Human Goods

The New York Times published an opinion piece on efforts to boost prevention of child prostitution in Atlanta. Atlanta stands apart as perhaps the major U.S. hub for the trafficking of American children for purposes of sex (see earlier Human Goods post on Libby Spears’ documentary, Playground). The problem rears its head in most cities, especially those that draw lots of tourists and convention-goers (the equation goes something like: men on holiday minus wives plus extra time and money to spend equals exploitation far too often).

But as the opinion piece points out, the laws against sexual exploitation are already tough, and what we need is a much more holistic response to tackling the problem:

The men who drive the sex trade by patronizing prostitutes rarely figure into discussions of the problem. Shirley Franklin, the mayor of Atlanta, has changed that through advertisements underscoring the damage that these men do to their communities.

The city is also considering legislation under which first-time offenders on adult prostitution charges will be required to attend classes where they would learn about the broader social harm associated with their activities. Restitution and community service may be required.

These measures are a good example to state officials. Lawmakers also need to encourage programs that train teachers, law enforcement officials, social workers and others to focus on children at risk and to recognize the signs of sexual abuse and prostitution. By spreading knowledge and devising plans to help at-risk children, the authorities can put themselves in a position to intervene before damage has been done.

Arthur Fournier, on the Huffington Post, responded to Dan Harris’ investigation into child slavery in Haiti in a recent Nightline special (see previous post on Human Goods).

Slavery, he says, is only the “tip of the ‘consequences-of-poverty’ iceberg”:

Given how little most Americans understand about Haiti and how this lack of understanding during the early years of AIDS led to stigmatization of Haitians that persists to this day, this is no small point - exploitation of vulnerable people has nothing to do with ethnicity or culture and everything to do with poverty and the survival choices poor people are forced to make …

Solutions, therefore must address conditions that make rural life insufferable - poor agricultural productivity, lack of education, high maternal and child mortality and lack of health care. Such models do exist.

Fournier is correct in identifying the scope of the problem (a scope so large that it’s questionable that Harris could have covered it in that much depth in a brief episode about Haiti).

(Christa Hillstrom / Medill)

by Christa Hillstrom - Medill Reports

“She was like a walking dead person, not even a person.”

Jody Raphael struggled to describe a woman who had been trafficked into the sex trade. -

“There was no personhood, no personality, like the soul had been removed.”

Raphael, a senior researcher at the DePaul University College of Law who has worked with dozens of trafficked women, is not talking about someone from Russia or China. She’s talking about a girl from Chicago.

Controversy over the reauthorization of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Act has stalled the bill in the U.S. Senate since it was passed in the House last December, with only two dissenting votes.

Lobbies on both sides are clashing over the inclusion of a new provision that eliminates the need to prove women were unwillingly forced or coerced into the sex trade, in order to penalize third parties who commercially benefit from the buying and selling of women: In other words, pimps.

“Our federal public policies have always focused on the woman’s willingness,” said Samir Goswami, director of policy and outreach for the Justice Project Against Sexual Harm.

“Forget about her willingness, whether she had a gun to her head or three guys who put her in a sack and shipped her off to Canada,” he said. “It’s about them: The guys out there who are preying on the most vulnerable people.”

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, first passed in 2000 to address the enslavement of people in the sex and other trades worldwide, has largely focused on international victims when it comes to enforcement. But the removal of the need to prove violence or coercion will open up a new can of worms for federal law enforcement: Domestic trafficking.

Under the provision, cases where violence and other coercive measures can be proved would be tried as cases of “aggravated” human trafficking.

If supporters are able to get the bill passed without the removal of the clause, their hope is that all people who commercially benefit from the sale of someone else’s body can be charged with human trafficking, a significantly serious felony and a major domestic problem in America.

This is something the bill’s proponents say the whole country has shied away from acknowledging until now.

“It’s not as sexy a topic as international trafficking, but we have a lot more trafficking going on domestically than we want to admit to,” said Goswami. “What this bill does is it finally addresses what’s really happening, not what we’d like to think is happening.”

Some studies have placed the number of women and girls involved in Chicago’s sex trade as high as 16,000, making it a major hub for traffickers.

The National Runaway Switchboard estimates that it takes an average of 48 hours before girls who have fled their homes are recruited into prostitution by a pimp, or are solicited for sex.

Raphael, who co-authored a study last month on the domestic trafficking of women and girls in Chicago, argues that recruitment tactics for internationally and domestically trafficked women are exactly the same, and it’s time to start giving young women from Chicago equal attention.

