This is a preview of a longer work on the intricate inner workings of Chicago’s sex trade.

For more on efforts to curb sex trafficking in Chicago, check out The Dreamcatcher Foundation and the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, both featured in the video.  Look for more about their work in an upcoming video.

(image by the International Labor Rights Forum)

The absurdity of the fact that many of us in the first world show our love for one another with products produced by the blood, sweat, and tears of others ought to give all of us pause.  Valentine’s Day offers a unique opportunity to probe into the reality of industries like diamonds and chocolate, sharpening social consciousness and opening new conversations about fair consumption.  After all, you wouldn’t give your girlfriend candy stolen from a child to express your appreciation — since love cannot be expressed through gross injustice.  What’s so different when it comes to nicely packaged products marketed as tokens of affection?

Usually it’s just that we don’t see it, or at least don’t want to see it.  But even as Valentine’s Day is preceded by a boom in the marketing of products associated with romance, there’s also somewhat increased attention to the issue.  Check out this post by Tim Newman of the International Labor Rights Forum, on the Labor is not a Commodity blog.  (They’ve got information on fair trade flowers for Valentine’s Day as well).

You can also check out Free2Work, a collaborative initiative between the International Labor Rights Forum and the Not For Sale Campaign.  They’ve ranked several companies in multiple categories, evaluating their policies and practices regarding child labor and labor rights, with a special action center on chocolate production and consumption.

Human Goods previously posted on the cocoa industry and controversy over corporate initiatives for change here.

(image by Chris Coady)

There’s real hope for Haiti, and it’s not what you’d expect

From Johann Hari and The Independent/UK:

When people live so close to the edge, even small price increases can break them.

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now – the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakeable grief that could last for years. In the middle of the Haitian people’s nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.

To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history – one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of the Free Market has rolled out across the world because the People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatise the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.

There’s just one snag: it’s not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tenets more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state.

The gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world’s poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle.

One of the most marked came in the form of “loans” from the International Monetary Fund(IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce “structural adjustments” to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open.

Here’s a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi, the country’s soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidise fertiliser for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this “a market distortion“, and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country’s crops failed, and famine scythed through the population. Tens of thousands starved to death. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies – and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again.

When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. The IMF systematically disregards the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of its commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies – to the IMF’s horror.

Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs – one of their former lackeys – calls the IMF “the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country”. So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programmes work very well – for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labour and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil.

The serve-the-rich ideology that caused our economy to crash in 2008 has been crashing poor countries for a long time. But there’s a sting. After decades of ordering poor countries to slash subsidies and state spending, the IMF reacted to the recession by urging rich countries … to spend a fortune subsidising the banks, and to increase state spending. They wouldn’t dream of drinking the medicine they have been serving out to the poor for so long. It’s not as if the IMF has learned from its mistakes: it has just forced countries from El Salvador to Ukraine to Pakistan to sign deals committing themselves to leave the state inert in the face of severe external shocks to their economies. No: the IMF only imposes its deadly prescriptions on those too weak and too distant to matter.

Here’s where Haiti comes in. The IMF agenda has often been forced on populations when they are least able to resist – after a military coup, a massacre, or a natural disaster. For example, the people of Thailand fought for years against clearing their locals off their beaches to make way for holiday resorts, and voted against the privatisation of water and electricity. But immediately after the tsunami, both were pushed through.

After the earthquake, something similar was poised to happen to Haiti. The IMF announced a $100m loan, stapled on to an earlier loan, which requires Haiti to raise electricity prices, and freeze wages for the public-sector workers who are needed to rebuild the country. So when people emerged from the rubble, they would find an economy rigged even more heavily against them.

There is no doubt about what the Haitian people would think: they know the IMF. Until 1994, the country at least grew its own staple crop: rice. But the IMF came in and ordered the government to cut its rice tariff from 35 per cent to 3 per cent. Suddenly the market was flooded with rice grown in the US by hugely subsidised farmers, and Haiti’s rice farmers went bust. Hundreds of thousands swelled to the slum-cities and sweat shops of Port-au-Prince, where they built mud huts – and were buried in 2010. The IMF reduced the country from self-sufficiency to dependency, in a move known locally as “the Plan of Death“. It was one of the external political earthquakes that made this natural earthquake far more deadly.

