Freedom for the Weekend: Fair Fund
Published November 06, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Well, it's Friday afternoon, and that means the weekend is almost here! W00t! Perhaps you're reading this blog because you're bored at work or school and you're thinking about what you want to do this weekend. How about spending part of your weekend fighting slavery? Each week I'll profile a different anti-trafficking nonprofit who you can connect with to help free slaves and prevent slavery around the world. So, spend a couple hours this weekend getting to know this nonprofit through their website, and then get involved!
This Week's Profile: FAIR Fund
The Bottom Line: FAIR Fund works to prevent human trafficking and sexual violence in the lives of youth, especially girls, around the world. They build the capacity of communities to better identify and assist youth aged 11 to 24 who are at high risk or have been exploited via human trafficking and sexual violence.
What They Do: FAIR Fund's programs include preventing youth trafficking in the greater Washington, DC area, building an international student movement against trafficking in persons, reducing orphan youths' risks toward sexual and labor exploitation in select Eastern European countries, and educating African street girls about how to protect themselves from sexual violence. They also work with college campuses, develop policy, and have skills development programs for teens.
What Can I Do?: You can join their mailing list to learn more. If you live in the DC area, you can also attend any of the upcoming events they are hosting. Or, you can donate online.
Why They Rock: FAIR Fund understands that human trafficking and sexual violence affect young women everywhere, which is why they have programs across Easter Europe and in Washington, DC. Languages and customs may be different, but teens' needs to make a way for themselves in the world is the same.
So now that you've got some basic information on FAIR Fund, visit their website this weekend and get involved. And on Monday morning when everyone else is talking about sleeping in and watching tv over the weekend, you can say, "What did I do this weekend? Oh, just the usual -- abolition of slavery."
Do you have a favorite nonprofit you'd like to see featured here? If so, let me know!
Doctors Arrested for Faking Infants' Deaths to Sell Them
Published November 06, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Three doctors and one nurse were arrested just outside of Mexico City yesterday for a child trafficking operation that involved fabricating the deaths of newborns and then selling the babies on the black market for profit. Whether the children were sold to parents desperate for a child or for more nefarious purposes is not yet clear. Nor is whether any of the infants were trafficked into the U.S.
What kind of sick and heartless beasts came up with this strategy? Did it start around the water cooler like this:
Evil Doctor 1: Hey, I'd love to make some money to supplement my doctor's salary, which is not quite enough to buy those jet skis. Anyone got any ideas?
Evil Doctor 2: Well, we've got all these babies just lying around the hospital, why don't we try selling some of them?
Evil Nurse: Who wants to buy a baby? Babies are expensive to take care of.
Evil Doctor 2: Oh, lots of people want to buy babies for all sorts of reasons.
Kraft Foods Commits to Buy More Sustainable Cocoa
Published November 05, 2009 @ 01:00PM PT
Kraft Foods, makers of Chips Ahoy and Oreo cookies (among others) has committed to buy 30,000 tons of Rain Forest Alliance certified cocoa beans to use in their products. In 2005, Kraft bought a smaller amount of certified beans from Cote d'Ivoire, but this move indicates a stronger commitment to fair and sustainable cocoa than ever before. Good job, Kraft Foods, for making a good choice in where your cocoa comes from.
As I've mentioned many times before, child labor, human trafficking, and abuses of workers are rampant in the cocoa industry, especially along the West Coast of Africa. Children enslaved and abused in the cocoa industry are made to work excruciatingly long days, and are often beaten if they try and leave or refuse to work. Many have been forced to pick cocoa with open wounds or covered in their own excrement. The cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast where some of the worst cases of child slavery and labor exploitation have been found are also the world's largest supplier of cocoa, making up 40% of the global market. The cocoa industry needs reform, and it needs it now.
"No Good Jobs": Sokha and Makara's True Story of Slavery
Published November 05, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Sokha and Makara's stories were originally collected by Stop the Traffick. In this case, a serious family illness put these young girls at risk for trafficking. Often, when given the choice between sending a child to work and watching another family member die, parents will send their children away with desparte hopes of money. Here is their story:
Sokha and Makara are from Poipet in Cambodia. When they were just 14 and 15 years old, their mother was ill with a liver problem. The family needed money to pay for the medicine to treat her. They also hoped to buy some land to build a home. A man promised good jobs for the girls in nearby Thailand, and offered the family some money if they would let them go. Sokha and Makara were excited at the thought of being able to help the family with the money they earned. The reality turned out to be very different.
The man was a trafficker. There were no ‘good jobs' for the girls in Thailand. Sokha's mother died within a year, and the family couldn't afford to buy the land that they had dreamed of. Sokha, who is now 17, says, ‘I felt cheated. The traffickers used us for slave jobs, and while they earned lots of money, we only got enough to feed ourselves each day.' She explains how she and Makara, 16, were given jobs selling fruit, but it did not pay enough. So they were forced to work even harder and to do work that they didn't enjoy.
Sokha and Makara's story has a happy ending because of the Cambodian Hope Organization (CHO) that works with Tearfund, a relief and development agency. Sokha and Makara's parents met with CHO and gave them photos to pass on to an organization in Thailand that rescues trafficked girls. The girls were found and rescued about a year after their ordeal started.
