Human Goods

(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: IRIN)

As presidential elections in Cote d’Ivoire approach, IRIN reported that the West African country has seen a spike in child abductions.  Only in this case, it’s not just for sex and labor trafficking.  IRIN is attributing it to “political hopefuls using traditional myths of human sacrifice to improve their electoral chances will fuel an already significant market for stolen children.”

In this ravaged country, children are already trafficked for their organs, for sex, and for labor.  I guess for ole fashioned sacrifice too.

IRIN interviewed a spokesperson for the country’s police:

Organ traffickers, who slice out hearts, kidneys, lungs and other body parts for sale to medical facilities and soothsayers are the main culprits, Bi said. The children are also taken to work in the sex trade, for use by illegal adoption rings, and for work on plantations, he said.

Dateline aired an episode on Tuesday inspired by E. Benjamin Skinner’s book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery.

Dan Harris’ “How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours” follows the same path Skinner took in his book in going from Manhattan to Haiti to purchase a child slave, or restavek.   The two experiences of attempting to buy children are almost identical, which just reinforces Skinner’s point of how easy it is.

Looks like the FBI is really doing something about child prostitution. In a dramatic sweep across 16 U.S. cities, the Bureau, in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, rescued 21 children from prostitution rings and arrested 389 perpetrators.

Susan Saulny of The New York Times reported,

The sweep was part of an annual roundup to draw attention to the issue. It marked the fifth anniversary of the Innocence Lost National Initiative, which was undertaken by the F.B.I. to address child prostitution and has led to the conviction of 308 people on a variety of federal and state charges. In all, 433 exploited children have been rescued as a result of the initiative, federal officials said.

At a press conference, FBI director Robert S. Mueller III attributed the rise of children in prostitution in part to the popularity of social networking sites and the host of problems that ride in on the internet wave

According to ABC News, the government hopes that,

some of the girls and women who were arrested in the sweeps will provide more information to go after key organizers and pimps…

… which leads me to question why such girls were arrested, and what will happen to them if they don’t cooperate in prosecution. For women, especially those who have been controlled by pimps since childhood,
who are asked to testify against the men who have manipulated and terrorized them for years, that can be a lethal prospect. Hmmm….

The Not for Sale Campaign launched a tool they’re calling a Slavery Map, which allows people to report incidents of slavery around the United States and the world.  You can click on any area and see where cases of human trafficking have been reported, including who reported them and what happened.

It’s a clever way to make learning about modern-day slavery interactive, since you can create an account and publish an incident if you encounter one.

(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:

(source: Pravda)

Pravda reported that a formerly homeless man escaped slave owners who had been holding him in a barn, forcing him to work with other slaves on a farm.  Authorities shadowed the man until he was caught by his pursuers at a bus stop, and then followed them all back to the farm to discover this:

The policemen visited the people who kept the man in a suburb. They found the slave with his neck chained and tightened with bolts and wires. The prisoner was bound to a metal tube by the other end of the chain.

Apparently, the perpetrators had been luring homeless people into slavery.

(A 13-year-old who was gang-raped by UN Peacekeepers; Source: BBC News)

Save the Children’s been calling the actions of three dismissed workers “a sackable offense.” The men had been having sex with 17-year-old girls in areas where Save the Children provides relief.

After conducting research in Southern Sudan, Ivory Coast, and Haiti, Save the Children is calling on aid organizations worldwide and the UN to investigate widespread accusations of child sexual abuse.

The BBC reports one 13-year-old girl who claims she was gang-raped by 10 UN Peacekeepers in Ivory Coast. “Then they just left me there bleeding,” she said.

Save the Children’s report included incidents of survival sex, rape, child prostitution, pornography, and sex trafficking in children.

IRIN reported on the NGO’s findings, too. A girl from Haiti said:

My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises,” said a 15 year-old girl from Haiti whose testimony is included in the report. “They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes (US$2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said no, but some of the girls did it and got the money.

This kind of abuse is nothing new. Peacekeepers and aid workers operate in regions afflicted with natural disasters and manmade conflicts. The often politically unstable and socially chaotic situations put children at risk of abuse.

While everyone agrees it’s a minority of aid workers and Peacekeepers who are perpetrating abuse, they’re also saying that there has to be zero tolerance.

The bottom line is: The world asks devastated people for their trust, to trust that big fancy UN, and foreign aid, to keep the peace and save their children.  And trust, when tampered with, can get pretty slippery.

See this table published by the BBC:

Recently I had coffee with Ben Skinner, author of the new book “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern-Day Slavery.” We talked about his experience as a writer communicating the grief of others, about why the anti-slavery movement does make economic sense, and what’s being done to fight it. The conversation is broken into a couple of different articles for the Medill News Service. Just click on them to read more.

PART I: Eradicating slavery is not just moral, it makes economic sense too

The Roman Empire, at its height, was home to 2 million slaves. During the peak of antebellum slavery, 4 million people living in the American South had been bought or bred into slavery.

But in today’s world, we leave those figures in the dust. There are as many as 27 million slaves in the modern global village.

