Save the Children: International Women's Day

Save the Children celebrates the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day with videos of success stories of brave women and girls.

From Save the Children:

In many poor communities around the world, sons are considered a blessing, while daughters are viewed as a burden. Often, families marry off their daughters early — sometimes as young as 9. Then, education ends and health risks grow. Young mothers and their babies are far more likely to die from complications during pregnancy and birth. Yet more than 16 million adolescent girls give birth a year — 95 percent of them in the developing world.

But what happens when you give a girl a voice? Save the Children, in partnership with the Nike Foundation, is helping girls develop the resources, skills and confidence to participate in planning their future. The Girls’ Voices project empowers girls and encourages families to let daughters prove just how much they have to offer.

Shathi’s Story: Married Young and Speaking Out view video.

Like many girls in rural Bangladesh, Shathi was forced to marry young and drop out of school. She had her first child at 15. That put both Shathi and her baby at far greater risk of death in a region where maternal and newborn mortality are already high. What happens when you give girls’ like Shathi a voice? Thanks to support from the Nike Foundation, Save the Children’s Girls’ Voices project has given 42,000 girls in Bangladesh a chance to answer that question. www.savethechildren.org

Shilpi’s Story: Proving the Value of Girls in Bangladesh view video.

In rural Bangladesh, sons are considered a blessing, while girls are seen as a burden. They are often married off young -- ending their education and putting them and their babies at greater risk of death from complications at birth or during pregnancy. But what happens when you give girls a voice? Shilpi gained the confidence to find an alternative -- even though women in her culture are expected to stay at home. Thanks to support from the Nike Foundation, Save the Children’s Girls’ Voices project has given 42,000 girls in Bangladesh a chance to raise their voices.

www.savethechildren.org

The Slave Next Door: EATING, WEARING, WALKING AND TALKING SLAVERY

Excerpt from The Slave Next Door. Reprinted with permission.

CHAPTER 6: EATING, WEARING, WALKING AND TALKING SLAVERY

Slavery probably crept into your life several times today, some before you even got to work. Rolling off your bed, standing on that pretty hand-woven rug, maybe you threw on a cotton t-shirt. In the kitchen did you make a cup of coffee, spoon in a little sugar, and then kick back with a chocolate croissant and your laptop to check the headlines? After a shower, maybe you drove to the station. Waiting for the train, perhaps you made a couple of calls on your cell phone.

All in all a normal day, but slavery was involved in almost every step. Hundreds of thousands of rugs are hand-woven by slaves in the “carpet belt” of India, Pakistan, and Nepal. Cotton is grown with slave labor in India, West Africa, and Uzbekistan, the world’s second largest producer. Coffee cultivation also encompasses slave labor, mainly in Africa. Enslaved Haitian workers harvest the sugar in the Dominican Republic, the largest exporter of sugar to the U.S. The chocolate in that croissant can also be the product of slavery, from the cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast. Even the steel and iron in your car can be polluted by slavery. From a quarter to a half of all U.S. imports of raw iron in different forms come from Brazil.[i] In that country slaves burn the forests to make charcoal, which in turn is used to smelt ore into pig iron and iron into steel. In America, the single largest consumer of Brazilian iron and steel is the automotive industry, though the construction industry also uses a large amount. Pressed against your ear, that cell phone keeps you connected to friends and family, but also to slavery. Cell phones (and laptops and other electronics) just don’t work very well without a mineral called tantalum. In the Democratic Republic of Congo poor farmers are rounded up by armed gangs and enslaved to dig tantalum out of the ground. Every one of us, every day, touches, wears, and eats products tainted with slavery. Slave-made goods and commodities are everywhere in our lives, but, paradoxically, in small proportions. The volume is unacceptable, but rarely critical to our national economy or quality of life. And slavery in our lives is not restricted to cotton, coffee, cocoa, steel, rugs, and cell phones. The list goes on and on, with new commodities and products turning up all the time. Some of them, such as shrimp, might surprise you.

