Catholic.net - Modern-Day Abolitionists Fight Slavery

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Author: Steve Weatherbe | Source: NCRegister.com

Human trafficking is growing, but so are efforts to fight it.

DAYTON, Ohio — When a young, pregnant Mexican woman who spoke no English was admitted to an Ohio hospital near Dayton with unusual pelvic injuries, staff asked the Casa Amiga for a translator.

Casa Amiga works with migrant workers. Its director, Maria Messer, responded to the hospital’s request.

She discovered the woman, an illegal immigrant, was being held captive by a local couple to bear the husband’s child, probably for sale to a childless couple. The woman’s injuries were the result of the couple’s efforts to speed up the birth.

That was a year ago.

Messer’s husband happens to be Mark Ensalaco, founder and director of the University of Dayton’s new human-rights program. The experience brought home in graphic terms the brutal reality of human trafficking.

“They were going to induce labor and steal the baby,” Ensalaco recalled. “It was like a ‘sign of the times’ for me.”

Having read those signs, he got his university, which was founded by the Marianist Fathers, to co-sponsor a conference on human trafficking with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Held Nov. 9-10, it assembled Ohio social-service agencies, legislators and law enforcement staff to discuss coordination at the state and local level.

For Ensalaco, it was a very positive turnout that garnered a lot of local and some national media coverage. Only a few weeks earlier, the FBI concluded a nationwide investigation by arresting 60 pimps and rescuing 52 children from the sex trade.

That brings to 114 the total number of arrests for human trafficking in 2009 nationally, 62 of them in the sex trade.

This may look like a drop in the bucket compared to the 20 million people the U.S. State Department estimates are subjected annually to some form of slavery worldwide, or the estimated 17,000 people brought into the U.S. in servitude, or the unknown number of American citizens held in bondage.

But Ensalaco is positive: “There are people studying this who believe human trafficking can be defeated in our lifetime, and some who think it can be done in a decade.”

Since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act became law in the U.S. in 2000, many other countries have passed similar, targeted legislation, as have 37 states, so that local police departments and prosecutors can add their efforts to those of the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In addition, the State Department is funding other countries to beef up their anti-trafficking efforts and theoretically can target negligent regimes with sanctions.

Paraphrasing Winston Church-ill, Ensalaco said, “We’re past the ‘end of the beginning’ on this. We know where to target our efforts.”

Bishops’ Involvement

A big part of the effort is being directed by the U.S. bishops’ conference, whose Migration and Refugee Services has a federal contract to provide social services to the foreign victims of trafficking across the U.S.

According to Kristyn Peck Williams, a Migration and Refugee Services screening and field coordinator who spoke at the Dayton conference, Migration and Refugee Services subcontracts, trains and liaises with existing local agencies around the country to ensure victims of trafficking are housed, protected and rehabilitated after often horrific experiences.

Under the Migration and Refugee Services, the number of participating agencies has grown from 25 to just over 100, while 1,408 client/victims were served in the last three and a half years, two-thirds of them women and children.

The sex trade accounts for 21% of the persons caught up in U.S. trafficking, while more than 70% are in other forms of forced labor: agriculture, construction (particularly in areas hit by Hurricane Katrina), domestic service, food services and manufacturing.

Ensalaco says human trafficking also got a big boost from the recent recession, “because people are desperate for work,” and from the collapse of the Soviet Union, which opened up former Soviet republics and other former Communist Bloc countries to exploitation.

Williams told the conference of cases like Dimitri, a Russian boy who came to the U.S. for a summer job, but was forced to work 20 hours a day in a hotel, sleeping in a lockup, without pay; or Rosa, a Mexican high school girl promised a restaurant job in Texas, who was raped and beaten and forced to sell drinks in a bar.

While most of the Catholic-run network gets its clients from law enforcement, one of its tasks is to educate the public and workers in fields such as medicine to spot victims.

Williams told of a Good Samaritan who befriended a domestic servant she met regularly walking her family’s dog: “It took a year to get through the language barrier and learn the facts and convince the woman she was a victim.” She had been kept for 30 years in servitude, living in the basement, keeping house for her captors, and let out only to walk the dog. “It was hard to get her to escape because she was worried about the family she was caring for. She loved her family and didn’t see herself as a victim,” Williams said.

Baby Steps

Williams said the United States and the world are taking “baby steps” in the fight against human trafficking, likening it to the early stages of the campaign against domestic violence decades ago.

After focusing for years on imported victims, she said, the U.S. government is only now waking up to the reality of domestic trafficking. There was no social-services program for U.S. citizens caught up in trafficking until recently. Now there are a handful of federally funded pilot projects. “Victims of sex trafficking, for example, don’t belong in housing situations with drug addicts,” said Williams.

The Dayton conference also heard from Theresa Flores, director of a safe house for teenage girls rescued from prostitution. She herself had been coerced by drugs, rapes and beatings into the sex trade in Detroit in her teens. After 20 years of silence, she wrote a book about the experience, The Sacred Bath: An American Teen’s Story of Modern-Day Slavery, and started Christian-based Gracehaven.

