Free the Slaves’ college chapter coordinator Laura Murphy has been doing an awesome job recruiting and maintaining the FTS presence in schools. (If you haven’t already, check out our new “students” page on our website to find out how you can make your own student chapter).
When she’s not managing FTS’ student chapters, Laura is a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. And, she has told us, her favorite class to teach is a freshman seminar called “Slavery and Abolition in the 21st Century.” As part of this seminar, Laura has created a blog—called, appropriately, “Slavery in the 21st Century.”
The blog is updated with four new posts every Thursday. The articles will be used as discussion points in Laura’s seminar. But, you don’t have to attend her classes to be educated—and intrigued—by the information. A recent post tackled the issue of rehabilitation—once enslaved people find freedom, how do they move forward? How can society, the rule of law support their freedom?
It’s a good read. And we’ll do our best to keep you, the wider FTS audience, up-to-date with the latest on the Loyola blog!
Also, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the Loyola New Orleans Free the Slaves chapter! You can check out their facebook page here. And, while you’re at it, join the Free the Slaves student Facebook page as well!
Here’s the latest from the “Slavery in the 21st Century” blog, written by Molly Alper:
It’s a Man’s World
China’s one-child policy was originally created to help minimize China’s already dense population. Created in 1979, it limited each family to only raising one son or daughter. Although successful in limiting the population, this policy has triggered an increase in the child sex trafficking industry. With government officials turning a blind eye, and the policy holding strong today, many female children are left without answers and looking for help.
China’s long withstanding traditions and cultures have always placed more emphasis on the importance of men. Men are viewed as a key factor in helping care for their elders, and also can carry on the family name. Due to this gender discrimination, many families are choosing to raise males rather than females. Chai ling, founder of the group “All Girls Allowed” explains how this policy affects the families’ gender selection in children by saying “some families are taking this matter into their own hands by selectively aborting, abandoning, and selling their baby girls” And the sex trafficking industry is more than willing to pick up these children.
Vice President Joe Biden will address modern-day slavery: Human trafficking on agenda for U.S. vice president’s trip to Moldova, Russia:
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden plans to address the issue of human trafficking on his visit to Moldova and Russia next week, a White House official said Friday.
“That is a subject I am quite certain he will bring up,” said U.S. National Security Advisor to the Vice President Tony Blinken.
“It’s an issue that this administration is very focused on, has deep concerns about and is something that we bring up when relevant wherever we go, so I expect it will be on his agenda,” he said on a conference call with reporters Friday, in response to a question from Xinhua.
Here’s an interesting story out of Hong Kong: A group of wealthy, corporate professionals take their business acumen, and apply it to ending slavery. Asia One has a feature on The Mekong Club, an exclusive band of moneymakers, whose mission is to marry “the strengths of the private sector with the expertise of the counter trafficking community.”
The article quotes Matthew Friedman, regional manager for the UN’s Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP): “Trafficking happens within the realm of bad business, of rotten business. So who better to address fixing this than the private sector?”
Here is the article, (via Asia One):
From Boardroom Battles to Beating Slavery
An estimated 9.5 million people across Asia are victims of human traffickers. Now a United Nations team is enlisting wealthy professionals from Hong Kong to help tackle the misery of modern-day slavery and sexual exploitation, reports Simon Parry.
By day, they are among Hong Kong’s most high-powered professionals – bankers, accountants, lawyers and telecom professionals who command stratospheric salaries and look out at Victoria Harbour from boardrooms high in the city’s most imposing skyscrapers.
Outside office hours, however, they have a very different mission. They’re preparing to become secret agents who will use their expertise, their contacts, their resources and their brainpower to fight the scourge of human trafficking which claims millions of victims across Asia.
The wretched lives of the trafficked people the “city slickers” have pledged to help could hardly be more different than their own. But already dozens of executives have agreed to use their considerable influence to combat an evil that destroys lives across the region.
