Human Goods

(Source: Associated Press)

The latest violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is expected to reinvigorate child recruitment efforts, IRIN reported this week.

The intensification of fighting in the North Kivu region, which resumed in August between the Congolese government and the rebel Congres National pour la Defense du Peuple (CNDP), is expected to raise the number of children fighting in the region well beyond the estimated 3,000 already abducted.

Ishbel Matheson, a spokeswoman for Save the Children, told IRIN:

Children who are forced into armed conflict suffer terrible physical and emotional damage.  They are traumatized by being separated from their families and may witness executions, beatings, and torture.  Many young girls now have babies.

Hundreds of schools have been forced to close due to the risk of abduction.  Troops have been known to attack them, raiding even primary school classrooms for fresh combatants and concubines.

(Photo source:  Wide Angle)

For anyone wanting to understand how globalization and new migration trends are affecting the illegal trafficking and smuggling of humans, it’s worth watching PBS’s Wide Angle episode, “Dying to Leave.”

Although produced in 2003, the short but excellent documentary, which can be viewed on their website, provides a wide angle indeed on how intertwined the baffling flux of global economics is with often dangerous patterns of international migration – from Iraqi refugees braving deadly seas to illegally reach Australia, to Moldovan single mothers being forced into prostitution in Japan, to Mexican workers violently imprisoned in Florida work camps.  They leave their homes because of economic hardship, but often end up in worse situations abroad.  The show argues,

Images of an abundant west have flooded the poorest parts of the world, fueling the perception that a better life is within reach.  In the modern global economy, capital and goods now move freely all over the world.  Not so, people.  The movement of people across borders is now more regulated than it’s ever been.

Human smuggling is harder to detect for immigration officials because it is so voluntary.  Paul Holmes, former head of the UK’s Metropolitan Police Vice Squad, points out that when people willingly choose, under the deceived illusion of a better job and life overseas, to sneak across borders, it is very hard to detect.  The average customs official in Bogota, who is specifically trained to recognize victims of trafficking, typically has about 45 seconds to assess whether or not someone is going to be manipulated into a trafficking situation once they reach their international destination.

In the growing shadow of globalization, distinguishing clearly between those who are voluntarily smuggled and those who are unwillingly trafficked becomes problematic at best.

“Once you take violent control of another human being, they stop being a smuggled person and start being a trafficked person,” trafficking expert Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves states.

Last week California passed two new pieces of legislation,

One of the new bills creates a counseling and treatment program for trafficked and sexually exploited minors. The other bill, recognizing that a majority of people trafficked into the United States are non-citizens without valid immigration documents, requires thorough investigation of trafficking cases regardless of citizenship status and allows victims to keep their names out of public record.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: Marie Claire)

Marie Claire published a piece by Danielle Pergament on the trend of Iraqi refugees engaging in survival sex (you can also see a video under an April entry on Human Goods called “Survival Sex: The Untalked-about Consequence of War”).

Pergament details the lives of a few women who formerly led middle class lives in Iraq, until “the Americans arrived.” Some of them were able to use their skills to work as translators for awhile, but when work in the Green Zone became too dangerous, they fled to places like Jordan.

In many countries, refugees are given sanctuary but are not permitted to work. Since war eliminates many means of male support because male family members are lost, killed, “disappeared,” often women, and children too, have no choice but to engage in sex work for survival.

Weirdly, and unnervingly, some of these women found themselves serving the same basic clientele (military, foreign contractors, etc) that they used to translate for, when they had the right to work.

Here’s the teaser to the article:

Imagine: One day you’re a nurse leading a quiet middle-class life; a few years later you’re in a strange country doing the unthinkable: selling yourself. For some Iraqi refugees, prostitution is the only trick they feel they’ve got left.

Burmese child soldier in WWII

(photo by Henry Allen, from the National Archives, 1944)

Myanmar, Seth Mydans wrote in The New York Times this week, has one of the world’s highest recruitments of child soldiers, with many of them coerced through violence, kidnapping, and terror to join the army.

Mydans draws his information from a report recently released by Human Rights Watch on the use of child soldiers worldwide. According to the report, Myanmar is the worst offender, beating out Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo.

Mydans sums up Myanmar’s evaluation in the article:

The report, issued last October, said that military recruiters and civilian brokers scour train stations, bus stations, markets and other public places for boys and coerce them to volunteer.

The recent cyclone has only exacerbated the problem. With homes and families wiped away, some small children get lost and don’t even know the names of the villages they come from.

Relief groups are trying to do something about the swarms of children that wander around crowded and chaotic refugee camps, but they don’t have a program to try to help families reconnect in place yet.

This is a concern, because the chaos has put the cyclone’s most vulnerable survivors at extremely high risk of being trafficked into the military or sexual abuse.

Ahava Kids, an NGO that specifically combats trafficking in children, asserts that child trafficking is “inevitable” wherever there is just one of the following:

1. Political chaos

2. Poverty

3. War

The organization’s website reports the disappearance of Iraqi children at an “alarming rate” and that in Baghdad alone, 5,000 displaced and/or orphaned children scavenge the streets in search of food.

Child slavery is widespread and touches every part of the world, and the more powerless the victims are, the more easily you can torture and manipulate them into sex objects, child soldiers, or laborers.

Wars, without fail, create refugees.

But despite frantic international conversation about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and democracy, the welfare of those refugees falls a little by the wayside.

What happens to Iraqi refugees once they’re removed from the war zone?

Last year, Nihal Hissan reported in The Independent on the plentiful nightclubs outside of Damascus, overflowing with refugee girls– most of them teenagers.

Iraqi refugee women have no legal means of making money if they have no male family members with them.

For many, there is no other option besides prostitution, or, as this NBC report dubs it– “survival sex.”