Human Goods

(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.

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.

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.

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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…

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)

Sweden (Swedish Penal Code) (PDF) 5KB

Prostitution: Illegal Since 1999 selling sex is not a crime but the buying of sex is. Buyers face fines and up to 6 months in prison. Brothel Ownership: Illegal Punishment includes up to 4 years in prison. Pimping: Illegal

“In Sweden, prostitution is officially acknowledged as a form of male sexual violence against women and children. One of the cornerstones of Swedish policies against prostitution and trafficking in human beings is the focus on the root cause, the recognition that without men’s demand for and use of women and girls for sexual exploitation, the global prostitution industry would not be able flourish and expand.” (Oct. 2004 “The Swedish Law that Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services” by Gunilla Ekberg

(source: www.procon.org)

Those who oppose prostitution and human trafficking the world over look to Sweden as an example.

This is because Sweden took a bold step thinking outside of the box when it comes to prostitution. Rather than criminalizing women, many of whom have few economic options for their families and so get involved in prostitution, Sweden recognized that when there is demand from those with power and economic voice, it’s problematic to punish poor people for filling it.

So Sweden decriminalized selling sex, so women wouldn’t go to jail. Instead, they arrest the men who buy sex. Pretty novel, especially considering that men are additionally punished by having their photos publicized when they get busted.

That’s one way to take away incentive from the demand side of the market.

As long as there is demand for a black market, no matter how many people you arrest (or how many times you arrest the same person without rehabilitating them), someone is going to fill in the gaps.

Perhaps it’s time other countries take such a step in addressing what is, after all, a demand side that is just as illegal as the supply side.

(Of course, there are always multiple sides to the story, as this BBC report demonstrates.)

Wedged into a space between Romania and the Ukraine lies the tiny Eastern European nation of Moldova. It is Europe’s poorest country, officially classified by Washington as a “failed state,” and it has been in the news recently since raids in London and Surrey rescued trafficked Moldovan women and led to 15 arrests.

That is, it’s been in the Tiraspol Times, which never passes on a good Moldova-bashing opportunity.

I know, I know — Where’s Tiraspol?

Wedged into an even slighter slice of space between Moldova and the Ukraine is the breakaway state of Transnistria, and Tiraspol is its capital. It’s a bizarre urban landscape cast eerily in utopian Soviet iconography — fields of red stars and gleaming statues of Stalin — that somehow doesn’t realize it’s no longer the Cold War era.

Unrecognized by most foreign governments, Transnistria seceded from Moldova in 1990 in a violent blink of a rebellion supported by Russia.

Today, Fistful of Euros calls it a “post-communist gangster state.” But Igor Smirnov, the little rogue state’s president, would probably disagree, since he professes he lays claim to 103.6 percent of the vote, according to Benjamin Skinner’s book, “A Crime So Monstrous.”

The government controls almost all media outlets, so it’s no wonder that Transnistria’s reports on human trafficking both at home and in Moldova are, to put it nicely, skewed. Articles, like this one in Pridnestrovie , are more reminiscent of an insecure high school queen bee making passive aggressive jibes at someone in the cafeteria:

• Despite persistent allegations, there is no evidence (unlike in Moldova) that hordes of young women have gone to work as prostitutes in the West. Instead, it is Moldova that holds a dubious world record: The country is today the leading haven for pedophiles and for traffickers who earn fortunes enslaving underage kids in a brutal international sex trade.

(Pay special attention to those less-than-necessary parenthetical asides, ahem..)

Despite such assurances, Skinner reports that “it was an open secret in Transnistria that police officers moonlighted as slave dealers.” Since it is an unofficial nation, almost no NGOs will go there, and few foreign governments deal with it.

But it is a primary trafficking corridor for arms (which Transnistria is suspected of manufacturing) as well as humans from Eastern Europe.

This BBC series explores the ghostly countryside of Moldova (where a huge percentage of its young people have gone abroad to work, thousands against their will). Some poor villagers sell organs to make money. Economies like this compel millions of people worldwide to fall into the trap of slavery.

Places That Don’t Exist: Transnitria - Volume 1: Worth watching to get impressions of the largely abandoned and destitute Moldovan countryside. Or at least for when the host runs into the Moldovan president on a casual-jeans day, who invites him to go fishing, randomly.

Volume 2 - The host demonstrates how easy it is for smugglers to hop across the border to the Ukraine. Literally, he hops across.