Huckleberry Finn it ain’t

If there is an archetypical picture of rural youth, it is the barefoot lad with the fishing pole over his shoulder. The dusty riverbanks, the lazy heat, the straw dangling from his lip, it all says that halcyon days are possible in our youth. Today even this picture out of Mark Twain is shot through with bondage. Across Africa and Asia children are enslaved to catch, clean, package, and dry fish. They feed a global demand for everything from shrimp cocktail to cat food. One of the world’s largest consumers of seafood is Japan, but the U.S. isn’t too far behind. Americans imported 2.5 million tons of seafood in 2006, worth over $13 billion.[ii] And when it comes to shrimp, the US imports significantly more than the seafood-loving Japanese. Americans love shrimp, and the little crustacean that was once an expensive specialty food is now as ubiquitous as chicken. More than three million tons of frozen shrimp were imported to the U.S. in 2006.[iii] The huge demand for shrimp in the U.S. and other rich countries has generated a gold rush along the coastlines of the developing world. From India to Bangladesh, from Indonesia to Ecuador, Guatemala and Brazil, coastal forests, mangrove swamps, and natural beaches are ripped up to build hundreds of thousands of acres of shrimp farms. In all of these places adults and children are enslaved to cultivate and harvest the shrimp.[iv] In some cases whole families are caught in debt bondage slavery, in others children are kidnapped and hustled off to shrimp and fish farms on remote islands. Children are regularly enslaved in fishing and shrimping, since kids can do the work and they are easier to enslave and control.

In Bangladesh, boys as young as eight are kidnapped and taken out to remote islands like Dublar Char off the southwest coast. Sold to the fishing crews for about $15, they are set to work processing fish on shore for 18 hours a day, seven days a week. If the boats return with a large catch they might work several days with no sleep at all. Like robots they clean, bone, and skin fish; shell mussels, shrimp and crab, and wash squid to remove the ink. Other children sort, weigh, check, and load the haul, processing and preparing the fish for freezing and shipment. The slaveholders sexually abuse the boys and beat them regularly. They get little food, no medical care, and sleep on the ground. If they sicken or are injured and die, they are thrown into the ocean.[v] Dublar Char was raided and the children freed in 2004 when researchers linked to the US anti-slavery group Free the Slaves discovered the situation. They worked with the State Department’s anti-trafficking office to bring diplomatic pressure on the Bangladeshi government, which led to a raid by military police. (The local police were on the take from the gangs running the island).

No one knows how many other remote islands conceal such slave camps. Much of the fish and shrimp from these islands enters the global markets and then comes to the U.S. Dublar Char is just one example of the slave operations that supply our hunger for seafood. Around the island of Sumatra in Indonesia the sea is dotted with what appear to be ramshackle rafts. They are actually fishing platforms, crudely lashed together and moored up to twenty miles off the coast. There are some 1,500 fishing platforms in this region, each holding three to ten children whose only avenue of escape is a twenty-mile swim. Promised a good job, they are left on the platform to cast nets, catch fish, and clean and dry the catch. In heavy weather the platforms can break up, children can be swept overboard, or they might simply fall through the holes in the rough bamboo deck. On irregular visits, the boss collects the fish and administers beatings to increase productivity. As in Dublar Char and so many other places, the children are sexually abused, and if they become ill, there is no relief. If they die of illness or injury, they are simply rolled into the water. The revenues from Indonesian fish exports reached $5 billion in 2006; America is one of the top destinations for frozen shrimp, canned tuna, tilapia and sea crab from that country.[vi]

________________________________

[i] See: Michael Smith and David Voreacos, “The Secret World of Modern Slavery,” Bloomberg Markets, December 2006.
[ii] See report of National Marine Fisheries Service, at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/fishwatch/trade_and_aquaculture.htm. Accessed Aug. 2007.
[iii] Shrimp imports also reported at: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/fishwatch/trade_and_aquaculture.htm.
[iv] See for example, “Dying for your dinner” Environmental Justice Foundation, accessed at http://www.csrwire.com/PressRelease.php?id=1932; and Report No. 32 on Forced Labor in Burma, International Labor Organization, accessed at http://burmalibrary.org/reg.burma/archives/199809/msg00281.html.
[v] Report on Indonesian Fishing Platforms, Anti-Slavery International, 1998.
[vi] See: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-779909/Indonesia-hopes-to-increase-fish.html#abstract. Accessed Aug. 17, 2007.


