Human Goods

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.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s blog recently posted commentary on the stalling of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in the Senate, which Human Goods reported on earlier, with a focus on Chicago.

John Miller, former ambassador on slavery for the State Department and leader of the Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. He boldly challenged the Bush Administration to account for the Justice Department’s opposition to new clauses in the bill that would intensify anti-slavery laws in the U.S.  Although the bill passed the House with weak opposition, the Senate stalling has been so pronounced that Sen. Joseph Biden reintroduced it with some of the controversial provisions eliminated.

Miller writes,

A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.

As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.

…….
Put me on the side of those who have worked with the victims. I have talked with survivors all over the world, including the United States, and I share the view that these women and girls — the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 — are not participating in the “oldest profession” but in the oldest form of abuse. They are slaves.

…..

And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has introduced a bill that largely complies with the department’s views.

The president may never have seen the Justice Department’s letter. But Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Deborah Pryce, Republican of Ohio, two of the leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking, have been unable to arrange a meeting with the president to express their concerns to him.

President Bush should meet with them — and his own Justice Department — before he loses his legacy and his leadership on the abolition of modern slavery.

(photo source: IKEA)

Robert Young Pelton’s bestselling guide to getting into, out of, and staying alive in the world’s most dangerous places does not include IKEA on a Sunday afternoon. Most people don’t stumble on minefields or receive ransom demands, but you still have to take a deep breath before going inside. Even from the parking lot, your skin starts to prick with the pressurized bustle of crowds and accumulation. Escalators criss-cross through the air above, carrying young couples in summer shorts with crabapple toddlers in tow through a maze of bedroom enclaves with fake books, fake televisions, clothing that is weirdly not for sale but seems shrewdly selected by a stylist for the room’s inhabitants that actually don’t exist.
Most of us are here for two reasons, the first being that there is something we want or think we need, and the second that, as first-world consumers, we have every right to get it. I woke up this morning bemoaning the lack of counter space in my kitchen. I had been intending to get into cooking, just as I had wanted to get into exercising a few months before and so had splurged on a gym that was ritzier than necessary, hoping the airy vibe would inspire me to hit the machines more often. As I attempted to slice bananas into my cereal on a meager plot of linoleum wedged between the microwave and the stove, I figured I’d be much more inspired to chop vegetables that evening if I had a little more space. Maybe a smooth wooden countertop, room to spread out, something comfortable. So I grabbed my keys to go fulfill that vision, a vision made possible by IKEA.
IKEA’s proclaimed mission is to bring aesthetically pleasing, well-designed furniture to everyday people at affordable prices — eye-popping prices, in many cases. I bump along through the shoppers strewn among displays of bathroom mats and living room sets, amassing ideas of how to brighten up a room here and there, or even totally overhaul it on the cheap. I have to make my way through dozens of versions of living space before I reach the faux kitchen sets, and not without feeling an onslaught of materialism ripple through me. That is indeed a neat idea for creating more sitting space in the living room. Maybe I would be happier with desk space like that. And it’s not an astronomical reach, of course. I mean, I’m an everyday person, right?
But there’s a small, sneaky conundrum that creeps into my heart. How come it’s all so cheap, after all? What really makes that possible? I pay extra for fair trade coffee because marketers have made it easy for me to choose a brand that’s fair. So what’s the deal with furniture?

There’s nowhere people like to point accusing fingers more than at corporate America when it comes to catch phrases like “social responsibility.” This shift in consumer values has forced U.S. companies to better account for what happens along their supply chains, and companies like Nike and Wal-Mart have both faced customer boycotts for sketchy labor conditions among the lowest echelons of their production chain.

Robert Strand, a teacher of business ethics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, researched the Scandinavian approach to corporate responsibility as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Norway. One of his initial mistakes when first exploring the issue was that he was digging around for responsibility clauses as add-ons to already existing corporate policy. American companies seemed to be tacking these gimmicky “extras” on like mad, so he wondered why he wasn’t seeing the same things happen in Norway.

