Human Trafficking in Africa
To Better Know A Country: Human Trafficking in Nigeria
Published September 02, 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..... Nigeria
Basic Stats
- Ranking: Tier 1
- Status: Source, transit and destination country for trafficking victims
- Political Stability: So stable all their princes and business men want to deposit $1.2 million in your bank account, please
- Cash Flow: Not super, despite the number of people duped by above scam
- Do I Think They Care?: They've worked hard to end trafficking, despite limited resources.
Who Are the Victims and What Are They Doing?
- Girls: Commercial sex, domestic servitude, and forced labor
- Boys: Forced labor in street vending, forced begging, and domestic servitude
- Women: Commercial sex and forced labor
Where Are They Coming From and Where Are They Going?
- Victims are trafficked from Nigeria to Gabon, Cameroon, Ghana, Chad, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, France, Greece and the UK.
- Nigerian victims are trafficked internally.
What's Gotta Happen?
- Continue prosecuting traffickers.
- Don't question traffickers and victims in the same building.
- Ensure victims are not detained in shelters against their will.
What Can I Do?
- You can support the Rafiki Foundation, a Christian non-profit organization which helps orphans and at-risk children in Nigeria.
In summary, I give mad props to Nigeria for being the only African country to get a Tier 1 rating from the State Department. I hope that all the other world leaders and country heads who are reading this blog right now take note of Nigeria's awesome achievement. You don't have to be the richest country to tackle trafficking, you just have to have the will. And if anyone from Nigeria is reading, please tell Prince Iniabasi that I'm still waiting on that deposit.
Prostitution or Starvation: Refugees Face Few Options
Published August 31, 2009 @ 09:17AM PT
The New Canaan camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kenya is named to sound like a promised land, but for many of the women living inside, it is anything but paradise. That's because increasingly, women living in this and other refugee camps in Kenya are faced with a terrible choice: feed themselves and their families via prostitution or risk starvation and death.
Many of the women at New Canaan fled their homes during the post-election violence in Kenya a year-and-a-half ago. Some were abandoned by their husbands after being raped, demonstrating the polar opposite of the concept of a "supportive partner". Others left their husbands in search of a man who could provide for and feed their children, which given the abandonment of their victimized sisters isn't surprising. Either way, once in the camp, these women have very few options to earn a living and to support their children. They see prostitution as the only viable option, and in their defense, they're sometimes right. According to Dr. Regina Karega, chairperson of the National Commission on Gender and Development, women who have no food reason that if a man is offering to feed them or their children in echange for sex, they'll "take the risk and feed [their] children.” What mother wouldn't?
The risk Dr. Karega refers to is contracting HIV/AIDS or another STD via unprotected sex in the refugee camps. However, women who have entered prostitution out of desperation, such as those in IDP camps, face additional risks, including rape, beatings, severe emotional and psychological trauma, and social isolation. Prostitution is dangerous for women, and often those dangers are exacerbated in camps like the ones at New Canaan.
Because these women are adults and no other person is forcing, coercing, or tricking them into prostitution, they are not considered victims of human trafficking. But isn't the lack of options for survival other than prostitution a form of coercion? If the choice is prostitution or watching your children starve, is that really a choice? The women of Kenyan IDP camps (and other refugee camps) are perfect examples of women who enter into prostitution out of desperation and a lack of other viable options. They can't be called victims of human trafficking because another person or group of people is not exploiting them. But surely they are victims of circumstance, victims of a gender-biased system, victims of a dearth of choices. They are not empowered women making active choices; they are fighting for survival despite the terrible risks.
In the Bible, Canaan was supposed to be a land flowing with milk and honey. New Canaan and the camps like it are lands overflowing with desperate women, hungry children, and increasingly, a coerced form of prostitution. It's not human trafficking, but it's exploitation nonetheless. Prostitution or starvation is not a choice anyone should have to make. In fact, it's not even really a choice.
How Our Tobacco Habit Kills Malawian Children
Published August 29, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Malawi's children are being slowly killed by tobacco, but not tobacco they're smoking. They're being killed by tobacco those of us in the U.S. and Europe are smoking. That's because Malawi's booming and dangerous tobacco industry is a huge exploiter of child labor, all in the name of serving a Western nicotine addiction.
