The Protection Project - Global Trafficking in Women

Global Trafficking in Women

Modern Day Slavery and the Movement to End It

International Woman’s Day – Bradley University

March 8, 2004

It is an honor to be here at Bradley University and to celebrate International Women’s Day. It is a double honor to be able to address the all-important topic of trafficking in persons, and to participate in conversations designed to galvanize the momentum of a caring community in order to abolish modern slavery.

International Woman’s Day

International Woman’s Day has a rich legacy that those of us interested in social transformation would do well to remember. International Woman’s Day was founded to encourage international solidarity among the female proletariat in their struggle for equal economic and political rights. The focus was on structural social, economic and political change for women everywhere. With its roots strongly embedded in the International Conference of Socialist Women, the driving goals included the promise of suffrage for women and social security and protection for mothers and children. This second is particularly compelling, as we will see. Women and children today are easy prey to traffickers in large part because of an absence of adequate social protection mechanisms within their own governments.

The most known International Woman’s Day celebration, marking the beginning of an institutionalized practice, was held on March 8, 1917, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Interestingly enough, and without being able to make a direct correlation, the Russian Revolution began only several days later. Since then, International Woman’s Day has served as a reminder of the power embodied by female solidarity to bring about change on behalf of women. The United Nations gave IWD official recognition in 1975. As an aside, I would like to point out that the original International Woman’s Day was planned to coincide with the Jewish celebration of Purim – the holiday commemorating the liberation of the Jewish people through courageous efforts of young Queen Esther. This year, International Woman’s day once again occurs on Purim.

The Trafficking of Women – Modern Day Slavery

Today, I would like to talk about the trafficking of women and children as modern day slavery, some of the causes of trafficking, and about some of the initiatives, both global and domestic, to prevent it.

I will begin by describing modern trafficking, providing you with numbers, patterns, and forms of trafficking. I will talk about why trafficking occurs, looking at both countries of origin and countries of destination, such as the United States. And finally, I would like to look at measures to combat trafficking. I would hope that, by the end of this discussion, you would be able to think of our own place within some of these efforts, individually and as a community.

The Scope of the Problem of Modern Day Slavery

Today, an estimated 27 million people live in slavery. There are more slaves alive today than all the people taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. Slaves are used in agricultural work, factory work, and in sweatshops run by large international corporations. They are exploited in the commercial sex markets, legal and illegal, around the world.

According to most recent US government statistics, between 800,000 and 900,000 people are trafficked annually across international borders. These numbers do not include the hundreds of thousands of people, primarily children, who are trafficked within their own countries, primarily in countries of Latin America and Africa. What are the purposes of this trade in human beings? Individuals are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation and forced labors, which means they are forced into prostitution or other forms of commercial sexual exploitation which can include strip clubs, massage parlors and pornography studios. They can be found in sweat shops or begging in the streets of our large cities. Children are trafficked for illicit adoption or forcibly conscripted into military service. There is also a growing market for trafficking in human organs.

Trafficking in persons is truly a global problem. It is unfortunately a fair assessment to say that every country in the world is affected by human trafficking as either a country of origin, transit or destination. Let me give you a few examples.

Globally, UNICEF estimates that over 200,000 children are trafficked into conditions of slavery to work in domestic and other forms of labor. Thousands of women and girls from South and Southeast Asia are trafficked to Saudi Arabia and forced into prostitution and domestic labor. The expansion of the sex industries in Southeast Asia is well known. UNICEF reports that between 244,000 and 325,000 women and children are victims of commercial sexual exploitation in Thailand. In Cambodia, at least 55,000 women and children are working as sex slaves, 35 percent of whom are younger than 16 years of age. Thousands of women and girls are trafficked from the countries of Eastern Europe to the United Arab Emirates, to Israel, and to other Western European countries for sexual exploitation.

The United States is also complicit. Between 18,000 and 20,000 men, women and children are trafficked into this country, from over 49 different countries. At the Protection Project, we collect information from the international press on trafficking activity around the world and in our own country. In the past three weeks, we have seen stories about the trafficking of Latin American women to California, to Arizona and to Florida. A gang that seduced or kidnapped young women and then forced them into prostitution in US cities was recently arrested in New York. Recently, a trafficker was sentenced in Texas for bringing foreign women into this country. And a police officer from Wisconsin was charged with traveling to have sex with minors.

