Human Goods

The U.S. seems to be moving a little bit on slavery prosecutions this month.

• In Lexington, Kentucky, human trafficking suspect Calvin Walker has been indicted by a grand jury for forcing two domestically trafficked women into strip club work, as this video report on KKYT in Lexington shows. It’s usually difficult to prove cases of trafficking in the U.S., even when women are forced across state lines or national borders, and when law enforcement nails traffickers they often end up charging them with other offenses.  It’s relatively unusual to prosecute for human trafficking
• The Immokalee drama continues in South Florida.  Jose Navarrete pled guilty to human slavery, according to WINK News.  Navarrete is accused of forcing Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants to work without pay, sleep in box trucks and shacks, and pay for food and showers in Immokalee.

• Two owners of a Denver sushi restaurant are accused of holding workers in “indentured servitude” for years, ABC Channel 7 in Denver reports.

The Human Trafficking Project posted an article originally from the Bangkok Post, written by Vitit Munt Arbhorn, that gives a helpful overview of different aspects of human trafficking.

The Human Trafficking Project is a blog worth checking out– one of the most comprehensive collections of international trafficking news, as well as a non-profit dedicated to seeking innovative solutions.

(Source: Children at Risk Foundation)

The word “restavek” means “stay-with” in Creole, and 300,000 children in Haiti (or, 10 percent of the population under 18 years old) are restaveks. Coming from impoverished rural areas in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, most of these children are given up by parents who cannot afford to take care of them. Families are often promised by middlemen that their children will be cared for and educated, but in most cases they are sold to families who are only a little bit better off: Households that cannot afford to employ real servants and so buy children as domestic slaves instead.  They frequently double as sex servants, too.

It is, well, normal, as Carmen Russel and Dane Liu uncovered last summer for MSNBC. The report also features a video about a restavek-owning household.

As inexcusable as such a practice is in Haiti, it seems all the more appalling when someone who has immigrated to the U.S. bring restaveks with them to slave away in their suburban homes. Not that the U.S. has such a great track record, of course.

The New York Times reported that Simone Celestin, who was adopted at 5 years old, was forced to work 15-hour days for Evelyn Theodore, 74, and Maude Paulin, her 52-year-old daughter. She escaped and pressed charges, resulting in the conviction of the women.

Lawyers for the defense accuse the girl of lying about her working conditions, claiming that Haiti and Haitian culture is simply old-fashioned.

Much as we need international organizations, national governments, the police and courts to bring traffickers to justice, we must all examine how we behave. The solutions lie in all our hands. Businesses must ask searching questions about their suppliers and not let themselves be fobbed off with convenient answers. As consumers, we need to think about what we buy, where it comes from and under what conditions it’s made. Everyone can make a difference.

Watch Emma Thompson’s portrayal of a modern-day slave in the Helen Bamber Foundation’s public awareness video. (Warning: Contains disturbing and intense depictions of sexual assault.)

“From fruit to beef, from sugar to coffee, slave labor brings food to our tables,” Loretta Napoleoni writes on Countercurrents.org.

(source: di+mars/macxoom/disc0stu/flickr)

How do we respond to this? Our first instinct, Napoleoni writes in The Challenge of Modern Slavery, is often to boycott items we know to have been produced by slaves (and most of the time, we don’t even know it).

But is this really effective? Or is it actually detrimental?

Napoleoni, who has written books about the darker side of economics, including Terror Incorporated and Rogue Economics, writes:

Almost every product we consume has a hidden dark history, from slave labor to piracy, from counterfeit to fraud, from theft to money laundering. We know very little about these economic secrets because modern consumers live inside the market matrix.

Listen to Napoleoni talk about what “rogue economics” means on Democracy Now!

For more on Loretta Napoleoni, visit her website.

We’ve heard about Darfur. We’ve heard about Tibet. But what about the slaves? How does their story fit into this summer’s controversial games?

“Whenever a big political event takes place, I don’t look at it through the same eyes anymore,” says Misha Glenny, author of the new book, “McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underground.”

Peter Edwards reported this in The Toronto Star in an article about the criminal underground and the Beijing Olympics. “China has already ordered a ’social cleansing’ to clear Beijing of beggars, hawkers, and prostitutes, but keeping crime groups from flooding the host city with hookers poses an Olympian task,” he writes.

In an article by Paul Legall, Ontario’s Hamilton Spectator reported that during every Olympic Games, women are imported from all over the world into sexual servitude.

“This is the ugly little secret people don’t want to talk about,” Clare Freeman of the Women Abuse Working Group told the Spectator.

The winter Olympics are just two years away for Canada, and as China faces the problem this year, on the other side of the world Canadians are already taking steps to curb the inevitable influx of trafficked sex slaves.

Dr. Mark Rodgers knows about human trafficking. From Latvia to Ecuador, he has worked directly in the field, helping law enforcement, social workers, government, educators, prosecutors, media and others unite and collaborate in the fight against slavery. Listen to the first installment of an interview I conducted with Dr. Rodgers, who is Dean of the School of Social Work at Dominican University (River Forest, IL), as he discuses what drives the economy of trafficking, what has worked in fighting it, and what it will take to end slavery at home and abroad.

<a href=http://humangoods.net/wp-content/audio/markrodgers>

Interview transcript:

Human Goods: Maybe to start, can you talk a little bit about what your experience with trafficking has been, and how you got involved?