In Malawi, 78,000 children, some as young as five, work 12-hour days to produce cigarettes. Some are literally paid pennies an hour for this difficult labor. Few earn what would be considered a "living wage." But for Malawian children in the tobacco industry, the lack of fair pay is the least of their worries. On a humid day (of which Malawi has several), the average child worker can be exposed to up to 54 milligrams of dissolved nicotine- the equivalent of 32 cigarettes! These kids are reaping the heath consequences of a pack-and-a-half-a-day habit without ever lighting up. One teen boy described the health problems as such,
We even carry on coughing at home. It starts as a little cough, but it goes on for a long time. Sometimes it feels like you don't have enough breath, you don't have enough oxygen. Yes, you reach a point where you cannot breathe in because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes and you vomit, you vomit blood. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache.
The relationship that Malawi has with tobacco is rooted, if dysfunctional and incestuous. Tobacco is Malawi's biggest export, and accounts for about 70 percent of their income from exports. Malawi is the fifth largest producer of tobacco in the world. So where does all this tobacco from Malawi go? Mostly, to the U.S. and Europe.
On the Philip Morris website, they claim that they "do not condone the unlawful employment or exploitation of children in the workplace, nor do we condone forced labor." However, they also don't list where their tobacco is sourced from or any specific regulations they require their suppliers to meet. Their Child and Forced Labor Policy is about as firm and healthy as the lungs of a lifetime smoker. And Philip Morris is just one company- tobacco companies all over the world buy Malawian tobacco.
Is it shocking that tobacco companies care as much about the health of the Malawian children who produce their products as they do about the Western children who smoke their products? Not really. Is it one more reason not to light up? Definitely.
FREE Fair Trade Chocolate (Seriously)!
Published August 27, 2009 @ 07:30AM PT
Halloween rocks! It's not too early to be thinking about your Halloween plans, in fact, I've been trying to decide what to be for weeks now. There are the mainstays of Halloween we all love: costumes, candy, ghoulish goodness. But this year, why not try something a little different with your Halloween and take yourself and/or the kids in your life reverse trick-or-treating?
Reverse trick-or-treating is exactly what it sounds like. You knock on doors and when folks answer, you yell "trick or treat". Except, instead of accepting delicious candy from the adults inside, you give them a piece of Fair Trade chocolate with a card that talks about how Fair Trade chocolate helps prevent slavery and protect the environment. And the best part is, you can get a FREE reverse trick-or-treating kit from the Fair Trade Resource Network, including Fair Trade chocolate to distribute and everything you need to go reverse trick-or-treating.
I love this idea because it's a great and easy way for parents to get their kids involved in social activism (and a way for parents to reduce the overflow of candy that comes with Halloween). It's also a smart way to educate people about the realities of the chocolate industrywith a sweeter (i.e. chocolate flavored) wrapping. Plus, it shows the recipients of the Fair Trade treats that next year there are better alternatives to the chocolate you find in the grocery store.
The deadline for groups to request their kits is October 1 and for individuals it's October 13. But this offer is only valid while the free chocolate lasts, so hurry up and order yours today!
Now if only someone would help me pick out a Halloween costume....
West Africa to EU: Major Sex Trafficking Circuit
Published July 31, 2009 @ 08:07AM PT
A report released by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime this week identified a major and continuous trafficking route from Western Africa to Western Europe. Most of the people moved along this route are women and girls from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Cameroon on their way to be forced into prostitution in the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and other EU countries. You can read the report here.
According to the report, this trafficking circuit is huge. It moves between 3800 and 5700 women into the EU annually, to the tune of over $200 million dollars a year. And yet despite those huge numbers, it is estimated that West African trafficking victims comprise only about 10% of the trafficking victims enslaved in commercial sex in Western Europe. If $200 million dollars is only a tiny percentage of the money being made through forced prostitution in Europe, imagine how much money exists in the industry as a whole. We're talking billions of dollars generated by the enslavement of human beings all over Europe. And when there is that much money to be had by the criminals, you can be the crime becomes harder to fight.
The system usually used on this circuit is debt bondage. The trafficker gives the victim a "loan" of somewhere between $40,000 and $55,000 to cover the costs of entry into the EU, usually including false documents, transportation, housing, etc. The trafficker then creates a "contract" detailing the method and time period of repayment. However, victims are often deceived about the nature and conditions of work awaiting them. Even if the victims know they will be engaging in prostitution in Europe, they are often lied to about the working conditions, their ability to leave or say "no", or the amount of money they will get to keep. Victims are then forced into prostitution on the traffickers terms "until the debt is repaid", which is sometimes never.
