Labor Trafficking News from November

Throughout the month, there are many cases or stories that break regarding forced labor. They are usually not on the front pages of our newspapers, rather they are buried deep and sometimes are only accessible through the internet. These are some of the stories, both headline articles and those that are not, from November.

Markus Löning, Germany's Human Rights Commissioner, criticized Uzbekistan for its use of child labor in the yearly cotton harvest. He demanded that the country allow monitors to enter the country and that it stop using children during the harvest. Each year, in September, schools are closed and students as young as seven are forced to pick cotton in the fields. The country has signed two Conventions against child labor and Löning asked them to honor their commitments. At least 65 retailers including Gap and Wal-mart, boycott Uzbek cotton.

Debates raged throughout November about whether or not carpets made in India would lose designation as being produced through child and or forced labor by the United States Government. The Deputy Undersecretary of Labor, Sandra Polaski, said that the US had not determined the status of the carpets, while India's Carpet Export Council claimed that the US would drop the designation. The Department of Labor clarified that it had not removed India's carpet industry from the list, but rather believed there was not enough suitable information to determine whether it should be kept on the list. They are awaiting the results of a study on child and forced labor in Asia to determine if India should remain on the list.

The Irish Human Rights Commission asked Ireland's Government to launch an investigation of the Magdalene laundries or asylums, where women of ill-repute were forced to undertake forms of hard labor including laundry work, even into the 20th century. The Commission said that appropriate redress should be provided to the survivors of the institutions. The findings included evidence that the State knew and was involved in the process of sending women and girls to the laundries. It is also possible that the Government violated obligations it undertook through the 1930 Forced Labor Convention by not outlawing or stopping the laundries and by trading with the convents that were running the laundries. The Government admitted as early as 2001 that the women were victims of abuse but no redress has been provided.

No agreement was reached on the future of Zimbabwe diamonds after a four day meeting of the Kimberly Process. While the Chairman, Boaz Hirsch, said he was hopeful that an agreement could be reached within a few days after the meeting, as of the end of November there still was no deal. Obert Mpofu, Zimbabwe Mine's Minister, said that despite the lack of an agreement, diamonds would still be for sale with no conditions to those who wished to purchase them. Sales of Zimbabwe's diamonds were barred last year due to human rights abuses, including the use of forced labor, in the Chiadzwa fields.

Three illegal immigrants were indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with a human trafficking scheme which forced its victims to sell CD's and DVD's. Charges included conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants and conspiracy to force labor. Victims were recruited from Mexico and forced to sell the pirated wares. The accused are believed to have intimidated victims into working until they paid off their debts.

After Cyclone Giri, which hit Myanmar at the end of October, the Government began forcing affected villagers to assist with renovations including helping rebuild military sites without pay. This was one of the hardest affected areas by the cyclone. The villagers are staying in makeshift huts, since many people have not been able at this point to rebuild their own homes and since they are forced to work from dawn to dusk on Government/Military projects.

Photo by Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department

Take Strong Action Now to Stop Gender-Based Violence in Haiti

“The way you saw the earth shake, that's how our bodies are shaking now” described one woman of a secondary humanitarian crisis facing the women and girls of Haiti.

As Haiti’s earthquake toppled buildings, it also toppled social structures that provided Haitian women some protection against sexual violence. Rape was widespread before January 12, but the hundreds of thousands of women now living on the streets or in camps, often without their family and neighborhood networks, are more vulnerable than ever.

Special thanks to Harriet Hirshorn for shaping and editing this video and to Sandy Berkowitz for shooting it.

Take a look at more of Harriet's work here: raboteau-trial.info/ and youtube.com/watch?v=SV0nTf78Vwc, and Sandy's work here: vimeo.com/user3252062.

"How to Buy a Child" Child Trafficking and Child Slavery in Haiti

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Everyone has the right to life and liberty. No one shall be held in slavery.

But at least 27 million people today are held in slavery. What would shock us into action? What if we find out that we can buy a child in Haiti in less than 12 hours? That the buyer could force the child to do anything he/she wanted. What if we learn that a child can be loaned, bought or sold on the 'market' for as little as $100, and if we pressed and bargained, we could bring the 'cost' down to $50?

That's $50 for a 10 year-old child who would act as a sex partner as well as a domestic servant. And what if we find out that in Haiti, slavery still exists today and that currently more than a quarter million Haitian children are loaned and traded, mostly for sex and labor?