But something new and startling happened this month. For the first time, the IMF was stopped from shafting a poor country – by a rebellion here in the rich world. Hours after the quake, a Facebook group called “No Shock Doctrine For Haiti” had tens of thousands of members, and orchestrated a petition to the IMF of over 150,000 signatures demanding the loan become a no-strings grant. After Naomi Klein’s mega-selling exposé, there was a vigilant public who wanted to see that the money they were donating to charity was not going to be cancelled out by the IMF.

And it worked. The IMF backed down. It publicly renounced its conditions – and even said it would work to cancel Haiti’s entire debt. This is the first sign that exposing and opposing the IMF’s agenda works. Klein says it is “unprecedented in my experience, and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics.” Of course, the IMF needs to be watched vigilantly. Already it seems to be rolling back some of its panicked initial rhetoric and saying that “beyond the emergency phase” it may go back to business as usual. Very powerful interests want the IMF to continue to dance to their tune.

But thanks to all the ordinary Europeans and Americans who pushed back, Haiti will not be IMF-ed up now, in its darkest hour. Not this time. Not these people. Not again. These should be the first baby-steps of a campaign to finally stop the IMF’s poverty-promoting machine steam-rolling across continents. On the political Richter scale, that would mark a 7.0 – for the causes of democracy and justice.

(For a compelling account of how IMF policy has affected Jamaica, see Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt listing on the Human Goods “Films” tab.)

(t-shirt worn by anti-trafficking volunteers in Miami)

Millions of football fans are celebrating the biggest American sporting victory of the year tonight.  But in the alleys of Miami, host of this year’s Super Bowl, just a handful of social workers, police, and volunteers are roaming around in the shadows, looking for underage girls who might have been trafficked to the city for the big game.

It’s one of the darker, and unfortunately pretty typical, side effects of major events in this country.  Large gatherings of men — conventions, concerts, and football games too — with money to spend, time to kill, and fun to be had present tantalizing markets to those with human wares to hawk.

Brad Dennis, director of search operations for KlaasKIDS Foundation, told CNN:

It’s just that party culture.  Super Bowl is an entertainment event and everyone wants to come down and party and when you throw that mix into an area with lots money to spend, it’s a traffickers’ playground.

Ernie Allen, of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, explained to The Miami Herald:

This is truly an example of supply and demand.  They use these kids as commodities for sale or trade, and go to where demand is the greatest, and where they can make the most money. That’s why they follow events like the Super Bowl.

Efforts to intervene in the selling of children to Super Bowl tourists during last year’s event in Tampa were most successful in the hotel industry.  Employees who had been educated about the dangers and the signs of underage prostitution were able to recognize when it was happening and tip off law enforcement.

This year, activists in Miami were even more prepared.  Volunteers have been printing fliers, making t-shirts, and spreading the word since weeks before the game.  Since Wednesday, they’ve been scouring the streets, on the lookout for young girls “in the life.”  In some cases, there are photographs of missing children, many of them runaways, whom volunteers hope might be spotted.  The average runaway in America is propositioned by a pimp or a customer within 72 hours of hitting the streets.

If it all sounds quite disheartening, brace yourself for this summer’s World Cup games in South Africa.  They’re bigger, and longer, and they draw more fans.  NGOs, law enforcement, and journalists already fear, and are even reporting, influxes of women and children to South Africa for the purposes of sexual exploitation.  Time reports that girls are already being sold by gangs in the country.  You can also check out the Human Goods post on sex tourism to Beijing during the 2008 Olympic games.

What you can do:  Support organizations that work with women and children in sexual slavery (see blogroll: NGO/Activism).

Most importantly — talk about it. Talk to your friends, talk to your family, bring it up in your churches and neighborhoods.  Admittedly, it’s a drag of a topic to drudge up when everyone’s in the mood for a good time, but the first step to effecting change in the world, and alleviating suffering, is acknowledging that something is really profoundly wrong.  If the conversation inspires even one person to just squint through the sexually loaded marketing of young women to consumers in the Super Bowl advertisements alone, then, well, that’s something.

