"Police in eastern India have rescued 13 babies and discovered the skeletons of two infants in raids on homes for the elderly and mentally disabled, as a probe into a suspected international human trafficking ring widened on Monday."
Read MORE
Babies, skeletons and forex found as human trafficking probe...:
(Reporting by Subrata Nagchoudhury. Writing by Nita Bhalla, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
Showing posts with label South Asia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Asia. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Friday, May 29, 2015
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Lack of clear definitions on human trafficking in South Asia is hurting victims | WNN – Women News Network
Source:| WNN – Women News Network:
(WNN/IRIN) Jakarta, INDONESIA, SOUTHEAST ASIA: A 2012 UNODC – UN Office on Drugs and Crime report on human trafficking recorded more than 10,000 cases of trafficking in persons in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific between 2007-2010, but it is unclear what the situation is today. Tens of thousands of people are vulnerable to being trafficked in Southeast Asia, with governments struggling to understand and respond collectively to the problem, say experts and government officials.
Continue:
http://womennewsnetwork.net/2013/05/07/definition-on-human-trafficking-south-asia/
(WNN/IRIN) Jakarta, INDONESIA, SOUTHEAST ASIA: A 2012 UNODC – UN Office on Drugs and Crime report on human trafficking recorded more than 10,000 cases of trafficking in persons in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific between 2007-2010, but it is unclear what the situation is today. Tens of thousands of people are vulnerable to being trafficked in Southeast Asia, with governments struggling to understand and respond collectively to the problem, say experts and government officials.
Continue:
http://womennewsnetwork.net/2013/05/07/definition-on-human-trafficking-south-asia/
Friday, July 19, 2013
Modern slave trade is a booming economy: Voice of Russia - UK Edition
http://ruvr.co.uk/2013_07_16/Modern-slave-trade-is-a-booming-economy/
SOURCE: Voice of Russia - UK Edition
Download
SOURCE: Voice of Russia - UK Edition
Jul 16, 2013 15:30
|
British author Mende Nazer, born in Sudan, was abducted when she was a child. She was sold into slavery and forced to work as a house servant in London, UK (Rex Features)
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Modern slavery is the third largest global criminal industry behind illegal drugs and arms, according to the UN. Every year millions of people from poor communities migrate so they can support their families at home, but many are trafficked into unpaid jobs where they work in shocking conditions. VoR's Juliet Spare reports.
Up until now, most of the international effort on human trafficking has focused on sexual exploitation.
But labour trafficking is more common.
Around 21 million people worldwide are now thought to be victims of forced labour.
The Eradication of Slavery Bill, which Labour MP Michael Connarty submitted to parliament last year, seeks transparency in UK supply chains in order to abolish modern-day slavery.
There are now further calls on the Prime Minister to introduce a modern-day slavery act.
Robin Brierley is a consultant on human trafficking and immigration in the UK who used to work for the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.
“The Eradication of Slavery Bill aims to make large companies accountable in their annual reports to show what they’ve done to prevent human trafficking in the supply chains.”He said.
“The subject of trafficking in supply chains is new and I think it’s taking industry a long time to recognise the benefits of working with partners to ensure workers aren’t being exploited.”
Modern-day slavery is a booming economy capitalising on trading humans and forcing them to work. And it happens here in the UK.
Migrant Help, a charity based in Dover was set up 50 years ago to help victims of modern-day slavery.
Sandra Ni Artaigh is the Human Resources Manager for Tilmanstone Salads which worked with the charity.
“Last year we inadvertently came across people trafficking. If one of our own staff hadn’t been hyper vigilant we would not have known as the girls didn’t speak English.
"They were fantastic workers so we decided to link up with Migrant Help and Canterbury CID.
"I don’t think any manufacturing company throughout the country is going to be immune from this and you must have resources to spot the signs of trafficking if someone doesn’t have the strength to tell you themselves.” She said.
“I think when it comes to trafficking and 21st century slavery every organisation and manufacturer has an ethical and moral obligation to ensure they’re doing the right thing by their people.
"It doesn’t cost thousands of pounds, it’s about awareness.”
The UK Government is investing 9.75 million pounds over five years into an initiative called Work in Freedom to help tackle known labour trafficking routes between South Asia and the Middle East.
