Forced Labor News from December

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 December.

A couple in South Florida was sentenced for forcing almost 40 Filipinos to work in country clubs and hotels. The couple pleaded guilty to crimes such as visa fraud. The workers had their passports confiscated and were not allowed to leave their living quarters without an escort. The victims were also deprived of their wages and proper medical care.

A woman from Russia is suing a man she married in California for forcing her and her daughter into slave labor. She met the man through an online dating service. Within weeks of moving to the US, the man and his son began beating the women and forcing them to work seven days a week performing tasks such as moving large rocks on the father's rural property.

Carmakers have until January 31st to make comments on proposed regulations to prevent the use of conflict minerals in the production of vehicles. Some of the mines where minerals such as tin and tungsten are extracted employ slave and child labor.

A journalist from Hong Kong claims that Local Communist Party officials in the Sichuan Province of China are behind an organization that kidnapped people who were homeless or mentally disabled and forced them into slave labor. The investigation suggests that some of the victims were shocked, beaten and forced to live in very poor conditions.

During an INTERPOL operation, 140 victims of child labor were discovered in Gabon. The operation focused on victims exploited in the local markets, but the children were from a total of 10 different countries. More then 44 suspected traffickers were arrested. The children were forced to do various tasks including carrying heavy items and selling goods.

A jury in Brooklyn awarded a Hindu priest $2 million after finding he had been forced to work in a temple in Corona, NY for 7 years. He worked up to 18 hours a day doing everything from ministering to construction work and was only paid $50 a week amounting to merely $21,000 over seven years. His passport was confiscated and was told he would be arrested if he left.

Police in Florida raided two houses and found 27 potential victims of human trafficking. Police believe the victims were forced to work at a buffet restaurant. Though there are not many details at this time, neighbors noticed that there were many people living at the two houses and that white vans would pick up people early in the morning and would not return until very late at night.

The United States Department of Labor added a dozen countries to its list of countries that use forced or child labor. On a positive note, the department suggest that the number of child laborers is decreasing. Some of the more common products on the list include cotton, sugar, diamonds and gold. You can see the full report here.

Two British firms, Cargill Cotton and ICT Cotton, are facing charges of breaking international rules on child labor by sourcing cotton from Uzbekistan, which is well known for its use of child labor during the cotton harvest. The complaint, filed by the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, claims the organizations are linked to Uzbekistan through branches in the country's capital and partnerships with state-owned merchants.

More details emerged about the the first case of human trafficking to come to trial in Canada. This article provides more details about the conditions workers endured, who is being charged and the types of evidence the government has against the families involved.

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

Internship on anti-sex trafficking issues

From Miramed:

ANTI-SEX TRAFFICKING /WOMEN'S ISSUES INTERNSHIP

This internship involves Work with Dr. Juliette Engel of MiraMed Institute and Marianna Solomatova of the Angel Coalition on anti-sexual trafficking issues that encompass legal issues, human rights, coalition-building, public education, research and training work.

Minimum Required Skills:

• Advanced Russian Language Skills
• Ability to Translate between Russian and English with Ease

Internship time frame must be a minimum of 3 months

Preferred Skills:

• Experience working with NGO's
• Experience living in Russia
• Experience working in Russia

If interested please fill out application and return it to Elena Yurovaat eyurova@angelcoalition.org

ANGEL COALITION INTERNSHIP APPLICATION HERE

:

About MiraMed's Graduate Internships:

We have graduate and post-graduate level internships available in our Moscow office for men and women who are interested in woman's rights, prevention of international sexual trafficking, social adaptation of orphans, and computer education including graphics and publishing.

We can provide housing for up to three interns at any one time in a fully equipped apartment. However, interns that can provide their own housing in Moscow are much more likely to be selected. Interns are expected to self-fund their transportation to and from Russia, food costs and personal expenses.

Since all internships are customized, you need to fill out the application for the specific focus area below and we need a resume. We need to know your academic background and interest and the time frame most suitable for you. If academic credit is being sought for your internship, you will need to let us know what we need to do to make sure you will receive credit.

We have customized internships available in the following fields:
Anti-Sex Trafficking / Women's Issues Intern
NGO Capacity Building / Grant Writing Intern
Social Work with Orphans / Psychology Intern
Computer / IT / Web Design Intern

From Reuters:

Russian pop star Valeriya says she is drawing on her experience as a battered wife and "slave" to help migrant workers break free of sexual exploitation and forced labor in her homeland.

