Human Goods

(photo:  Osvaldo_Zoom/flickr)

A UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre report entitled “South Asia in Action: Preventing and responding to child trafficking” is calling on South Asian nations to crack down on the enslavement of children, a problem that is widespread in much of South Asia.

Allison Alert reports for the UNICEF Innocenti Research Center, which authored the report:

Children in South Asia are being trafficked for many forms of exploitation - for sexual exploitation, labour, begging, early marriage, forced military recruitment, to work on camel farms, and for several other harmful purposes …

Girls who have not yet reached puberty may be married off to older men so that their parents have one less mouth to feed. Children are often sent to the capital city or an urban area to ‘have a better life’, which often involves deprivation of food, sleep and shelter, restriction of movement, and severed contacts with their families. The unprepared child who lacks awareness of the risks may voluntarily leave the home to migrate to another country and increase her or his vulnerability to trafficking.

While the report demands that South Asian countries improve anti-trafficking legislation and intensify enforcement, it is key that it also advises a collaboration between health, education, and social services, and the legal system, to name a few factors that exacerbate complications that lead to trafficking.

Most parents don’t want to sell their children.

They also don’t want to see them starve to death, and when someone promising who has money will give them a little so that one of their children can get work in the city and the remaining ones can eat … it is tempting to believe that a future is possible.  To believe what you have to to see them live.

When you place people without options up against the faceless global forces of supply and demand, it’s easy to make moral judgements about how those people respond to such forces; but morally murkier when you try to convince them to stand up to that system.

Also this week, the UN released another report claiming that “a significant number” of the 15,000 children in Nepal’s orphanages are admitted as a result of fraud or coercion, and many of those adopted out are not orphaned but separated from their families.  The report recommends a cessation of intercountry adoption which UNICEF fears has encouraged the illicit sale of children across international borders, according to the UN:

“The vast majority of children in centres don’t need to be there,” said Joseph Aguettant, Tdh Country Representative in Nepal.

“They have family… The first priority, therefore, should be to reunite 80 per cent of the children in institutions with their families, not to re-open intercountry adoption.”

To truly curb and eliminate the problem, we must address — in a real way — the circumstances which force parents to give their children up in the first place and deprive children of safe environments to grow up in.

Yesterday marked the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade, and UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura used the opportunity to remind the world how critical it is to remember that the slave trade is indeed still happening.

The UN News Centre quoted him saying,

While we should never forget the atrocities committed in the past, we should be equally vigilant in seeking to abolish the contemporary forms of slavery that affect millions of men, women and children around the world.

The Day commemorates the 1791 uprising when Caribbean slaves rebelled and sparked a revolution in Haiti.

Few Americans will likely make human trafficking a deciding issue when they go to the polls this November. But nevertheless, the topic pops up now and then in speeches and interviews of the candidates. Paul Bernish, of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s Freedom Blog, broke down the candidates’ stances on slavery in a post titled, “Human Trafficking: What are McCain and Obama saying?”

“Most likely,” Bernish writes, “Trafficking will remain a secondary issue unless something happens to bring the matter into the public realm and prompt the political news media to raise questions with the candidates.”

Bernish highlights some of McCain and Obama’s references to human trafficking, including a May speech by McCain on defending the rights of the powerless worldwide:

While the past few years have seen increased efforts on the part of the State and Justice Departments and the FBI to combat the human slave trade, we must do more. As President, I’ll increase cooperation and communication between all agencies of the federal government by establishing an Inter-Agency Task Force on Human Trafficking, whose purpose will be to focus exclusively on the prosecution of human traffickers and the rescue of their victims.

During last weekend’s Saddleback conference, mediator and megachurch pastor Rick Warren questioned Obama on how he plans to address the problem:

RICK WARREN: OK. Another issue, the third largest and the fastest growing criminal industry in the world is human trafficking. $32 billion a year. A lot of people don’t know that there are about 27 million people living in slavery right now. Many of them in sex trafficking than any others. How do we speak out and how do you plan to do something about that?

BARACK OBAMA: This has to be a top priority and this is an area where we’ve already seen bipartisan agreement on this issue. What we have to do is to create better, more effective tools for prosecuting those who are engaging in human trafficking and we have to do that within our country. Sadly, there are thousands who are trapped in various forms of enslavement, here in our country.

Oftentimes young women who are caught up in prostitution. So we’ve got to give prosecutors the tools to crack down on these human trafficking networks. Internationally, we’ve got to speak out and we’ve got to forge alliances with other countries to share intelligence, to roll up the financing networks that are involved in them. It is a debasement of our common humanity, whenever we see something like that taking place.

(click here for full transcript)

(Photo: Bullit Marquez/Associated Press)

As the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics kick off this weekend, William Sparrow for the Asia Times asks,
“China has the Games, doesn’t it expect the players to show up, too?”

In an article also featured on The Human Trafficking Project’s site, Sparrow refers to the inevitable influx of Olympic-going foreigners who double as sex tourists.