But it seems more companies in the UK need to adopt a business model which makes it impossible for modern day slaves to be abused by the job market.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Cooperation against trafficking: New support to protect girls and women from ‘modern day slavery’
Source: ILO
CONTINUE READING:
http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/news/WCMS_217666/lang--en/index.htm
ALSO see FACTS AND FIGURES of FORCED LABOR:
http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm
Related articles
http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/news/WCMS_217666/lang--en/index.htm
ALSO see FACTS AND FIGURES of FORCED LABOR:
http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm
Related articles
Friday, July 5, 2013
INTERNATIONAL - No one innocent in human trafficking, UN official says
Source: Hürriyet Daily News
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/no-one-innocent-in-human-trafficking-un-official-says.aspx?pageID=238&nID=50022&NewsCatID=359
Almost every country in the world is complicit in human trafficking, as each one is an origin, transit or destination country for the trade, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Yury Fedotov, has said, adding that the victims of the crime are being exploited in almost every part of the world.
“We are often talking about vulnerable people tricked and coerced into being trafficked and then cruelly exploited. Almost every country in the world is an origin, transit or destination country for human trafficking,” Fedotov told the Hürriyet Daily News in a telephone interview.
He noted that human trafficking was a global crime producing estimated yearly profits of around $32 billion dollars, each one of those criminal dollars is earned from the misery and suffering of victims. According to the UNODC’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2012, women account for around 60 percent of all trafficking victims detected globally by the authorities. “Our report found victims from 136 different nationalities in 118 countries. We also identified at least 460 different trafficking flows for the victims globally,” Fedotov added.
“Based on the findings of our report, however, I can say there are significant regional variations. The share of detected child victims, for example, is 68 percent in Africa and the Middle East, and 39 percent in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific; that proportion diminishes to 27 percent in the Americas and 16 percent in Europe and Central Asia,” he said.
Fedotov underlined that many countries may had difficulties in confronting human trafficking. “They may, for instance, lack the law enforcement capacity or need additional support in the area of criminal justice,” he said. Noting that helping to build capacities and offering technical support to these countries was part of U.N.’s work, he said that they could not afford to exclude countries. If countries are excluded the system was at risk of a two-speed approach in which “human trafficking declines in some countries, and possibly grows in those countries that are blacklisted and possibly ignored. If we did this, we would be offering the traffickers the potential to simply cross borders to evade punishment.”
‘Turkey a transit route’
However, Fedotov heralded some good news, as the number of countries criminalizing human trafficking increased from 78 to 95 percent of the total considered in the report between 2008 and 2012. “The improvements are encouraging, but they are coming too slowly to help the millions of victims. A catalyst is needed. We need an inspirational, but totally realistic goal: a decade of concrete action to try to end human trafficking. Action built on cooperation and coordination,” he said.
There is a roadmap for the international community. A global plan of action was agreed in 2010 and the UNODC is working with its partners and the international community to implement this plan throughout the world.
When the executive-director was asked how they label Turkey on the issue, Fedotov said Turkey is a transit route for human trafficking along the so-called Mediterranean route for trafficking, but it is also a destination for victims.
“I should also point out that the Turkish government has vigorously sought to prosecute traffickers and has introduced legislation that outlaws this crime,” he said.
“Although it concerned migrant smuggling and not human trafficking, I would like to commend Turkey on its work earlier this year, in early February, when the Istanbul police force worked with law enforcement agencies from other countries to break up an international migrant smuggling operation.
It was a very good example of how international cooperation and information sharing supports local police work.”
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/no-one-innocent-in-human-trafficking-un-official-says.aspx?pageID=238&nID=50022&NewsCatID=359
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says almost every country in the world is complicit in human trafficking, urging them to fight against it
A man is escorted by Spanish and Italian security forces to an unmarked police car after being arrested in a flat. REUTERS Photo
“We are often talking about vulnerable people tricked and coerced into being trafficked and then cruelly exploited. Almost every country in the world is an origin, transit or destination country for human trafficking,” Fedotov told the Hürriyet Daily News in a telephone interview.
He noted that human trafficking was a global crime producing estimated yearly profits of around $32 billion dollars, each one of those criminal dollars is earned from the misery and suffering of victims. According to the UNODC’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2012, women account for around 60 percent of all trafficking victims detected globally by the authorities. “Our report found victims from 136 different nationalities in 118 countries. We also identified at least 460 different trafficking flows for the victims globally,” Fedotov added.
“Based on the findings of our report, however, I can say there are significant regional variations. The share of detected child victims, for example, is 68 percent in Africa and the Middle East, and 39 percent in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific; that proportion diminishes to 27 percent in the Americas and 16 percent in Europe and Central Asia,” he said.
Fedotov underlined that many countries may had difficulties in confronting human trafficking. “They may, for instance, lack the law enforcement capacity or need additional support in the area of criminal justice,” he said. Noting that helping to build capacities and offering technical support to these countries was part of U.N.’s work, he said that they could not afford to exclude countries. If countries are excluded the system was at risk of a two-speed approach in which “human trafficking declines in some countries, and possibly grows in those countries that are blacklisted and possibly ignored. If we did this, we would be offering the traffickers the potential to simply cross borders to evade punishment.”