What Strand found was that Scandinavian companies, including IKEA, were committed to a “triple bottom line,” a way of framing success that is not measured by next quarter’s profits alone, but a balance between economic, social, and environmental factors. Strand credits much of this to more entrenched values of social justice in Scandinavian cultures that benefit stakeholders – including employees, communities, and production workers, to name a few – as much as they do shareholders.

With stores in 24 countries throughout the world, IKEA reported $29 billion in revenue last year. Anyone who’s ever been anywhere near Scandinavia knows that that the affluent countries that make it up are anything but cheap. Salaries are high and labor laws generous, so IKEA moved its production to lower-cost regions to produce lower-cost goods. Makes sense.

Except the developing world taps an entirely new well of nightmarish problems when it comes to monitoring human rights and environmental safety. Take, for starters, the “carpet belt” of Uttar Pradesh.
There are 27 million slaves in the world today, and at least half of them live in India. Many are children, and in states like Northern India’s Uttar Pradesh, it’s almost impossible to monitor labor conditions. This is partly due to the fragmentation of production. UNICEF figures identify as many as 525,000 weavers across the belt.

“The production of carpets in India is spread over large geographical areas and divided into many small units,” IKEA spokeswoman Marianne Barner writes. “Sometimes right down to individual looms in villages scattered across the countryside.”

The nature of the beast, then, is that it’s impossible for IKEA to fully monitor the working conditions of those at the bottom of the supply chain. But what’s unique about the blue-and-yellow giant is that it has partnered with organizations like UNICEF to work out strategies to tackle rights violations as best it can, rather than throwing its hands up with the defense that the problem is just too big.
It’s common, when sweatshops and child labor are exposed somewhere in the supply chain of U.S. companies, to reflexively cut off those suppliers like gangrenous appendages that threaten the grail of positive branding. But all too often, this actually further jeapordizes the welfare of children, who are considered stakeholders. They are scuttled from sweatshop to sweatshop, or, if production in the area is completely shut down, some children find themselves involved in survival sex.
IKEA’s corporate social responsibility code is unique in the way it recognizes this complexity – how poverty, exploitation, and lack of education are all interwoven. When IKEA inspectors unearth instances of child labor, instead of severing the connection in a flush of PR anxiety, IKEA works with suppliers to reshape their treatment of children and labor conditions, and even sends the kids to school. It’s about reforming, improving, making good on a genuine value of accountability. Not carefully maintaining a corporate image with hedge-clippers.
Great, I think. Now I don’t feel bad about wanting that new kitchen counter, and being able to get it with a swipe of the card.
Being green and having a social conscience are all too often temporary fads that you can frivolously clip on like earrings, and as I weave through conversations among other IKEA shoppers who sound like they’re toying with greenness as the season’s new accessory, it strikes me, in a sheepish, sinking way, that maybe the corporations are a lot more responsible than we are. Maybe we point fingers at “big this” and “big that” simply because it’s easy.

I sit on the wide hardwood floors of my apartment – beautiful floors that stretch across four rooms for one person – and furrow my eyebrows at the Swedish cartoon instructions on how to assemble my pretty new counter amid an explosion of nuts and bolts, and I realize something. The conundrum, even after assurances of broad-based, sincere and effective corporate efforts that are surely paving goodness in the world, hasn’t resolved itself. It flaps its wings instead of settling, because the whole point is still missing, and my heart knows it. It knows my concern about social responsibility is outwardly focused, that responsible policy provides relief because it requires me to give up nothing. I have license to carry on the way I do with the assurance that I’m not harming anyone. Not really, anyway.
So I do carry on. I set up my counter. I give myself more space and convenience. I don’t learn to brook discomfort, because comfort remains so attainable. I slice those bananas with all the elbow space I need.

(Click here to watch a WCCO interview with Robert Strand)

(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: 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:

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.