Human Goods

(A 13-year-old who was gang-raped by UN Peacekeepers; Source: BBC News)

Save the Children’s been calling the actions of three dismissed workers “a sackable offense.” The men had been having sex with 17-year-old girls in areas where Save the Children provides relief.

After conducting research in Southern Sudan, Ivory Coast, and Haiti, Save the Children is calling on aid organizations worldwide and the UN to investigate widespread accusations of child sexual abuse.

The BBC reports one 13-year-old girl who claims she was gang-raped by 10 UN Peacekeepers in Ivory Coast. “Then they just left me there bleeding,” she said.

Save the Children’s report included incidents of survival sex, rape, child prostitution, pornography, and sex trafficking in children.

IRIN reported on the NGO’s findings, too. A girl from Haiti said:

My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises,” said a 15 year-old girl from Haiti whose testimony is included in the report. “They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes (US$2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said no, but some of the girls did it and got the money.

This kind of abuse is nothing new. Peacekeepers and aid workers operate in regions afflicted with natural disasters and manmade conflicts. The often politically unstable and socially chaotic situations put children at risk of abuse.

While everyone agrees it’s a minority of aid workers and Peacekeepers who are perpetrating abuse, they’re also saying that there has to be zero tolerance.

The bottom line is: The world asks devastated people for their trust, to trust that big fancy UN, and foreign aid, to keep the peace and save their children.  And trust, when tampered with, can get pretty slippery.

See this table published by the BBC:

Recently I had coffee with Ben Skinner, author of the new book “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern-Day Slavery.” We talked about his experience as a writer communicating the grief of others, about why the anti-slavery movement does make economic sense, and what’s being done to fight it. The conversation is broken into a couple of different articles for the Medill News Service. Just click on them to read more.

PART I: Eradicating slavery is not just moral, it makes economic sense too

The Roman Empire, at its height, was home to 2 million slaves. During the peak of antebellum slavery, 4 million people living in the American South had been bought or bred into slavery.

But in today’s world, we leave those figures in the dust. There are as many as 27 million slaves in the modern global village.

Author E. Benjamin Skinner dedicated the last 5 years of his life to finding out why. His new book, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern-Day Slavery,” spans five continents, exploring what the lives of today’s slaves look like, who it is that’s enslaving them, and the role they play in the world economy.

“The devaluation of human life is incredibly pronounced,” Skinner writes, observing the gulf between the value of an American slave in 1850 (about $40,000, adjusted for inflation) and the value of a 9-year-old Haitian girl he is able to bargain down to $50.

Although he didn’t actually buy her, it helped him learn how recognizing and understanding slavery is like going “through the looking glass.” He sat down with Medill Reports to talk about what it looks like from the other side.

(READ MORE…)

Skinner got his first real exposure to modern-day slavery while working for Newsweek in South Sudan. (Photo courtesy of Ben Skinner)

PART II: One author gives voice to the voiceless, and finds his own along the way

E. Benjamin Skinner has stood in the parched desert of Southern Sudan, where thousands of people over the past two decades have fallen prey to violent slave-raiders.

He’s waited in the murky courtyard of a makeshift Romanian brothel, noticing the way sewage squeezed through clear plastic piping on the outside of a building where pimps were forcing makeup onto a mentally challenged girl they tried to sell him.

He’s witnessed the way Haitian child slaves double as sex toys because they’re “there for that,” and the way generations of Indian untouchables are bonded to the endless sweaty work of smashing rocks into sand.

And he’s seen how these slaves are sometimes taken to the United States, too—raped and enslaved in a Florida suburb.

He has seen all of these things. He has known those who survived them, and those who probably won’t. And now he’s stepped up to the challenge of how to tell their stories to the world.

Skinner talked to Medill Reports about the writer’s responsibility to communicate suffering with sensitivity and truth.

(READ MORE…)

(map by Christa Hillstrom and Kevin Janowiak)

Part III: Go deeper

The more in depth response to the question of economic sustainability:

Medill Reports: Here in Chicago, the Archdiocese has an anti-trafficking task force and one leader has pointed out what an economically sustainable industry slavery is. And on the other hand, he said, fighting it is not economically sustainable, it takes huge amounts of commitment, some reprioritizing of resources, and it has to be made an issue. Is that something you see as a challenge?

Ben Skinner: I think we have to change our conception of it here. We have to look at fighting slavery, and harnessing some of the lessons that the good sustainable development organizations have learned in fighting absolute poverty. And again, fighting the two things are different, but there are many, many things that are similar. I mean, we’re talking about access to credit, and credit that doesn’t come from a human trafficker. And so, we’re talking about micro-credit organizations in some instances, and we’re talking about mini-credit organizations, because these people will have no collateral whatsoever. These are not people that would normally be found by the Grameen Bank or by BRAC or by these other organizations that deal with this.