‘Turkey a transit route’
However, Fedotov heralded some good news, as the number of countries criminalizing human trafficking increased from 78 to 95 percent of the total considered in the report between 2008 and 2012. “The improvements are encouraging, but they are coming too slowly to help the millions of victims. A catalyst is needed. We need an inspirational, but totally realistic goal: a decade of concrete action to try to end human trafficking. Action built on cooperation and coordination,” he said.
There is a roadmap for the international community. A global plan of action was agreed in 2010 and the UNODC is working with its partners and the international community to implement this plan throughout the world.
When the executive-director was asked how they label Turkey on the issue, Fedotov said Turkey is a transit route for human trafficking along the so-called Mediterranean route for trafficking, but it is also a destination for victims.
“I should also point out that the Turkish government has vigorously sought to prosecute traffickers and has introduced legislation that outlaws this crime,” he said.
“Although it concerned migrant smuggling and not human trafficking, I would like to commend Turkey on its work earlier this year, in early February, when the Istanbul police force worked with law enforcement agencies from other countries to break up an international migrant smuggling operation.
It was a very good example of how international cooperation and information sharing supports local police work.”
July/05/2013
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Shrimp exports to West tied to bonded labor
Shrimp exports to West tied to bonded labor:
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In the third chapter of my new book on bonded labour, I explore the shrimp industry of Bangladesh. Chingri (shrimp) harvesting provides a highly illustrative case study of the very powerful ways in which environmental change can directly contribute to human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labor exploitation, especially in the far reaches of the developing world.
To research the shrimp industry of Bangladesh requires a journey to the cyclone-wracked southwestern reaches of the country.
Here, one finds four stages to Bangladesh’s shrimp industry supply chain: 1 shrimp fry (baby shrimp) collection, shrimp farming, the distribution to processors, and shrimp processing. Each one of these stages is tainted by some form of severe labor exploitation.
Bangladesh’s shrimp industry is relatively new, and the recent shift from traditional agriculture to shrimp aquaculture in southwestern Bangladesh is primarily a result of climate change.
Beginning in the 1990s, farmers began to notice more and more saline shrimp in their irrigation channels, primarily due to rising sea levels.
Bangladesh is within close proximity of several multi-billion-dollar shrimp exporting nations such as Thailand, India, and Vietnam, so landowners quickly did the math and realized that low-intensity saline shrimp would generate far more profit than rice or potatoes ever would.
They rapidly transformed the area from freshwater agriculture to saline aquaculture. Now there are more than 170,000 hectares of saline shrimp farms (ghers) along the southwestern coast of Bangladesh (and more than 400,000 hectares of freshwater ghers further north). Nothing else can grow here, and no animals can graze.
“Our children have no vegetables to eat, no fresh water, and no milk,” a shrimp farmer named Aziz told me. “It is terrible here, but we have no choice. We are lucky to have this gher; otherwise what would we do?”
Aziz was a former agricultural bonded laborer who managed to transition to bonded labor for shrimp farming.
Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forcibly displaced by the shrimp farms, because shrimp harvesting requires vastly fewer people than agricultural crops. Many of these peasants were trafficked to India and Southeast Asia for labor exploitation.
Those that remain eke out a destitute existence of bondage.
Children are also heavily exploited by the shrimp sector of Bangladesh. Thousands of children wade into the muddy, parasite-infested rivers near the Sundarban mangrove forests to catch baby shrimp in small blue nets.
As one of these children named Mohammed explained: “None of us are in school. I wish I could be in school, but I must do this work or else we cannot earn enough money…This entire area is for shrimp farming, so there is no other work for us.”
Once caught, the baby shrimp spend three to four months growing into full-grown shrimp in farms like Aziz’s, after which they are distributed to processors who de-scale, de-vein, and/or behead them before freezing them for export.
Almost all shrimp exports from Bangladesh are bound for the U.S., the EU, and Japan. This processor stage is rumored to be replete with forced labor, but I had little success in accessing the plants as I was angrily turned away at gunpoint from all of them except one.
By my calculation, roughly one out of every 57 shrimp consumed around the world are tainted by forced labor, bonded labor, or child labor from Bangladesh alone.
As the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately two kilograms of shrimp per year, this means that each American eats roughly one to three pieces of tainted shrimp each year, just from Bangladesh.
While a low cost of production in countries like Bangladesh has helped shrimp become the top seafood commodity in the world, it is vital to remember that as with so many other commodities sourced from the developing world, this same low cost of production is a direct function of immeasurable human exploitation and environmental harm.