These necessarily anonymous executives are the first members of the Mekong Club – a newly formed group set up by a United Nations task force to harness the financial muscle, brain power and expertise of Hong Kong professionals into the war on human trafficking.
At a series of meetings earlier in February, executives from five major legal companies and three telecom companies as well as large financial brokerages pledged support to the project which will provide finance and brain power to help bring traffickers to justice.
When it begins its work in earnest, the Mekong Club is expected to parachute top lawyers in to tackle court cases around the region, to draw on the financial expertise of its members to trace traffickers’ cash trails, and to use telecom experts to set up trans-border hotlines for victims.
Via the BBC: A journalist posted a photo of a kidnapped child on a microblogging site. The photo on the right was blogged back, and the child was reunited with his parents.
It is estimated that up to 20,000 children in China are kidnapped every year. Some are sold to gangs to be used as beggars, others to families who don’t have a son but want one. Most are never recovered.
[Kidnapped child] little Lele’s family… found help from Deng Fei, a journalist, who has a massive following on the internet.
Twitter-type microblogs took off in popularity in China last year. Well over 100 million people now use them. Deng Fei tweeted Lele’s picture to his two million followers. Someone saw it and spotted the boy in Jiangsu province, 2,000km away from where he was kidnapped.
So Lele’s father headed there. Overcome with emotion he waited outside the police station as officers went to investigate the sighting. They returned with his son.
Peng Gaofeng shouted the boy’s name. Lele replied: “That man crying is my father.” It was all filmed and tweeted live by journalist Deng Fei.
Inside the police station Peng Gaofeng called his wife to tell her the news, breaking down in sobs as he told her the boy had been found. Then he clutched Lele close and told him: “No matter where you go, I will find you.”
‘Rights Activists Say China’s Gender Ratio Contributes to Human Trafficking.’ Via Voice of America:
A new online campaign to publish photographs of child beggars is helping to reunite children who have been kidnapped with their families.
On Thursday, the Ministry announced that people can call the number 110 if they believe that a child has been a victim of human trafficking and made to beg. The campaign was initiated by Professor Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The police’s decision to involve ordinary citizens in anti-trafficking activities comes after the January 25 launch of a similar initiative by online bloggers and internet communities. Professor Jianrong has urged ordinary citizens to take picture of children they suspect of being forced to beg and posting them on micro-blogs.
Free the Slaves Policy and Research Associate Jody Sarich is featured on Big Think today, speaking about her research on forced marriage and its relation to slavery and human trafficking in China. With FTS President Kevin Bales, Sarich is currently writing the first ever book on forced marriage worldwide.
In many cases, forced marriages subject women and girls to conditions indistinguishable from those recognized by international and domestic laws as modern-day slavery. Although the U.N. Slavery Convention called servile marriage a “practice similar to slavery” over half a century ago, the enslavement of women into forced marriages remains one of the least understood (and most misunderstood) forms of modern slavery today.
Sarich and Bales’ groundbreaking book seeks to change that. They will show how the enslavement of women can be hidden within the institution of marriage—and what can be done to stop it. Through the voices of women and girls themselves, they will show how once-enslaved “brides” have found lasting freedom.
In March, Sarich will travel to South Africa to meet with survivors and local organizations—watch this space for updates!
Here is Jody Sarich’s interview with Big Think:
As many as 24 million Chinese men will be unable to find wives in 2020, say experts. In some areas there are already as many as 130 men for every 100 women. This gender gap, just one of the many consequences of China’s one-child policy, is driving many of the country’s men to look for wives through forced marriage and human trafficking.
Jody Sarich, an anti-slavery researcher and advocate, is currently writing a book on forced marriage with former Big Think expert Kevin Bales. Sarich told Big Think that while exact numbers aren’t available, studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that slavery and human trafficking are already huge problems in China.
“There is a great demand for women, especially in poor, rural areas,” says Sarich. “Certainly the gender gap is a major factor, but it is one factor among several that work together to make it such a problem in China. Working alongside that is the fact that there’s been a great increase in women’s economic empowerment and desire for education in China. So you have fewer women overall as well as more women who are choosing to be educated and to have jobs. In many cases they don’t see it as compatible to be married and work, so the women who do exist aren’t necessarily marrying at the same rate.
