Human Goods

Anti-sex tourism legislation can get a little tricky, as demonstrated by a recent case reported by the Associated Press.

A Florida man was arrested when he responded to a tourism ad advertising sex in Costa Rica. His intention for traveling? Sex with a 14 - 16-year-old girl.

But the travel agency was actually run by the FBI, and Jorge Muentes was arrested before boarding the plane.

His lawyers argue that he is being charged with a fantasy that he may or may not have acted on.

But prosecutors and the FBI say they were averting the damage before it happened.

Wars, without fail, create refugees.

But despite frantic international conversation about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and democracy, the welfare of those refugees falls a little by the wayside.

What happens to Iraqi refugees once they’re removed from the war zone?

Last year, Nihal Hissan reported in The Independent on the plentiful nightclubs outside of Damascus, overflowing with refugee girls– most of them teenagers.

Iraqi refugee women have no legal means of making money if they have no male family members with them.

For many, there is no other option besides prostitution, or, as this NBC report dubs it– “survival sex.”

Mauritania has only one railroad that stretches from the middle of the desert to the sea. And some cities are only reachable by driving miles down sandy beaches without roads, Kevin Bales reported in his book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy.

But unlike most systems of slavery today, where people are usually enslaved and forced to work for a certain period of their lives, in Mauritania it is an institution more comparable to slavery of the American South.

While slavery has technically been illegal in the country since 1981, CNSNews.com quoted Anti-Slavery International’s claim that about 40 percent of the population are slaves. Rather than being acquired, sold, trafficked, and eventually discarded, Mauritanian slaves are born into slavery. Much like black Americans in the antebellum South, they are not just forced to work because of unjust economics– there is a deep-seated mentality of OWNERSHIP.

Mauritania elected new leadership in 2007, and in August enacted new anti-slavery legislation, IRIN reported. But it’s going to take more than creating laws, Anti-Slavery International’s Romana Cacchioli said. It’s going to need some active enforcement.

“We don’t eradicate slavery just by introducing a law,” Cacchioli told IRIN. At the very least, the new law acknowledges that slavery does exist in Mauritania.

On March 23, the Mauritanian slave advocacy groups SOS Slaves’ founder Boubacar Messaoud told the Washington Post that it’s going to take more than a political overhaul to change the culture of slavery– it will be a slow and arduous process of transforming the psyches of both slave-owners and slaves themselves.

“Slavery has been perpetuated in Mauritania by the persistence of tradition, distorted notions of religious obligation … Slaves are unaware that they are entitled to equal rights and don’t know how to seek justice,” Nora Boustany wrote in the Washington Post.

Last week the Associated Press reported the conviction of an El Paso man, John Dickens Armstrong, for crossing the border to Juarez to have sex with underage girls.

Engaging in sex with minors is unique as a federal crime because it’s one of the only things Americans can be prosecuted for doing on foreign shores.

Tourism is now the world’s biggest industry, and the U.S. Department of Justice reports that the biggest factor drawing children into prostitution is poverty, with children serving 100 - 1500 clients a year.

Mexican officials arrested Armstrong last April when they found him with a 15-year-old girl in a Juarez apartment.

It only took Benjamin Skinner about five hours to find a slave to buy when he left U.N. headquarters in New York. At the end of this experiment that tested the ease with which someone, even a New Yorker, can wake up some morning and decide to buy someone, he found himself facing a child trafficker in Port-au-Prince, Haiti who wanted to know his preferences: just a child for domestic labor? Or a child who could be whipped up into an able cook, servant, and sex toy, or “la-pou-sa-a”:

“there-for-that.”

To most Americans, this is inconceivable, but as Skinner’s new book, A Crime so Monstrous, proves– the purchase of humans for money is, for much of the world . . . normal.

Acceptable.

Convenient.

And even in the U.S., often heartily practiced.

Skinner is a journalist who was initially inspired to investigate the personal anguish at the heart of the global slave trade by Kevin Bales’ Disposable People: New Slavery and the Global Economy. Bales’ book focuses on systems of slavery around the world, from Thailand to Mauritania to Brazil.

But while much of the literature on human trafficking out there focuses primarily on stories of victims, Skinner’s book offers a rare kind of insight into the minds and processes of slaveholders. An insight that just as often as not, spooks him. Sometimes irretrievably.

In a recent interview with wnyc.org, he described negotiating with a slaveholder at a Romanian brothel — in exchange for a used car, he was offered a hastily made-up girl with Down Syndrome. The make-up, despite her scars, made her “salable.”

“There’s a point as a journalist where you cross the line and you get involved. And honestly I don’t feel bad about it,” he says in the interview, pointing to one time where he intervened for a dirt-poor Haitian mother to buy back the daughter she hadn’t seen in three years

And why should his readers care?

“This is an American issue . . . It is a U.S. burden to fight slavery worldwide,” he said, citing Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000

Whether we know it or not, we’re signed on as part of it.

See Benjamin Skinner speak about modern-day slavery on his current book tour.

25% of U.S. royalties from the book go to the not-for-profit Free the Slaves

It’s no secret anymore that millions of people in the world continue to live in slavery today. But many of us still consider this a ‘third-world issue’– a problem that plagues developing countries with the worst economic hardship. While this is largely true, it’s important to recognize the huge reality of the West’s connection to international human trafficking, modern-day slavery, and the presence of more than 50,000 slaves in the U.S. today.

What is sex tourism? Who are sex tourists? Where do they come from and what do they do?

Whether rowdy spring breakers on vacation in Thailand, organized sex tour buses through Russia, or single female vacationers in Jamaica– there is a steady stream of tourists from wealthy countries to poorer ones that travel with the goal of having sex with locals for money, many of them children. It’s a daunting, growing problem, but organizations and governments are stepping up to do something about it.

What makes countries so susceptible to human trafficking? What could possibly compel parents to sell their own daughters into sexual bondage? How are so many millions of women entrapped when they seek a better life?

In a glowing “human rights” age like this, how is it possible that more than 27 million people in the world are still owned by others? How is it that captured slaves clear the rainforests in Brazil, that bonded ones sweat in the brick kilns of India, that trafficked ones serve the sexual needs of thousands of Americans? And the list goes on and on.

What is going on in the global landscape when you put this all together?