Valeriya was formally named on Tuesday as goodwill envoy for the Russian Federation on behalf of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an agency she has teamed up with for the past year to combat human trafficking.

"I meet and talk to these people, I am not a professional psychologist but I am sure I can help people with my own experience as an ex-victim of slavery. I suffered a lot of domestic violence," the blonde 40-year-old told a news briefing.

"I was forced to work for a man, my (former) husband, who treated me like a slave. So I feel I know the subject maybe even more than many others and am ready to help people with all my heart," she said.

Valeriya -- who only goes by her first name -- has sold 100 million CDs. She is entering the British music market, where she has been dubbed the Russian Madonna, with an English version of her album "Out of Control".

Her anti-trafficking clips already appear on Russian television and she plans to dedicate some of her concerts around Europe next year to raising public awareness of the problem.

"This evil exists... it is among us," she said.

"Sometimes we artists, actors and musicians are able to bring more public attention to a problem than officials or politicians. We speak the language of emotions and feelings."

Russia has become an attractive destination for millions of migrants from neighboring countries looking for better opportunities, according to the IOM. The Geneva-based agency says that it has good cooperation with the Russian authorities.

Some 260 victims of trafficking have been assisted at an IOM rehabilitation centre which opened in 2006 in Moscow. Many are Russians, followed by migrants from Uzbekistan, Moldova and Ukraine.

"The one thing we can say with some certainty is it's the tip of the iceberg," said Richard Danziger, IOM's head of counter-trafficking activities worldwide.

Valeriya recalled her decision to leave her husband of 10 years, who was also her manager, and take her three children to live with her and her parents in their one-bedroom flat.

"He beat me up, cut me with knives and there was sexual exploitation as well -- all kinds of bad things. One day I was fed up and couldn't bear it any longer," she said.

"My main message when I was talking to these poor girls who suffered so badly because of their naivety, was 'Do not feel sorry for yourself. You have to act, you have to rebuild your life. Do not look back and beat yourself up because this is only destructive,'" she said.

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Child Trafficking in Russia

Sex Slaves: A Darker Side Of The Russian Economic Boom

Sex Trafficking in Russia

Russia's Thriving Sex Slave Industry

From CNN

By Matthew Chance

Young women in bright miniskirts and high heels line up to sell themselves in the dingy back streets throughout the Russian capital. Moscow's illegal flesh markets are flourishing, with up to 30 women at each pickup point, or tochka, standing in order of price for the night.

Customers light up the lines with their car headlights and are asked to pay between $100 and $700 for a woman.

Aid workers for groups fighting for women's rights say Moscow is witnessing a surge in prostitution, including forced prostitution, as a result of Russia's booming economy.

They say thousands of young women are made to work as sex slaves on the city's streets, unable to escape from the ruthless and violent criminal gangs who traffic them. "It's because of the economic boom they are brought here," said Afsona Kadyrova of the Angel Coalition aid agency, which rehabilitates trafficked women and children. "The fast pace of development in Moscow has fueled demand for a range of cheap workers, including prostitutes." To investigate the thriving trade, CNN went undercover posing as potential customers and gained access to speak directly to the prostitutes and their pimps.

"Take your pick from any of the girls," the female organizer said at one location, lines of women all around. "The expensive ones are on the right, for $600 and $700 a night. The women on the left are $100."

Read the full article

Western New York Working to Halt Human Trafficking

From WBFO:

LEWISTON, NY (2008-05-15) Western New Yorkers were shocked in December when a police sting closed down several massage parlors operating a sex slavery business. But members of the local human trafficking task force say no one should be surprised. Members of the task force and others gathered Wednesday to begin educating the public on who is being victimized and what is being done to stop it.

About two hundred people showed up bright and early for the conference at Niagara University. They settled in with hot coffee and pastries ready to hear about the legal fight to halt the estimated $16 billion human trafficking industry. But they were woken up quickly to the very human side of this dark business.

Toronto journalist Victor Malarek spent two years interviewing victims in several countries. And he did not flinch from telling people exactly what he found out -young girls, tortured and living in fear.

Malarek recounts these and other horrifying realities in his book, The Natasha's: Inside the New Global Sex Trade. He said people need to open their eyes to what is happening all over the world to young women and girls.