But at the same time, what I found in Northern India were examples of credit unions that had grown up around these quarries that were entirely self-sustaining. The key to freedom here was there would be one or two people were able to pull together, you know, just one or two rupees… In other words, individually they would not be getting paid anything beyond subsistence but collectively they might be able to save one or two rupees a month. And they put that into a collective fund and eventually come up with enough money for one of them to buy a plot of land or something like this. I mean, a tiny plot of land. And then from that plot of land, that’s a piece of collateral. There’s also a much more effective way of dong this. This is what was going on in the 90s and it took years in order to get two people out of slavery, and then those one or two people out of slavery could help the others organize.

The much more effective way of doing it is to get good legal representation that presses the cause of the slaves with the district magistrates in India, and other local officials in other parts of South Asia, and says, Ok here’s the situation: You’ve got these quarry contractors who have this lease from the Raja to quarry on this land. The thing is, it’s forest land, it’s not owned by the Raja. The largest landowner in India is the state. So these quarry contractors are there illegally.

Now even if you’re not going to stop quarrying from going on in forest land, which you should be, let’s make this fair and give the workers, the people who have lived here for generations, title to the land (or anyway, in this case lease to the land). So this is not even a question of their owning the land – it should be a question of their owning the land—but it’s getting lease to the land so they can work it. And once they get that, then they can keep the products of their own labor. And it’s a legal process that, you know, given the Indian courts it could drag on for decades, or if there are good lawyers who press the case and if you get the right magistrates involved you can get this done in a matter of months. In the cases I looked at in India, they managed to get this through in a matter of months.

So, legal rights, property rights, matter a great deal. If the private property rights of the poorest of the poor are respected, recognized, and enshrined by the state, if those who have squatted on that land for generations are given title to that land, they will for the first time in their lives have access to an asset. And with that asset, they can leverage capital. They can leverage credit. And slowly, they can begin to build wealth and pull themselves out of slavery.

MR: I imagine that people here, when they hear how relatively little money is needed to pull people out of slavery, want to know what they can do to contribute. What do you tell people?

BS: Well, the simplest thing, even if you’re not going to dedicate your life to this or you’re not going to go overseas to free and rehabilitate slaves, the critical thing is contributing to some of the very good organizations that do work on this. And the organizations that have dealt with modern-day slavery, some of them have been around for centuries, in the case of Anti-Slavery International. Anti-Slavery International is the oldest human rights organization in the world. And I’ve been really involved with Free the Slaves.

Read an excerpt of Ben’s book

This weekend, the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation put on a film festival called The Price of Sex, screening several films dealing with the sex trade. One of them, a short film called Svetlana’s Journey, was particularly harrowing to watch. Watch this report to see how the director first got the idea of making a film about a young woman in Bulgaria trafficked into the sex trade.

There are as many as 27 million slaves in the world. Experts estimate that 50,000 of them are enslaved in the U.S.

Maybe you can’t dedicate time to volunteer for advocacy groups. Maybe you don’t know how to lobby for policy.

But in the face of such overwhelming statistics, can you really have an impact?

The MOSAIC group in Chicago decided to do something to raise awareness in their own community through putting on an arts event called Traffick Jam. Check out the video below…

(Musical performance by Jessica Sonner)

On the Immigration Here & There blog, Elise Barthet explores the trend of Lebanese families purchasing foreign maids, a symbol of economic prestige. In Lebanon, Barthet writes, buying a maid is as common as buying a car: “And just like cars, maids are imported.”

Although the women often come through legal agencies and are somewhat trained for the domestic work, they frequently have their passports confiscated when they arrive and suffer physical and sexual abuse. According to Barthet,

Beirut employment agencies promote them as merchandise or, in extreme case, as pets. They offer advice about which nationalities are supposedly docile, easy to maintain or “harder to break.”

Pets????

That’s a first, even for me.

This Indonesian maid reportedly got gangrene after being tied up in Saudi Arabia for a month.

(Reuters photo, Source: BBC News)

The BBC reported on the decision of a Saudi court to overturn a ruling that would prosecute employers who physically abused their Indonesian maid.

The maid, Nour Miyati, allegedly suffered from gangrene after being tied up and left without food for a month in 2005, according to the report.

Her employer was originally sentenced to “35 lashes,” but the sentence was overturned and instead Miyati will just be paid $670 in damages.

Human Rights Watch is challenging the government to impose a heavier sentence. The BBC quotes them saying it “sends a dangerous message to Saudi employers that they can beat domestic workers with impunity and that victims have little hope of justice”

Holly Fox’s Familienpolitik blog recently posted on a Washington Post article that describes U.S. allegations of baby-selling and trafficking in Vietnam. According to the article, some brokers go to rural Vietnamese villages to buy babies that eventually get adopted.  Inconsistencies in adoption paperwork led authorities to investigate, and new parents most likely would never know that their babies had been trafficked.

As a result, Vietnam is now halting new adoption applications from U.S. couples.

The people of Afghanistan have never gotten a break. Newsweek recently reported on the “Opium Brides of Afghanistan,” referring to the now relatively common practice of poppy farmers selling off daughters to their debtors because the poppy market– a huge cash crop in many parts of Afghanistan– hasn’t been bringing in adequate money since the war started.