Traffickers are able to operate at low risk and maintain high profits. Because the supply is so great, they feel no need to care for their victims and treat them as easily replaceable commodities. The global community has yet to reverse this trend and return to the victims of modern slavery the basic human rights that have been taken away from them.

What is Trafficking in Persons?

In the United States, human trafficking is still cloaked in a lot of mystery. The very idea that human slavery could exist here is still difficult for people to comprehend. I am thankful for the many articles that have appeared in the papers recently, for the television documentaries, and for the inclusion of trafficking even in commercial films. I believe, however, for many Americans, that Trafficking remains a very murky issue.

What is it? I will begin by telling you what it is not.

Human Trafficking is not alien smuggling. We hear a lot about smuggling in the news – truckloads of people are found dead, or almost, after being abandoned in the backs of trucks in the middle of a desert, or in barrels of a ship, or stuffed into the backs of cars. Smuggling involves a contractual relationship between the person being smuggled and the coyotes, or other agents, for the purpose of crossing an international border. Once in the destination country, the relationships among the individuals end because the fee has been paid up front. According to international law, alien smuggling is a crime against the state.

Human trafficking is not another word for prostitution. Many of the more sensational cases to make headline news stories involve child prostitution and other forms of commercial exploitation including work in strip clubs, massage parlors and the pornography industry. Prostitution is certainly one horrific form of exploiting women and young girls. But this is not the only form of trafficking. Human beings are also trafficked to work in sweatshops, plantations and mines, as beggars, or as domestic servants. Children are trafficked for illicit adoption. Healthy young adults are trafficked for their organs.

So what is human trafficking? The United States Law defines severe forms of trafficking in persons as a) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under 18 years of age, or b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion, for the purpose of subjugation to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. Whereas smuggling is a crime against a state, human trafficking is a crime against the individual. When we are talking about human trafficking, we are talking about a deliberate violation of the rights and dignity of another human being.

Trafficking in persons is the exploitation of an individual for gain and profit. Trafficking in persons involves the payment of money or other goods for another person. Trafficking in persons means the buying and selling of human beings. This means that young children will labor for ten hours a day in the gold mines of Peru, deprived forever of dreams and hopes of a future. This means that girls as young as 7 and 8 years of age are forced to perform as many as ten sex acts a day in brothels in Cambodia. This means that women, who think they are responding to ads for legitimate jobs, leave their own countries to be trapped in lives of misery and abuse, sometimes forcibly addicted to drugs, all for the gain of another. This is happening around the world, as we speak, and in the United States, in March 2004.

Tragically, few countries recognize trafficking in persons as a serious crime, or the women and children as victims of a serious crime.

Why does trafficking occur?

In November I traveled to Moldova. One of the poorest countries of the former Soviet Union, it is now also one of the most significant countries of origin for trafficked women. I was there to speak at an international conference, along with a good friend, Nomi Levenkron, who is an anti trafficking activist from Israel. However, our most important assignment was not to participate in meetings and the development of action plans. Instead, we visited the a family whose daughter Ina, had been trafficked from her own country across the Sinai desert into Egypt and brutally exploited for a year before being apprehended in a brothel raid. She remained in Israel long enough to testify against her traffickers and, once the trial was over and the verdict reached, she was required by law to return to her home country. Ina chose instead to kill herself, leaving behind a mother, a younger sister, and a four-year-old daughter Violetta who was still angry that her mother was brought home in a box and she was not allowed to see her. Nomi and I spent several evenings in their small home. Although Ina’s presence was always felt, no one mentioned her name, or asked questions about her life in Israel. The specter of shame and dishonor was too great. Nomi and I were both taken by Ina’s younger sister, Gabriella, barely 18, with long blonde hair and big blue eyes, a hunger to know about the world outside of her small village, and a quiet despair about the prospects for her own future. After we left, we looked at each other and acknowledged what we both know to be terribly, tragically true: Gabby could be next.

Why was Ina trafficked, and why is Gabby at risk?