Anyone who studies human trafficking will tell you that wherever there is a congregation of people with money who are open to a good time, there is a market for prostitution.

Dissecting a published set of guidelines for admitted foreigners released by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, Sparrow writes,

Under the rubric “Which categories of foreigners are not permitted to enter China?”, the HRC-translated guide included, “Those who are believed to potentially engage in smuggling, narcotic trafficking or prostitution after entering China”, and “Those who are suffering from a mental disorder or insanity, sexually-transmitted disease, or an infectious disease such as active tuberculosis.”

How the Beijing government plans to enforce these policies, namely prostitution-seekers and those with sexually-transmitted disease, is impossibly unclear. Even for an authoritarian government as strict as Beijing, it seems an immense undertaking to pre-determine the health and intent of millions of expected tourists.

It is obvious, however, that the government has thrown down the gauntlet and will do whatever it must to crack down on vice in an effort to present China’s best face for the Games. In terms of stopping prostitution, and its alleged negative effects on society, this may be a laudable endeavor. But on the ground, let’s be honest, it’s laughable.

Sparrow references a Washington Post article by Maureen Fan that points to China’s economic boom as a major factor for rising numbers of sex workers. This will be undoubtedly exacerbated by the arrival of millions of tourists with money to spend on fun.

Sparrow concludes,

In the main cities where the Games will be held - Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai - any efforts to prevent or even tame prostitution will prove unmanageable. The confluence of history, economics and human nature - all in a carnivalesque environment - will simply be too much to overcome.

Dubai, by most accounts, is something of a fantasyland. Exploding with new money that begets uninhibited , almost Dr. Seussian, architecture and draws affluent business and pleasure-seekers from around the world, it has also, much like Las Vegas or Amsterdam, become what I like to call an exception zone. A playground of privilege, if you will, where things you might not do elsewhere become acceptable. Because, hey, it’s Dubai. The rules don’t apply in this surreal metropolis.

Except wherever money and power accumulate, exploitation almost always follows, flying under the radar and making both business and pleasure attainable. Night clubs pulse with military contractors, tourists, and Arab businessmen seeking easy sex with Iragi refugees. Filipina maids, obtaining jobs abroad so they can send money home to their children, are often abused (sometimes quite sadistically). There have been numerous cases of maids being thrown out the windows of lavish, otherworldly skyscrapers that peak up, Jetson-like, above the clouds on a foggy day.

But it makes a kind of sense– where there is excess, people become increasingly expendable. And easy to replace.

Glen Carey, for The Asian Sex Gazette, published an article on the trafficking of persons to Dubai:

Dubai has transformed itself from a trading village to the Persian Gulf’s financial and tourist hub with lower taxes and a more vibrant nightlife than other Gulf states. Bars heave with men drinking $10 beers and women in short skirts.

That’s attracted rich Saudis, US oil workers flush with cash after stints in Iraq, and bankers who are paid as much as 40 percent more than those in London or New York.

Affluence has increased the demand for laborers and housemaids, and the development of laws to protect them from exploitation hasn’t kept pace, the International Labor Organization said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Women from Asia and Africa often sign contracts to work as maids, waitresses, hairdressers and secretaries, only to have employers confiscate their passports and force them to work as prostitutes, the US report said. Others work excessive hours under the threat of mental, physical or sexual abuse until they can pay off recruitment costs.

According to the article, Dubai, which is ranked on the Tier 2 Watch List of the U.S. Trafficking in Persons report, is making an effort to curb the problem. Carey writes, “In July (2007), the UAE formed a committee of senior officials to combat human trafficking, and it has opened a shelter for abused women. In the past year it has closed 40 hotels and clubs that allowed prostitution, said Anwar Gargash, minister of state for Federal National Council Affairs in Dubai.”

Such efforts are well and good. But you have to wonder, as you do with Vegas, about how much the problem really can be eradicated when the whole culture of the place, the essence of it, what makes it saleable, what makes its market value shine, is precisely the fact that it assuages the guilt of the haves by promoting their entitlement to the labor and bodies of the have-nots and building on the delusion of the Western right to pleasure at all costs. Costs which usually remain invisible to most of us who can’t even imagine having to surrender the autonomy of our bodies and souls.

In the end, Dubai is an exception zone, yes. But only more obviously than the rest of the world we occupy.

A feature length documentary called Call and Response will be released this fall to rally action around modern-day slavery. Musician Justin Dillon decided to form a collective of musicians, including Imogen Heap, Moby, and Talib Kweli, to head this musical abolitionist movement. Also interviewed in the documentary are longtime anti-slavery activists Nicholas Kristof to Madeleine Albright to Julia Ormond.

According to the documentary’s website,

CALL+RESPONSE goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India to reveal that in 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.

You can check out the film’s blog and even share your response to increasing slavery awareness on the site’s interactive “respond” tab.