Free the Slaves is very happy to announce the upcoming publication of the paperback edition The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today.

Human Trafficking Workshop in Bangladesh

From Bdnews24:

Foreign adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury on Thursday said that human trafficking had become an alarming migration issue, with the perpetrators easily luring jobless people into being bought and sold.

"In a country where unemployment is pervasive and opportunities are limited, illegal human traffickers do not have to try too hard to mislead the millions of job seekers," the foreign adviser said.

"But we must make trafficking immensely costly for traffickers."

Inaugurating a workshop on Migration and Human Trafficking, at Hotel Sonargaon, Iftekhar urged public servants to expand legal migration opportunities to prevent illegal migration and trafficking of people.

"Although human trafficking is a relatively new issue of migration, it is becoming more and more a concern for both the government and non-government organisations working in the field," he said, at the workshop organised jointly by the Foreign Service Academy and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Dhaka.

Executive editor of the Daily Sangbad, Manzurul Ahasan Bulbul, also speaking at the workshop stressed effective government-media collaboration to combat illegal migration and human trafficking.

Human rights lawyer barrister Sara Hossain expressed the need to consider using international migrant rights and human rights instruments to protect the rights of migrant workers.

Legal Migration, Jobs for the Poor Can Reduce Trafficking

From the Daily Star:

BANGLADESH- Experts at a consultation yesterday said encouraging legal migration in the developed countries and creating employment opportunities for poor section of people in the country all the year round can be effective means to prevent human trafficking and labour exploitation.

Human trafficking is an organised crime across the world which is also a serious human rights violation, but its real causes are not adequately addressed yet, they added, calling for united actions for awareness, legal reforms and prosecuting the traffickers.

The experts said this at a national-level consultation on 'Interventions in human trafficking' organised by Concern Universal Bangladesh and Terre des Hommes Italy Foundation and supported by International Organisation for Migration (IOM) at Brac Centre Inn in the city with IOM Regional Representative Rabab Fatima in the chair.

Pointing to European countries, Home Secretary Abdul Karim said, “We have to encourage legal migration… Many more jobs are expected to be created in Europe. You can meet the labour demands by hiring workers from countries like us.” Many asylum seekers are regularised in those countries, but they are always not good people. They also flee their own countries with criminal records, he said, adding “If you encourage legal migration, it will give a win-win situation.”

Stating that the government has put counter-trafficking issue on a priority agenda, Abdul Karim, who spoke as the chief guest at the inaugural session, said: “We are very serious to detect traffickers and prosecute them. We have already delivered death penalty to eight traffickers.”

He said the government has trained law enforcers as well as religious leaders and introduced community policing to deal with trafficking. “We are aware of our obligations. We want to be known as decent society.”

In his presentation, Concern Universal Research Specialist Shankor Paul said acute poverty and familial crisis have been found to be two very significant causes of human trafficking.

Addressing these issues by providing employment opportunities to reduce economic hardship and empowerment of women can help combat the menace, he noted.

Read the full article

Confusing trafficking and smuggling

Multiple articles were published yesterday and today in major news agencies around the world regarding the Europol operation that arrested 75 people yesterday in nine different countries in Europe under charges of smuggling. 

From the Europol press release:

Today, a total of 75 persons suspected of being part of a people-smuggling network were arrested throughout Europe...

All suspects are said to be involved in the clandestine smuggling of a large number of illegal immigrants into and within the European Union. This was one of the largest co-ordinated actions against people smugglers ever, involving more than 1,300 police officers...

Operation Baghdad targeted a network primarily consisting of Iraqi nationals and former nationals facilitating the illegal immigration of citizens from Afghanistan, China, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Iraq into and within Europe.

No where in the release is it mentioned that there were suspicions or charges of human trafficking although it did mention that the migrants often suffered through cramped conditions while being smuggled into the EU.

However, the BBC and the Times Online reported that this effort was a part of a bust on human traffickers.

