Human Trafficking in the US
7 Ways to Fight Slavery at the Grocery Store
Published August 02, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
I am a bit of a foodie (and more than a bit of a nerd), so grocery shopping for me is a fun, relaxing activity. Handling the fruit, smelling the cheese counter, ogling the wine section- it can be quite a nice outing. But when you're trying to pay attention to what you buy, sometimes grocery shopping can feel overwhelming! To make things a little easier, here are seven items at a grocery store to pay special attention to if you're looking to shop slavery-free.
1. Coffee: Coffee might be the most famous food product for having a high incidence of slavery involved in its production. Luckily, most grocery stores carry Fair Trade and ethically-produced brands of coffee which are a better choice for workers.
2. Chocolate: As more and more chocolate companies begin to introduce greater responsibility into their production, finding slave-free chocolate is getting easier. However, the candy isle at the grocery store is still covered with chocolate from companies like Hershey and Nestle who have no supply chain transparency.
3. Seafood: Fishing industries, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa, are growing as destinations for trafficked children. Don't think Thai seafood will make it to your supermarket in the U.S.? Think again. Always check where in the world your seafood comes from and how it is produced.
4. Strawberries: Strawberries are a valuable crop which is difficult to harvest, making migrant workers in the strawberry industry extremely vulnerable to exploitation and slavery. When strawberries are in season, you may be able to find them picked near you. It doesn't guarantee a slave-free berry, but it avoids feeding the industry in California and Central America where much of the trafficking has been found.
5. Tea: Like coffee, the tea industry has seen a lot of slavery. And because tea is the most popular beverage in the world, the profits from exploiting tea growers and harvesters are high. Many teas now are coming out with better labels indicating how they were produced.
6. Poultry: Processing poultry is a gross and dirty job, which means it is often left to undocumented workers. And lack of oversight of poultry factories puts these workers at risk of trafficking. There was even a recent case of disabled workers being enslaved in a turkey processing plant for years.
7. Sugar:The slavery on sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean never quite went away. Slaves grow and harvest sugar in Caribbean, Africa, and Central America. Some grocery stores may carry Fair Trade or ethically-sourced sugar, but you might have to seek out a specialty store in some areas.
Remember. slavery can be found in any industry, but these are a few of the common offenders. Knowing where to look for slavery is the first step toward being a conscious consumer of slave-free goods.
Image from prevention.com
Reader Challenge: Can You Find 10 Slave-Free Consumer Products?
Published July 30, 2009 @ 01:08PM PT
This post is part of a challenge in tandem with the Human Trafficking Project. You can check out the other half of the challenge there.
The Reality: My name is Jenn Kimball, and I am a contributing writer for the Human Trafficking Project blog. Earlier this month, I wrote a post about slavery and the products we buy and use every day. Amanda Kloer wrote a post for this site about fair trade and "the slave behind your bargain" as well. Sadly, even without intending to, we can be promoting slavery through our habits as consumers.
We decided to cross post this week to continue this conversation and to challenge readers to research options for buying products that were not made with slave labor.
As more people are becoming aware of the ways that the products we buy may be made in exploitative conditions and/or by slaves, more people are demanding fair trade products. Fair Trade products are made in non-exploitative, sustainable ways that pay their producers a fair, living wage. Yet, despite increased attention to the need for fair trade products, many industries still use slave labor; it can be incredibly difficult to know for sure if the t-shirt you bought was made by someone laboring in terrible conditions (and the "Made in the USA" label is no guarantee). While the role slaves play in the coffee and chocolate industry has garnered a great deal of attention, many other products we buy and use daily are also tainted by slavery, even if we do not realize it.
The Challenge: Find places to buy all of the items on the shopping list from fair trade or other slave-free sources.
Perhaps because I am in the midst of moving, I am particularly struck by the fact that the furniture and household goods that I buy (or hopefully pick up for free. . .) may be available to me because someone else was exploited in their production. Electronics, furniture, and other basic household items do not get the kind of fair trade/slavery free attention other types of items do.
Here is the shopping list:
- Couch
- Stereo
- TV
- Flowers
- Rug
- Lamp
- Rice
- Curtains
- Coffee Table
- Coffee
The Reward: Amanda and I will post the best list/resources that we receive and credit the authors. In addition to being credited on our sites, your work will help others find and buy products that do not support slavery.