Read more about bonded labor in Asia.
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In the third chapter of my new book on bonded labour, I explore the shrimp industry of Bangladesh. Chingri (shrimp) harvesting provides a highly illustrative case study of the very powerful ways in which environmental change can directly contribute to human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labor exploitation, especially in the far reaches of the developing world.
To research the shrimp industry of Bangladesh requires a journey to the cyclone-wracked southwestern reaches of the country.
Here, one finds four stages to Bangladesh’s shrimp industry supply chain: 1 shrimp fry (baby shrimp) collection, shrimp farming, the distribution to processors, and shrimp processing. Each one of these stages is tainted by some form of severe labor exploitation.
Bangladesh’s shrimp industry is relatively new, and the recent shift from traditional agriculture to shrimp aquaculture in southwestern Bangladesh is primarily a result of climate change.
Beginning in the 1990s, farmers began to notice more and more saline shrimp in their irrigation channels, primarily due to rising sea levels.
Bangladesh is within close proximity of several multi-billion-dollar shrimp exporting nations such as Thailand, India, and Vietnam, so landowners quickly did the math and realized that low-intensity saline shrimp would generate far more profit than rice or potatoes ever would.
They rapidly transformed the area from freshwater agriculture to saline aquaculture. Now there are more than 170,000 hectares of saline shrimp farms (ghers) along the southwestern coast of Bangladesh (and more than 400,000 hectares of freshwater ghers further north). Nothing else can grow here, and no animals can graze.
“Our children have no vegetables to eat, no fresh water, and no milk,” a shrimp farmer named Aziz told me. “It is terrible here, but we have no choice. We are lucky to have this gher; otherwise what would we do?”
Aziz was a former agricultural bonded laborer who managed to transition to bonded labor for shrimp farming.
Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forcibly displaced by the shrimp farms, because shrimp harvesting requires vastly fewer people than agricultural crops. Many of these peasants were trafficked to India and Southeast Asia for labor exploitation.
Those that remain eke out a destitute existence of bondage.
Children are also heavily exploited by the shrimp sector of Bangladesh. Thousands of children wade into the muddy, parasite-infested rivers near the Sundarban mangrove forests to catch baby shrimp in small blue nets.
As one of these children named Mohammed explained: “None of us are in school. I wish I could be in school, but I must do this work or else we cannot earn enough money…This entire area is for shrimp farming, so there is no other work for us.”
Once caught, the baby shrimp spend three to four months growing into full-grown shrimp in farms like Aziz’s, after which they are distributed to processors who de-scale, de-vein, and/or behead them before freezing them for export.
Almost all shrimp exports from Bangladesh are bound for the U.S., the EU, and Japan. This processor stage is rumored to be replete with forced labor, but I had little success in accessing the plants as I was angrily turned away at gunpoint from all of them except one.
By my calculation, roughly one out of every 57 shrimp consumed around the world are tainted by forced labor, bonded labor, or child labor from Bangladesh alone.
As the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately two kilograms of shrimp per year, this means that each American eats roughly one to three pieces of tainted shrimp each year, just from Bangladesh.
While a low cost of production in countries like Bangladesh has helped shrimp become the top seafood commodity in the world, it is vital to remember that as with so many other commodities sourced from the developing world, this same low cost of production is a direct function of immeasurable human exploitation and environmental harm.
Read more about bonded labor in Asia.
Bonded labor stretches from third to first world
Bonded labor stretches from third to first world:
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In September 2010, I met a young girl named Nirmala in the remote western Terai region of Nepal. Nirmala is one of the thousands of internally trafficked domestic slaves in Nepal, called kamlari, who belong to the outcast Tharu ethnic group.
Agents recruit Tharu girls as young as eight to work as servants in upper-caste homes. Aside from room and board, the children receive little to no payment for up to 10 years of work. Kamlari girls often suffer extreme abuse and maltreatment.
“I did all the work,” Nirmala explained, “cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, washing dishes. I woke each morning at 5 a.m. and went to sleep at 10 p.m. I slept on the floor…I did this work seven days a week. Sometimes the wife would beat me. The husband in the home would rape me. I did not want to be in that home.”
Nirmala’s situation is representative of a typical South Asian debt bondage arrangement: food and shelter as credit in exchange for slave-like labor exploitation.
The upper classes of Nepal see this arrangement as completely justified because the alternative for a low-caste girl such as Nirmala would be worse: destitution in her village or trafficking to India for forced prostitution.
My new book, “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia” provides the first comprehensive overview of the unconscionable system of bonded labor in South Asia.
