I was finally able to get the site back up after a mishap with the hosting site a few months back. I will be gradually re-adding the content from the previous site that was recovered. Please stay tuned…
IRIN recently reported on the International Labor Organization’s study of child labor in Pakistan’s bangle industry. According to the study, children must hunch over hot stoves for average 12-hour days in order to produce glass bangles.
Pakistan’s Federal Bureau of Statistics claims 3.3 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are currently involved in the industry.
IRIN quoted Fazila Gulrez, national manager of promotions for the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, arguing that educating children in the workplace is not the solution to the problem. She added:
The notion that poverty is a cause is inaccurate. In fact child labor itself leads to poverty and creates a vicious circle… The high drop-out rate from schools with 50 percent leaving education within the first 5 years of primary education also contributes to child labor.
Child participation in the industry provokes ethical dilemmas across the board. For student Raheela Abbas, exposure to the plight of children and their working conditions caused her to renounce wearing bangles altogether.
But it’s important to understand the broader picture as well. These children, like most others in their families, are working in deplorable conditions because they have no other options. Boycotting something that is repulsive is often an attractive option, but it’s also necessary to take into account the repercussions if the industry’s overall economy takes a hit.
So … What DO you do?
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(Photo source: Wide Angle)
For anyone wanting to understand how globalization and new migration trends are affecting the illegal trafficking and smuggling of humans, it’s worth watching PBS’s Wide Angle episode, “Dying to Leave.”
Although produced in 2003, the short but excellent documentary, which can be viewed on their website, provides a wide angle indeed on how intertwined the baffling flux of global economics is with often dangerous patterns of international migration – from Iraqi refugees braving deadly seas to illegally reach Australia, to Moldovan single mothers being forced into prostitution in Japan, to Mexican workers violently imprisoned in Florida work camps. They leave their homes because of economic hardship, but often end up in worse situations abroad. The show argues,
Images of an abundant west have flooded the poorest parts of the world, fueling the perception that a better life is within reach. In the modern global economy, capital and goods now move freely all over the world. Not so, people. The movement of people across borders is now more regulated than it’s ever been.
Human smuggling is harder to detect for immigration officials because it is so voluntary. Paul Holmes, former head of the UK’s Metropolitan Police Vice Squad, points out that when people willingly choose, under the deceived illusion of a better job and life overseas, to sneak across borders, it is very hard to detect. The average customs official in Bogota, who is specifically trained to recognize victims of trafficking, typically has about 45 seconds to assess whether or not someone is going to be manipulated into a trafficking situation once they reach their international destination.
In the growing shadow of globalization, distinguishing clearly between those who are voluntarily smuggled and those who are unwillingly trafficked becomes problematic at best.
“Once you take violent control of another human being, they stop being a smuggled person and start being a trafficked person,” trafficking expert Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves states.
Last week California passed two new pieces of legislation,
One of the new bills creates a counseling and treatment program for trafficked and sexually exploited minors. The other bill, recognizing that a majority of people trafficked into the United States are non-citizens without valid immigration documents, requires thorough investigation of trafficking cases regardless of citizenship status and allows victims to keep their names out of public record.
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After the Christmas 2004 tsunami, Hannah Lobel, in a 2005 article from the Utne Reader, described “slimy ’sexpatriates’ who’ve set up shop as purveyors of women free from the influence of ‘feminazis’” that took advantage of young women and girls struck by the disaster. She’s referring to an article by Alex Renton describing the tendency of international sex tourists to exploit regions of the globe most brutally hit by natural and economic hardship. Renton writes:
It was the tsunami, of course. Patong beach, one of the worst hit parts of Phuket island, is among Thailand’s best known destinations for tourists seeking sex. So the men transferred their holidays to Bangkok. Happily for them, there was a drought in northeastern Thailand at the end of 2004. The poor rice crop that resulted sent more young girls than usual down from their impoverished villages on the plains of Isaan to harvest the tourists in the big city. This seasonal migration goes back, historians of the sex trade will tell you, to the Vietnam war and the establishment of Thailand as a brothel for American GIs on leave. Prostitution for foreign visitors developed into a major industry, although official Thailand shrouds its economic and social significance in misinformation and a variety of interesting hypocrisies.