Image from gsl.uml.edu
Does Craigslist Think We're Stupid?
Published July 29, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
These days, Craigslist is looking more and more like a naughty child who keeps getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. That is, if the cookie jar were illegal prostitution and pimping of children. It's time for real change.
Amid increasing pressure (some of it from you, dear readers) two months ago, Craigslist agreed to replace their "Erotic Services" section with the more euphemistically-named "Adult Services" section, as if it now offers mostly wine classes and tax preparation. However, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart who sued Craigslist last year claims that prostitution is still thriving in the Adult Services section under a thin veneer.
According to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the rampant prostitution ads on Craigslist are
"...so thinly disguised, the real question is how they are permitted to be there if, in fact, the site is doing the screening and policing that they said they will do."
The pressure on Craigslist to remove their "Erotic Services" section stemmed from several cases of minor and adult human trafficking victims being sold via Craigslist. Craigslist claims the new section has strict qualifications to help avoid the exploitation of minors, but they have not yet released what those qualifications are.
I thought, perhaps, as Craigslist claims, all these sheriffs and attorney generals are only attacking the company for personal or political reasons. So I hopped onto Craigslist to see what I could find. Here are a few of the ad titles:
- Bodywork By Black Stunning Transsexual Beauty
- $100- Super Hot Grad student for massage
- S.U.P.E.R.S.T.A.C.K.E.D.massage
- Young sweet Asian girl massage
- Sexy Sexy Sexy Sexy Sexy Sexy
In most of the ads I looked at, the massage skills of the "masseuse" were not mentioned at all, whereas their supposed ages, physical attributes, and prices were described in detail. Sometime, obvious euphemisms like "100 roses per half hour" or "200 diamonds" are used in place of dollar signs.
Unlike Craigslist, I don't think you're stupid. I think you can look at the ads in Craigslist's Adult Services section and tell if they look like ads for legitimate massages, Or if they look like the same escort and prostitution businesses, some of which were pimping minors, that have been on advertised on Craigslist since its inception. Congress has already called Craigslist on their lack of real change. Now you can tell Craigslist you see through their game too, and you're not stupid.
America's Trafficked Children Are Being Arrested, Not Rescued
Published July 22, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
This was the topic of an unprecedented congressional briefing on capitol hill that took place yesterday. Co- sponsored by the Caucus on Victims' Rights and the Caucus on Human Trafficking, Congressman Chris Smith, Congressman Ted Poe, and Congressman Jim Costa were attentively listening to the challenges and recommendations of the panelists in addressing child sex slavery in America. In addition to the Congressman in attendance - the room was packed with nearly 80 congressional staffers and professionals. A clear message was sent that we are concerned about every victim exploited through the crime of human trafficking and that includes hundreds of thousands of American kids - every year.
The congressional briefing was spurred by the National Report on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: America's Prostituted Children written by Shared Hope International. The report reveals the shocking findings of three years of intensive research on the issue of child sex trafficking in America from ten locations across the U.S. While the research locations ranged from areas as diverse as Salt Lake City, Utah to Clearwater, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada the findings were hauntingly similar - underage American girls are the bulk of victims in commercial sex markets and are too often being arrested rather than rescued. Additionally, nearly every interview revealed that American child sex trafficking victims were being misidentified or not identified at all by Child Protective Services and social service providers who are responsible for providing proper treatment and care. The arrest and lack of specialized services for these children is causing revictimization.
Important key findings:
- At least 100,000 children are used in prostitution every year in the United States.
- The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years old.
- Prostituted girls are often controlled by a pimp who recruits them into sex trafficking by posing as a boyfriend, caretaker, and protector.
- The 3 primary manifestations of child sex trafficking in America is: pimp-controlled prostitution, familial prostitution, and/or survival sex.
- The business of sex trafficking of America's youth is flourishing as demand for commercial sex with young, innocent girls and boys continues to occur with little and low punishment.
- Child sexual slavery is fueled by a cultural of tolerance which glorifies pimping and normalizes the sexual exploitation of children.
Domestic minor sex trafficking is a serious problem in the U.S., and one that will not be solved overnight. But the first step is admitting to ourselves that it's not just foreign kids who are vulnerable- it's our kids. And this report is the first step to learning to admit that.