If you have news about a missing minor, The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children runs a 24-hour hotline at 1-800-THE-LOST

I’ve spent much of the past two decades visiting factories where our stuff is made and dumps where it is disposed of around the world. After years of seeing firsthand the often hidden environmental, social, and health impacts of all the stuff we consume, I’ve developed a sort of neurosis: When I look at a product—a disposable coffee cup, a cell phone, a piece of clothing—its entire life cycle flashes before my eyes.

Instinctively, some part of my brain runs through images of oil fields in Ogoniland, garment factories in Port-au-Prince, factories in Gujarat, ships crisscrossing the ocean, and dumps here and abroad. It’s a fascinating neurosis to have, but to be honest, it has been lonely sometimes. While many friends and colleagues work on more photogenic issues like rainforest preservation or more visible issues like social inequity, I have often been alone in my fascination with trash. No longer.

It’s true: I do love exploring garbage, visiting dumps, and rifling through trash cans in new cities. But for me, garbage never has been the end point; it is an entree to much deeper economic, social, and environmental issues—the same issues that many are working to address. Over the years, I’ve learned that we can’t solve the waste problem by working only on waste. We must examine the economic and cultural forces that drive such massive waste production and somehow make it seem tolerable. In the same way, we can’t solve the climate crisis, resource depletion, or social injustice until we see what’s driving those problems. And when we look deep enough, we see that many of the drivers are the same.

Looking deeper can be hard and intimidating. It is much easier to call for a forest to be saved or a toxic chemical to be eliminated from consumer products than it is to ask the tough questions about how we’re treating each other and the planet.

In late 2007, Free Range Studios and I made an animated film, The Story of Stuff, which sought to spark conversation about the hidden impacts of the stuff we consume. Our hope was that The Story of Stuff would inspire viewers to think about the underlying connections among a range of issues and to think big about alternatives beyond individual campaigns. Since we posted the film online at www.storyofstuff.org, viewers in some 200 countries and territories have visited the site more than 7.5 million times. The film has been shown in universities, churches, and community meetings, and even on television. The response has amazed me in two ways.

First, I’m inspired and delighted by the breadth and volume of positive feedback. We’ve been flooded with emails from people for whom the film resonated. Many have written to thank us for articulating something they felt but couldn’t quite express. We’ve heard from people new to these issues, who tell us that the film turned on a light switch of awareness, motivating them to rethink their relationship to stuff. And we’ve heard from longtime activists who’ve worked on one piece of the materials economy for years without thinking much about the broader system.

One day I received emails from both an Oxford University economics professor and a fourth-grader from Michigan. The professor, originally from India, explained that in Punjab there is an expression: to enclose the ocean in a bowl. “The Story of Stuff,” he said “covers so much that it encloses the ocean in a bowl.” The fourth-grader, who had seen the film in class, said The Story of Stuff was “totally awesome” and filled the page with dozens of electronic smiley faces.

We’ve heard from people who have incorporated The Story of Stuff into teaching curricula, who have written songs or created puppet shows based on it, and who have organized neighborhood stuff swaps inspired by the newfound desire to have less stuff and more community.

While I once felt like a marginalized garbage-nut, I now realize I am part of a massive community of people, all over the world, who know deep in our hearts that something is wrong. Our economy is off track. Half the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 a day, unable to meet basic needs, while a handful of people amass obscene levels of wealth. Our industries convert the planet’s resources into wastelands while pumping out toxic chemicals so pervasive that they are now present in every body, even in those of newborn infants. And our culture encourages us to find fulfillment in rampant consumerism rather than compassion and connection.

The outpouring of support has shown me that many, many people recognize these problems and want change—enough to actually make that change! It’s not just a few little pockets of us in eco-hotspots. All around the world, parents, students, farmers, activists, religious leaders, writers, engineers, scientists, fisher folk, businesspeople, and many others are standing up, speaking out, calling for a new kind of economy and culture that serves the planet and its people, rather than sacrifices these for the economic benefit of the few. So, in spite of the dire data on the state of the planet, I find myself more full of hope than ever. I am not alone.

We are not alone.

