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

Tiffany Williams: Silencing Human Trafficking Victims in America

From Other Words:

Women should be able to access victim services, regardless of their immigration status.

Thanks to a wave of anti-immigrant proposals in state legislatures across the nation, fear of deportation and family separation has forced many immigrant women to stay silent rather than report workplace abuse and exploitation to authorities. The courts have weakened some of these laws and the most controversial pieces of Arizona's SB 1070 law have been suspended. Unfortunately, America's anti-immigrant fervor continues to boil.

As a social worker, I've counseled both U.S.-born and foreign-born women who have experienced domestic violence, or have been assaulted by either their employers or the people who brought them to the United States. I'm increasingly alarmed by this harsh immigration enforcement climate because of its psychological impact on families and the new challenge to identify survivors of crime who are now too afraid to come forward.

For the past decade, I've helped nannies, housekeepers, caregivers for the elderly, and other domestic workers in the Washington metropolitan area who have survived human trafficking. A majority of these women report their employers use their immigration status to control and exploit them, issuing warnings such as "if you try to leave, the police will find you and deport you." Even women who come to the United States on legal work visas, including those caring for the children of diplomats or World Bank employees, experience these threats.

Though law enforcement is a key partner in responding to human trafficking, service providers continue to struggle with training authorities to identify trafficking and exploitation in immigrant populations, especially when the trafficking is for labor and not sex. While local human trafficking task forces spend meetings developing outreach plans, our own state governments are undermining these efforts with extremely harsh and indiscriminate crackdowns on immigrants.

Even before Arizona's draconian anti-immigration law went into effect, hundreds of immigrants were arrested and deported without screening that would have identified them as victims. While it's true that victims of crime who are "out of status" or undocumented can access immigration relief in the form of special visas, it will be impossible for service providers and advocates to reach them if their fears of law enforcement are reinforced by "ICE ACCESS" programs. The best known of these is 287(g), which allows local police to enforce federal immigration laws, as well as state legislation like SB 1070.

Approximately five million U.S. citizen children have at least one undocumented parent. A study by the Urban Institute revealed that children are often the real victims of workplace raids--80 percent of the children of workers in their study sites were less than ten years old. When families experience long separations from other family members, the report noted the effects can include significant economic hardship, psychological stress, and feelings of abandonment that can lead to sustained mental health problems.

When the American Psychological Association recently recommended overhauling our detention centers and social service networks to better protect children and maintain family units, it acknowledged the widespread psychological trauma caused by immigration enforcement--including everything from infant developmental delays to dismal academic performance.

Regardless of their legal status, these women are human beings working hard to feed their families. Their home countries' economies have been by shattered by globalization. Our economic system depends on their cheap labor. Yet much of the debate about U.S. borders fails to acknowledge immigrants as people, or appreciate the numerous cultural contributions that ethnic diversity has provided this country. As a result, humane comprehensive immigration reform remains out of reach in Congress.

We're a nation of immigrants and a nation of hard-working families. An economic crisis caused by corporate greed has turned us against each other in desperation and fear. We should band together to uphold our traditional values of family unity, to give law enforcement the tools they need to provide effective victim protection and identification rather than reactionary laws, and ensure that women can access victim services, regardless of immigration status.

I thought this was a particularly effective piece for making the case that you cannot consider immigration policy and anti-trafficking policy as completely divorced from one another. There are two longer journal articles I would recommend, which also touch on this issue: "Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking" by Jennifer Chacon and "Assessing the U.S.-Mexico Fight Against Human Trafficking and Smuggling: Unintended Results of U.S. Immigration Policy" by Salvador A. Cicero-Dominguez.

International Women's Day

Today marks International Women's Day. According to the International Women's Day website, "International Women's Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. . . Annually on 8 March, thousands of events are held throughout the world to inspire women and celebrate achievements." This year, the UN's theme for International Women's Day is Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All. International Women's Day is an opportunity to reflect on the ways that gender inequalities and gender-based violence facilitate human trafficking.