The Pros and Cons of Prostitution Court
Published July 20, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Baltimore is certainly not the first city to develop such a specialized court. Dallas began a diversion program last year which has helped women who wanted to leave prostitution but had no options get out. And other cities around the country are starting to re-think the way their criminal justice systems handle prostitution cases.
But do specialized prostitution courts "work"? Many of these programs are only a couple years old, so few cities have hard statistics on whether or not such a court program has significantly reduced the amount of prostitution in the area. A huge pro of having a specialized court system for women with prostitution charges is that it becomes much easier to train the people working in that court to identify children in prostitution and women in prostitution against their will. It also gives women who perhaps entered prostitution willingly but have since wanted to choose something else a way out of the industry.
On the other hand, one con of this system is that some specialized courts and diversion programs may deny due process to the women arrested, forcing them into the treatment program instead of allowing them a full trial to deny the charges. However, this problem seems possible to avoid if the diversion program/specialty court were optional as opposed to mandatory. Another con is that depending on how such a court is handled, it could be used to further stigmatize women charged with prostitution.
As cities like Baltimore and Dallas begin to track the progress of their specialized courts, other cities will be able to use their data and experiences to improve their own court systems. Hopefully, these specialized courts will help other criminal justice systems focus more on providing services to women in prostitution and identifying which women are trafficking victims. Do you have a specialized prostitution court in your area? Do you think it has worked?
Image from sharonherald.com
The New Market of Mobile Porn
Published July 08, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT
The porn industry has always been at the fore-front of developing new technologies. It popularized the VCR in the 1980s and quickly blanketed the Internet in the 1990s. And now, porn is going mobile. Mobile phone, that is.
Already, wireless companies in Japan are having capacity issues, as so many users are downloading more and more pornographic films and photos to their mobile devices. And those same companies estimate the amount of revenue from adult mobile downloads will double between now and 2013 to the tune of $4.9 billion. Now that's a lot of porn. In the U.S., the attitude is slightly different. After an app entitled "Hottest Girls" (decidedly soft-core, featuring scantily clad women) appeared in their app store, Apple announced they would not allow pornographic apps on their devices. However, the estimates of the market size- $3.5 billion by 2010- are similar to the Japanese.
So what's the problem with vast amounts of porn being downloaded and watched on cell phones across the country? As with most porn issues, the problem is kids. When porn is mobile, the industry is much harder to regulate. Already, there have been several cases of child pornography showing up on cell phones. It's also harder for parents to monitor what their children are looking at when porn can fit in pocket. And some of the porn that's out on the Internet these days is not of the "Hottest Girls" vein; it's hard-core, violent, and sometimes grotesque. A thriving mobile porn industry makes it much harder for parents and schools to protect children, both from child predators who would harm them and from disturbing and violent pornographic images.
The mobile porn industry is young enough that few meaningful national conversations about how to regulate and control this newest medium have happened. But if we're looking at what will be a $3.5 billion industry in a couple years, well then it's time to start talking.
Image from theiphoneblog.com
What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?
Published July 04, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
The Potomac River is a time machine. The city of Washington which surrounds it is a modern city, dripping with Starbucks cold, tall buildings, but the Potomac belongs to an earlier era. When you sit on its banks and watch the water ripple, it's impossible not to feel nostalgic patriotism. Close your eyes and you can see the boats carrying goods to trade and hear the musket fire of a distant revolution and feel connected to those people who died to make the country possible. The Potomac reminds me why I love America.
Yet every 4th of July, I am also reminded of what I don't love about America and what I'd like to change: that over 150 years after it was officially abolished, we still have slaves in America. In 1852, Fredrick Douglas issued his famous (if slightly depressing and anti-American at times) speech What To a Slave is the 4th of July. The following is an excerpt:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Perhaps today, one could argue, America is rivaled and surpassed in cruelty, in slavery, and in oppression. But the fact remains that America is better than slavery. It has been and will continue to be. But we must be the ones who make slavery history.
This 4th of July, you may be celebrating. Great. Have fun and be safe. But also consider taking a few moments to take action in the name of freedom and to help us achieve Mr. Douglas' dream and the dream of so many others: an America untainted by slavery.
This 4th of July, shouldn't we all be free?