In a series of articles for the CNN Freedom Project, I will describe the system in more detail and outline how we can best tackle this brutish mode of servile labor exploitation.
The issue of bonded labor may receive marginal attention globally, but bonded labor is the most extensive form of slavery in the world today.
There were approximately 18 to 20.5 million bonded laborers in the world at the end of 2011, almost 90% of whom were in South Asia.
This means that approximately half of the slaves in the world are bonded laborers in South Asia.
More importantly, the products made by bonded laborers touch almost every aspect of the global economy, including frozen shrimp and fish, tea, coffee, rice, wheat, diamonds, cubic zirconia, glassware, hand-woven carpets, limestone, salt, cigarettes, apparel, fireworks, sporting goods, and many more products.
Virtually everyone’s life, everywhere in the world, is touched by bonded labor in South Asia.
Bonded labor basically involves the exploitative interlinking of labor and credit agreements between parties.
On one side, a party possessing an abundance of capital and power provides credit, food, or tenancy to the other party, who, because he lacks almost any assets or capital, pledges his labor to work off the loan.
Given the vast power imbalances between the parties, the laborer is often severely exploited. Bonded labor occurs when the exploitation descends to the level of slave-like abuse.
The borrower is often forced to work at pathetic wage levels to repay the debt. Exorbitant interest rates are charged (up to 20 percent per month), and money lent for future needs is added to the debt.
Sometimes these debts last a few years, and sometimes they are passed on to future generations if the original borrower perishes without having repaid the debt.
Centuries ago, debt bondage existed across the world from the American South to Medieval Europe to Tokugawa Japan. Social revolution and transition to market economies largely dissolved the system throughout the world, except for South Asia.
There, the system persists due to a highly pernicious cocktail of forces, including immense poverty, acute caste and gender discrimination, social apathy, corruption, and a global economy that scours the globe for the lowest cost of production possible.
The desperation of the bonded laborers I met across South Asia is acute.
Anguish to be rid of these debts leads to desperate measures, including the sale of kidneys, the sale of children to human traffickers, or suicide.
For the sake of the millions of outcast and destitute debt bondage slaves in South Asia like Nirmala, the need to eradicate this feudal system of slave-like exploitation could not be greater.
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In September 2010, I met a young girl named Nirmala in the remote western Terai region of Nepal. Nirmala is one of the thousands of internally trafficked domestic slaves in Nepal, called kamlari, who belong to the outcast Tharu ethnic group.
Agents recruit Tharu girls as young as eight to work as servants in upper-caste homes. Aside from room and board, the children receive little to no payment for up to 10 years of work. Kamlari girls often suffer extreme abuse and maltreatment.
“I did all the work,” Nirmala explained, “cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, washing dishes. I woke each morning at 5 a.m. and went to sleep at 10 p.m. I slept on the floor…I did this work seven days a week. Sometimes the wife would beat me. The husband in the home would rape me. I did not want to be in that home.”
Nirmala’s situation is representative of a typical South Asian debt bondage arrangement: food and shelter as credit in exchange for slave-like labor exploitation.
The upper classes of Nepal see this arrangement as completely justified because the alternative for a low-caste girl such as Nirmala would be worse: destitution in her village or trafficking to India for forced prostitution.
My new book, “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia” provides the first comprehensive overview of the unconscionable system of bonded labor in South Asia.
In a series of articles for the CNN Freedom Project, I will describe the system in more detail and outline how we can best tackle this brutish mode of servile labor exploitation.
The issue of bonded labor may receive marginal attention globally, but bonded labor is the most extensive form of slavery in the world today.
There were approximately 18 to 20.5 million bonded laborers in the world at the end of 2011, almost 90% of whom were in South Asia.
This means that approximately half of the slaves in the world are bonded laborers in South Asia.
More importantly, the products made by bonded laborers touch almost every aspect of the global economy, including frozen shrimp and fish, tea, coffee, rice, wheat, diamonds, cubic zirconia, glassware, hand-woven carpets, limestone, salt, cigarettes, apparel, fireworks, sporting goods, and many more products.
Virtually everyone’s life, everywhere in the world, is touched by bonded labor in South Asia.
Bonded labor basically involves the exploitative interlinking of labor and credit agreements between parties.
On one side, a party possessing an abundance of capital and power provides credit, food, or tenancy to the other party, who, because he lacks almost any assets or capital, pledges his labor to work off the loan.
Given the vast power imbalances between the parties, the laborer is often severely exploited. Bonded labor occurs when the exploitation descends to the level of slave-like abuse.
The borrower is often forced to work at pathetic wage levels to repay the debt. Exorbitant interest rates are charged (up to 20 percent per month), and money lent for future needs is added to the debt.
