Human Goods

The Not for Sale Campaign launched a tool they’re calling a Slavery Map, which allows people to report incidents of slavery around the United States and the world.  You can click on any area and see where cases of human trafficking have been reported, including who reported them and what happened.

It’s a clever way to make learning about modern-day slavery interactive, since you can create an account and publish an incident if you encounter one.

(source: The Economist)

The Economist published a nice concise response to the release of the 2008 Trafficking in Persons report released by the State Department. It gives a good overview of what the global situation is and a very brief definition of what the report is supposed to do.

The State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons released its 8th annual Trafficking in Persons report last week.

Since the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed and the TIP office was created, it has annually ranked all the countries in the world (besides the U.S., quite conspicuously) on a four-tier system that works like this:
TIER 1
Countries whose governments fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards
TIER 2
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards
TIER 2 WATCH LIST
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards
AND:
a) The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing; or
b) There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or
c) The determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring themselves into
compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to
take additional future steps over the next year
TIER 3
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so

The report is worth reading, to get a sense of how the U.S. government frames the fight against human trafficking. But keep in mind that it’s a tool, and a controversial one. Some critics argue that methods for gathering the information from country to country are not clear, and we don’t necessarily know how accurate a reflection the report is on a country by country basis.

Moreover, its purpose gets a little shoved around by other geopolitical motivations. For example, check out some of the Tier 3 list (countries that face potential sanctions). Many of them have been on there for years:

ALGERIA, BURMA, CUBA, IRAN, NORTH KOREA, SUDAN, SYRIA.

Undoubtedly, these countries do have terrible problems when it comes to trafficking. But we’re not really burning any bridges with them when we threaten them with sanctions on slavery grounds.

Meanwhile, India, which has more slaves than the rest of the world combined, remains on a “watch list,” where we can shake our finger a bit at them but all other diplomatic causes basically trump slavery. Which is not the TIP office’s fault, it’s just the way things go, I guess.

Click below to listen to Condaleezza Rice’s remarks on the 2008 report:

(source: Pravda)

Pravda reported that a formerly homeless man escaped slave owners who had been holding him in a barn, forcing him to work with other slaves on a farm.  Authorities shadowed the man until he was caught by his pursuers at a bus stop, and then followed them all back to the farm to discover this:

The policemen visited the people who kept the man in a suburb. They found the slave with his neck chained and tightened with bolts and wires. The prisoner was bound to a metal tube by the other end of the chain.

Apparently, the perpetrators had been luring homeless people into slavery.