Gabby is at risk for the following reasons:
She is a woman and she is young
She comes from a country which has experienced, and is still experiencing, extreme political and economic chaos
She has no specific skills. Because her income, even a menial income as a worker in a candy factory, is needed to support the household, she has no opportunity to attend any vocational training programs – even if she could afford them.
Her father is an illegal migrant worker in France, and she lives in a female headed household
Twenty-five percent of the working age population of Moldova works outside of the country and for Gabby, as for her sister Ina, any hope for a future with any possibilities for financial security and personal fulfillment lies outside her own country.

What contributes to the risk? Many leaders in countries or origin are quick to say that poverty is at fault, that if only there were additional resources, they would have the problem. Certainly, poverty is a harsh reality. However, in combating modern slavery, it is important now as it was in the last centuries to look at the responsibilities of governments in perpetuating the practice. For, although slavery has been obliterated from the law books, many countries harbor deeply institutionalized practices which perpetuate this abuse.

Traffickers are extremely clever, and full of a lot of common sense. They do not traffic big strong men, because these fight back. They do not traffic daughters from two parent families in middle and upper class neighborhoods because fathers, brothers and uncles would mobilize manpower as well as resources to get their daughters back. Traffickers prey upon those who are most vulnerable in a culture: those women and children who have left without their traditional protectors and who have little means of providing for themselves.

Some of the factors that create conditions of vulnerability include collapsing economies, such as in Moldova. We also need to consider civil war, ethnic conflict and large-scale catastrophes, such as HIV/AIDS. Customs and trends which preclude young girls from getting an education, which push them into early marriages, and which marginalize them from the formal economic sectors are all factors which contribute to institutionalizing vulnerability. I will talk about two conditions of vulnerability and what can be done about them.

The greatest numbers of poor today are women. Leaps in global communication technologies, the progressive disappearance of national borders, and the internationalization of the world’s economies in the past 30 years have led to a technologically and financially sophisticated world. However, the benefits of such growth have not been evenly enjoyed by all countries or social groups. In particular, women constitute one group that has had relatively little access to the benefits of globalization. The rates of poverty worldwide have escalated, especially among women. For example:

One in every five families worldwide is headed by a woman. Households headed by women with young children in their care are among the poorest. Usually, children from such households remain poor.
The most important factors that contribute to the feminization of poverty include migration, divorce, civil strife, widowhood, and the notion that children are women’s responsibility and not the responsibility of the fathers.
In developing countries, 570 million rural women, or approximately 60% of the population, live below the poverty line.
Literacy rates around the world, especially in developing countries, are traditionally higher for men than for women. In India, Nepal, and Pakistan, three countries of origin, the male literacy rates for boys is more than double that of girls.
In some countries of Eastern Europe, notably Ukraine, women make up as much as 70% of the unemployed labor force.

Women are leaving their countries of origin in larger numbers. Migration for employment is increasing among developing countries as individuals recognize that in order to provide for their families, they must find work outside of their own countries. As a temporary measure, this is understandable. However, modern social and economic trends are beginning to institutionalize the practice with alarming social consequences. It is estimated that funds sent home to family members from workers overseas totals nearly 95 billion dollars annually. Mexico alone recorded remittances of $13.2 billion dollars last year, making emigrant money transfers the country’s second largest source of income, after oil exports. In Cape Verde, an archipelago of nine islands of the coast of West Africa, more than 20 percent of the national income comes from paychecks sent home by expatriates. In Senegal, another West African country, remittances make up almost ninety percent of income in households that receive transfers. This creates serious economic challenges because these countries have no incentive to develop their own economies, because they are waiting for money from the West.

This increase in migration has direct implications for the vulnerability of women and children, and can be defined as one of the factors contributing to the rise in human trafficking. Currently, over half of the world’s 129 million legal and illegal migrants are women. For them, migration can be escape from poverty, as well escape from an oppressive lifestyle: the lack of hope or opportunity, the need to care for older relatives, or an abusive home situation. Because migration is frequently considered the only option available to them, and because the lure of the West is so strong, young women are easily misled by glamorous job opportunities promising large salaries and glamorous life styles. Because poor migrant women are more easily controlled, they are susceptible to the exploitation that is commonly involved in trafficking.

Finally Gabby is at risk because there is a demand for cheap labor and cheap sex, and the demand is fueled in large part by the countries of the developed world.

What is to be done, and how do we think about the problem?

