? What’s the breakdown on that?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: I don’t think we have a particular ratio yet. At this point, the folks that were on the ground were the grantees, and so we’re looking to try to intensify that so that they can get into action immediately.
QUESTION: Okay.
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: Many of them started working first and then we’ve been trying to overlay it so they can actually start bringing in some experts – not only American experts, but also there are a lot of Haitian experts, people on the ground, who can be brought into this, I think especially as people continue to dig out. And so we want to make sure that the – that our partners on the ground there have the funding, everything from rebuilding and making sure that there’s enough food and water for the kids, to if they need to be hiring more social workers or other things so that they can go ahead and do that.
QUESTION: Just one last question?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: One last question.
QUESTION: Okay. Just on statistics here, the number of people who are laboring in bondage, do you have any figures for the United States?
AMBASSADOR CDEBACA: The United States numbers are very imprecise, and I don’t think that we’re in a position where we can really give you a number. There’s been numbers recorded in the past. We’re looking at their methodology on that. I think that the consensus out in the anti-trafficking community is that certainly, we’re talking about tens of thousands. The number of trafficking victims that have been found in the United States don’t come anywhere near that, and that’s one of the things that we’re going to be talking about today with the fellow cabinet members, is how we can ensure that we’re finding and protecting as many of those victims as possible.
I think one of the ways that we do that, frankly, is that we’re now starting to see state laws come on line. And as we get state and local law enforcement – not just federal law enforcement – we’ll hopefully be seeing more rescues.
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