At the same time, another response has surprised me. This one is much smaller, but makes up in viciousness what it lacks in both size and critical reflection. Since the film’s launch, both it and I have been accused of being anti-American and of terrorizing viewers. I’ve even been called “Marx in a ponytail.” I’ve received hate mail, with messages such as “you should move to a mud hut in Afghanistan if you don’t like stuff” and “you’re a traitor for questioning consumption.” There’s even a blog discussing the best physical violence I deserve for daring to raise these issues.

These responses make me sad, not so much for me, but for the sorry state of discourse in this country. What does it mean for our country if one must endure such hatred for raising important issues about resource depletion, toxic chemicals, worker safety, economic justice, and overconsumption? Why is it not seen as a service to our country to point out where we’ve gone astray, where our economic and industrial system is no longer serving the vast majority of the country’s—or the planet’s—people? Why is it so unacceptable to say, “We could do better”? Isn’t saying so a sign of respect? Of hope?

I know we can do better. We can design and make our products without trashing the environment or our health. We can share the planet’s resources more fairly. We can replace a culture of out-of-control consumerism with one of wonder and appreciation for this phenomenal planet and the people with whom we share it.

Now that I know how many people share this vision, I am more confident than ever that we can bring about this transition. And now that I’ve seen the viciousness of the resistance firsthand, I see more clearly the structural and cultural obstacles we’ll face.

But for those seeking to make the world a better place, facing resistance is nothing new. Every leader I admire throughout history has faced far greater threats than Fox News talk show hosts. We’ll succeed if we keep our focus on the end goal—building a sustainable and just society.

A first step in that direction is advancing a rational, informed, and respectful conversation about what is and is not working in our current economic and industrial system. There are many things that simply aren’t working, yet these issues remain beyond the attention of mainstream media and elected officials. We’ve got to turn up the volume on these conversations and refuse to let the attacks on us stifle discussion and dissent.

(Annie Leonard)

So write articles and blogs, ask questions in classes and church, visit elected officials, and raise these issues everywhere you go. With climate change as severe as it is, the future of the planet as we know it is at stake. Now would be a good time to get people to start talking about solutions. The Story of Stuff Project is going to continue doing our part to turn up the volume on these discussions. We’re partnering with allied organizations to produce new films and launch an interactive website that allows viewers to share information and take collective action.

We need to be courageous, we need to support each other moving forward, and we need to stay focused, think big, and love strong. And, in doing so, we won’t be alone.

Read more at Yes Magazine.

They go and capture other people’s children. They bring the heart and the blood directly here to take to the spirits.

In January the BBC aired an episode of Newsnight on what it claims is a rise in human sacrifices and ritual child killings in Uganda:

One man said he had clients who had captured children and taken their blood and body parts to his shrine, while another confessed to killing at least 70 people including his own son.

The fairly shocking report, which has received sharp criticism for what academics have argued is sloppy journalism, is the latest in a series from sources both within Uganda and worldwide on increasing numbers of children being kidnapped and ritualistically murdered by “witch-doctors” in the past year.  The trend is allegedly spurred by an intensifying pursuit of wealth amongst Ugandans, and hence caught up in the wider imbroglio of globalization.

(A re-enacted demonstration of a sacrificial ritual performed for the BBC crew)

In February of last year — after a gruesome lead-in describing how a young mother found the mutilated body of her beheaded infant in a polythene bag (which, curiously, was not linked to witchcraft in the end) — Uganda’s The Indepedent blamed ritual murders on poverty, inadequate legislation, and even lazy parenting:

Negligent parents leave their children with uncouth friends, relatives, or even strangers, who in turn connive with witches to kill the children for money.

Timothy Opobo, a program coordinator at the Africa Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect claimed that money was a motivating factor, citing children’s purity as the reason they are so attractive as sacrifices.

In September, the Guardian quoted Moses Binoga, commissioner of Uganda’s anti-human sacrifice and trafficking task force, who confirmed that sacrificial killings were on the rise, with parents even selling their own children as sacrifices.

Yes, it all sounds very spooky. Now take a look at the BBC’s film.