Another American evangelical Christian effort is the International Justice Mission; devoted to ending human trafficking in all its forms, the organization uses undercover agents who gather evidence against human-trafficking operations abroad and turn the evidence over to the police and provide safety for victims and witnesses.

More than 20 religious orders, schools and social agencies from the U.S. and abroad have formed the Coalition of Catholic Organizations Against Human Trafficking to provide safety and rehabilitative services for victims of human trafficking, to lobby for tougher enforcement, and to provide awareness and prevention training abroad.

Amy Roth, media relations director for International Justice Mission, said the Catholic Church “is beginning to be a major player in the fight against human trafficking. It’s an international network of 1.3 billion people, and that’s what’s needed to take on a global network of criminals.”

Roth, who was on staff with the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See for five years during the George W. Bush administration, worked closely with Sister Eugenia Bonetti of the Italian Union of Major Superiors to enlist religious orders, particularly of women, in the struggle. “Around the world,” said Roth, “nuns have opened their doors to prostitutes, ministering to their brokenness.”

Both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches have had to rethink the issue and see women caught in the sex trade as victims. Roth credits the Vatican with staging several international conferences and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI with leading the effort to raise awareness.

International Justice Mission itself focuses on cooperating with local justice systems in foreign countries to strengthen their efforts against what Roth calls “this plague.”

And she’s optimistic: “We’re not at the tipping point, but we’re approaching it — and having a global network of Catholic religious communities on our side is a big, big help.”

Steve Weatherbe writes from Victoria, British Columbia.

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• Shocking rise of 'new slavery' in America (guardian.co.uk)

Forced labour and rape, the new face of slavery in America | World news | The Observer

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In the Midwestern heartland, police are encountering a new social evil: trafficking, often involving women and children who are forced to work as prostitutes or unpaid labour; and the outcomes can be brutal.

* Paul Harris in Dayton, Ohio
* The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009

Human trafficking has become a major issue in the Midwest heartland of America, causing some campaigners to dub it a modern form of slavery.

Figures from the State Department reveal that 17,500 people are trafficked into the US every year against their will or under false pretences, mainly to be used for sex or forced labour. Experts believe that, when cases of internal trafficking are added, the total number of victims could be up to five times larger. And increasing numbers of trafficked individuals are being transported thousands of miles from America's coasts and into heartland states such as Ohio and Michigan.

"It is not only a crime. It is an abomination," said Professor Mark Ensalaco, a political scientist at the University of Dayton, Ohio, who organised a recent conference on the issue. In Ohio a human trafficking commission has just been set up to study the problem, while in the northern Ohio city of Toledo a special FBI task force is tackling the issue. For many local law enforcement officials, it is a bewildering new world.

In one recent incident a 16-year-old Mexican girl was found to have been trafficked across the US border. Doctors noticed the heavily pregnant girl showed clear signs of physical abuse when she was brought into a hospital in Dayton to give birth. The police were called but the couple who had brought her had already fled. When the girl's story emerged, it became clear she had been kept against her will in the nearby city of Springfield and used for labour and sex. "I thought slavery ended a few centuries ago. But here it is alive and well," said Springfield's sheriff, Gene Kelly.

He emphasised the risks to the girl's baby after it had been born if the doctors had not been so alert: "Like the mother, the baby could have ended up a victim for years to come. Who knows? Future labour? Future person to traffic?"

Ohio anti-trafficking campaigner Phil Cenedella, founder of Combating Trafficking Anywhere, believes that the baby was destined to be sold off by her captors. "They would have put the kid on the black market. It is crazy that this is happening." Human trafficking – defined as forcing someone against their will to work for no reward – has been dubbed modern slavery. At the Dayton conference, it was discussed as a growing social problem, not in some far-off foreign land, but among the cornfields of Ohio.

"The problems are broader than we realised," said Ohio's attorney general, Richard Cordray. "What we want to do is find and disrupt these networks."

One of the country's leading anti-trafficking advocates is Theresa Flores, a former victim. Flores puts a different kind of face on human trafficking in America. She is white, middle-class and blond and looks the epitome of a suburban American woman. She grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit in Michigan and did well at school. Yet Flores tells a nightmarish story of two years being drugged, raped and sold for sex.

Flores, whose ordeal was turned into a book called The Sacred Bath: An American Teen's Story of Modern Day Slavery, was attacked and raped when she was 15. Her assailant used the threat of photographs he had taken during her rape to force her into having sex with strangers. She became the effective prisoner of a drugs gang that used her as a prostitute and kept her earnings, or gave her away free to gang members as a "reward". "People don't think that trafficking looks like me or that it can happen to someone who came from a nice neighbourhood. But it does. People need to see outside that box," said Flores.

