International Human Trafficking and Migration
2010 Freedom Award Nominations Now Open
Published September 17, 2009 @ 08:38AM PT
Do you know someone who has survived human trafficking? Do you know of an organization which has worked hard to eradicate human trafficking over the past year? Then nominate them for a 2010 Freedom Award. The Freedom Award was created by Free the Slaves to recognize and reward organizations and individuals who are working to eradicate human trafficking, forced labor and modern-day slavery.
The 2010 Freedom Awards winners will receive:
- Honorary grants for strengthening of anti-slavery efforts and professional development
- An opportunity to travel to the United States to meet other leaders and stakeholders in the movement
- Possibilities for further support and partnerships for Laureates via the connections and relationships built during Freedom Awards events
You can make a nomination here. All nominations must be received by midnight GMT on November 2, 2009. Late nominations will not be considered for the 2010 awards.
The Freedom Award presents a wonderful opportunity for abolitionists working outside the U.S. to travel to the U.S. and receive support for their work. If you have connections with individuals or organizations working overseas, please consider making a nomination.
Photo credit: misfit
Fatal Promises Premiers in NYC
Published September 14, 2009 @ 07:30AM PT
Kat Rohrer, co-producer of the new film about human trafficking Fatal Promises, discusses her film which premiers in New York this week.
New York is America’s biggest port of entry for human trafficking. So it is crucial that our film Fatal Promises film premieres in New York City at the heart of the crisis. Fatal Promises, four dedicated years in the making, is now finished and premiering from the 16th to 24th September.
We found out about human trafficking thanks to a single news item in the New York Times about people being bought, transported across borders, sold and re-sold and, finally, discarded. Humans as commodities? Not in the developed democracies, not in this modern age, surely! After some research we felt compelled. The stories of victims have to be told and documented, public awareness must be raised. How can we, as a conscientious society, tolerate slavery in 21st century?
The survivors we met are truly remarkable people who have been through ordeals we could not even imagine. It is their voices and their anger that we want the public to hear in this film -- stories like Katja’s, an ambitious Ukrainian who was promised a summer job on America’s east coast but landed in a strip club in the Midwest. Or that of 18-year-old sailor cadet Eugene, who was promised good money crab fishing off the Russian coastline, but was in fact starved and abused on an unmarked ship.
As activist Gloria Steinem says in Fatal Promises,
The stories of the victims have to be told – not just the bare facts and numbers like human trafficking being a billion-dollar-business.
We remain stunned by the fact that, despite all the endless conferences and proclamations to end modern day slavery, the trade has been growing steadily since we started the work on the documentary in 2005. Activist and Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson was so right in 2008 at the million-dollar Vienna Forum of the UNODC when she condemned the "karaoke for the concerned“ in an interview for Fatal Promises, and asked "What is the point of us all traveling to Vienna when we don’t have a plan?"
The title of the documentary not only refers to the promises made to potential victims which, for many, turned out to be fatal. It also refers to the empty promises made by governments and organizations like the UN which vow to abolish modern day slavery but lack the political will to act.
Fatal Promises is playing at Cinema Village, E 12th St, New York, NY, 10003 from 16 – 24 September 2009.
Photo credit: epredator
What Fox News Doesn't Want You to Know About the ACORN Prostitution Scandal
Published September 13, 2009 @ 01:42PM PT
Some workers at ACORN offices in Baltimore and Washington DC made some pretty bad choices recently in front of an undercover film crew pretending to be a pimp and prostitute trying to buy a home. They didn't protest when the actors told them they wanted to bring thirteen 15-year-old girls from El Salvador into the country to sell in prostitution, helped them with creative ways to avoid the cops, and even suggested how to claim the girls as dependents on their taxes. However, there is a lot more to these videos and the media blitz behind them than meets the eye.
Fox News and other conservative media outlets would have you believe this is a story about sex trafficking. It's not. It's a story about race, class, prostitution, tax evasion, and serious ethical and legal concerns. In the edited versions of the videos, the actors and the ACORN employees discuss activities that could be classified as trafficking only about 1% of the time. The rest of the time they talk about prostitution, which the woman claiming to be a prostitute repeatedly says she is engaging in by her choice and keeping the money she makes (therefore, she is not a trafficking victim herself). The ACORN employees should have taken action when the actors talked about prostituting underage girls; not doing so was reprehensibly unethical and illegal. And since prostitution is illegal in both Maryland and DC, they shouldn't have condoned lying (and in some cases cheating) on taxes to support it. But Fox and the conservative media have twisted these videos to indicate ACORN as an organization was promoting child prostitution, which was never the case.
The videos are certainly an indictment of four ACORN employees, all of which have now been fired. But they are also an indictment of the conservative media outlets that push stories like this as a way to discredit and defund liberal organizations like ACORN under the guise of concern about sex trafficking. The sting was orchestrated by conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe who targeted a number of ACORN offices, with incriminating results found in two. It's clear the goal of the operation was nothing to do with preventing harm to children, and everything to do with finding ACORN employees willing to help a prostitute get housing and set up a business. From the perspective of the ACORN employees, they were helping a woman without education or resources set up a business to survive. From the perspective of we the taxpayers, they were helping a woman cheat on her taxes and earn income illegally through criminal activity. Had the woman been selling cocaine instead of sex, the legal and ethical implications would be similar. What the employees did was unethical, but it was about taxes, not trafficking, and it was a lot more complex and nuanced than Fox News is making it out to be.