“An additional pillar of what is leading this problem in China, especially for foreign brides, is China’s policy of repatriating foreign women who are discovered—even though they’re victims of trafficking,” she says. And for women from North Korea, repatriation means a sentence to North Korean labor camps, which Sarich likens to concentration camps. This fear of repatriation makes trafficked women all the more vulnerable and keeps them from coming forward, she says. And there is now a generation of children born from these forced marriages who are also illegal and must remain invisible to the government. “These children are equally vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation, especially the girls but also the boys and young men,” says Sarich.
In San Francisco, 2008, a protest of Chinese support for the Myanmar regime. Photo by BrokenSphere.
This week, the Global Post published a great article about human trafficking in Ruili, a city on the Chinese side of the border with Myanmar. The article, written Kathleen E. McLaughlin, says that China’s one child policy is fueling trafficking of women from poorer neighboring countries like North Korea and Myanmar into forced marriages.
Recently, we reported from a congressional hearing in which North Korean defectors spoke of being trafficked upon landing on Chinese soil. And worse yet, arrested and sent back to North Korea, where they were tortured. (Read ’90% of North Korean Defectors Sold to Chinese Traffickers, Advocate Says’). China is currently on the Tier 2 watch list on the latest Trafficking in Persons Report. And the Chinese government has made several high profile human trafficking busts in recent months (like this, this and this).
But critics, such as Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) have said that China does not comply with the minimum standards prescribed by the Trafficking Victims Protections Act.
Read McLaughlin’s report (via Global Post):
At least 10,000 women from Myanmar live and work in the Ruili area, with varying degrees of legal status. Many are maids and nannies. Many more work in the sex trade. This is a hub of prostitution, and foreign women are both exotic — a big draw for Chinese men — and cheaper than Chinese girls. Prostitution halls are often disguised as massage parlors, but the sex trade is barely hidden.
Women lured from Myanmar to China fill a gap created by this country’s one-child policy and cultural preference for sons. By 2020, an estimated 35 million Chinese men will be unable to find wives. Increasingly, bachelors buy women from poorer countries like Myanmar and North Korea.
Watch video of the report after the jump!
Shivanna (second from left) and his family were bonded laborers in India. But with the help of anti-slavery organization JEEVIKA, they are now free.
Washington, D.C.—At a hearing held by the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, the State Department’s anti-trafficking Ambassador Luis CdeBaca recommended that slavery eradication efforts take a more victim centered approach. Survivors of modern day slavery should not be treated like criminals, he said.
The hearing, titled “Out of the Shadows: The Global Fight Against Human Trafficking,” took a broad based look at human trafficking around the world and what was being done to combat it.
MODERN SLAVERY IS ‘SUBTLE’
Slavery is often difficult to detect. And millions are vulnerable to it. Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) said there is only a “thin line between being short on your paycheck and being held bondage.”
Neha Misra of the Solidarity Center’s Migration and Human Trafficking program said media and policy focus on commercial sexual exploitation has caused enslaved laborers to be overlooked.
“In 2010, a slave is not necessarily a person in chains or shackles,” she said. “Modern day slavery can be much more subtle. Trafficking victims toil in factories that produce products that are exported to the U.S. [They] harvest vegetables and process food that ends up on our dining room tables,… pick crops or mine minerals that are raw materials in the products we buy.”
SLAVERY IN ASIA
Asian countries and their Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report rankings were at the center of much of the discussion.
Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) showed his disappointment that Cambodia was moved up from Tier 3—the lowest possible ranking—to Tier 2, saying it was a “slap in the face to the thousands of victims” still enslaved. David S. Abramowitz, Director of Policy and Government Relations at Humanity United spoke about his work in Nepal, where 90 percent of migrant workers are trafficked into labor and sex slavery.