Sometimes these debts last a few years, and sometimes they are passed on to future generations if the original borrower perishes without having repaid the debt.
Centuries ago, debt bondage existed across the world from the American South to Medieval Europe to Tokugawa Japan. Social revolution and transition to market economies largely dissolved the system throughout the world, except for South Asia.
There, the system persists due to a highly pernicious cocktail of forces, including immense poverty, acute caste and gender discrimination, social apathy, corruption, and a global economy that scours the globe for the lowest cost of production possible.
The desperation of the bonded laborers I met across South Asia is acute.
Anguish to be rid of these debts leads to desperate measures, including the sale of kidneys, the sale of children to human traffickers, or suicide.
For the sake of the millions of outcast and destitute debt bondage slaves in South Asia like Nirmala, the need to eradicate this feudal system of slave-like exploitation could not be greater.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Millions pushed into child labour in Pakistan
http://www.asafeworldforwomen.org/womens-rights/economics-poverty/ec-central-and-southasia/2019-millions-pushed-into-child-labour-in-pakistan.html
Tears tracing lines of dirt on his face, six-year-old Pakistani boy Nabeel Mukhtar cries while crouching on a pavement to scrub motorbikes, his job for nine hours a day, six days a week.
He is one of millions of children driven into labour by poverty in a country where the unpopular government is seen as too corrupt and ineffective to care for its citizens, even the young and helpless.
“I want to study and become a doctor but we don’t have any money,” said Mukhtar, who helps his family make ends meet.
Rising food and fuel prices and a struggling economy have forced many families to send their children to search for work instead of to the classroom.
Frequent political crises in US ally Pakistan means the South Asian nation’s leaders are unlikely to end child labour, or a host of other problems from a Taliban insurgency to power cuts, any time soon.
“From the bottom of my heart, I want to send my son to school but we have so many expenses … We struggle to put food on our table,” said Mukhtar’s mother, Shazia, who also has a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
Her husband, Mohammed, a street barber, earns only 7,500 rupees ($83) a month, not enough to support the family.
“He’s learning to work and he also earns around 300-400 rupees. So what’s wrong in that. We are poor,” Mohammed said of the boy.
Pakistan needs to take immediate measures to stabilise growing budget pressures and to raise interest rates to contain rising inflation, the International Monetary Fund warned on Monday.
Economic pressures are forcing young Pakistanis, like teenager Noor Shah and his three brothers, to leave home in search of work.
They now live in a tiny room above a grimy tea shop where they toil all day in Pakistan’s biggest city and commercial hub of Karachi.
“I have so many dishes to wash. When I get tired the men serving tea become very angry with me. They swear and shout,” said Shah, who is from Balochistan province.
Others, like 11-year-old laborer Kashif, are subjected to harsher treatment.
“If he makes a mistake I’ll hit him,” said his 19-year-old supervisor, Tanveer Shehzad, who said he had endured the same hardship as a child labourer.
Up to ten million child-labourers
Up to 10 million children are estimated to be working in Pakistan, says Mannan Rana, child and adolescent protection specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The latest government figures, showing three million child laborers, date back to 1996, underscoring how scant attention has been paid to documenting the problem, which is likely to get worse given the makeup of the fast-growing population.
The plight of child labourers in Pakistan came under international scrutiny when it was discovered that children were hand-stitching soccer balls in the town of Sialkot.
Foreign sports equipment companies are wary of any hint of association with child exploitation. One stopped orders in 2006 from a Pakistan-based supplier of hand-stitched soccer balls, saying the factory had failed to correct labour compliance violations.
Industry has gone underground
“The problem is that the whole industry has moved into private homes, which has made it a bit difficult to monitor if child labour is being used,” said Hussain Naqi, the national co-ordinator of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
“This is not just an issue in Sialkot, child labour is occurring all across Pakistan in very dangerous sectors like glass bangle manufacturing, cleaning of oil tankers, poultry farms, motor workshops, brick kilns and small hotels.”
On Monday, the collapse of a three-storey factory in the city of Lahore after a gas explosion highlighted dangers faced by child labourers.
“I was inside the building when the blast happened. Two other boys were with me and they started running,” said eight-year-old Asad, a laborer in the veterinary product facility.
“I don’t know where they went or if they are alive.”
His sobbing mother said crushing poverty had left her no choice but to send her son to work in such conditions.
17% of budget goes to defence
Pakistan spends less than 2 per cent of its gross domestic product on education, which translates into a lack of skills amongst the younger population, pushing them onto the street in search of work.
By comparison, just over 17 per cent of 2011-12 state spending went to defense, though some experts put the figure at 26 per cent.