Journalist Tim Whewell interviews a reformed witch-doctor in Northern Uganda, who now campaigns to convert similar practitioners to renounce the trade in children’s blood and body parts.  He accompanies him on a conversion and even looks on as a shrine that supposedly houses dark spirits is burned in the shrubbery.

Several British academics and anthropologists have taken issue with what they call the report’s simplistic, sensational, and irresponsible handling of what is a remarkably complex issue.  When blown out of proportion and taken out of context, they argue, such a topic is damaging not only to those who might fall victim to mob hysteria in Uganda but also to the status of Africa in the Western mind.  Propagating rumors of exotic and primitive practices like witchcraft, child sacrifice, and ritual killings only sets back the work of those who seek to free Africa from the darkly fascinated and salacious assumptions of popular imagination.

In the London Review of Books blog, anthropologist Adam Kuper counters the overeager claims of Whewell’s report with a level-headed summary of the issue:

Most African herbalists cause no more damage than dispensers of alternative medicines on our high streets. Every now and then, however, a sinister practitioner will advise a very special client that while roots and animal parts are useful, the most potent medicines are made from human blood, liver, spleen and heart. Yes, it is dreadful, he whispers, but there are unscrupulous people about, and I have heard that your rival is in the market for the stuff. What choice do you have? When one big man is persuaded, his peers are immediately alerted. In consequence medicine murders tend to crop up in clusters, the clients typically rich and powerful men. The anti-human sacrifice and trafficking unit of the Uganda police recorded 26 cases in 2008 and 28 in 2009, and a number of suspects were brought to trial.

It is the rich elite, Kuper argues, not the poor, who can get away with murder, occasionally offering a human sacrifice to sanctify and ensure one’s fortune.  What is perhaps of more immediate concern, Kuper and his colleagues suggest, is the hysteria often provoked in atmospheres of intense hardship where much is at stake and truth gets muddled.  Sensationalizing what Kuper calls rumors can turn into, well, a witch hunt.  Literally.

When it comes to the practice of and battle against witchcraft, Africa’s recent history is undoubtedly fraught.  In Northern Uganda itself, Joseph Kony, who gained notoriety for abducting children to be initiated as soldiers in his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has been accused of communing with spirits and practicing ritualistic witchcraft.  And let’s not forget the tens of thousands of children in the DRC and Nigeria who were suspected as witches and sorcerers, subjected to brutal exorcisms and ostracism from their own families and churches as a result of mass panic.

In a published letter to BBC editor Peter Rippon, Professor Tim Allen of the London School of Economics warns of the aftermath of the LRA’s reign of Northern Uganda:

Accusations of witchcraft will be on the rise as hundreds of thousands of people leave the displacement camps and struggle to make ends meet.  That was the case in the 1980s when the population of West Nile returned from Sudan, and it is again now in the central north.

In response to the published complaints, Whewell and Rippon cite the evidence and very real suffering of their interviewees and argue that the problem is indeed significant and growing and deserves media coverage.  (For a very long correspondence between all parties on the topic, see the London Review of Books Blog).

Indeed, Uganda is not the only place where witch doctors are accused of trafficking in human body parts to gain spiritual leverage.  Tanzania has also been in the news for the apparent rise in murders of albinos, whose bodies are believed by some to have powerful magical properties:

Surely this report is flawed as well, but it seems that frenetic reporting environments and pressurized deadlines, which obviously foster journalism that is much shallower than work nurtured by twenty years of research is, are reflective of the amount of time and attention the public is able to give to any item on the inundated daily menu of issues.  How deep do any of us really get in ten minutes?

I recommend an ethnography.

Legendary writer, activist, historian, and teacher Howard Zinn died yesterday, at 87 years old, of a heart attack.  Perhaps most famous for his groundbreaking reworking of American history, A People’s History of the United States, Zinn spent his life giving voice to those elbowed to the margins of society.  His retelling of both history and current events illuminated the perspectives of the powerless, fervently asserting that history need not be dominated by the winners.

Democracy Now! ran a tribute to Zinn to celebrate his life and work, speaking to colleagues and friends Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, and Naomi Klein.  Click to watch.