An ABC News story, "How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours" and the book, A Crime So Monstrous by Benjamin Skinner, show how easy it is to buy a child in Haiti for around $50 to $150 and do whatever one wants with the child. And that was before the earthquake.

In 1926, the Slavery Convention, in article 1.1., established an international definition of slavery. "Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised".

With independence, came the end of slavery in Haiti in 1804. Slavery is illegal in Haiti. In fact, slavery is illegal throughout the world. At least, officially anyway. However, according to many estimates, we have more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history. And Haiti is no different.

It is said that, technically, these children, known as restaveks, are not slaves. In Haiti, it is common to lend a child to other families, mainly relatives, to help with extra domestic work. Poor families lend their children to wealthier families and in exchange for the domestic help, those children would receive housing , food, clothing, and education. And some children do receive all this; however, the reality for majority of the children is very different. A restavek child is a servant who is forced to work seven days a week without any pay, is excluded from other children in the family, has no time for play or school, and is subjected to abuse.

Jean-Robert Cadet, who is a former restavek and the founder of Restavek Freedom, has said, "A restavek is a child placed in domestic slavery". A CNN article says, "According to the foundation, restavec children are usually responsible for preparing the household meals, fetching water from the local well, cleaning inside and outside the house, doing laundry and emptying bedpans. They usually sleep on the floor separate from members of the family they serve, and are up at dawn before anyone else to do household work. Sometimes they're physically and sexually abused".

We should not even be talking about slavery today. Throughout history, many agreements and laws have passed to abolish slavery, but still it turns out, there are more than 250,000 thousand children slaves in Haiti. Again, I wonder, what would shock us into action?

And this was the condition before the earthquake. Even before the earthquake, Haiti had a serious problem with child trafficking and slavery.

After the earthquake, the condition has only worsened for these children. These children were far away from their families and now have no where to go. In times of crisis, these children are the first to be thrown out on streets, ready to be picked up by traffickers and sold to exploiters.

Many reports warn of the dangers of child trafficking. Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has said that he has received reports of child trafficking, including organ trafficking. "Any child that is leaving the country has to be validated by the embassy under a list that they give me, with all the reports," he said.

Legally this may be true, but in reality acquiring papers does not seem very difficult. As pointed out in a shocking ABC News story, it is very easy for traffickers to get fake papers. "As further enticement, the trafficker says he can even get me fake papers that would allow me to take this child back to the U.S. with me. Both traffickers say they have experience providing children to Americans. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, officials have no idea how often this sort of transaction transpires".

Clearly, Haiti needs better laws to protect these children from abuse and slavery, but all this brings up a much deeper question. Slavery is possible only because of the existence of inequality between any two people. In today's world, slavery is not about race or skin color, it is about profit and exploitation of vulnerable members of the society. Many times we've read human trafficking is caused by poverty.

Human trafficking is not caused by poverty; it is caused human traffickers and exploiters, it is a crime committed by criminals and silent observation fuels this problem. We have to attack the root of the problem; we have to attack the root of inequality. Slavery, exploitation, and abuse have existed throughout history, much before population and poverty were a problem, like in our world today. Slavery and exploitation are not new phenomena and human trafficking is just a new name for slavery and exploitation. An increase in population and poverty does not and cannot explain how one human can treat another human this way.

I cannot imagine a more horrifying crime than human trafficking - commodification of human beings so they can be bought and sold on the market, again and again, only to be used and abused by others.

So again I wonder, what is needed for every single person to act and fight against this horrifying crime? What would shock us into action?

CNN: Child Trafficking & Organ Trafficking in Haiti

On CNN last night Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive talked to the network's Christiane Amanpour about child trafficking and organ trafficking from victims of the earthquake that struck a few weeks ago.

Human Trafficking and the Environment

In December, the world watched the progress of the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference. While the conference may not have been front and center in the anti-trafficking community, the impact of environmental degradation on slavery and human rights cannot be ignored.

This issue is particularly pressing in light of the recent tragic events in Haiti resulting from a 7.0 earthquake. Haiti already faced extreme hardships and poverty, making the devastation even greater. Haiti also has a significant problem with trafficking of children called restaveks for forced domestic labor, often in situations of extreme abuse and neglect.

Environmental catastrophes, from Hurricane Katrina to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean to a cyclone in Myanmar, wreck incredible damage on people's lives. Sadly, the devastation often impacts the most vulnerable, leaving them even more susceptible to abuse and exploitation. According to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, while it is hard to predict the extent of the consequences of climate change, we can expect more droughts, more flooding, and increased incidence of extreme weather, all of which could negatively impact people's lives in extreme ways.