Flores said that her lowest point came when the gang took her to a seedy motel where she was raped by as many as two dozen men. She woke up alone, abused and with no clothes. "I was told I would die if I told anyone. It happened over and over for two years as I became a sex slave for those men," she said.

Anti-trafficking campaigners point out that cases in the US come in a wide variety of forms involving men, women and children. One major area is that of trafficked labour with people used for domestic work or, more commonly, for back-breaking labour in agricultural industries. But trafficking cases have also occurred in businesses such as restaurants, hair salons and beauty parlours. The overwhelming majority of the rest are sex cases, usually involving young women or children forced into prostitution. The methods used to keep people vary. They include confiscating the passports of those brought in from a foreign country or the threat of extreme violence. Other tactics are to threaten family members if a victim does not comply or, as in Flores's case, to use blackmail.

Trafficking represents a new challenge to law enforcement, especially in regions which have traditionally not thought of it as a major problem. That is especially true where it happens within an immigrant community. Languages are a problem as well as cultural issues and a natural fear that many immigrants – some of them possibly illegal – have of contacting the police.

Kelly believes that is the case in Springfield, a town that is almost the Midwestern archetype. It was once featured in a story in Newsweek magazine entitled "The American Dream". But its 65,000 citizens also face all the problems of a modern America in the grip of a deep recession: an immigration crisis and profoundly changing demographics. The town now hosts several prominent minority communities who make up more than a fifth of its population, including Russians, Chinese, Latinos and Somalis. "There are a lot of people who distrust law enforcement. We need to break down those barriers. Our officers need training, especially in languages," said Kelly. "If you can't speak to people, you can't reach them."

Some commentators and experts have accused victims' advocates and academics of overstating the problem, arguing the problem has been exaggerated and expressing scepticism at the notion that vast organised criminal networks are dealing in human beings for sex or labour. Law enforcement officers also acknowledge that the definitions of trafficking may need refining.

In North Carolina last week the mother of a five-year-old girl was charged with human trafficking after being accused of offering her daughter for sex. The child was later found dead. The crime was horrific, but the distinction between trafficking and simple, sadistic child abuse might not be immediately obvious.

"We have a problem with definition. It is not always straightforward and easy to explain," said Laura Clemmens, a government lawyer in Dayton. "The hard part is bringing it into the light. At the moment these crimes are clouded in secrecy."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/people-trafficking-usa-prostitution-ohio

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VOA News - Human Trafficking Reaches to High Alert Around World

By Kane Farabaugh
Dayton, Ohio
13 November 2009

The U.S. State Department estimates that 800,000 human trafficking victims cross international borders each year. The United States is often a destination for many of these victims, where they are held in what many human rights activists consider modern day slavery. Some of those activists participated in the Human Rights Accords in Dayton Ohio, a two-day conference to help raise awareness about the problems victims face. The conference occurred this week as U.S. law enforcement agencies are engaged in a nationwide crackdown on human trafficking.

Sharla Musabih has watched the Emirate of Dubai transform from a small town into one of the largest and fastest growing cities in the Middle East.

Dubai's growth has made it an attractive destination for people from poorer areas looking for work. According to Musabih, it has also attracted criminals looking for victims in the dark underworld of human trafficking.

"A lot of women are coming in victims of agents that go out to rural areas and promise them wonderful jobs," said Musabih.

But according to Musabih, those wonderful jobs often lead these women into forced labor and prostitution.

Musabih has led a sometimes solitary effort to help fight for the rights of victims of human trafficking in Dubai. Her job became increasingly difficult as Dubai's population grew. Her work has recently attracted unwelcome attention in Dubai and she is now living in the United States.

"I think I was a very loud voice for the victims," said Musabih. "I was basically exposing things that were going on. I was kind of pushed out and then slandered in the media."

These are some of the experiences Musabih shared with U.S. law enforcement and social agencies gathered at the University of Dayton, Ohio for the Human Trafficking Accords. Director of the University's Human Rights Program Mark Ensalaco says one of the targets of the conference is to shed light on a growing problem in the United States.

"It would be a terrible misconception on the part of Americans to think that this crime of human trafficking, or modern day slavery, is confined to the Third World. It's everywhere, and it's in the United States as well," said ensalaco.

Polaris Project, one of the largest anti-trafficking organizations in the United States, estimates as many as 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the United States each year. They also estimate as many as 244,000 American youth are vulnerable to exploitation.

To combat the growing problem, Ensalaco said in late October the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated Operation Cross Country IV, a nationwide crackdown on human trafficking.

"They arrested dozens of pimps and freed more than fifty sex slaves," he said. "Many of them children in Ohio, the youngest was 10."

Ensalaco says the recent arrests reinforce the reality that human trafficking is not just an international problem, but also a local one affecting every community in the United States. Ensalaco said he hopes the conference is the first of many would help educate the public as well as law enforcement to reach the goal of ending human trafficking.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-11-13-voa15.cfm

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