Ben Skinner, an anti-slavery activist and journalist, writes in Time:

Two minutes later, the quake smashed open the building, and the top three floors pitched northward, hurling Bill down nearly 80 feet onto a neighbor’s concrete roof, where he landed briefly, apparently on his back. Almost immediately, he tumbled onto a tin-roofed shack and then to the ground. A neighbor later said she saw Bill “flying like a bird.” In his last moments of consciousness, Bill saw the top three concrete floors of the orphanage, along with a massive wind charger, hurtling toward him. Instinctively, he rolled out of the way and grabbed a clothesline, pulling himself into a corner before the cement crashed exactly where he had fallen. His legs wouldn’t work, so he crawled for several feet over broken glass before passing out.

Skinner, who met Nathan several years ago while working on his award-winning account of modern-day slavery in Haiti and around the world, A Crime So Monstrous, immediately tried to reach his friend. Skinner and Nathan have a special bond, as Nathan, only 21 years old at the time of their meeting, saved the American journalist’s life when he contracted malaria in Haiti.

When Skinner found out what had happened, he set out for Haiti to save his friend.  Check out his compelling account here.

Skinner has recently reported on the influx of sex slaves to South Africa in preparation for the arrival of tens of thousands of soccer fans who will doubtless be in the mood for a good time at this summer’s World Cup Games.

For more information on child slavery in Haiti, and Skinner’s work, watch Nightline’s special, How to Buy a Child in Ten Hours

In Haiti’s unstable post-quake atmosphere, at least one industry is poised to flourish. For those who buy and sell children for sex and cheap labor, Haiti is ripe with opportunity,

Nicolette Grams, staff member of the International Justice Mission, writes in the Atlantic.  Grams uses her article to illuminate the escalating threat of child trafficking through the lens of her own experience working with vulnerable and impoverished populations in India.  She reminds us that among the less visible consequences of previous natural disasters around the world — from the 2004 tsunami to the devastating flooding of India’s poorest state, Bihar, in 2008 — is the opportunity for traffickers to pluck children up right out of the wreckage:

Rescuing victims of slavery and sexual exploitation are our [IJM's] specialties, and natural disasters unfailingly bring us new business …

In Haiti, as in India, human trafficking is a problem at the best of times. Even without the pandemonium unleashed by a 7.0 earthquake, an estimated quarter-million Haitian children are trafficked within the country each year. These slaves, known as restavecs, are typically sold or given away to new families by their own impoverished parents. Physical and sexual abuse is common for restavecs. Many owners use the girls as in-house prostitutes, sending them to live on the street if they become pregnant.

Not all of these trafficked children end up as domestic slaves within Haiti—plenty of others are promised work in the Dominican Republic but are instead sold to work in agricultural fields or brothels across the border. Poor children who escape a life in bondage most often end up in street gangs; if they are fortunate, they may be accepted into overcrowded orphanages.

Nevertheless, as Grams points out, Haitians and foreign relief workers are hardly in a position to adequately monitor and protect children:

Keeping an eye out for suspicious strangers would seem to be the least of the nation’s problems. With most of Haiti’s hospitals reduced to piles of rubble, aid groups like Doctors Without Borders are struggling to set up inflatable care centers in parking lots. Prisoners are escaping from their destroyed cells, and the riots surrounding food trucks have stretched police forces to their limits.

Meanwhile, an entirely new chunk of Haiti’s population has become homeless over night. Even with aid pouring in from around the world, essential resources like food and medicine are enormously scarce on the streets of Haiti. But for predators looking for boys and girls to sell for labor and sex, Haiti is the right place to be.

While earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade,

Tracy Kidder wrote in The New York Times, referring to last week’s cataclysmic quake in Haiti.  Kidder, who has written about the work of the legendary Dr. Paul Farmer in rural Haiti, explains in his article what many others have also voiced about the recent tragedy:  That the damage wrought in Haiti last week is only a more dramatic and pronounced shake up of long-term systemic fault lines and fissures that have kept people vulnerable and impoverished for years.