Though it is impossible, due to the covert nature of trafficking, to obtain exact statistics on victims, FAIR Fund estimates that 80% of trafficking victims are women and girls. In her book, The Road of Lost Innocence, Somaly Mam, a survivor of child sex trafficking in Cambodia, points out that the devaluation and dehumanization of women and girls has created a climate of gender-based violence that allows trafficking to continue and creates situations where women are extremely vulnerable to abuse. Cambodia is not unique in this respect by any means.

Martina Vandenberg, a lawyer who represents trafficking victims and survivors, argues that efforts to prevent human trafficking must include efforts to end gender-based discrimination that makes women vulnerable. Such efforts must also include addressing forms of gender-based violence and exploitation, such as domestic violence, since whenever someone is trapped in a situation of abuse they are particularly vulnerable to trafficking.

In his book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, Siddharth Kara identifies gender discrimination - along with ethnic and racial discrimination - as one of the main factors that drives the supply of trafficking victims globally (201). He points out that when women lack rights, economic opportunities, educational opportunities, and when violence against women goes unpunished and implicitly sanctioned, women are easy targets for traffickers and are likely to be re-trafficked if they do manage to leave a trafficking situation (129-33).

Women and girls are certainly not the only victims of trafficking, and gender violence and inequalities are not the only factors that shape modern slavery. Nevertheless, efforts to end slavery and prevent trafficking must include efforts to promote women's rights and end gender-based violence. Today as we celebrate women's achievements and progress that has been made towards equality, let us also remember how far we have to go and how much is at stake.

Determinants of Trafficking: Understanding the problem and the actors

The starting point for understanding the problem of trafficking and finding a solution is to figure out what we think and know about the problem. So this is where I started.

Recently, I read a report which said, half the districts in India are affected by human trafficking. I have read similar reports on different countries across the globe, and each report claims the problem exists because people know either nothing or very little about trafficking. While this may be true, what confused me is the fact that even though there are people or groups who know more than others, it is not always easy to figure out what those people or groups precisely think about the problem.

As I read more, I want to know what everyone thinks of the problem. To keep this exercise structured, I have broken down the study into multiple parts. Today's post is an attempt to understand the factors that influence activities of victims, exploiters, and buyers.

PART I: Determinants of Trafficking: Understanding the problem and the actors

It is crucial to understand all the actors involved in human trafficking as well as the dynamics between the actors and between the actors and the environment.

There have been many articles written on human trafficking, but there is no consensus on what the necessary conditions are to create and maintain human trafficking, i.e. what causes human trafficking and what keeps it going? The answers of course range from political factors such as war and conflict to social factors such as gender discrimination. Perhaps we can never have a uniform answer to these questions. It seems that only now we're beginning to agree on a definition of trafficking so it is hard to believe we will be able to find a set of common determinants of trafficking so soon. Hence, I am very interested in learning what everyone thinks about the questions below and where we differ in our ideas - I hope this exercise will help us see the problem from different perspectives. The goal of this post is to start a discussion on determinants of trafficking and to learn from others' views.

1. What conditions are necessary for trafficking to occur? What (plausible) assumptions can we make about the type of factors that influence trafficking and what makes these assumptions plausible?
• For example, in terms of economic drivers, we know poverty and high level of unemployment are some of the (essential) conditions traffickers look for in recruitment areas , but they may not be causes of trafficking, but rather conditions for it. There may be poor communities which may not be be suitable for 'recruitment' because those communities, for example, may not have well connected criminal networks.
  Categories:
1. Personal: literacy, communication channels, home environment, etc.
   
2. Economic: debt, high levels of unemployment, etc. :
   
• For example, we've read globalization may have created conditions that make it easy for criminal networks to flourish and hence for trafficking to occur. In this case, we would attempt to understand precisely how globalization creates these conditions.
  
3. Political: war, conflicts, exclusion by caste or some other group, etc.
   
4. Social: gender discrimination, marital status, etc.
   
5. Geographic: forced migration due to scarcity of water, etc.
2. How are the necessary conditions for trafficking (from question 1) created and maintained?
3. Who can we classify as exploiters (trafficker, pimps, etc) ? What assumptions can we make about the exploiters?
   
