Human Goods

“Even where there is no war, women’s bodies continue to be battlegrounds,” says Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the UN Population Fund, to the UN News Service.

She’s referring to “Women on the Frontline,” a new BBC series that will investigate women’s issues around the globe in 7 films covering:

“Organs are now big business in China,” the BBC reported in 2006. “But it’s one built on death and deception.”

Although it is a technical departure from “slavery,” the commodification of the human body occurs whether living bodies are bonded into slavery, or just… harvested.

Benjamin Skinner’s “A Crime So Monstrous” told of one trafficker who thought it might have been more profitable if he had sold one of his slave’s organs by the kilo rather than trying to sell her for sex. Because she was ugly.

Wealthy Westerners in need of transplants frequently engage in “transplant tourism,” traveling to developing countries for discounted organs.

The Initiative on Global Organ Trafficking says,

“The most notorious hotspots include India, Pakistan, China, Central and South America, and the Philippines. Other trafficking rings are in South Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. People rarely sell their organs in developed countries, such as the U.S., Europe, Australia, or Japan. Rather, buyers from these countries usually travel to impoverished organ trade hotspots to engage in transplant tourism.”

This NGO claims that transplant tourism, and of course illegal organ trafficking, is unethical because most “donors” selling their parts are unaware of the real consequences and do not receive medical follow-up.

In the worst cases, they don’t even have a choice.

China executes more prisoners per year than the entire rest of the world combined. The BBC reports that many of the organs obtained in China are harvested from executed prisoners before being given to transplant tourists.

When Americans think of slavery, they probably think first of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that abducted millions of Africans and enslaved them in the Americas.

Almost all of us know how hideous the journey was. The history is notorious.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade looked like this:

But fewer people can visualize the modern-day global slave trade. It is difficult to track the way international organized crime networks distribute their goods from the poorest countries to slightly less poor countries. From moderately poor countries to rich ones.

Traffickers move the downtrodden to the marketplace so consumers have access to the goods they want to purchase.

Today’s global slave trade looks like this:

And that’s just a Southeast Asia focus.

Free the Slaves and National Geographic have interactive world maps that let users click on different countries to explore their relationships with modern-day slavery.

Wedged into a space between Romania and the Ukraine lies the tiny Eastern European nation of Moldova. It is Europe’s poorest country, officially classified by Washington as a “failed state,” and it has been in the news recently since raids in London and Surrey rescued trafficked Moldovan women and led to 15 arrests.

That is, it’s been in the Tiraspol Times, which never passes on a good Moldova-bashing opportunity.

I know, I know — Where’s Tiraspol?

Wedged into an even slighter slice of space between Moldova and the Ukraine is the breakaway state of Transnistria, and Tiraspol is its capital. It’s a bizarre urban landscape cast eerily in utopian Soviet iconography — fields of red stars and gleaming statues of Stalin — that somehow doesn’t realize it’s no longer the Cold War era.

Unrecognized by most foreign governments, Transnistria seceded from Moldova in 1990 in a violent blink of a rebellion supported by Russia.

Today, Fistful of Euros calls it a “post-communist gangster state.” But Igor Smirnov, the little rogue state’s president, would probably disagree, since he professes he lays claim to 103.6 percent of the vote, according to Benjamin Skinner’s book, “A Crime So Monstrous.”

The government controls almost all media outlets, so it’s no wonder that Transnistria’s reports on human trafficking both at home and in Moldova are, to put it nicely, skewed. Articles, like this one in Pridnestrovie , are more reminiscent of an insecure high school queen bee making passive aggressive jibes at someone in the cafeteria:

• Despite persistent allegations, there is no evidence (unlike in Moldova) that hordes of young women have gone to work as prostitutes in the West. Instead, it is Moldova that holds a dubious world record: The country is today the leading haven for pedophiles and for traffickers who earn fortunes enslaving underage kids in a brutal international sex trade.

(Pay special attention to those less-than-necessary parenthetical asides, ahem..)

Despite such assurances, Skinner reports that “it was an open secret in Transnistria that police officers moonlighted as slave dealers.” Since it is an unofficial nation, almost no NGOs will go there, and few foreign governments deal with it.

But it is a primary trafficking corridor for arms (which Transnistria is suspected of manufacturing) as well as humans from Eastern Europe.

This BBC series explores the ghostly countryside of Moldova (where a huge percentage of its young people have gone abroad to work, thousands against their will). Some poor villagers sell organs to make money. Economies like this compel millions of people worldwide to fall into the trap of slavery.

Places That Don’t Exist: Transnitria - Volume 1: Worth watching to get impressions of the largely abandoned and destitute Moldovan countryside. Or at least for when the host runs into the Moldovan president on a casual-jeans day, who invites him to go fishing, randomly.