“You’re taking people that are totally needy, and you are promising a roof over their head and money,” she said. “The same thing that happens in developing countries, happens in our own low-income communities.”

According to the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, the average age of entry into prostitution in Chicago is 12 years old.

Girls typically become attached to a pimp through enticement and even love, which turns to violence and force only later, Raphael’s research showed. Because of the apparent complicity in the beginning, focusing prosecution on women’s willingness to participate is problematic and even detrimental to stopping traffickers, Goswami said.

While the study doesn’t measure the percentage of girls who came from sexually abusive backgrounds, Raphael said many participants shared staggering stories of abuse.

“Many of our sample came from horrible family backgrounds that they ran away from,” she said. “What hit me was that they were so disconnected, so isolated, they had this relationship with this pimp and that was it. They were just this sad little island.”

Raphael explained that young women without support systems are easily enticed into the sex trade by the recruitment tactics of pimps.

What Goswami said he hopes the much-contested provision in the new bill will do is recognize this enticement as exploitation and enable prosecutors to target pimps, whether the woman seemed complicit or not.

“They don’t necessarily kidnap you—knock you on the head and put a rag in your mouth,” he said. “They can talk you into it.”

Some sex workers’ advocacy groups fear the new law will be manipulated to arrest sex workers, rather than just third-party pimps.

Groups that view sex work as a viable option for women who are able to choose it say that tightening legislation may result in increased criminalization of already targeted women.

Jasmine Jewels, a representative of the Sex Workers Outreach Project in Chicago, whose East Coast counterpart is a major lobby against the proposed bill, is no stranger to the tension between law enforcement and sex workers: She is a sex worker.

She said she is unsure whether she opposes the bill, but recognizes the potential for the government to use it to crack down on women.

“It’s easier to arrest 10 of them [sex workers] than infiltrate a ring of traffickers,” she said. “And you always take the shortest distance between two points. The government will probably manipulate the law, because in history, that’s what they’ve done with us.”

Anti-prostitution groups and the media tend to skew and narrow what the sex trade looks like, according to Jewels, who said she doesn’t know any sex workers who report to pimps.

“You have to understand the difference between someone who is using sex as a legitimate income, and a 14-year-old girl who is being exploited,” she said.

Jewels spends her Friday nights on the street with a backpack full of condoms and business cards to seek out and educate young women who might be at risk of contracting sexually-transmitted diseases, or being harmed by pimps and customers.

Her own experience of sex work is quite different, she said, citing her expensive condo and self-run website, which allows her to screen customers.

Goswami said he understands why sex workers would be leery of increased legislation, since they have been traditionally stigmatized by the law. But to jump to such conclusions with this act would be a mischaracterization of something that is designed to protect women, especially the ones who don’t have the freedom to choose to be there, he added.

“The bill is very, very clear that it’s only going to prosecute third parties,” he said. “That’s the whole idea.”

The Department of Justice has also contributed to blocking the bill’s passage. It has expressed fear that the amendment goes too far by implicating all third-party participants in prostitution under the federal umbrella of human trafficking, regardless of the presence of force. This would obligate federal law enforcement to take on what previously fell under the jurisdiction of state and city law.

The Department issued an official statement in November, expressing doubt about the ability of the federal government to address so broad an issue as prostitution due to lack of resources.

But that’s not a good enough excuse, said James Wagner, executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission and 31-year FBI veteran. He said he understands that resources are strained and the FBI is already stretched thin with complicated caseloads that include counterterrorism and mortgage fraud, but trafficking must still be made a priority.

“I think lack of resources is a poor reason for opposing something that should be done,” he said. “You have to decide where you’re going to put the manpower to work.”

“So what if it’s difficult?” Goswami asked. “It’s difficult to go after gang bangers and international drug cartels. But we still have to do it.”

Part of the difficulty for law enforcement comes from the complexity and secrecy that shrouds the so-called “indoor sex industry.” Some studies have suggested that 85 percent of prostitution happens indoors, rather than on the street, and it is notoriously difficult for police to infiltrate these networks.

“The way we handle prostitution is we respond to complaints by districts,” Goswami explained. “People call 911 and say, ‘There’s a prostitute on my street, come and get her.’ The street is cheap, it’s 10 bucks a sex act. The real money is in these indoor venues.”

Frank Bochte, a representative for the Chicago field office of the FBI’s human trafficking task force, said police largely rely on tips to penetrate more hidden operations. But it’s rare to get them, he added, since men who patronize prostitutes aren’t likely to come forward, even when they suspect human trafficking might be occurring.