Hundreds of thousands are taken to other countries and forced to work as sex slaves. He said some are lured from desperation to other countries with false promises of a legitimate job and a better life.

And many are sold into slavery by those who are supposed to protect them. Malarek said orphanages in Russia are prime suppliers of some of the youngest victims.

From WBDO:
And officials say no one is paying much attention to them when they show up in our neighborhoods either. The December sting revealed that eleven Asian women were held as sex slaves in some of Western New York's most unsuspecting suburbs.

Amy Fleischauer is coordinator for Trafficking Victims' Services at the International Institute in Buffalo. She said the community ca not pretend it is not happening here.

She said the Buffalo Niagara region is a prime spot for human trafficking. Partly because of its border location, she said the region serves as a pass through and training ground for Toronto and New York city. But she said there is also plenty of demand right here, not only for sex slaves, but for all kinds of slave labor, from agricultural to domestic.

And she said the victims are not necessarily foreign born - some are United States citizens, and include women, girls, men and boys.

Read the full article

A Disappointing Life in the Promised Land

By Matt Siegel

From Russia Profile:

TEL AVIV, Israel- Although Israel has only two official state languages—Hebrew and Arabic—it’s difficult to find a restaurant that doesn’t have a Cyrillic menu in the winding alleys of Jerusalem or the wide main boulevard in Haifa. Everywhere, second-hand shops and luxury chains alike hawk their wares to Israel’s Russian population. While these signs can, and often should, be perceived as a sign of hospitality toward Russian speakers, at other times, they signify something radically different.

For Jews, Israel is the “Promised Land,” the biblical home held out as the prospect of a final end to millennia of wandering. But for many thousands of people from the former Soviet Union, Israel held out a different sort of promise: a respite from the crushing poverty of the post-Soviet economic and social decline.

According to experts in Israel and Russia, many of these people, whose hopes and dreams were exploited for nearly two decades, became part of the vast illegal network of human trafficking that fueled the sprawling Israeli archipelago of prostitution and domestic slavery. It now appears, however, that what had for so long seemed to be an intractable problem for both Russia and Israel, is finally beginning to show signs of improvement.

The good news
The U.S. State Department’s scathing 2006 indictment of Israel’s inactivity in combating human trafficking, which nearly relegated the country to the level of North Korea and Sudan, appears to have been the final straw for the government of the Jewish state. Since then, the government of Israel, working together with a tight network of domestic NGOs, has made tremendous inroads against human trafficking from the former Soviet Union. A raft of new laws and tougher enforcement policies, together with increased cooperation on extradition from regional governments, has helped reduce the peak number of trafficking cases by some 90 percent.

“A lot has been done. It’s actually virtually miraculous how much has been done. I feel that we have a more humane system here: more has been attained here than has, in many ways, been accomplished in the United States,” said Rahel Gershuni, National Coordinator in the Battle Against Trafficking in Human Beings within the Israel Ministry of Justice. “Look, there’s a lot left to do, I’m not saying no, but a lot of progress [has been made].”

According to an October 2007 report by the Ministry of Justice entitled “Trafficking in Persons in Israel,” the police estimate that the trade in women reached its peak in 2003, with 3,000 people being trafficked. The same report claims that this number had dropped to “a few hundred, up to 1,000 in 2005-6.” Due to the problematic nature of documenting an illicit trade, these statistics are almost certainly incorrect. The positive trend, however, has been confirmed by multiple experts with street level knowledge of the situation.

But despite all the good news — and nearly everyone agrees that the news has been good — there is a dark side to the story. Deprived of a steady supply of women from Russia and the former Soviet Republics, internal traffickers are increasingly turning to Israeli citizens, a great number of whom appear to be native Russian speakers who immigrated to Israel legally. The lost children of Russia’s Diaspora live in sub-human conditions on the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, many addicted to drugs, all victims of a cruel cycle of exclusion and desperation.

Falling through the cracks
Israel’s improbable victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, in which 264,000 Israeli soldiers delivered a crushing defeat to almost 550,000 soldiers from the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, led to a massive awakening of Zionist sentiments among the Jews of the former Soviet Union. A surge in protests and lobbying both internally and abroad led to the first wave of emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel in 1969. Emigration continued at a trickle throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with the plight of Soviet Jews becoming a key bargaining chip in the Cold War power struggle. In 1990, with the implosion of the Soviet Union, that trickle turned into a raging river that carried more than a million Russian speaking Jews to Israel over the next decade.