Volume 2 - The host demonstrates how easy it is for smugglers to hop across the border to the Ukraine. Literally, he hops across.

The USA.

“The daunting truth today is that wherever drugs are being sold in the United States, children, too, are being sold,” the description of Libby Spears’ new documentary, Playground, says. “American children.”

This weekend, the Latino Social Workers Organization hosted a human trafficking summit at Dominican University in Illinois. The summit, which drew people from social service and governmental organizations across Chicago, premiered the trailer for Spears’ upcoming film.

Watch the Playground trailer (contains disturbing images and content)

Playground ties a thriving domestic sex trade of “throwaways” (ie, children) to the vast superstructure of slavery worldwide. Spears initially set out to investigate international sex trafficking, but found a horrific underbelly much closer to home.

“Trafficking is self-sustainable,” Father Larry Dowling, who is part of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Faith and Justice Committee, told the summit, emphasizing what a huge business it is. “Combating this problem is not. It requires funding.”

Indeed, human traffickers have the incentive of immeasurable profit and general impunity. Overcoming such a sustainable global industry requires us to finally decide that it’s a priority.

The human soul is not for sale: find out more.

Denver’s Democratic National Convention this August is expected to draw 35,000 people. For some, it will be against their will.

Or at least that’s what Reproductive Health Reality Check contends in a report this week. While the article’s evidence seems a little bit patchy, it claims that Denver strip clubs are tripling their staffs to accommodate the influx of potential customers.

Goods follow the market. And big events create big markets.

Two years ago before the 2006 World Cup Games in Germany, Radio Free Europe reported on the International Organization for Migration’s concern that as many as 40,000 women might be imported against their will to the games for sexual exploitation

They call them “shadow economies.”

Human beings make up the third largest illegal commodities market in the world, after the illegal arms and drugs trades.

“Enforcement agencies have always focused on the drugs and arms trade but this is the fastest growing global crime,” Ruth Dearnley of Stop the Traffik told BBC News.

Exact numbers are hard to pin down, but the human body market is estimated to bring in $31.6 billion a year in profits.

The Higher Council for Motherhood and Childhood is teaming up with the Yemeni government to kick off a new initiative to combat trafficking in children. One big step is to gather accurate data to better define the scope of the problem.

Although it is unclear just how big the issue is here, in April the General Administration of Women and Juvenile Affairs told IRIN that they had already rescued 49 children from being smuggled across the Saudi border since the beginning of the year.

The plan (if it is actually carried out) is thorough in scope: it examines socio-economic factors that put children at risk of being trafficked, steps that can be taken to prevent it, and improvements to laws that will help prosecute traffickers.

The project is funded by UNICEF.

“Slavery” is kind of like “fascism.”

They’re powerful terms we can throw back in the face of clear and unapologetic oppression. But scholars like Kevin Bales (whose definition of slavery is below) have noted that it’s important to distinguish between actual slavery and those who are poor, oppressed, and toil for unfair, slave-like wages.

Those who work in sweat-shops and free trade zones are not necessarily slaves.

But the Senate is meeting right now to determine whether the working conditions of tomato pickers in Florida constitute a serious violation of human rights.

The Nation reported that The Coalition of Immokalee Workers testified about the experience of migrant wage-laborers in Florida: “seven-day workweeks, debt bondage, and armed crew bosses that beat workers who attempt to leave.”

The case, if proved, also implicates giants like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and KFC.

Anxiety over growing slave markets is increasing elsewhere on the continent, too.

The Canadian Press said Canadian officials are re-evaluating the number of sex slaves in the country because of skyrocketing estimates by activists– some of them peaking at 15,000 people.

But the government, although it is looking into the matter, is understandably leery of such guesses.

While Canada, like most developed countries, undoubtedly wrestles an influx of trafficked women due to organized crime, the claims of activists aren’t always easy to prove.

One activist described a growing demand for Canadian women– particularly those from Quebec– that can be traced back to “a reputation for being good in bed.”

Hmmm…

Sometimes freed slaves and their advocates successfully prosecute their former slaveholders. But one woman in Niger is going even further: she’s suing the government.

Last week the BBC reported that Hadijatou Mani, who was sold as a 12-year-old concubine to a master who already had many wives, accuses the Niger government of not enforcing anti-slavery laws throughout the country.

What’s interesting about this case is that it imposes increased accountability on the government. Almost every country in the world outlaws slavery now, and yet there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world.

It is easy to write a law on a piece of paper.

But if governments don’t make a real, substantial effort to enforce such laws, then complex factors like traditions of inequality and organized crime are not going to yield to a piece of paper.

Human rights groups estimate that there are still 43,000 people living in slavery in Niger.