Read about Free the Slaves’ work in Nepal
Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) shared stories of North Korean defectors trafficked in China. He criticized China’s one child policy, saying it contributed to the trafficking of women into forced marriages. He pointed to an investigative article in The Economist titled “The War on Baby Girls” that said 100 million girls are missing, due to sex selective abortions in China and Northwestern India.
And yet, China and India are Tier 2 countries. Smith urged CdeBaca to re-assess these rankings, saying that neither country complies with the minimum standards prescribed by the Trafficking Victims Protections Act.
MOST OF THE WORLD’S SLAVES ARE IN INDIA
India’s caste system drives millions into slavery, said Dr. Beryl Ann D’Souza, Medical Director of the Dalit Freedom Network. “Of the 27 million people around the world that the UN considers human slaves in the trafficking industry, the UN recognizes that most live in India and most are Dalits,” she said. Dalits are the lowest level of India’s caste system. While slavery is illegal in India, centuries of social pressure keep many dalits in bonded labor.
Kim Jong-il, leader of Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korean defectors to China are often subject to enslavement and trafficking.
Yesterday, Free the Slaves Policy and Research Associate Jody Sarich and I attended a congressional hearing on North Korean human rights violations, in which several NK defectors described being trafficked into forced marriages in China, and repatriated back to NK, where they were further tortured and abused.
The testimonies were heart wrenching. Mi-Sun Bahng described her enslavement in China:
“The first people I met as soon as I stepped foot in China were Chinese brokers. Once they saw me they used the safety and well being of my children to threaten me. Finally I was separated from my children and sold for 4,000 Chinese Yuan Renminbi (approximately $600). What was more infuriating was that these Chinese brokers called North Korean defector women ‘pigs’, and treated us like animals.”
Jin Hae Jo, now living in the United States told of the abuse endured by defectors repatriated back to NK:
“Every time a person died they would become manure for fruit trees, and a common phrase developed whereby whenever someone died, people would say, ‘Someone just became manure’; they all would lament why there was no war to end the misery in North Korea.”
Su-Jin Kang survived forced marriage in China—then torture at the hands of camp guards, when she was sent back to North Korea. Kang was finally able to defect for good, and in 2006, she started the South Korea-based NGO, Coalition for North Korean Women’s Rights, to help other North Korean survivors of trafficking.
At the hearing, she shared the results from a study conducted this year by her organization: “100 North Korean defector women are living in South Korea,” she said. “90% experienced being sold into a human trafficking ring in China.”
The Shanghai skyline.
- Asia One News: China’s gender gap fueling trafficking: “The gender gap has created a situation where there are not enough women of marrying-age for China’s single men…Chinese police have so far freed 10,621 kidnapped women and 5,896 kidnapped children… Among the women freed were 1,099 foreigners, mostly from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Mongolia, who were sold as brides to Chinese men or forced to work as prostitutes.”
- Change.org: Victory! Bangladeshi labor leaders released from jail: “Victory is sweet for the over 1,000 Change.org readers took action to demand the release of Bangladeshi labor rights advocates Kalpona Akter and Babul Akhter from jail… Kalpona and Babul were put in jail on trumped up charges at a time when garment workers in Bangladesh were protesting for better wages.”
- Senate passes Child Protection Compact Act, an anti-child trafficking bill: Senator Barbara Boxer said, “The trafficking of children is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable. I am so proud that my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, supported this bill, which will give the State Department new, innovative tools to help protect vulnerable children around the globe.”
The Child Protection Compact Act, if passed into law, would allow the U.S. to give up to $15 million in aid over a three year span to countries who are “eager, but currently unable” to combat slavery and human trafficking. You can learn more about this law at the website of our ATEST colleagues, International Justice Mission.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon meets with Mira Sorvino, UN Goodwill Ambassador to Combat Human Trafficking, March 2010. UN Photo/Mark Garten
UN LAUNCHES FUND TO ASSIST SLAVERY SURVIVORS
UN Announces “Global Plan of Action Against Trafficking in Persons.” Ten years ago, the UN General Assembly first officially recognized the need to combat human trafficking by implementing the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.