“The problem is there and we are not in a state of denial,” said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, social sector special assistant to the prime minister, adding that about 45 per cent of Pakistan’s population of almost 180 million is below the age of 22.
But Pakistan’s leaders are often too consumed by infighting, or tension with the military, to address child welfare.
With little government protection, children keep falling into the same vicious circle of exploitation.
“It is all very damaging for a child’s psychology,” said Salma Jafar, executive director at Social Innovations, a human rights advocacy group.
“Once you are abused, you grow up with that abuse.”
Twelve-year-old Mohammed Naeem, the eldest of three orphans, ran away from his first boss. He could not take the verbal and physical abuse.
But his new work, scraping rust all day for 25 rupees at a mechanics shop to feed his sisters, is still grueling.
“I don’t see any other life for myself. What can I do. I’m helpless. The government is doing nothing for us,” said the boy, wearing soiled clothing and open, oversized sandals.
“All I ask of them is to assist me in my helpless state. To take it away.”
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Beyond borders | Magazines | DAWN.COM
Beyond borders
Photo by White Star
The UN data reveals that globally, human trafficking is the third-largest and fastest growing trade, with drugs and weapons generating a staggering total of 31 billion dollars each year.
No sector of the world market is immune to this dilemma: 161 industrialised and developing countries are being affected, with millions of people—largely women and children—now reduced to living lives of appalling tragedy and modern-day slavery.
To combat this trans-national organised crime, the UN introduced an International Convention in 2000, the first legally binding instrument in over half a century. It sets out an agreed definition of human trafficking and addresses its cruel chain of abduction, kidnapping, coercion, deception, abuse of power and taking undue advantage of the victim. The helpless victims are vulnerable to exploitation, prostitution, forced sexual labour, slavery, and even the sale of organs.
According to Asia Times, human trafficking is an undeniable part of Asia’s persistent tragedy; a widespread scourge. The shadowy criminals who deal in such human misery have established a systematic trafficking chain worldwide, consisting of several steps—the first of which is recruitment, where trust is built between the recruiter and the potential victim. The victims are most susceptible to false promises, better paid work abroad, or marriage (in which the recruiter poses as the potential ‘husband’). The root causes for such vulnerability are oppressive poverty, ignorance, discrimination and social exclusion.
The next step is transportation and arrival, when the victim is passed on to the subsequent member of the chain, who takes them to a temporary destination. Passports are taken away in order to continue control and eradicate any possibility of escape. Middlemen, intermediaries or brokers act as facilitators in the chain of procurement, arranging visas, procuring travel documents, providing pre-departure orientation, guidance and training, and even negotiating the initial work contract.
When the victims reach their final destination, they suffer the worst forms of abuse, and are deprived of even their most fundamental rights. This core of contemporary slavery involves force, fraud and coercion—there is just no escape. Slavery is thriving, with millions being coerced into this trade.
It is essential to address the greatest tragedy, the demand side of trafficking, which arises from the widespread demand for cheap labour and sex, paid for in human terms by these unwitting victims, who lose their most fundamental human rights in the process.
Data from the UN and Pakistan indicates that in South Asia, about one million Bangladeshis and more than 200,000 Burmese women have been trafficked to Karachi alone for slave trade and sale into prostitution. Since the early ’90s, it has been estimated that 200,000 Bangladeshi women have been trafficked to Pakistan in the last decade, at the rate of 200 to 400 per month. In addition, most Bengali women are forced into slave trade for the equivalent of 1,500 to 2,500 US dollars each.
Besides Karachi, other entry points include Lahore, Kasur, Bahawalpur, Chor and Badin. The victims enter illegally, suffering immense deprivation on the journey; many reportedly die en route. Two hundred thousand undocumented Bangladeshis and Burmese are currently in prison or shelters; others with undocumented lives have been lost to slavery and/or the sex trade.
Political turmoil in Afghanistan is also accompanied by kidnapping and the sale of women at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border where, as of 1991, they’re sold like cattle in the marketplace at minimal rates. Auctions of girls are arranged for three kinds of buyers: rich visiting Arabs, state-funded medical and university students, and wealthy local gentry. The data also claims that the police charges a 15 per cent commission on each sale.
Currently, trafficking of girls between the ages of eight and 15 is rising. Orphaned girls are sold as ‘wives’ to rich men, for further profitable sale.
India and Pakistan are the main supply source for children under the age of 16. Nineteen thousand Pakistani children have been trafficked to the UAE alone. Hundreds of thousands of children are involved in the sex trade; including in Pakistan, where reports indicate that paedophilia is rife in street children. Children are kidnapped even from internet cafes, or other points where children gather.
