Close-Ups: A Memoir in Letters

Death has been forcing a familiarity lately – an uneasy intimacy with its commonplace nature. How do you take custody of someone else’s grief? And what if you do it wrong?

Lenses on Survival

Use it for good. Do something with it. Photojournalist Tim Matsui talks to Human Goods about bearing witness to courage in an upside-down world, and what he hopes his audience will take away from what they see.

At the Junction

Will the efforts sparked by India’s “revolutionary” new education bill be radical enough to reach its millions of child laborers?

The Playing Field

The fans have gone home. The stadiums are empty. But the legacy of South Africa’s World Cup games remains to be seen in one of the world’s most unequal societies.

A Miseducation

On the day he decided to run away, 9-year-old Coli awoke on a filthy mat. Like a pup, he lay curled against the cold, pressed between dozens of other children sleeping head-to-toe on the concrete floor. How Senegal’s Quranic boarding schools became hubs for forced begging.


Labor Trafficking

Circus Slaves

A small girl spins high above the tantalized crowd, gripping a bar with nothing but her teeth. It’s not a piece of outlandish fiction. It’s the Indian circus, and it depends on hundreds of trafficked Nepalese children to thrill audiences with bizarre and dangerous acts.

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Sex Trafficking

A Perfect Storm: Behind the trafficking of Minnesota’s Native American girls

Systematic extermination. Forced migration. Re-education. Sterilization. The collective history of Native Americans is infused with centuries of genocide and oppression that create a unique vulnerability to sex trafficking.

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Global Economics

Going Native: Modern sex tourism and the post-colonial gaze

For a submissive girl, go to Southeast Asia. For someone a little more feisty, try Latin America. The drive behind sex tourists’ desire for encounters with “exotic third-world” women is rooted in a centuries-old history.

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Policy

An End to the Age of Blood Phones?

How far can American companies and consumers go in regulating the bloody flow of Congolese precious metals into our electronics? The hopes and limits of Obama’s financial reform bill.

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Recent Articles

In Yamuna Bazaar: A Memoir in Letters

If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines – then my world changes …

read more

An End to the Age of Blood Phones?

How far can American companies and consumers go in regulating the bloody flow of Congolese precious metals into our electronics? The hopes and limits of Obama’s financial reform bill.

read more

Going Native: Modern sex tourism and the post-colonial gaze

For a submissive girl, go to Southeast Asia. For someone a little more feisty, try Latin America. The drive behind sex tourists’ desire for encounters with “exotic third-world” women is rooted in a centuries-old history.

read more

Circus Slaves

A small girl spins high above the tantalized crowd, gripping a bar with nothing but her teeth. It’s not a piece of outlandish fiction. It’s the Indian circus, and it depends on hundreds of trafficked Nepalese children to thrill audiences with bizarre and dangerous acts.

read more

A Perfect Storm: Behind the trafficking of Minnesota’s Native American girls

Systematic extermination. Forced migration. Re-education. Sterilization. The collective history of Native Americans is infused with centuries of genocide and oppression that create a unique vulnerability to sex trafficking.

read more

The moral landscape of exile: Displaced Iraqi women struggle to survive

Female-headed households accounted for almost a quarter of the refugees with the U.N. refugee agency. Widowed, divorced, or separated from husbands by the war, many women had children or elderly parents to support. Sex was often their only marketable asset.

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Make the connections: Poverty, disease, and the state of the world’s mothers

Picture a mother with several children living in Africa, Asia, or South America. She lost her husband to malaria a couple of years ago, she cannot work due to a disabling injury, and she usually hasn’t enough food to protect her children from the ravages of malnutrition.

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Make the connections: Development, exclusion, and the making of “World Class Cities”

The most obvious consequence of globalization for the urban poor has been the emergence of a significant middle class – often cited as one of the surest indicators of ‘development’ – who demand more and more space for their accommodation, particularly in capital and large provincial cities.

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Exporting porn: AIDS, Africa, and the hardcore American dream

The moment porn truly stopped being fun came in a remote Ghanaian village — mud huts, barefoot kids, no electricity. How hardcore American porn is propelling the spread of AIDS and sexual violence in Africa.

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Diary of a sex slave: One survivor’s writing helps bring her traffickers to justice

“To write, or not to write … I had my first guest. I cannot put my feelings into words. I only know that I am hurting.”

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What we talk about when we talk about rape: Sunitha Krishnan’s call to action

It’s very fashionable to talk about human trafficking in this fantastic AC hall. It’s very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. But it is not nice to bring them to our homes.

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Genesis: Overcoming the nightmare of American sex trafficking

Genesis Ramirez was 15 years old when she turned her first trick. The following years blended together in a traumatizing series of rapes, beatings, stabbings, miscarriages, and addictions. Today she’s a proud mother and a nursing home aide, but she still spends some Saturday nights walking the streets– this time to help other women.

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Cuckoo for cocoa: Valentine’s chocolate in the age of unfair trade

Showing our love for one another with products produced by the blood, sweat, and tears of others is perhaps a little absurd. But it’s Valentine’s Day. So what about chocolate?

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Make the connections: Debt, action, and the “free” market

“To understand what has happened in Haiti, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history – one you are not supposed to hear. The serve-the-rich ideology that caused our economy to crash in 2008 has been crashing poor countries for a long time.”

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Party time: Searching for prostituted children in Miami’s jubilation

In the alleys of Miami, host of this year’s Super Bowl, just a handful of social workers, police, and volunteers are roaming around in the shadows, looking for underage girls who might have been trafficked to the city for the big game.

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Make the connections: Exploitation, consumption, and change

“It’s true: I do love exploring garbage, visiting dumps, and rifling through trash cans in new cities. But for me, garbage never has been the end point; it is an entree to much deeper economic, social, and environmental issues.”

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Witch Hunt: New surge in human sacrifice, or another case of hysteria?

“They go and capture other people’s children. They bring the heart and the blood directly here to take to the spirits.” As accusations of child sacrifice in Uganda escalate, skeptics fear a return to a sensational view of the “Dark Continent.”

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A tribute to Howard Zinn

Perhaps most famous for his groundbreaking reworking of American history, “A People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn spent his life giving voice to those elbowed to the margins of society.

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Good news from Haiti: Journalist Ben Skinner returns a life-saving favor

Two minutes later, the quake smashed open the building, and the top three floors pitched northward, hurling Bill down nearly 80 feet onto a neighbor’s concrete roof, where he landed briefly, apparently on his back. Almost immediately, he tumbled onto a tin-roofed shack and then to the ground.

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The place to be: For child traffickers, Haiti’s chaos is ripe with opportunity

In Haiti’s unstable post-quake atmosphere, at least one industry is poised to flourish. For those who buy and sell children for sex and cheap labor, Haiti is ripe with opportunity.

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Before the quake: The roots of Haiti’s destruction

The damage wrought in Haiti last week is only a more dramatic and pronounced shake up of long-term systemic fault lines and fissures that have kept people vulnerable and impoverished for years.

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