According to Linking Human Rights and the Environment, by Romina Picolotti and Jorge Daniel Taillant, "victims of environmental degradation tend to belong to more vulnerable sectors of society - racial and ethnic minorities and the poor - who regularly carry a disproportionate burden of [human rights] abuse. Increasingly, many basic human rights are being placed at risk, as the right to health affected by contamination of resources, or the right to property and culture comprised by commercial intrusion into indigenous lands." Such people are also extremely vulnerable to trafficking.

In The Slave Next Door, Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter make the link between the environment and human trafficking even more explicit with a slightly different perspective. In their discussion of slavery and consumer goods, they point out that trafficking victims are often forced to contribute to environmental degradation to produce products. Bales and Soodalter describe teh horrific conditions endured by slaves in charcoal camps in Brazil: "slaves suffer burns and cuts, the heat is ferocious, and their flesh wastes away. . . Unknowingly, the US consumer provides the incentive for this destruction of both human life and the environment" (146).

A report entitled Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center, shows another point of intersection between environmental issues and human trafficking. They highlight a trafficking case where a company exploited guestworkers from India to fill hotel positions vacated by people who evacuated after Hurricane Katrina. Threatened with massive "debts" and unable to leave their employee because of visa restrictions, they were ripe for exploitation.

Environmental degradation and slavery exist in a vicious cycle where people can be trafficked for labor that harms the environment or as the result of environmental issues, and where such environmental degradation places additional burdens on those who are already the most vulnerable to trafficking. Ending slavery and promoting human rights will require addressing this cycle.

India's Child Flood Victims Vulnerable to Traffickers

From Radio Australia:

September 4, 2008

Human traffickers are targeting vulnerable children in India's flood-effected Bihar state.

Radio Australia's Karon Snowdon reports it appears to be going largely unchecked as authorities struggle to handle evacuation and relief operations.

The director of the New Delhi-based Save the Children Movement, Kailash Satyarthi, says Bihar is notorious.

"The trafficking of children from those districts were quite rampant even in the past," he said.

His volunteers in a town in Bihar rescued six children aged about 10 from a man taking them to West Bengal.

Once there, they would have been sold into forced labour in tea shops or possibly prostitution.

Kailash Satyarthi says he has asked for urgent action to protect children but with authorities fully engaged in rescue efforts, criminals are freer to operate.

"The trafficking is not (the authorities) priority.

"Unfortunately the army personnel and the police could not go to those remote areas where the traffickers have gone," he said.

Mr Satyarthi says traffickers are taking advantage of the human tragedy of the floods.

He says the children will are kidnapped for the purpose of forced labour, beggining and even prostitution.

Read the full article

Trafficking occurs in the wake of Cyclone Nargis

From the Associated Press:

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — More than 80 women and children who were victims of Myanmar's recent cyclone have been rescued from human traffickers scheming to smuggle them to neighboring countries, a media report said Thursday.

Border police caught the traffickers, who had taken victims of Cyclone Nargis from the Irrawaddy delta to border areas, between June 11 and 14, the well-regarded biweekly journal Eleven reported, citing police.

Police Lt. Col. Rahlyan Mone, from the force's human trafficking division, told the Yangon-based journal that victims facing hardship are being enticed with job offers abroad by traffickers disguised as aid workers.

Police and other authorities who deal with human trafficking could not immediately be reached for comment.

Cross-border trafficking, especially to Thailand, has grown in recent years as people in one of the world's poorest nations seek opportunities elsewhere but are often tricked or coerced into prostitution or sweatshops.

The ruling junta has warned against exploitation of cyclone victims and urged the public to report any evidence of human trafficking.

Myanmar introduced an anti-human trafficking law in September 2005 that imposes a maximum penalty of death.

Local and foreign aid officials fear that trafficking could increase in the wake of the cyclone, which hit Myanmar May 2 to 3, killing more than 84,500 people and leaving nearly 54,000 missing, according to the government.

The last numbers of the article forgot to include the estimated 110,000 who have been displaced by the damage caused by the cyclone, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers.

Despite the rather strict laws against trafficking in Myanmar, the U.S. TIP Report still lists the country in Tier Three and cites that (listed as Burma), "The military junta’s gross economic mismanagement, human rights abuses, and its policy of using forced labor are the top causal factors for Burma’s significant trafficking problem."