More often than not, victims are flown in (another reason we need better training for immigration personnel at airports). Adult women may be presented as the trafficker's wife or newly hired maid. Minor girls are often told to ask for asylum, after which they are placed temporarily in a juvenile shelter. It's easy for the trafficker to then take the girl from the shelter. Once in the EU, the victims are often rotated between countries or cities. This serves the dual purpose of keeping the faces (and bodies) changing for the male buyers and keeping the victims disoriented and confused.
This route is one which the international community has known about for a long time. But because of the hidden nature of the crime, it is still thriving.
Nigerian Baby Farms Breed Slaves from Slaves
Published July 21, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
I wish this article were a joke, and that the term "baby farm" was an exaggeration for what is happening to teen girls and their children in Nigeria. It's not. Nigerian girls are being trafficked to breed children in factory farm-like conditions to then be harvested and sold. Both the teens and their children are victims of the baby harvesting industry.
Here's how the baby farm operation works. Poor teen girls are lured into traffickers' hands in many of the ways traffickers lure teen girls for sex- promises of jobs, money, love, or stability. But instead of simply enslaving these girls in a traditional brothel, the traffickers bring them to an illegal clinic where they are raped until they become pregnant. During the pregnancy, they are cared for medically. After they give birth, the babies are sold into slavery for anywhere between $2,500 and $3,800 and the girls are paid $170 for their baby and their "work".
These clinics operate like a factory farm- the seeds are sown via rape into the teen mothers. The babies are then allowed to germinate, are harvested, and are sold as a commodity. I have rarely in my years working with human trafficking systems seen a process so completely dehumanizing to all the people involved. The girls are treated not just as objects but as factories, and the babies are treated as a product. A disturbing addition to this already disturbing story is the fact that some of these children are adopted by well-meaning parents, who believe the clinic is a legitimate adoption agency. They see the payment as an adoption fee and don't realize their child was created via human trafficking and rape in order to turn a profit. Other children, however, are not sold to well-meaning parents at all. Some are sold into slavery.
Thus far, I don't know of any confirmed cases of baby farms outside of Nigeria where the teen mothers were trafficked into the situation. There have been reports of baby farms in other countries like India where the women were all supposedly participating of their own free will. But I cannot help but believe that where there is a profit to be had by the sale of human beings, there will be traffickers willing to do what it takes to make that profit. This is not a uniquely Nigerian crime- in fact, Nigeria has laws preventing the sale of children in the same way the U.S. and the UK and many other countries do.
The photo above is a little tongue-in-cheek, but the reality of these girls' experiences is bleak. The outlook for some of their children is no brighter.
How You Rescue a Child From Slavery
Published July 16, 2009 @ 07:06AM PT
The issue of how to best remove children from human trafficking situations, and more importantly what to do with them when they are removed, is as complex as it is important. And it's not a process in which there can be many mistakes.
Unabridged has a great article this week about the steps one man named George takes to free children from slavery in the fishing industry in Ghana. It's a process, which in this case, can take up to six months. After identifying a child in slavery, he must then find the parents, convince them of the reality of their child's situation, and secure a legal means for their release into his care. By this time, the traffickers and the child have sometimes moved to a different place.
While this article is an interesting example of how to find and help child slaves, it's important to remember that removing children from different industries and in different countries will look very different. Sometimes, removal is accomplished by a raid by local law enforcement, a tool often used on illegal brothels or work sites with a high immigrant populations. Other times, children can be removed by the intervention of families, NGOs or community based groups. Occasionally, a child may escape his or her trafficker and seek help at a service agency. In short, there is no one universal way to rescue a child from slavery.
While the process of getting a child out of an exploitative situation is important, what happens next is arguable even more crucial. Children who are removed from slavery and not given proper services and resources are incredibly vulnerable to be re-trafficked. Since in all parts of the world, NGOs and shelters are underfunded and often at capacity, children are often rescued only to have no place to go. It's these situations which are often most dangerous for the children. This one of the many reasons that collaboration and coordination between law enforcement, NGOs, shelters, and other groups working with trafficked persons is so crucial.
Image from abandoned-orphan.typepad.com
