The Human Trafficking Project: Walking Merchandise: Child Smuggling and the Snakehead Trade

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Last Spring, Rob Nguyen and Ethan Downing decided that they wanted to raise awareness about a lesser-known division of human trafficking. In the following year they tracked down lawyers, journalists, social workers, and trafficked individuals in order to create an informative and startling documentary about Chinese human traffickers known as snakeheads. The film, Walking Merchandise: Child Smuggling and the Snakehead Trade, examines the intricacies of this specific trafficking method from China to the United States.
“We got involved with the topic because last Spring, Ethan Downing, the director of the film, was completing a Master's in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, at Columbia University,” said Rob Nguyen, the producer of Walking Merchandise. “He had been aware of Lauren A. Burke's work at The Door, a youth services center here in New York. She had been working with young Chinese persons who had been smuggled and trafficked into the U.S. and often working in restaurants around the U.S.”

Snakeheads solicit individuals to travel from China into the United States, using illegal means to transport them across borders and charging fees as high as $80,000, according to Walking Merchandise. Many of these individuals are children being sent by their own families. These individuals are subjected to cruelty, and extortion during their journey to America. After arriving they are forced into labor, and their well-being, as well as their families’, are threatened should they not pay back the impossible debt.

The interviews between the filmmakers and victims are an enlightening glimpse into one specific subclass of human trafficking, which as a whole, has become an estimated $31.6 billion industry, according to the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking.

Finding professionals who had knowledge of human trafficking, and more specifically, the Snakehead Trade proved easy. However, finding young individuals to tell their stories was much more difficult. “Many of them still owe money to either the snakeheads who brought them here, or persons from whom they borrowed money to pay the snakeheads,” said Nguyen.

Current involvement in the industry posed challenges for the filmmakers. Many of these individuals would be traveling to New York City only to find their next job on the restaurant circuit. This offered the individuals a chance to tell their story to, but the filmmakers extremely short notice to meet with them.

“During that brief window of time is when we'd meet with them, so this would be often last minute, with just a day or two's notice,” said Nguyen. “We just tried to be as flexible as possible in order to make ourselves available to meet with them.”

Another important part of production was maintaining anonymity of the trafficked individuals’ identities. “So as you may see in the trailer for the film we've either obscured the young persons' faces through silhouette lighting and post-processing, or otherwise simply not including their faces in the shot when we filmed the interview,” said Nguyen.

Many of the interviews they conducted were through a professional referral, and “They would take great pains to make sure that the young person was choosing to be interviewed of their own free will, and that's something that we would ask them again once we sat down and met with them,” said Nguyen.

Nguyen was surprised to find that while most of the young victims spoke with a “matter-of-fact perspective” about their ordeal, others were particularly eager to share. These few were able to realize the scope of the film, and a larger purpose in telling what had happened to them.

“They felt that they themselves had not been told the full story when their parents sent them to the U.S., and they really wanted other kids to know about it,” Nguyen said. “This was really impressive, as was their ability to articulate their experiences and their hopes for other young persons considering making the same journey.”

The film, which is currently in post-production, is expected to be finished in May of this year. The filmmakers hope that they will be able to screen the film at festivals, as well as for non-profits and NGO’s who specialize in human trafficking, through May of 2012.

“After that, we'll release the film online for free streaming and download,” said Nguyen. “We'll also try to complement that with a number of smaller online videos, similar to those on our website presently, so that the site, as well as the film itself, can be a resource for people wanting to learn more about this issue.”

Funding for the documentary was provided through a graduate fellowship from Columbia University’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity that Downing had been awarded. Later, additional capital was raised through a fundraiser for the film, known as the Kickstarter Campaign.

Nguyen, Downing and the rest of the team who worked on the film, including Vincent DeLuca, Director of Photography, Drew Downing, Production Assistant, Annie Sheng, Translator, and Michael Nguyen, Publicity Coordinator, are extremely grateful for the additional encouragement that pushed them to finish the film.

“As with many small films, we are also heavily indebted to countless family and friends for their support and help with the film,” said Nguyen.