Yeah, things were bad before. Add to it the global crisis over skyrocketing food prices. For this Afghan father, interviewed by IRIN, it became “like selling your heart!”

(source: IRIN humanitarian news and analysis)

SHEBERGHAN, 18 May 2008 (IRIN) - Sayed Ali (not his real name) said he sold his 11-year-old daughter, Rabia, for US$2,000 to a man in Sheberghan city, Jawzjan Province in northern Afghanistan to feed his wife and three younger children.

With food prices in Afghanistan having soared over the past few months and the 40-year-old father unable to find work, he said he had no other choice but to sell his daughter to save his family from starvation.

“Even animals don’t sell their children, because they love them and want to die for them, not to mention human beings. For too many days I stood next to roads and asked people for work, but always ended up disappointed. I couldn’t go home empty-handed and disappoint my starving children, so I used to scavenge in garbage and collect leftover food.

“I would lie to my family and say I bought them food from the market. But now it’s even hard to find anything edible in the garbage because of [increasing] food prices. People now eat all their food because it’s very expensive and also the numbers of those who scavenge in garbage has increased.

“Because I am illiterate, no one will give me a job. I am illiterate because of war and poverty. I didn’t go to school because my parents wanted me to work. My children also don’t go to school and they’ll also be brought up illiterate like me.

“How can someone sell his own child? It’s like selling your eyes or selling your heart!

“As no one would give me work I had no other option but to sell my lovely daughter. I sold her only to save the rest of my family. I sold her only to buy food for my younger children who otherwise would have died from hunger.

“I know people will say I am a cruel and merciless father who sold his own child, but those who say so don’t know my hardship and have never felt the hunger that my family suffers.

“I know other poor people who don’t have children and say, if necessary, they will blow themselves up [in a suicide attack] and kill other people in order to feed their families.

“I hope the government will hear my voice and help people like me to find jobs and feed our families.”

Burmese child soldier in WWII

(photo by Henry Allen, from the National Archives, 1944)

Myanmar, Seth Mydans wrote in The New York Times this week, has one of the world’s highest recruitments of child soldiers, with many of them coerced through violence, kidnapping, and terror to join the army.

Mydans draws his information from a report recently released by Human Rights Watch on the use of child soldiers worldwide. According to the report, Myanmar is the worst offender, beating out Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo.

Mydans sums up Myanmar’s evaluation in the article:

The report, issued last October, said that military recruiters and civilian brokers scour train stations, bus stations, markets and other public places for boys and coerce them to volunteer.

The recent cyclone has only exacerbated the problem. With homes and families wiped away, some small children get lost and don’t even know the names of the villages they come from.

Relief groups are trying to do something about the swarms of children that wander around crowded and chaotic refugee camps, but they don’t have a program to try to help families reconnect in place yet.

This is a concern, because the chaos has put the cyclone’s most vulnerable survivors at extremely high risk of being trafficked into the military or sexual abuse.

There seem to be more and more stories surfacing on the global organ commodity market. Even though such stories aren’t necessarily related to slavery, organ commodification undoubtedly falls under “human goods,” and the disconnection of humanness from the human body.

In the New Scientist, Michele Goodwin reviewed Donna Dickenson’s book, Body Shopping:

If there was any doubt whether the human body is a global commodity, Dickenson ably puts it to rest.

Dickenson explores organ commodification from face transplants to sketchy schemes that dupe patients into organ donation. Goodwin writes,

The book could not be more timely. Last month, Michael Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon, pleaded guilty to pillaging 1800 bodies for bones, ligaments, heart valves, organs and other valuable tissues. His New Jersey biotech firm was more like a human chop shop, paying funeral directors $1000 per pillaged corpse and later reselling the parts, earning at least $13,000 per body. After snatching the desired parts, Mastromarino stuffed the bodies with plumbing piping to deceive relatives. Body parts from diseased corpses with AIDS, cancer, hepatitis and other serious illnesses were sold for transplantation to unsuspecting hospitals, doctors and patients throughout the US and abroad.

Most of the more than 1 million Americans that receive tissue, bone and tendon transplants from cadavers every year would probably be shocked to discover how the parts were obtained, according to Goodwin.

But it’s too easy to blame corporations or black markets for all of the implications of the organ trade, because, as with slavery, the goods follow the market. And in a way, Dickenson’s theory of what it comes down to, “dreams of infinite regeneration, immortality, and eternal youth,” has similarities to the way that slave-using culture dehumanizes bodies, breaking them down into what they’re physically good for, forcing them under the domination of what it desires.

Goodwin writes,

While some commentators argue that body shopping is ethically problematic because organs and other human parts are “moral” or community property and not commercial products, Dickenson offers a perspective that is courageous and more convincing. She argues that the body should never be a consumer good because it should never be “merely a thing”. To Dickenson, what is at stake is our dignity.