Sex tourism, Renton argues, is at best difficult to measure. Immigration officers don’t list sex as a qualifier when questioning incoming tourists whether their trip is for business or pleasure. He adds, however:
Westerners form an important—albeit not the major—part of this economic picture. A few have settld here because of it, calling themselves “sexpatriates.” In towns like Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand, on Phuket island and in the sex trade districts of Bangkok, they run bars, hotels and brothels, mediating the transactions between male tourists and Thai women. They are vocal on websites and in local publishing ventures, churning out guides for sex tourists. Some of these men see themselves as exiles, refugees from the “feminazis” who are crushing the spirit of the western male. Here, the old order of the sexes still reigns. Women know their place, they wash your feet before they have sex with you, they say thank you and help you in the shower afterwards. And, of course, westerners’ savings and pensions go a long way. Beer is a dollar a bottle, and a woman for the night available for £10 or less. It’s the “last place you can be a white man,” says one bar-owning sexpat on his website.
Interestingly, Renton also identifies another industry revolving around the Thai sex trade– that of NGOs that seek to combat sex trafficking. Despite all the activism around the issue, it is difficult for journalists to obtain accurate statistics measuring just how big the problem is. This is, perhaps, because no one actually has such numbers.
Nevertheless, Renton predicts that the trend will continue to escalate as long as tourists have disposable incomes and oppressed countries have disposable people …
The country’s beaches are overexploited, its forests shrinking and the islands poisoned by tourists’ waste. But Thailand and its neighbours retain one renewable resource for the tourists that is not in danger of running out—the supply of poor, smiling women.
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“Victims of slavery tend to be isolated, relatively poor, and badly educated,” former U.S. ambassador at large on modern-day slavery John Miller writes in the current Wilson Quarterly. “They don’t hold press conferences.”
Miller gives an outline of the nuanced topography of today’s fight against slavery founded in both global policy and personal experience. He describes some of the slaves he has met around the world, from a young woman kidnapped by the LRA in Uganda and forced to serve as a concubine and killer until her jaw was shot off during combat, to a teenager terrorized for years by her Minneapolis pimp.
Miller keenly looks to historical abolitionists of other slave trades to point out the critical role of language in framing, describing, and awakening the world to the realities of slavery:
As I grappled with the enormity of the crimes I encountered and the near silence that surrounded them, I turned to history for insight, and especially to the example of William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the great British reformer who led the 20-year campaign in Parliament to abolish the slave trade in the British Atlantic … For today’s antislavery activists, I realized, much of the task is the same as it was in Wilberforce’s time: to awaken others to an abomination that most people barely recognize. It is a measure of the challenge that remains that activists still need to persuade human rights organizations and other groups to pay attention to slavery…
In Wilberforce’s day, slavery was shrouded in euphemism by its defenders: “field hand,” “laborer,” and “houseboy.” Today, the news media and academics unthinkingly use words—“forced laborer,” “child soldier,” and “sex worker”—that have their own anesthetic effect, and along with others I have insisted on calling slavery by its right name. I have never understood why we constantly use the bloodless, bureaucratic term “human trafficking.”
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A UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre report entitled “South Asia in Action: Preventing and responding to child trafficking” is calling on South Asian nations to crack down on the enslavement of children, a problem that is widespread in much of South Asia.
Allison Alert reports for the UNICEF Innocenti Research Center, which authored the report:
Children in South Asia are being trafficked for many forms of exploitation – for sexual exploitation, labour, begging, early marriage, forced military recruitment, to work on camel farms, and for several other harmful purposes …
Girls who have not yet reached puberty may be married off to older men so that their parents have one less mouth to feed. Children are often sent to the capital city or an urban area to ‘have a better life’, which often involves deprivation of food, sleep and shelter, restriction of movement, and severed contacts with their families. The unprepared child who lacks awareness of the risks may voluntarily leave the home to migrate to another country and increase her or his vulnerability to trafficking.