Posted by Lauren Hutton at 6:49 AM

Source: The Human Trafficking Projec
The Human Trafficking Project: Walking Merchandise: Child Smuggling and the Snakehead Trade

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On the hunt for China's child snatchers

Image by Planet Love via Flickr

Over 2,000 trafficked children have been rescued since China's government began a crackdown on the trade in stolen children earlier this year.

But as the BBC's Damian Grammaticas reports from Beijing, many thousands of children are being snatched off the streets to be sold every year and most are never recovered.

The footage from the CCTV security camera is soft and blurred, but a man can be seen walking down a street carrying a child away in the night.

He glances over his shoulder, wary. This is a child kidnapper in the act of committing his crime.

The man has snatched the boy off the street in Dongguan in southern China where he was playing.

Another camera films the abductor as he gets tired, pauses, puts the boy down, then picks him up and sets off again.

His air is unhurried. There are many passersby, but nobody questions him.

There are thousands of cases like this in China every year - children, often boys, stolen to be sold for profit.

Detective work

In another case a camera mounted in a bus station catches a man luring a boy into his trap.

The man is sitting, holding a baby turtle in his hand.

A young boy comes up to him, his sister by his side, to look at the animal. But it is the boy, three-and-a-half-year-old Luo Run, who is the target, not the girl.

He was abducted and spirited hundreds of miles away by a gang of traffickers.

In Luo Run's case the police were able to identify the man who snatched him.

Trailing the gang took them to the mountains of southern Fujian province.

There, posing as buyers looking for a child, detectives arranged a meeting with the so-called snakehead, the gangster who had sold the boy on.

The demand for children is driven by a deep-seated preference in southern China for sons, boys to keep the family name alive who have a duty to care for aged parents.

And some parents are prepared to buy a stolen child if they can not have a boy of their own.

It is thought China's One Child Policy exacerbates the problem. Couples the law applies to who have a girl first cannot then legally have another child, so many turn to the traffickers to procure a boy.

Arresting the snakehead who had sold Luo Run led detectives to trace and free not only him, but also more than a dozen children, all of whom had been stolen and traded to families in the area.

The children were all taken back to Guangdong province where they had come from and were reunited with their parents.

Abductions rising

Luo Run's parents are poor migrant labourers who live in a tiny flat in a workers' block in Guangzhou.

They say their son ended up with a well-off elderly couple who were desperate for a son of their own and showered the boy with toys. When he was rescued it took him days to accept his real parents again. Now they never let him out of their sight.

"When my son went missing, it was like my heart was being cut into pieces. It was the darkest time of my life, words cannot describe it," Luo Run's father Luo An Xin says.

"When my son came back, everything suddenly became clear, and it filled my heart with joy."

Happy as it is, Luo Run's rescue is an exception.

Nobody knows how many children are being kidnapped every year. But parents say it is thousands, and most are never recovered.

Even China's Supreme People's Court has said the numbers of stolen children are rising.

This week it sentenced two men to death for kidnapping and trading 15 children. It may be a sign that China's government wants to send a signal that it is cracking down on the trade.

Desperate search

On the streets of southern China's teeming factory towns the children of migrant labourers, playing unsupervised, are easy prey for the traffickers.

Two thousand stolen children have been recovered by Chinese police in a special operation launched this year, but often China's authorities can be callous in their response to the problem.

Some parents say local officials often do not want to deal with cases of stolen children. They say they have been warned to keep quiet and not campaign publicly to find their children lest they disturb social order.

Peng Gaofeng's two-year-old son Le Le was abducted right outside his shop. Le Le was a cheeky, vivacious boy, doted on by his parents.

Security camera footage shows a man walking away holding the boy. But it is too blurred to show the face of the man.

Peng Gaofeng agrees to meet us, but only discreetly in a local restaurant.

He has travelled across southern China looking for his son. He has put up posters and been on television.

But since he began his public campaign to find Le Le and other children, he says he has been monitored by police and warned against making too much fuss.

"If there were just one or two cases it would be a minor thing for the police. But there are thousands of us who've lost our kids. It's a massive issue," Peng Gaofeng says.

"By campaigning openly we undermine the image the government wants to project that this is a harmonious society."

For some officials finding Peng Gaofeng's child appears less important than preserving the facade of order.

So all he has now are some pictures of his son, and the security camera footage showing Le Le, vanishing into the night.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8383424.stm

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