BBC: A pan-European police operation has led to the arrest of 75 people suspected of trafficking Iraqi Kurds in the EU

Times Online: Dozens of suspects were arrested in Britain and across Europe yesterday in one of the largest co-ordinated crackdowns on people-trafficking.

It is important to recognize the distinction between trafficking and smuggling for multiple reasons:

• They are different problems, even though their paths sometimes cross. Essentially, smuggling is the facilitation of illegal border crossing or irregular stay, while the final purpose of trafficking is exploitation. Also, borders need not be crossed in trafficking (i.e. internal trafficking.
  
• By not distinguishing the issues, it creates confusion among the public and hinders general awareness of both problems.
  
• It impedes a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to tackling the problems effectively.

While, other news sources such as AP, Al Jazeera,  and CNN (although CNN used the term "funneling" immigrants, which is not an official term) did not place trafficking anywhere in their reports, the fact that some news agencies did confuse the two terms shows that there is still a lack of awareness among journalists covering these stories, even in major news networks.

The AP story did include an interview with a representative from UNHCR who commented on how this operation, for example, affects refugees desperate to reach Europe.

William Spindler, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in Geneva, urged authorities to consider the interests of refugees who at times count on human smugglers to help them flee misery at home.

"We welcome actions to crack down on human smugglers, some of whom are utterly ruthlerr characters who abuse, exploit, rob and sometimes even kill their clients. But it is important to ensure that their victims are properly protected," he said.

"An unintended effect of cracking down on human smugglers - as important as that is - may be to close the only avenue left for refugees to escape persecution or conflict," he said.

He noted cases in which some Iraqis had been granted refugee status in European countries but were unable to get there without turning to people smugglers.

"For many refugees it is well nigh impossible to get passports, visas or plane tickets," Spindler said. "They have to travel in an irregular way in order to save their lives and reach a secure place."

An article such as this one approaches these issues from multiple points of view without confusing them. Law enforcement must also be careful in these situations with migrants who may, in fact, end up becoming victims of trafficking. The importance is to approach the migrants with a consideration for human rights and the possibilities facing these migrants as to why they went through a smuggler in the first place. However, it is the media's job to be responsible and not confuse the issues, thus hindering better public awareness and a better response to each of these problems.

Bangladeshi Victims of Trafficking in Yemen

From the Yemen Times:

A group of 15 Bangladeshis have been imprisoned by the Department of Immigration and are awaiting departure, said a source within the department on Tuesday. The arrests have brought to light the plight of approximately 3,000 Bangladesh nationals who were illegally trafficked into Yemen and work in conditions close to indentured servitude.

The departmental source did not want to give more details about the Bangladeshis' custody conditions, because he was directed not to speak to the media.

The Yemen Times received an appeal letter entitled “Bangladeshi nationals are suffering,” on Sunday that referred to the 15 arrested Bangladeshis.

The letter said that some Bangladeshi "brokers" are bringing workers from Bangladesh, providing them with tourist visas to enter Yemen and promising them high salaries of up to US $500 per month, with the support of Yemeni sponsors.

“After bringing these potential workers to Yemen, 'brokers' engage them in inferior jobs illegally, which don’t match what they were offered," said the letter. "Most of the time they don’t provide work [at all].” The letter revealed the names of four major Bangladeshi brokers, including Kabir Hussein, Anamul Hoque, Harunur Rashid and A. Rahman.

According to a reliable Bangladeshi source who asked to remain anonymous, “the "brokers" take US $4,000 for each Bangladeshi worker and give them hope of good jobs and salaries,” he said. “However, they mostly find themselves working as cleaners at restaurants and companies or construction workers."

The source said that there are currently at least 3,000 illegal Bangladeshi workers in Yemen who end up taking menial jobs because they have no other choice. They receive between US $100-130 per month, or approximately three dollars per day.

According to Yemeni labor laws, foreigners are not allowed to work in Yemen without proper labor permits, which must be issued by the government. Frequently in cases like these, the foreigners are arrested and deported.

"For this reason, so many poor Bangladeshi innocent people are suffering in Yemen," said the Bangladeshi source. "Some of them are unemployed and some are working illegally with very low earnings, which aren’t sufficient for their livelihood, as they don’t have any other choice.”

Read the full article