Mark Rodgers: Sure. I was involved in 2002 through 2004 with a U.S. State Department grant to assist the country of Latvia in developing social work programs. And we went to Washington and met with the State Department and while there, they said, “Hey, what do you know about human trafficking, overall, and more specifically in Latvia?” And in December 2004 we were in Riga and we had approximately a hundred people at a training, starting conversations between media and judges and supreme court judges and prosecutors and social workers.

And so it was a very powerful conference that what I began to see was the development of a model that I’ve used since then. The group that grew the most from the public awareness conference were the judges. They said, “You know, we have these girls and their traffickers sitting in front of us. In the next few weeks when we go back to our courtrooms, we have a whole different view of these girls now. We understand this in a whole different way.”

So, that’s been the model that I’ve found has been most successful, to move through public awareness, to then targeted training of people who own this for their country or region.

HG: Has that model been exported to other Tier 2 Watch List countries?

(see Trafficking in Persons Report released annually by the U.S. State Department)

MR: Yes, we started to do the same thing in Ecuador. What happened in this case is that the ABA did a lot of good training with what they call the Ecuadorian Judicial Police, which is really their FBI, but because of their focus, they never thought about social service. So they said, “We’re starting to find victims here, but we don’t have a witness protection program, we don’t have social workers on the ground, we don’t have shelters, we don’t have job training.

And that’s when they discovered us, and we assessed social services. They were using, which many countries do initially, a lot of domestic violence shelters when they found these girls. That is effective, at least initially, but there’s a difference between trafficking victims and domestic violence victims. There needs to be some different training, different outreach, etc.

HG: OK, so can you talk about why so many former Eastern Bloc and Soviet countries find themselves on the Tier 2 Watch List, or Tier 3, and what was it about this post-Communist time period that puts people in an economically vulnerable position?

MR: Sure, sure. I like to use the expression both in Latvia and Ecuador that desperate times make for desperate people. I mean, with the fall of the Soviet Union, a lot of the so-called “givens” were gone. Apartments were privatized, industry fell apart, people now had to hunt for jobs rather than being guaranteed a job, and there was also—what I’d begin to say—outward migration, where people were leaving the country in droves. So you’ve got endemic world poverty, you’ve got people always shopping for a cheaper bargain. I mean, you know, who in America wants to pay fair trade coffee prices, unfortunately. So you’ve got this kind of globalized economy that really has some people at quite the wrong end and quite high at risk. Put that factor in to the fact that perhaps these gals for years have been rather calorie malnourished to begin with (average dress size 2 or 3), and— they’re on the market. I mean, people are seeking this out, and as a consequence they’re in an international market around the sex trade.

HG: What is the situation, as far as you know, for someone, you know, imagine you’re explaining this to someone who has barely heard of human trafficking and can’t imagine that it happens in Chicago. How would you briefly describe the situation to them?

MR: They’ll grab this very quickly: They’ll go, “Oh, it’s the international people.” And I’ll say, “Yeah that’s part of it.” But quite frankly I have documentation on girls from the South Side of Chicago being trafficked to the West Side of Chicago. Domestically trafficked. And they’re getting younger and younger, they’re down like 14, 13 years old.

HG: I mean I like your point about paying extra for fair trade coffee. Because a lot of people ask, well what can I do about it besides being aware, or besides making a donation to an NGO. You can protest something or support a kind of issue of social justice, but there is a kind of personal sacrifice that comes with making something a priority. What would you tell people that they can do?

MR: I think you’ve said it very well. They have to be willing to reach into their pocketbook, but not in a one-time effort. It has to mean that people around the world deserve a fair wage for the product that they produce. We have to do something with our country about the issue of us being a demand country. You know, this much I know about illegal activity: If there isn’t a demand for a product, then that group shifts somewhere else.

Watch Human Goods for more from Dr. Mark Rodgers…

Who knew that MTV had a campaign to end modern-day slavery?

Well, it does, and Thom Yorke is interested.

MTV EXIT, which stands for End Exploitation and Trafficking, may initially sound a little gimmicky. But the new Radiohead video for the song “All I Need,” which features parallel stories of a boy making shoes in a sweatshop and a boy in the West using those shoes, could potentially reach 560 million households worldwide with the help of this MTV initiative. And this is a good thing, York said on MTV’s website:

I think if [the campaign] does one good thing, it would be to make this concept of slavery — which is what it is — less taboo. If they can make it something that is OK for us to talk about, and for politicians in the West to actually accept that this is an issue, well, then we’re doing a good thing.

MTV News interviewed Yorke before the May 1 world premiere of the video:

Melissa Farley, author of Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada, and Victor Malarek, author of The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, published a heated response to the Elliot Spitzer scandal in the New York Times, challenging the idea that prostitution– even that involving high-class “call girls”– is a victimless crime.

“But most women in prostitution, including those working for escort services, have been sexually abused as children, studies show. Incest sets young women up for prostitution — by letting them know what they’re worth and what’s expected of them. Other forces that channel women into escort prostitution are economic hardship and racism.

William Finnegan’s “The Countertraffickers,” is a compelling account, in this week’s New Yorker, of one crusader at the Office of International Migration’s Moldovan office, and what she does to rescue trafficked women.

It’s lengthy, but worth it, especially to gain insight into the utterly chilling world of forced prostitution in the city-state of Dubai (which seems at once both Wonderland and wasteland), where frequently the incredibly wealthy control the incredibly impoverished in some pretty gruesome ways.

This report from Current TV explores prostitution in Dubai further.

(source: Current TV)