Strict law enforcement is critical, especially along borders. Since 2005, an Inter Agency Task Force is responsible for coordinating with coast guards, maritime agencies, and police. This linkage has led to the arrest of over 2000 illegal migrants, including 47 (human} smugglers, including agents, sub-agents and traffickers. Further checking is carried out by the anti-trafficking unit and coordinating and monitoring cell.
Proactive measures to combat this crime include the Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance; Pakistan has now been removed from the unsavoury category of International ‘Watch List’. The National Plan of Action, with guidelines for further on-going action has been launched, supported by comprehensive legislation for greater protection of victims. Amendments to the trafficking ordinance are in the pipeline.
A ministerial committee oversees progress, for speedier prosecution of arrested individuals, and greater security at entry and exit points, with enhanced policy and legislative steps, matched by technical steps, and forgery detection.
Undoubtedly, there is critical need for greater vigilance along all South Asian borders. Better law enforcement and large-scale national campaigns against human trafficking, including by NGOs are essential, as is the imperative to keep this horrendous trade constantly on the media radar, and in the public mind, with frequent updating of current information.
Source www.dawn.com
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Brenham Banner-Press > Archives > News > Human trafficking within Texas, U.S.
By ALLISON P. SMITH/Staff Reporter
Human trafficking can happen in any community where there are high profits and very low risks, and Texas is one of the largest areas of trafficking through the U.S., the speaker at Thursday’s Lifetime Learning lecture said here.Human trafficking is a $9.2 billion industry where people can be sold multiple times for multiple purposes and prosecution is difficult due to the nature of the crime, said Kazuko Suzuki, assistant professor at Texas A&M.
“Traffickers don’t stay in one place, they move around to avoid the police,” Suzuki said. “Many of the victims die in the brothels and those who do escape are too scared to go to police.”
The most common form of human trafficking is the sex trade, but there are other forms of exploitation: labor, bride trafficking, domestic services and illegal adoption.
The sex trade accounts for 46 percent of the human trafficking in the U.S. with domestic servitude coming in second at 12 percent.
“We don’t pay much attention to the nannies, maids or other forced labor workers,” Suzuki said. “We think they come here to work as maids but they might be trafficked people.”
The U.S. is one of the largest destinations of forced labor trafficking where not much thought is given to factory or agriculture workers being trafficked.
“In the U.S. the sex workers are always considered trafficked because the prevailing thought is no one would willingly submit to such an activity,” Suzuki said. “But we really have to look at those domestic services as well because they might be victims as well.”
There are more than 4 million people trafficked a year throughout the world, according to the U.N. report, but it is difficult to pin down an actual number because the definition of trafficking changes over the years, Suzuki said.
“Trafficking and smuggling can over lap and it is difficult to differentiate between the two,” she said. “But the U.N. adopted a resolution against human trafficking and President Clinton signed the Victim of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in 2000 which increased the prison time to 40 years.”
The new trafficking protocol also introduced a universal definition to human trafficking to make prosecution easier. According to the new definition trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbor or receiving of a person by means of threats, force, abduction, drugs, deception, abuse of power or position of vulnerability to achieve the control of a person for the purpose of exploitation.
Human trafficking is the third largest underworld trade industry after drugs and weapon smuggling, and is looked at as a form of modern day slavery, Suzuki said.
“There is really little risk associated with human trafficking and the average prison time has been two to six years,” Suzuki said. “A lot of brokers get off with no jail time and make their way back to countries of trafficking origin to begin again.”
These brokers might deceive people with the promise of legitimate jobs in another country, people might be sold to brokers by family members or acquaintances, or the broker will kidnap people and put them into trades against their will, Suzuki said.
There are many factors contributing to human trafficking, including poverty or economic depression, lack of education and social inequality for women and children and political turmoil.
“Sex trafficking is correlated with the increasing marginalization of women especially where they are vulnerable,” Suzuki said. “We also need to look at the demand for the bodies of women and children and cheap labor in order to fight human trafficking.”
Demand seems to be higher in densely populated urban areas, military bases or where prostitution is flourishing or tolerated, she said.
Human trafficking can be fought by educating women and more economical development in origin areas like South Asia, China and Russia and awareness in destination countries like the U.S. Western Europe and the Middle East, Suzuki said.
The U.S. has special visas for victims of human trafficking where there will be major retribution if the victim returns to the origin country, and victims are also eligible for legal, medical and psychological services.
“They underwent a lot of trauma, and we as a community need to do everything we can to help rehabilitate them back into society,” she said.
Brenham Banner-Press > Archives > News > Human trafficking within Texas, U.S.
Source: brenhambanner.com
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