As the social safety nets crumbled beneath millions of former Soviet citizens, many thousands of desperate people, including women with no prospects in their home countries, decided to follow the path of Soviet Jews and flee their homeland for brighter prospects. Israel, with its large population of Russian-speakers (by some estimates as much as one-third of the country), and its porous border with Egypt, became a prime destination for the smuggling of human beings.

“We were all so happy, you know; the wicked Communists fell, but at least when the Communists were in power, people had some sort of welfare network,” said Gershuni. “They weren’t hungry. They may have been in prison for dissenting, but they weren’t hungry.”

According to an unnamed source with first-hand knowledge of Israeli law enforcement, the system for trafficking women from the former Soviet Union has not changed much since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In most cases, women from all over the region respond to advertisements placed in local media sources looking for exotic dancers or models. According to experts in Israel, these are code words well known in the countries that once comprised the Soviet Union, and very few of the women are unaware of the fact that they will be engaging in prostitution once in Israel. What many of them don’t know is that the glossy descriptions given to them in ads or even by former prostitutes sent as recruiters are often very far from the truth.

Read the full article

Trafficking Ring busted in Bukovina region of Ukraine

This is my translation of an article from DELFI. Here is the original in Russian.

A human trafficking ring is exposed in Bukovina

According to the Public Relations Section of Administration of the Ministry of Interior of Ukraine in the Chernvitsi Oblast [region], employees of the department responsible for combating crimes connected to human trafficking have blocked a ring that exports young girls to Russia for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

According to information from the head of the Special Department Alexander Rarenko, police arrested a 37 year old man and a 17 year old girl who are residents of the Chernivtsi oblast and who organized the sending to Russia of a 22 year old female from Chernivtsi and a 20 year old resident.

The minor participant of this group was involved in the recruitment of young girls, and her places of focus were night clubs, bars, and discos, where she looked for future victims, for which she was paid $200 for each one.

The young swindler promised the unskilled girls a better life, good pay and work with the support of VIP clients, and as many of the candidates came from difficult families, the majority of them agreed. The pimps promised to pay them $1,000 a month, but this money was never paid.

Prosecutors have established that now in Moscow there are some girls from Bukovina in sexual slavery, and they have taken measures concerning their return to Ukraine. It is also established that members of the criminal group prepared exit documents to Moscow for several minors of Bukovina, but their attempt was cut short.

I chose this article for two reasons:

1.) I lived in Bukovina, in Chernivtsi, for six months in 2006 so news like this is difficult for me to hear, personally. It's a small area, and I still have friends there. There are not that many clubs and bars as compared to places like Kyiv so odds are, I know some of these places of recruitment. $1.000 a month is a huge sum of money for an unskilled worker from this area.

2.) This article touches on an issue that came up while I was doing research on the developments of Ukraine in preparation for ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings: Some of these girls who consent to work abroad in the sex industry have extremely warped concepts of what that may entail. And their traffickers are quick to exploit that.

For example, a prosecutor in the Dnipropetrovsk region asked some of the victims she was working with what made them feel safe in accepting these offers to work in the sex industry abroad, and most of them answered that they believed they would be working with young, attractive, and rich clients who wouldn't treat them bad. It was a glamorous view of the world of high-end prostitution, prevalent on TV programs. They perceived little risk that they would be locked up or beaten or forced to work extemely long days in dangerous conditions.

"Happy" Trafficking

From RFE/RL:

Lia was lured by a "friend" from her native Moldova with promises of a job and a better life. But once in Turkey, those hopes were quickly replaced with fears for her life after the acquaintance turned her over to sex traffickers. She'd been "betrayed" and unwittingly sold into a nightmare existence. "I was humiliated, and I can't find the right words to describe the horrors I was going through," Lia told RFE/RL's Romania-Moldova Service after she'd managed to escape. "I took a bath every time I came across some water, hoping the soap could wash away all the pain from my body. There was not a single day without sexual abuse and threats."

Reliable data are hard to find, but an estimated 2.5 million people are victims of forced labor at any given moment around the world, many for sexual exploitation. Victims are trafficked across borders, regions, and continents as part of a trade that reaps some $32 billion a year -- half of it from transactions in the industrialized world.