4. What assumptions can we make about the buyers? Who (and what process) creates the demand?
• We've read that trafficking enables "commodification" of humans. We also know that the demand for any commodity is much more complex than just the need of the buyer. Hence, what are these other variables that make understanding this demand and the buyers so difficult and complex?
5. Are we missing something? Who else plays a role and how important is it?

Input from everyone would be extremely helpful and I look forward to a discussion about the questions in this post.

"The Road of Lost Innocence"

"In 1986, when I was sold to a brothel as a prostitute, I was about sixteen years old. Today there are many far younger prostitutes in Cambodia. There are virgins for sale in every large town, and to ensure their virginity, the girls are sometimes as young as five or six," writes Somaly Mam on the dedication page for her book The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine. In the book, originally published in French in 2005, Mam recounts her experiences as a sex trafficking victim, survivor, and eventually as a rescuer for others in the same situation.

Mam was born in 1970 or 1971 during a time of great upheaval in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge political party came into power and ruled from 1975-1979; due to executions, starvation, and forced labor, 2 million Cambodians died during this time. As Mam notes, this time of incredible hardship and violence shaped and continues to shape life in Cambodia. People are especially vulnerable to exploitation, and Mam suggests that there is a legacy of extreme violence, particularly towards women and girls. Throughout the book, Mam contextualizes her experiences and the sex-trade in general in the larger socio-political context of Cambodia.

Mam was left as an orphan when she was a young girl. After living on her own and scrambling for food and shelter, a man calling himself her grandfather took her to a city, where he abused her and sold her out as a domestic slave. Eventually he sold her to a brothel as a sex slave. After experiencing years of abuse, she gained her freedom after the death of her "grandfather." Because she lacked job skills, education, and any support network, she stayed in the commercial sex industry until she eventually married a Frenchman who was working on foreign aid projects in Cambodia. Eventually they moved to France for a few years, where Mam gained work experience and learned French.

Upon her return to Cambodia, she started working on behalf of other girls and young women who were forced into commercial sex work, either by their parents who sold them to pay a debt or because they were kidnapped from their families for use as sex slaves. At first she mainly provided condoms and other services to the girls and women. Later, she started working to rescue them from the situations, and she opened a shelter. Eventually, Mam opened several shelters, ranging from emergency shelters to more permanent educational facilities for survivors.

In the book, Mam details the many challenges she has faced in her work, particularly relating to lack of consistent funding and police corruption. Despite these many difficulties, Mam's work has helped countless girls and women, many who had no other chance of getting out of their situations. Mam has received numerous honors for her heroic efforts, including being named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine in 2009, which the Human Trafficking Project reported on earlier this year.

During her childhood and young-adult years, Mam endured horrific physical and sexual violence, which she graphically describes in the book. Mam notes, however, that the situation in Cambodia has only worsened. According to Mam "the brothels have grown larger and more violent. We find women chained to sewers. Girls come to us beaten half to death. They are so young. Increasingly we see that the meebons have addicted them to drugs so they won't even try to escape. When I was young we were terrorized with snakes and heavy fists, but these girls suffer a more brutal sort of torture. They have marks that are worse than anything I have ever endured" (166).

Looking back on her work, Mam writes, "I don't feel like I can change the world. I don't even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering. I want to change this small real thing that is the destiny of one little girl. And then another, and another, because if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to live with myself or sleep at night" (129). Mam's words are especially powerful in light of the prevalence of sex trafficking in Cambodia. The Future Group, a Canadian NGO, reported in 2005 that at least 1 in 40 girls born in Cambodia will be sold into sex slavery.

Throughout the book, Mam emphasizes the need for people to get involved to work to end modern-day slavery. The Somaly Mam Foundation website lists a number of ways to support her work in Cambodia, including volunteering, interning, volunteering in Cambodia, donating, selling bracelets made by survivors, and hosting an awareness fundraiser. While the entire book is a pressing call to action, one passage in particular highlights the urgency of anti-trafficking work: "It's still happening, today, tonight. Imagine how many girls have been raped and hit since you started to read this book. My story doesn't matter, except that it stands for their story too, and their stories are why I don't sleep at night. They haunt me" (61).