While the report demands that South Asian countries improve anti-trafficking legislation and intensify enforcement, it is key that it also advises a collaboration between health, education, and social services, and the legal system, to name a few factors that exacerbate complications that lead to trafficking.
Most parents don’t want to sell their children.
They also don’t want to see them starve to death, and when someone promising who has money will give them a little so that one of their children can get work in the city and the remaining ones can eat … it is tempting to believe that a future is possible. To believe what you have to to see them live.
When you place people without options up against the faceless global forces of supply and demand, it’s easy to make moral judgements about how those people respond to such forces; but morally murkier when you try to convince them to stand up to that system.
Also this week, the UN released another report claiming that “a significant number” of the 15,000 children in Nepal’s orphanages are admitted as a result of fraud or coercion, and many of those adopted out are not orphaned but separated from their families. The report recommends a cessation of intercountry adoption which UNICEF fears has encouraged the illicit sale of children across international borders, according to the UN:
“The vast majority of children in centres don’t need to be there,” said Joseph Aguettant, Tdh Country Representative in Nepal.
“They have family… The first priority, therefore, should be to reunite 80 per cent of the children in institutions with their families, not to re-open intercountry adoption.”
To truly curb and eliminate the problem, we must address — in a real way — the circumstances which force parents to give their children up in the first place and deprive children of safe environments to grow up in.
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As the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics kick off this weekend, William Sparrow for the Asia Times asks,
“China has the Games, doesn’t it expect the players to show up, too?”
In an article also featured on The Human Trafficking Project’s site, Sparrow refers to the inevitable influx of Olympic-going foreigners who double as sex tourists.
Anyone who studies human trafficking will tell you that wherever there is a congregation of people with money who are open to a good time, there is a market for prostitution.
Dissecting a published set of guidelines for admitted foreigners released by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, Sparrow writes,
Under the rubric “Which categories of foreigners are not permitted to enter China?”, the HRC-translated guide included, “Those who are believed to potentially engage in smuggling, narcotic trafficking or prostitution after entering China”, and “Those who are suffering from a mental disorder or insanity, sexually-transmitted disease, or an infectious disease such as active tuberculosis.”
How the Beijing government plans to enforce these policies, namely prostitution-seekers and those with sexually-transmitted disease, is impossibly unclear. Even for an authoritarian government as strict as Beijing, it seems an immense undertaking to pre-determine the health and intent of millions of expected tourists.
It is obvious, however, that the government has thrown down the gauntlet and will do whatever it must to crack down on vice in an effort to present China’s best face for the Games. In terms of stopping prostitution, and its alleged negative effects on society, this may be a laudable endeavor. But on the ground, let’s be honest, it’s laughable.
Sparrow references a Washington Post article by Maureen Fan that points to China’s economic boom as a major factor for rising numbers of sex workers. This will be undoubtedly exacerbated by the arrival of millions of tourists with money to spend on fun.
Sparrow concludes,
In the main cities where the Games will be held – Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai – any efforts to prevent or even tame prostitution will prove unmanageable. The confluence of history, economics and human nature – all in a carnivalesque environment – will simply be too much to overcome.
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Dubai, by most accounts, is something of a fantasyland. Exploding with new money that begets uninhibited , almost Dr. Seussian, architecture and draws affluent business and pleasure-seekers from around the world, it has also, much like Las Vegas or Amsterdam, become what I like to call an exception zone. A playground of privilege, if you will, where things you might not do elsewhere become acceptable. Because, hey, it’s Dubai. The rules don’t apply in this surreal metropolis.
Except wherever money and power accumulate, exploitation almost always follows, flying under the radar and making both business and pleasure attainable. Night clubs pulse with military contractors, tourists, and Arab businessmen seeking easy sex with Iragi refugees. Filipina maids, obtaining jobs abroad so they can send money home to their children, are often abused (sometimes quite sadistically). There have been numerous cases of maids being thrown out the windows of lavish, otherworldly skyscrapers that peak up, Jetson-like, above the clouds on a foggy day.
But it makes a kind of sense– where there is excess, people become increasingly expendable. And easy to replace.