The problem is further compounded by the lack of general community awareness.

“These kinds of things, whether they’re gentlemen’s clubs or massage parlors, blend into the community they’re in and people don’t really recognize what’s going on,” Bochte said.

The crafty mobility of the trafficking industry also keeps it under the radar. When law enforcement is able to sniff out potential trafficking sites it is often too late, according to Dr. Mark Rodgers, dean of the School of Social Work at Dominican University in Oak Park, who has worked extensively both locally and internationally on the global trafficking crisis.

“As soon as things get hot, they [traffickers and pimps] have these vans, and they can pack up their people and they’re gone,” he said. “They are well-organized. We are the disorganized ones. They are years ahead of us.”

“I happen to know that when the police squeeze here in Chicago, pimps go right down to Joliet,” he added, emphasizing the need to make sure this issue is taken seriously everywhere, not just in the big cities.

Rodgers, who has coordinated programs to combat human trafficking in Latvia, Ecuador and Romania, said Chicago’s trafficking problems have similarities to those in many developing countries in that the city lacks the holistic services needed to assist victims of domestic trafficking once they are found.

“They need so much, they need everything,” Raphael said of the process of rehabilitating survivors. “They had no childhood, so they can’t go back home. What do you build on? Where do you start?”

In addition to the social and emotional challenges of addressing legacies like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, lack of services has a direct effect on prosecution, said Jessica Ashley, a senior research analyst for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

“There’s no safe place in Chicago to put them,” she said. “There’s very little safe housing specifically for prostitutes. So a lot of times they leave the placement out of fear, and go back to their pimps. It’s not worth the risk for them.”

It is precisely because of this overwhelming danger that Raphael said she doubts that tightening provisions in the reauthorization act will make much of a dent in the trade.

“I don’t think law enforcement can go after the trafficker or the pimp,” she said. “I’m all for giving law enforcement every tool that they need to go after every wrong-doer, but I don’t think you can arrest and prosecute without the testimony of the girls that have been trafficked. And it’s a very dangerous thing for those girls.”

Instead Raphael suggests eliminating the conditions that drive young girls out of their homes and onto the streets, and the fundamental problems that prevent so many disenfranchised communities from ensuring safe homes for their young women.

“It’s about offering opportunity in these low-income communities, and getting it to all of these people at all levels,” she said. “The community, in turn, has to be the one to blow the whistle — they know who these traffickers are, and they have to turn on them.”

Goswami too said factors like poverty, inequality and violence against women, which enable trafficking to flourish in many cultures, must be halted with long-term solutions.

A state senate resolution passed on May 29, sponsored by state Sen. Jacqueline Collins, a Chicago Democrat, encourages U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama to support the bill’s passage in Washington.

Despite the outcome of the Senate vote, which may not take place before the session’s adjournment, at the very least proponents of the bill say the contentious clause has at least thrown the issue of domestic trafficking into the fringes of the spotlight — even if the provision does not remain in the final version of the bill that is voted on.

Rodgers said he hopes this self-examination will take root in the way Americans view their own attitude towards human rights. “If the domestic issues had been removed from the bill, it probably would have sailed right through,” he said. “As if trafficking is a problem out there, not in here.”

“These girls are not going to Mexico, they’re not going to Europe,” said Goswami. “They’re being shipped around this country. And that’s what I think is a huge step forward in this bill. The rest of the world has recognized this for years. We haven’t.”

For Raphael, it remains a personal issue with a very human face.

“Humiliation, degradation, and fear of death on a daily basis? I’d say that’s a human rights issue,” said Raphael of the experience of the trafficked women with whom she’s worked.

“We think our culture is better, we think we don’t exploit people the way they would be exploited in Thailand or Bangladesh. For most people, we just can’t go there, to say Americans do these things. We haven’t been able to accept that… yet.”

(Christa Hillstrom/Medill)

(Christa Hillstrom / Medill)

by Christa Hillstrom - Medill Reports

America likes to solve its problems after they’ve already occurred, if you ask Mark Rodgers.

“How do you put a plaque on prevention?” he asks.

Efforts to combat the problem of sex trafficking must take a strenuous look at why men purchase sex in the first place, he said, not just catch them at it.

The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation is taking a close look at the complexities of this market and how demand can be curbed from the ground up.