The antitrafficking community -- allying government officials, multinational organizations, and civil-society activists -- fears that the prevalence of a tactic known as "happy trafficking" could extend the reach of traffickers and exacerbate the problem.

The method minimizes risks to organizers and maximizes profits in a sort of human pyramid scheme. It combines physical and psychological pressure with financial and other incentives to turn victims into proxy recruiters and, eventually, traffickers. In part to avoid detection by authorities, traffickers pledge to release some victims -- and even reward them financially -- on condition that they return to their home countries and recruit one or more women to replace them.

"Happy" refers to recruiters' practice of pretending to have had an ideal experience in legitimate jobs in the West or elsewhere, hiding the fact that they'd been forced into prostitution themselves. International media first signaled the emergence of "happy trafficking" in the Balkans and Italy, but campaigners warn that it has become common practice in many parts of the world. In Europe, the converted recruiters are frequently former sex workers from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, or Balkan and Southeastern European states like Bulgaria and Romania.

Central Asia is also emerging as one of the hot spots where "happy traffickers" are active. One activist who works with trafficked women in Thailand told RFE/RL that large numbers of Central Asian women have been turned into sex workers in Bangkok.

The activist, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, singled out young Uzbek women as especially prevalent, perhaps due to broad unhappiness over poverty and dire social conditions at home. "I meet literally hundreds of women from Central Asia -- particularly from Uzbekistan -- on any night of the week," the activist said. "I haven't got any statistics, but I would probably estimate that at least a couple of thousand Uzbek women, if not more, are in Thailand as sex workers."

She said thousands of women from Uzbekistan are lured to Thailand by Uzbek recruiters known as "Mama-sans" -- former sex workers who have themselves become madams under the supervision of traffickers.

Reprisals are harsh against those who try to escape, so the prospect of release in exchange for recruiting new victims can be difficult to resist. Traffickers are keen to use the former sex workers as go-betweens because they are familiar with the business and, at the same time, provide criminal organizers a way to remain invisible to authorities.

Read the full article

Report from Turkey Releases Data from 2004-2006

Istanbul

From Today's Zaman: Turkish authorities intercepted some 246 victims of human trafficking in 2006, an overwhelming majority of whom came from former Soviet Union countries, official data announced yesterday revealed.

One hundred ninety-one of the victims have been safely sent back to their home countries. The data, announced in a 55-page report prepared jointly by officials from the Interior Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the police department and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), show that the number of people falling victim to human trafficking has remained steady in past years: In 2004, authorities identified 239 victims and in 2005, the number stood at 256.

According to the report, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine top the countries of origin for victims of human trafficking in Turkey. Turkey has in the past been more of an origin country itself, but in the recent past has grown as a destination country as its economy gets stronger. Of course the most frequent place these victims were found was in Antalya, a very popular Turkish Mediterranean resort destination for Eastern Europeans. I can't tell you how many advertisements I see around Ukraine for tourism to Turkey, with the most popular site being Antalya. Not that those are necessarily connected, but to some extent, they are.

The last two paragraphs of the article really shocked me:

A significant instrument in the rescue of human trafficking victims is a hotline launched in 2005. According to the report, some 56 people were rescued by security forces after victims themselves or others dialed 157 for help. As in previous years, the clients of women forced to prostitution themselves proved to be the most helpful: Clients of friends/relatives of the women made 81 percent of the calls to 157, while only 19 percent of the calls were made by the victims themselves.

All of the victims repatriated to their countries by IOM were women, the report also revealed, and 40 percent of them had one or more children. The report also showed an increase in the number of people detained for human trafficking in 2006 compared to earlier years. Some 422 people were detained in 2006, 379 in 2005 and 277 in 2004. A total of 156 people were arrested after being brought to court, while 127 were released pending trial in 2006.

A couple things did not necessarily strike me as out of the ordinary:

1) The success of the hotline. It also has been a very useful counter-trafficking instrument here in Ukraine as well, although the national hotline also gets an excessive amount of phone calls with questions regarding migration.

2)Women victims often have children. So do male victims of labor trafficking.

However what did surprise me was the amount of victims who called in themselves for help as well as the fact that clients were willing to step out and report what was happening. Its good to hear more people are being detained under the law. I'm hoping and assuming they're detaining more traffickers and pimps as opposed to victims. I'll have to go through the whole report.