Glen Carey, for The Asian Sex Gazette, published an article on the trafficking of persons to Dubai:
Dubai has transformed itself from a trading village to the Persian Gulf’s financial and tourist hub with lower taxes and a more vibrant nightlife than other Gulf states. Bars heave with men drinking $10 beers and women in short skirts.
That’s attracted rich Saudis, US oil workers flush with cash after stints in Iraq, and bankers who are paid as much as 40 percent more than those in London or New York.
Affluence has increased the demand for laborers and housemaids, and the development of laws to protect them from exploitation hasn’t kept pace, the International Labor Organization said in an e-mailed response to questions.
Women from Asia and Africa often sign contracts to work as maids, waitresses, hairdressers and secretaries, only to have employers confiscate their passports and force them to work as prostitutes, the US report said. Others work excessive hours under the threat of mental, physical or sexual abuse until they can pay off recruitment costs.
According to the article, Dubai, which is ranked on the Tier 2 Watch List of the U.S. Trafficking in Persons report, is making an effort to curb the problem. Carey writes, “In July (2007), the UAE formed a committee of senior officials to combat human trafficking, and it has opened a shelter for abused women. In the past year it has closed 40 hotels and clubs that allowed prostitution, said Anwar Gargash, minister of state for Federal National Council Affairs in Dubai.”
Such efforts are well and good. But you have to wonder, as you do with Vegas, about how much the problem really can be eradicated when the whole culture of the place, the essence of it, what makes it saleable, what makes its market value shine, is precisely the fact that it assuages the guilt of the haves by promoting their entitlement to the labor and bodies of the have-nots and building on the delusion of the Western right to pleasure at all costs. Costs which usually remain invisible to most of us who can’t even imagine having to surrender the autonomy of our bodies and souls.
In the end, Dubai is an exception zone, yes. But only more obviously than the rest of the world we occupy.
Posted in global economics, labor, middle east, refugees, sex, sex tourism | Leave a Comment »
The New York Times published an opinion piece on efforts to boost prevention of child prostitution in Atlanta. Atlanta stands apart as perhaps the major U.S. hub for the trafficking of American children for purposes of sex (see earlier Human Goods post on Libby Spears’ documentary, Playground). The problem rears its head in most cities, especially those that draw lots of tourists and convention-goers (the equation goes something like: men on holiday minus wives plus extra time and money to spend equals exploitation far too often).
But as the opinion piece points out, the laws against sexual exploitation are already tough, and what we need is a much more holistic response to tackling the problem:
The men who drive the sex trade by patronizing prostitutes rarely figure into discussions of the problem. Shirley Franklin, the mayor of Atlanta, has changed that through advertisements underscoring the damage that these men do to their communities.
The city is also considering legislation under which first-time offenders on adult prostitution charges will be required to attend classes where they would learn about the broader social harm associated with their activities. Restitution and community service may be required.
These measures are a good example to state officials. Lawmakers also need to encourage programs that train teachers, law enforcement officials, social workers and others to focus on children at risk and to recognize the signs of sexual abuse and prostitution. By spreading knowledge and devising plans to help at-risk children, the authorities can put themselves in a position to intervene before damage has been done.
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(photo: Jon Krause)
John Miller, former ambassador on slavery for the State Department and leader of the Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. He boldly challenged the Bush Administration to account for the Justice Department’s opposition to new clauses in the bill that would intensify anti-slavery laws in the U.S. Although the bill passed the House with weak opposition, the Senate stalling has been so pronounced that Sen. Joseph Biden reintroduced it with some of the controversial provisions eliminated.
Miller writes,
A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.
As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.
Put me on the side of those who have worked with the victims. I have talked with survivors all over the world, including the United States, and I share the view that these women and girls — the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 — are not participating in the “oldest profession” but in the oldest form of abuse. They are slaves.And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has introduced a bill that largely complies with the department’s views.
The president may never have seen the Justice Department’s letter. But Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Deborah Pryce, Republican of Ohio, two of the leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking, have been unable to arrange a meeting with the president to express their concerns to him.
President Bush should meet with them — and his own Justice Department — before he loses his legacy and his leadership on the abolition of modern slavery.
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