“We as a society haven’t addressed the root cause of trafficking yet, which is the demand” said Rachel Durchslag, director of the Alliance. “And that’s why we haven’t been that successful.”

Durchslag headed a study, whose preliminary results were released last month, which asked 113 men in the Chicago area why they buy sex.

“A lot of this stuff, it’s really just sad,” she said.

Groups like the Sex Workers Outreach Project are questioning the study’s methodology and results, arguing that the study has inbuilt bias since it was designed by anti-prostitution groups.

Nevertheless, it’s getting people interested in understanding demand.

David, 27, who asked that his name be changed for this article, has participated in sex trades from Dubai to Mexico, including at home in the United States.

“We were always curious about if you call an escort, what really happens,” he said of his first experience, ordering an escort with some friends during college.

“In your head you perceive her as being an object,” he said, “But when she gets there, then she’s a regular person.”

Patronage of the sex trade became a regular habit for David until recently, he said, when he realized how unfulfilling it was.

“For me, it was like a splurge, an indulgence, like if you were on vacation somewhere,” he said. “Something you know is really bad for your health.”

Unlike the majority of men who participated in Durchslag’s research, David said he limited his physical contact with sex workers because of the risk of sexually transmitted diseases:

“My most common experience would be going to a massage parlor, which is usually Asian-run. They don’t offer full sex, they offer what’s called a ‘happy ending.’”

David, like many of the men Durchslag interviewed, expressed occasional remorse for his behavior.

“When this lady is performing whatever action, I’m thinking in my head that I don’t think she’s enjoying it,” he said. “But she’s doing it for the money. I regret it because that’s not something anyone wants to do.”

Regardless of what inspires demand, most opponents to trafficking agree that stopping it from growing is the surest way to gain more than a band-aid fix.

What we need to do is figure out why men feel entitled and drawn to purchase it in the first place and address it at an early age, Durchslag said.

“Inherently when you have ownership of someone as part of a culture, there’s a marginalization of the person who can be owned in the minds of the culture,” she said.

The Alliance is developing a curriculum that it hopes can be incorporated into sex education programs for young people in Illinois. The goal is to teach boys to value all women and recognize the social, emotional and psychological damage that prostitution can inflict.

Even David said he thinks this is a good idea.

“I feel like I have those values, but when I go to those massage parlors, those always go out the door,” he said, adding that he thinks more meaningful education about the dangers of objectification and trafficking could prevent men from developing the habit in the first place.

Recognizing objectification and changing the way we think about women are a good start to preventing exploitation, said Durchslag.

“You know, a hundred years ago, we didn’t think it was possible for a woman to be raped by her husband,” she said. “These frameworks do change.”

(source: IRIN)

As presidential elections in Cote d’Ivoire approach, IRIN reported that the West African country has seen a spike in child abductions.  Only in this case, it’s not just for sex and labor trafficking.  IRIN is attributing it to “political hopefuls using traditional myths of human sacrifice to improve their electoral chances will fuel an already significant market for stolen children.”

In this ravaged country, children are already trafficked for their organs, for sex, and for labor.  I guess for ole fashioned sacrifice too.

IRIN interviewed a spokesperson for the country’s police:

Organ traffickers, who slice out hearts, kidneys, lungs and other body parts for sale to medical facilities and soothsayers are the main culprits, Bi said. The children are also taken to work in the sex trade, for use by illegal adoption rings, and for work on plantations, he said.

Looks like the FBI is really doing something about child prostitution. In a dramatic sweep across 16 U.S. cities, the Bureau, in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, rescued 21 children from prostitution rings and arrested 389 perpetrators.

Susan Saulny of The New York Times reported,

The sweep was part of an annual roundup to draw attention to the issue. It marked the fifth anniversary of the Innocence Lost National Initiative, which was undertaken by the F.B.I. to address child prostitution and has led to the conviction of 308 people on a variety of federal and state charges. In all, 433 exploited children have been rescued as a result of the initiative, federal officials said.

At a press conference, FBI director Robert S. Mueller III attributed the rise of children in prostitution in part to the popularity of social networking sites and the host of problems that ride in on the internet wave

According to ABC News, the government hopes that,

some of the girls and women who were arrested in the sweeps will provide more information to go after key organizers and pimps…

… which leads me to question why such girls were arrested, and what will happen to them if they don’t cooperate in prosecution. For women, especially those who have been controlled by pimps since childhood,
who are asked to testify against the men who have manipulated and terrorized them for years, that can be a lethal prospect. Hmmm….

(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

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.”