Human Goods

(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

There are as many as 27 million slaves in the world. Experts estimate that 50,000 of them are enslaved in the U.S.

Maybe you can’t dedicate time to volunteer for advocacy groups. Maybe you don’t know how to lobby for policy.

But in the face of such overwhelming statistics, can you really have an impact?

The MOSAIC group in Chicago decided to do something to raise awareness in their own community through putting on an arts event called Traffick Jam. Check out the video below…

(Musical performance by Jessica Sonner)

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.

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:

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)