Author E. Benjamin Skinner dedicated the last 5 years of his life to finding out why. His new book, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern-Day Slavery,” spans five continents, exploring what the lives of today’s slaves look like, who it is that’s enslaving them, and the role they play in the world economy.

“The devaluation of human life is incredibly pronounced,” Skinner writes, observing the gulf between the value of an American slave in 1850 (about $40,000, adjusted for inflation) and the value of a 9-year-old Haitian girl he is able to bargain down to $50.

Although he didn’t actually buy her, it helped him learn how recognizing and understanding slavery is like going “through the looking glass.” He sat down with Medill Reports to talk about what it looks like from the other side.

(READ MORE…)

Skinner got his first real exposure to modern-day slavery while working for Newsweek in South Sudan. (Photo courtesy of Ben Skinner)

PART II: One author gives voice to the voiceless, and finds his own along the way

E. Benjamin Skinner has stood in the parched desert of Southern Sudan, where thousands of people over the past two decades have fallen prey to violent slave-raiders.

He’s waited in the murky courtyard of a makeshift Romanian brothel, noticing the way sewage squeezed through clear plastic piping on the outside of a building where pimps were forcing makeup onto a mentally challenged girl they tried to sell him.

He’s witnessed the way Haitian child slaves double as sex toys because they’re “there for that,” and the way generations of Indian untouchables are bonded to the endless sweaty work of smashing rocks into sand.

And he’s seen how these slaves are sometimes taken to the United States, too—raped and enslaved in a Florida suburb.

He has seen all of these things. He has known those who survived them, and those who probably won’t. And now he’s stepped up to the challenge of how to tell their stories to the world.

Skinner talked to Medill Reports about the writer’s responsibility to communicate suffering with sensitivity and truth.

(READ MORE…)

(map by Christa Hillstrom and Kevin Janowiak)

Part III: Go deeper

The more in depth response to the question of economic sustainability:

Medill Reports: Here in Chicago, the Archdiocese has an anti-trafficking task force and one leader has pointed out what an economically sustainable industry slavery is. And on the other hand, he said, fighting it is not economically sustainable, it takes huge amounts of commitment, some reprioritizing of resources, and it has to be made an issue. Is that something you see as a challenge?

Ben Skinner: I think we have to change our conception of it here. We have to look at fighting slavery, and harnessing some of the lessons that the good sustainable development organizations have learned in fighting absolute poverty. And again, fighting the two things are different, but there are many, many things that are similar. I mean, we’re talking about access to credit, and credit that doesn’t come from a human trafficker. And so, we’re talking about micro-credit organizations in some instances, and we’re talking about mini-credit organizations, because these people will have no collateral whatsoever. These are not people that would normally be found by the Grameen Bank or by BRAC or by these other organizations that deal with this.

But at the same time, what I found in Northern India were examples of credit unions that had grown up around these quarries that were entirely self-sustaining. The key to freedom here was there would be one or two people were able to pull together, you know, just one or two rupees… In other words, individually they would not be getting paid anything beyond subsistence but collectively they might be able to save one or two rupees a month. And they put that into a collective fund and eventually come up with enough money for one of them to buy a plot of land or something like this. I mean, a tiny plot of land. And then from that plot of land, that’s a piece of collateral. There’s also a much more effective way of dong this. This is what was going on in the 90s and it took years in order to get two people out of slavery, and then those one or two people out of slavery could help the others organize.

The much more effective way of doing it is to get good legal representation that presses the cause of the slaves with the district magistrates in India, and other local officials in other parts of South Asia, and says, Ok here’s the situation: You’ve got these quarry contractors who have this lease from the Raja to quarry on this land. The thing is, it’s forest land, it’s not owned by the Raja. The largest landowner in India is the state. So these quarry contractors are there illegally.

Now even if you’re not going to stop quarrying from going on in forest land, which you should be, let’s make this fair and give the workers, the people who have lived here for generations, title to the land (or anyway, in this case lease to the land). So this is not even a question of their owning the land – it should be a question of their owning the land—but it’s getting lease to the land so they can work it. And once they get that, then they can keep the products of their own labor. And it’s a legal process that, you know, given the Indian courts it could drag on for decades, or if there are good lawyers who press the case and if you get the right magistrates involved you can get this done in a matter of months. In the cases I looked at in India, they managed to get this through in a matter of months.

So, legal rights, property rights, matter a great deal. If the private property rights of the poorest of the poor are respected, recognized, and enshrined by the state, if those who have squatted on that land for generations are given title to that land, they will for the first time in their lives have access to an asset. And with that asset, they can leverage capital. They can leverage credit. And slowly, they can begin to build wealth and pull themselves out of slavery.

MR: I imagine that people here, when they hear how relatively little money is needed to pull people out of slavery, want to know what they can do to contribute. What do you tell people?

BS: Well, the simplest thing, even if you’re not going to dedicate your life to this or you’re not going to go overseas to free and rehabilitate slaves, the critical thing is contributing to some of the very good organizations that do work on this. And the organizations that have dealt with modern-day slavery, some of them have been around for centuries, in the case of Anti-Slavery International. Anti-Slavery International is the oldest human rights organization in the world. And I’ve been really involved with Free the Slaves.

Read an excerpt of Ben’s book