Human Trafficking Awareness
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President Obama, Please Address Slavery in North Korea Today
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101 Things to Be for Halloween Other Than a Pimp
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The Myth of Initial Consent
Business Groups Oppose Ban on Child and Slave-Made Products
Published November 14, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Rachel Maddow's choice of "you child labor-endorsing, pro-slavery freaks" to describe business groups' opposition to a bill that would ban the import of goods made by child labor or slave labor was pretty apt. However, I personally would describe the move as the most stunning display of corporate douchebaggery since Walmart's "dead peasant's insurance" fiasco. According to a recent report from Inside U.S. Trade, business interest groups are "worried" that a legislative ban on goods made by children and slaves could prompt the government to more actively seek out and identify consumer goods made by exploited people. And if we started doing that, well then businesses might have to start giving workers their rights, paying them a living wage, not abusing children, and freeing their indentured slaves. And then where would we be?
Here's Maddow's analysis (the relevant part of the video starts about 3:30 in):
My colleague (and frequent guest poster) Tim Newman also has a great analysis of the history of legislative attempt to ban goods made with child and slave labor here. Last year, the International Labor Rights Forum took Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to task for trying to block a voluntary child labor free certification initiative in the Farm Bill. The initiative passed, despite the lobbying of interest groups. History shows that despite the powerful corporate lobby, grassroots activists can be just as powerful a voice for children and workers as high ticket lobbyists can be for corporations.
Superstition and Modern-Day Slavery
Published November 13, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Friday the 13th is the most superstitious day of the year -- supposedly a jinxed day which brings bad luck and misfortune. In Western cultures, superstition is usually laughed off as silly old wives tales about cats, ladders, and unfortunate mirror accidents. But for many people around the world, superstitions are ingrained parts of faith, culture, and society which have the power to make them more vulnerable to human trafficking or help them survive the trauma of modern-day slavery.
Recently, Spanish authorities apprehended a human trafficking ring based in Nigeria which was enslaving women in the commercial sex industry in Europe. To keep the women from trying to escape, the traffickers took their victims' hair and fingernails and performed voodoo rituals to bind their victims spiritually and physically. They told the women the curse would drive them mad or destroy their souls if they tried to disobey the traffickers. This ceremony and the religious and superstitious implications it had prevented the women from trying to leave their trafficking situations.
But it's not just voodoo that comes with cultural superstitions; traffickers have used superstitious and religious ceremonies as part of other faiths to scare and manipulate victims as well.
Report Exposes Egyptian Christian Women Forced Into Muslim Marriages
Published November 12, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
A new report released by Egyptian women right's activist Nadia Ghaly and anti-trafficking specialist (and guest blogger here) Michele Clark has uncovered an insidious system of the kidnapping of Christian (known as Coptic in Egypt) women. These women are forced to marry Muslim men and in many cases convert to Islam. It's a practice which meets the international definition of human trafficking, but is also a serious issue of violence against women.
Exemplary of this phenomenon is the story of a woman identified as “R.” At 17, she received a phone call from a polite young man who said his name was Amir and that he admired her. He asked her to meet him at a local church. When she arrived, however, she was drugged and kidnapped. When she woke up “Amir” told her she would have to marry a stranger, a Muslim man named Mahmoud. When she refused to have sex with Mahmoud, his family held her down while he raped her. As a result of the rape, she is now unable to have children.
Human Trafficking Officially a Mainstream Issue
Published November 11, 2009 @ 01:00PM PT
Human trafficking has been officially declared a mainstream issue. By me. Just now on this blog. What gives me the right to move this cause from the "niche" box where it has sat so comfortably for over a decade to the "mainstream" box where the big causes like global warming and world peace dwell? Because human trafficking is officially everywhere in the mainstream media. Yep. Everywhere.
The media life of human trafficking was nascent for much of the 1990s. Sure, there was a news article here or there about some poor Ukrainian girl who was brought to America to work as a waitress and then forced into prostitution, but these were presented as isolated and unique cases. Then sometime around the change of millennium, the issue began to pick up traction. Newspapers reported stories on not just isolated cases of trafficking, but individual stories that are part of a global phenomenon of exploitation. Patterns were recognized and connections were made between cases of people trafficked into commercial sex and other industries, like agriculture and factory work. Between 2000 and 2004, a great deal of attention was paid to modern-day slavery as something that happens in the developing wold, from the brothels of Thailand to the brick fields of India to the cocoa plantations of Cote d'Ivoire.
Sometime in the middle of the decade, Americans (and American media outlets) began to look internally for human trafficking. And they found it.
Emma Thompson's Journey Into Abolition
Published November 09, 2009 @ 03:47PM PT
Human trafficking victims have a well-informed and intelligent celebrity advocate who doesn't show her underwear in public. I'll wait while you pick your chin off the floor. The newest hero of the modern-day abolitionist movement is award-winning British actress Emma Thompson. Thompson is not new to human rights advocacy or even anti-trafficking advocacy. But she is going above and beyond just using her celebrity to bring attention to this issue and using her well-endowed noggin.
Thompson recently opened an art exhibit called Journey, which is meant to draw attention to the issue of trafficking of women and girls into commercial sex. But the mature and nuanced analysis which Thompson brings to her characters on stage and screen also shows through in her approach to human trafficking. Journey presents trafficking as not just an international phenomenon, but a local one which happens where we live, even in the U.S. and UK. Case in point -- Thompson got involved in the fight for abolition when she discovered a massage parlor on her street was trafficking women. And if I had to guess, I'm gonna guess Emma Thompson doesn't live in a shady, low-rent part of London. Journey drives home the point that slavery in prostitution and commercial sex is not just happening on the other side of the world, it's happening in your community.
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.
"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