Despite the pervasive nature of the problem of trafficking in persons (and I can guarantee that it will only continue to grow), governments around the world have been making progress in addressing the issue.

The international framework to combat trafficking in persons is based on a three-pronged approach, which includes prevention of trafficking activities, prosecution of the perpetrators of the crime, and protection of the victims.

The prosecution of traffickers must continue in order to demonstrate the seriousness of the offense and to serve as a deterrent to future traffickers. In the United States, we have made substantial progress in this area, and there are currently 148 cases being investigated.

Protection of Victims of Trafficking involves, first and foremost, the recognition that individuals who have been trafficked are not criminals, even if they have entered a country with false documents. Protection involves recognizing that victims of trafficking are victims of a violent crime and, as such, have rights that need to be protected. In the US, we have identified these rights as the right to safety, privacy, information, legal representation, to be heard in court, to compensation, to medical assistance, to social assistance, to seek residence, and to return to their own country. Our own US law has provided for generous treatment for victims of trafficking in each of these areas.

Prevention is the most essential component of any plan to combat trafficking. Prevention is traditionally thought of as public awareness programs and education campaigns designed to alert prospective victims on the dangers of trafficking. Countries around the world have develop national campaigns which involve publishing and distributing written materials, publicizing the issue on radio and television, and presenting programs within the schools.

In the spirit of International Woman’s Day, and remembering that one of the driving goals included social security and protection for mothers and children, I would like to think for a moment about what an anti-trafficking framework means for us. There is a structural dimension to preventing trafficking that can be addressed which requires a deep rekindling of the solidarity of 1917. I am talking about prevention that comes from ensuring that state institutions are in fact designed to protect the weak and the vulnerable.

One of the measures of good government is the extent to which a government is willing to invest in the care and protection of its people. Social Protection is a collection of measures to improve or protect human capital, ranging from labor market interventions, unemployment insurance, social security and targeted income support. Social protection interventions assist individuals, households, and communities to better manage the income risks that leave people vulnerable. Specifically, social protection seeks to reduce the vulnerability of low-income households by ensuring that basic services are provided. Social protection interventions contribute to the solidarity, social cohesion, and social stability of a country.

In European countries, social protection comprises 14% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. In the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Nicaragua, it is just over 1%. In South Asia, social protection represents about 4 percent of the GDP; in sub Saharan Africa, it is about 2%. All of these are regions of the world where trafficking originates. This lack of government provision helps to sustain conditions of vulnerability for people who are already living on the edge. Low levels of social protection leave populations vulnerable to economic crises. Low levels of social spending on health services and education leave populations without adequate access to equal opportunities.

To put it another way – every measure to ensure that young women are taught to read can be considered an anti-trafficking program. Every provision to provide young girls with an education and with skills in an anti-trafficking program. Every measure taken to ensure that young women – as well as male heads of households – will be able to find gainful employment within their own countries, these are anti-trafficking programs. And these are measures within the purviews of governments as well as donor nations. For women of the West, the developed world and the countries of destination, prevention becomes a function largely of political and social advocacy for change. Change that is usually somewhere else, and this is one of the challenges of trafficking prevention – the advocates are so often removed from those most affected by the offense. I will get back to this point in closing.

What does prevention look like in a country of destination, like the United States?

Identification of the Problem: What does the problem look like in individual communities? Sex tourism, domestic service? Where are the individuals from?
Public Awareness: communicating to the public what is going on and encouraging them to take action at the community, local and state levels.
Mobilization of community efforts to combat trafficking. State legislation is very important.

What can we say in closing?

It is interesting to note that the notion of solidarity has all but disappeared from notions of modern feminism. Historian Ruth Rosen, herself a veteran of the early American feminist movement, describes how “feminism became palatable to American mainstream culture by addressing the individual woman, rather than women as a group.” “Eventually,” Rosen says, “the idea of sisterhood gave way to the image of the Superwoman who, with her hair swept back, briefcase in one hand and baby in the other, tried to have it all by doing it all.”

But, does this have to be true? The movement to combat trafficking in persons, as with many other international human rights movements, requires a united front. It requires a mobilization of people groups from all different backgrounds to make a deliberate decision to not allow this modern day form of slavery to continue to grow around the world.