What is unusual about this story is not that the sisters were trafficked, but that they were kept together for the duration of their enslavement. Many traffickers will try and isolate and disorient victims, which often means cutting them off from friends and family. However, having a sister close by may have been the key to helping these two young women survive slavery.
Photo credit: thomaswanhoff
Victory in Landmark Human Trafficking Civil Case
Published November 04, 2009 @ 01:00PM PT
What does justice look like for a survivor of human trafficking? Is it seeing her pimp handcuffed and sent to prison? Is it hearing his abuser sentenced to 10, 20, or 30 years? Is it reuniting with friends and family who were lost? All of these things can be justice for human trafficking survivors, but increasingly survivors are seeking another kind of justice -- cash. Specifically, they are suing their traffickers. And at least in once case in California this week, they are winning.
In what may be the first case of its kind in California, and one of the first in the country, a trafficked domestic worker brought suit against her former employer and was awarded $768,000, including $500,000 in punitive damages. The case stated that an Indonesian businessman brought the survivor Suminarti to Los Angeles to work in his home. The family confiscated Suminarti's passport, withheld all her pay, required her to work 16 hours a day with no days off, and refused to let her pray at a mosque or visit the Indonesian consulate. They abused Suminarti verbally and psychological, and told her to lie and say she was a family member if law enforcement ever visited the house. The family was convicted og the crime of human trafficking, but Suminarti wanted the sort of justice that civil suit could bring.
Her victory is indicative of a number of positive developments in the anti-human trafficking field.
To Better Know a Country: Human Trafficking in South Africa
Published November 04, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Every year, the U.S. State Department releases a Trafficking in Persons report which rates countries on their efforts to combat human trafficking. Each week, I'll be providing a brief glance at human trafficking in one of those countries, based off the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, with my own (often snarky) analysis added. This is just a snapshot of what's going on in the country. For more information, you can check out the full text of the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report here.
This Week's Country..... South Africa
Basic Stats
- Ranking: Tier 2
- Status: Source, transit, and destination country for trafficking victims
- Political Stability:It seems racial justice is actually good for a country. Who'da thought?
- Cash Flow:They are to the rest of Africa what Donald Trump is to me: someone a lot richer who isn't going to give the money away.
- Do I Think They Care?: Yes, but they're making a lot of bad policy calls.
Who Are the Victims and What Are They Doing?
- Women:commercial sex, domestic servitude
- Girls: commercial sex, domestic servitude, forced marriage, sex tourism
- Med: forced labor in mobile factories
- Boys:forced street vending, begging, crime, agriculture
Rhode Island Bans Indoor Prostitution
Published November 03, 2009 @ 02:36PM PT
The end has finally come to a long and often malicious battle in Rhode Island over a 30-year-old legal loophole which allowed indoor prostitution to legally occur. Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri signed the bill into law today, and it is effective immediately. The debate which took place around this bill and the Rhode Island prostitution law ended up being about far more than just legalese and statutory distinctions. It encompassed the growing debate about the relationship between human trafficking and prostitution.
To say the personal attacks that have been broadcast through the blogosphere during this debate escalated to vicious is like saying people had strong feelings about Obama's election. Both the pro-legalizing indoor prostitution camps and the pro-making indoor prostitution illegal camps did their fair share of demonizing the other side. Those who fought to keep the loophole in the law were accused of being unsympathetic to human trafficking victims, shells for the commercial sex industry, and anti-feminist. Those who fought to close the loophole were called autocratic moralists, Bush administration cronies, and anti-feminists. If you listen to the rhetoric that went on, is sounds like the biggest group of misogynists to ever fight for the rights and welfare of women. At one point I was called an "intellectual malcontent," which I believe was intended as an insult, but which I consider somewhat of a compliment (I strive to be intellectual and I'm am certainly not content with the prevalence of human trafficking and sexual violence against women in the world). But the mud-slinging was more than just meanness, it was symptomatic of how long before today, this debate stopped being about Rhode Island and its residents, and started being about polarizing and conflicted ideologies on how best to protect women.
I've made no secret that I believe that human trafficking thrives in areas with legal and heavily tolerated commercial sex markets, nor that many, many women enter into prostitution as children, due to coercion, or because of a lack of other options. So it won't come as a surprise that I support Gov. Carcieri's signing the bill into law, and that I anticipate it will help protect women and children from exploitation. But it would be naive to think the broader debate is over now that the Rhode Island question is settled. And it would be negligent to think that the next debate should also devolve into the level of petty name-calling and unreasonable accusations that this one did. These questions are not going away of their own accord, and all of us who care about women -- women in prostitution, women who are victims of trafficking, women in need of economic options -- owe it to them to not lose sight of our common goals in the darkness of our differences.
So please, see this message as an open invitation to anyone who was dissapointed by the Rhode Island decision and wants to have a respectful discussion about the relationship between human trafficking and prostitution and how that affects or should affect legislation. Let's do something truly radical to change the world together: let's listen to each other. Let's listen and learn how we can be better advocates, and how we can create better policies. We cannot hide from each other any more than the women we try and help can hide from violent pimps or violent police men or violent clients or the violence of poverty. And we cannot afford to lose ourselves in petty insults when there is so much work still to be done.
This blog will always be a space where people can respectfully discuss these important issues, even when we disagree. All I ask is a willingness to listen.
Photo credit: keepwaddling1