Why one girl refuses to remember

Part of an excellent story about how children cope with the horrors of tragedy, abuse, and exploitation:

From CNN:

Nway pretends that it never happened.

The storm didn't come. The wind didn't tear her home to pieces. The cyclone didn't sweep her mother and father away.

In those brief moments, when she tunes out the questions, the 7-year-girl from Myanmar can step back in time -- before May's Cyclone Nargis took everything away.

That's the girl aid workers from World Vision International, a Christian humanitarian group, found when they met Nway in her demolished village a month after the cyclone.

"When she was asked about the cyclone, she turned away and said she didn't remember anything about it, and left," says Ashley Clements, a World Vision worker who met Nway.

International relief groups know how to rebuild devastated countries like Myanmar. But how do they rebuild the lives of children like Nway? That's the challenge faced by groups trying to help child survivors of natural and manmade disasters.

Aid workers who deal with these children say the experience can drain their souls. They try to comfort children in Darfur, Sudan, who have seen their mothers raped; children in China who have seen their parents buried under rubble; children in Louisiana who watched their homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

No matter where they encounter these children, these aid workers face the same question: How can a child remain a child after experiencing a tragedy?

Rose Kimeu, a disaster response specialist for World Vision in African and Latin America, says many children don't know how.

"They don't laugh. They don't smile," Kimeu says. "They have this look in their eyes that's very sad... It's something that breaks my heart over and over."

What Nway wants for her future

But some of the memories aid workers carry around with them are more painful to recall.

Dean Hirsch, president of World Vision International, just returned from visiting some of the child-friendly spaces. He was struck by the children's body language.

"A lot of the children were holding onto to each other," he says. "If their mother was there, they would hold onto her, or if she wasn't, they'd hold onto the workers."

The children spent a lot of time drawing pictures of their homes, toys and pets.

"They were trying to restore through their memories what they had," Hirsch says.
A child who loses a parent faces plenty of dangers, Hirsch says. They could suffer brain damage or stunted growth if they don't eat enough.

"If they lost their father, the income source is gone," he says. 'If it's the mother, it's that person who did the food and supplied the love."

The children face other risks as well. They become easy targets for human traffickers. Some girls are exploited sexually by men.

When World Vision established child-friendly spaces in Darfur, Kimeu, the group's disaster response specialist, says her staffers noticed something odd. No girls would visit.

They later found out why. Many of them had been raped or seen their mothers raped. World Vision had male workers in the child-friendly spaces.

"They will not go near a man," says. "They will simply not show up."

The healing process varies with each child, Kimeu says. She says there was one girl who was raped in Darfur who took a year to play with other children.

Some never heal. In Uganda, some former child soldiers introduced to the child-friendly spaces never learned to be children again.

"Former child soldiers are very difficult," Kimeu says. "Some of them have killed not one but several people."

Today, Nway is being helped toward her own recovery. She lives in a village with her aunt. She plays with her friends during the day in child-friendly spaces and looks after her little cousin.

At times, Nway returns to her old village with the adults. She walks over the ruins of her old school. She proudly wears a yellow silk blouse that was donated to her. But she and the other villagers have a difficult time ahead. The cyclone blew away rice, utensils, farming tools -- even the village's cows and buffalos were swept away.

Nway may no longer talk about her past but she will talk about her future. Clements, the World Vision staffer who visited her, once asked Nway what she wanted to be when she grew up.

She talked that time. Her answer revealed that though she might not be ready to talk about her own wounds, she's already becoming more sensitive to the pain of others.

"I want," she answered after hesitating, "to be a doctor."

Human Trafficking Expert Warns of Risks to Children in Disaster Zones

From the International Herald Tribune:

Natural disasters such as the cyclone in Myanmar can put children at risk for abuse and exploitation, a human trafficking expert said Monday.

Eva Biaudet, of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said she had no specific information about the situation of children in Myanmar, but noted that similar disasters, as well as conflicts, have put minors at risk of being taken advantage of and abused.

"When there are these kind of catastrophes — when the state fails, when there are no systems — children are extremely at risk for not only of course being just abandoned ... but also for abuse and exploitation," Biaudet told reporters on the sidelines of a two-day OSCE human trafficking conference that began Monday.

"It is a very good place for traffickers to be when the state sort of fails," Biaudet said, adding that children in conflict zones were also at the risk of falling prey to such criminals. Last week, UNICEF said it believed the number of children left without guardians in Myanmar because of the cyclone is more than 600 and could rise.