Kidder traces the problem even further back than the nation’s inception, explaining Haiti’s history of colonization, slavery, and debt.  Under French rule, the colony practiced outright importation of African slaves, who famously revolted and emancipated themselves in 1804 (long before American slaves were emancipated).  And ever since, Kidder writes,

Haitians have been punished … for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)

Indeed, in The Guardian, Peter Hallward calls the international treatment of Haiti “the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.”

Haitians were forced to pay “reparations” to the French, their colonizers and slave-holders, for investments lost in its former slave colony.  Haiti has since suffered numerous blockades and coups (including those sponsored by the U.S.), in addition to dealing with disease, poverty, and — yes, still — slavery.

The collective debt that Haitian slave descendants have been saddled with since claiming their “freedom” has mired the nation in policies and structural adjustment plans that have largely damaged Haiti’s rural economy (as in much of the global South) and triggered waves of migrants to the cities seeking work (as in much of the global South).  All the while, the country struggles to pay its debt to the world as cheap foreign food flows in, annihilating its Haitian competition (as in much of the global South).

This, in a country whose impoverished population is known to feed their children dirt cakes mixed with vegetable shortening to soothe hunger pangs when there are no other options.

Hallward writes,

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more “natural” or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.

Hundreds of thousands living in desperately sub-standard housing.  Often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines.  Enter the earthquake.

In his January 14 New York Times column David Brooks puts the disaster in perspective:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

Bill Quigley of the Center for Constitutional Rights told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!:

[Those who live in the slums] got there because they or their parents or grandparents were pushed out of Haiti’s countryside, where most Haitians used to live. And they were pushed out of there by policies thirty years ago, when it was decided by the international experts that Haiti’s economic salvation lay in assembly manufacture plants. And in order to advance that, it was decided that Haiti needed to have a captive labor force in the cities. So a whole bunch of aid policies, trade policies and political policies were implemented, designed to move people from the countryside to places like Martissant and the hills …

(Click here for Goodman and Quigley’s full conversation)

With millions of dollars of aid and international attention focused on Haiti, then, what should happen next?

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,warns of the global trend of manipulating such disasters to implement even worse policies that would economically oppress Haitians further.  She issued a “disaster capitalism alert” on her website asking the public to “stop them [those who would take advantage of the crisis to rush in and implement exploitative economic policies] before they shock again.”

Quigley, on CommonDreams.org, suggests ten things the U.S. can and should do for Haiti now:

One. Allow all Haitians in the US to work. The number one source of money for poor people in Haiti is the money sent from family and workers in the US back home. Haitians will continue to help themselves if given a chance. Haitians in the US will continue to help when the world community moves on to other problems.

Two. Do not allow US military in Haiti to point their guns at Haitians. Hungry Haitians are not the enemy. Decisions have already been made which will militarize the humanitarian relief – but do not allow the victims to be cast as criminals. Do not demonize the people.

Three. Give Haiti grants as help, not loans. Haiti does not need any more debt. Make sure that the relief given helps Haiti rebuild its public sector so the country can provide its own citizens with basic public services.

Four. Prioritize humanitarian aid to help women, children and the elderly. They are always moved to the back of the line. If they are moved to the back of the line, start at the back.

Five. President Obama can enact Temporary Protected Status for Haitians with the stroke of a pen. Do it. The US has already done it for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Sudan and Somalia. President Obama should do it on Martin Luther King Day.

Six. Respect Human Rights from Day One. The UN has enacted Guiding Principles for Internally Displaced People. Make them required reading for every official and non-governmental person and organization. Non governmental organizations like charities and international aid groups are extremely powerful in Haiti – they too must respect the human dignity and human rights of all people.

Seven. Apologize to the Haitian people everywhere for Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.

Eight. Release all Haitians in US jails who are not accused of any crimes. Thirty thousand people are facing deportations. No one will be deported to Haiti for years to come. Release them on Martin Luther King day.

Nine. Require that all the non-governmental organizations which raise money in the US be transparent about what they raise, where the money goes, and insist that they be legally accountable to the people of Haiti.

Ten. Treat all Haitians as we ourselves would want to be treated.

For more information about how Haiti’s current child slaves have been affected by the earthquake, check out Change.org’s End Human Trafficking blog.

To further understand Haiti’s restavek, or child slave, system — watch below.