The videos from Baltimore and DC are here below. Watch them for yourself, and then take a look at the way some news outlets have been covering them. It's a scandal for ACORN to be sure, but not one that's really about human trafficking.
From Budapest to Toronto: Timea Eva's True Story of Slavery
Published September 06, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
This story was collected from KMBC. Timea Eva's experiences as a trafficking victim are common. They're so common that situations like her's -- a young, Eastern European woman tricked into the commercial sex industry -- have become the norm for mainstream coverage and examples of human trafficking. But this situation was real for Timea Eva and thousands of other women from Eastern Europe from the 1990s to today.
The summer Timea Eva Nagy was 20, she decided to take a summer job in Canada. It was far away from her home in Budapest, Hungary, but she would earn money and have an interesting international experience. Shortly arriving in Toronto, however, she was kidnapped and forced to strip and sell her body for sex.
During her captivity, Nagy desperately wanted to leave, but her traffickers threatened to harm her family back in Hungary if she tried to escape. They starved her to keep her weak and thin. She tried to find help. She eventually even tried suicide. But it seemed nothing would release her from this nightmare. But despite it all, Nagy suppressed the urge to panic and break down. She stayed calm and went into "survival mode", determined to finally find a way to break free.
Finally she found a way out. Nagy managed to use a Hungarian-English dictionary to explain to a DJ and a security guard that she was being abused, and that she wanted to leave. They helped her escape her captors and find safety.
Nagy's story has as happy an ending as such a story can have. She now tours the U.S. talking about her experience and educating people on the reality of human trafficking. She has even written a book called "Walk with Me: A Memoir of a Sex Slave Worker."
Photo credit: Mysi anne
Beef Tacos and Forced Prostitution
Published September 03, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
La Cabana, a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta suburb Woodstock, GA, was famous for two things -- the beef tacos in the front of the house and the young women and teen girls selling sex in the back. That's because this Mexican restaurant was a front for a human trafficking operation from Central and South America to metro Atlanta. Selling ethnic foods by day and human beings by night is a trend among traffickers all over the country.
At La Cabana, women and girls as young as 15 were smuggled from Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador into the U.S. While the restaurant was open, they served customers plates of Hispanic delicacies. But after the kitchen closed, the restaurant became a gentleman's club, and they serviced the mostly Hispanic male audience sexually. In a back room, the women and girls were forced to engage in prostitution to pay off their smuggling debt. Interestingly enough, none of the news reports I found on this case called it human trafficking. But if this isn't human trafficking, then I'll buy Rush Limbaugh's greatest hits tape.
Keeping trafficking operations within one cultural, racial, or ethic group are one technique traffickers use tp avoid detection by the police. The philosophy is that operating a criminal enterprise within a community of "friends" is safer. This happens often with suburban brothels in private homes that sell cater exclusively to Korean men, Hispanic men, East African men, etc. But large numbers of men going in and out of a private home at odd hours might look suspicious to neighbors. Therefore, an ethnic restaurant provides an ideal cover for the traffickers. Plus, they have two sources of income from the women they are exploiting: their labor in the restaurant and their sexual exploitation. In this case, fortunately, the police were a couple steps ahead.
The La Cabana trafficking ring got busted because someone, presumably who lived in the area, called in a tip about the loud music late at night and Hispanic women going in and out of the building frequently. This is one more example of how people like you, just by being aware of your surroundings, can help trafficked people to safety. If you see something suspicious, don't trick yourself into believing you're the Dark Knight and go running in guns-or-video-cameras-blazing. But do call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-3737-888 or call local law enforcement.
Photo credit: Loco beef taco by jasonlam
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 Natural Disasters Make Children Slaves
Published August 20, 2009 @ 07:22AM PT
Natural disasters can destroy homes, raze farmlands, and devastate families. They can wipe out whole communities in moments and cause damage that costs millions of dollars to repair. But can natural disasters turn children into slaves? According to a recent report from ECPAT International, they sure can.
ECPAT International found increases in trafficking of children after severe droughts in Swaziland in 2007 and flooding in India in 2008. In Swaziland, an increased number of children were pulled out of school; their families traded their bodies for food and water. In India, children were sent to work as bricklayers and seamstresses to make up for destroyed business. Other girls left vulnerable by the floods were sold as brides into forced marriages.
But natural disasters aren't the only tragedies that push children into slavery; man-made conflicts can be just as devastating. Children in the Congo, Guinea, and other West African nations living in refugee camps are trading sex for basic supplies and food. In some cases, the adults who exploit them include camp leaders, teachers, and humanitarian aid workers.
So how do natural disasters and conflicts turn children into slaves? For the most part, these children were already vulnerable to human trafficking before the disaster struck. They were living at some level of poverty with little education and few resources. The disaster pushes children and their families over the edge into destitution and desperation. Sometimes the disaster causes a family to send a child away to work, a risk that ends in slavery. Sometimes the family must marry off daughters they cannot feed. Sometimes criminal businessmen will traffic children to regain profits lost to a natural disaster. The possibilities are as endless as the supply of children whose lives the disaster has destroyed.
Human trafficking is deeply connected to and propelled by hurricanes, floods, fires, tsunamis, and other natural disasters. And it's also deeply connected to civil wars and other armed conflicts. So the next time you hear about a natural disaster, remember that once the emergency aid organizations leave, the nightmare isn't over. And for some children, the nightmare is just beginning.
Image from ens-newswire.com