The new Action Plan will expand on this protocol by creating a United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund—money set aside to help NGOs and government agencies protect and rehabilitate survivors of modern day slavery. “After they have been exploited and abused, [survivors of human trafficking] should not be punished, too,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his announcement yesterday. Read his entire statement here.
China's Human Trafficking Stats
IN CHINA HUMAN TRAFFICKING CONVICTIONS ON THE RISE
“Xue Shulan, a judge in the SPC, attributed the rising number of human trafficking cases to the demand of a large market, especially in rural areas where people who have a preference for males are willing to spend a lot of money to buy a boy.
About 30,000 to 60,000 children are reported missing every year in China, but it is difficult to estimate how many are actually cases of human trafficking, the Ministry of Public Security said.” Read more on this report fro Economic Daily here.
UK ‘OPTS OUT’ OF EU HUMAN TRAFFICKING DIRECTIVE
From Press TV: “Amnesty International UK spokeswoman Lucy Wake called the opt-out ‘alarming’ at a time when Britain’s own efforts to stop human trafficking were failing.
She argued for ‘an independent anti-trafficking watchdog—something that the directive specifically calls for.
‘Trafficking is a serious international crime and we need coordinated international measures to tackle it, not opt-outs and piecemeal responses.’
The Home Office defended its decision, claiming: ‘By not opting in now but reviewing our position when the directive is agreed, we can avoid measures that are against our interests.’” Read the Guardian’s coverage here.
SPAIN BREAKS UP MALE SEX TRAFFICKING NETWORK
From the New York Times: “The police said 14 people, almost all of them Brazilian, were arrested over recent weeks as part of an inquiry into the network’s activities begun in February.
…The police estimated that between 60 and 80 men were brought to Spain by the network, most of them in their 20s and originating from Brazil’s northern state of Maranhão. They reached Spain by passing through third countries.
The network covered the whole of Spain, with the sex workers placed in, and then switched regularly between, apartments whose landlords received half of the money earned by them, as well as €200, or about $255, to cover food and lodging, officials said.”
FIJI TO CREATE NATIONAL ACTION PLAN AGAINST TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS
From the Fiji Times: “Human trafficking is a global phenomenon and its symptoms have now been identified domestically and also at our borders, says Immigration Director Major Nemani Vuniwaqa. He said human trafficking was new to the citizens of Fiji.”
- Associated Press: Donald Tump files suit claiming copyright infringement by a Lithuanian “Mrs. Universe” pageant. “One of the main thrusts of the Lithuanian pageant was awareness of human trafficking, which continues to plague many East European countries. Participants held a discussion on the topic in Lithuania’s government, which helped sponsor the pageant, and presented a project, ‘Beauty Against Human Trafficking,’ as a possible idea to combat the problem.”
- The Epoch Times: A critique of China’s human trafficking policy: “China’s definition of human trafficking is narrower than the TIP Protocol. It does not prohibit forced labor. Also, Chinese law leaves out offenses committed against male victims.”
- Ace Showbiz: Dolph Lundgren plans to direct human trafficking film: “Lundgren is hoping his time in the spotlight will help him get his own movie off the ground – he has written a script for a picture called “Skin Trade” and is hoping to direct and co-star in the feature.”
- New York Daily News: Pakistan flood damage will take at least three years to fix: “Heavy monsoon rains in northwest Pakistan have put farms, roads and bridges underwater, crippling nearly one-fifth of the country.”
- Foreign Policy: Why doesn’t the world care about Pakistanis?: “Why has the most devastating natural disaster in recent memory generated such a tepid response from the international community? Something of a cottage industry is emerging to try to answer this latest and most sober of international mysteries.”
- Daemons Media: First Episode of the new season of NCIS: Los Angeles is titled “Human Traffic”: Synopsis: “When one of their own disappears while undercover, the team must work alongside LAPD on a case involving human-trafficking…”
