Human Trafficking Panel Discussion

From Radio Netherlands Worldwide:

A recent panel discussion on trafficking in the Netherlands discusses global anti-trafficking efforts and the challenges of combating the issue.

Listen to the mp3 here

The Panel

Diana Wong is a fellow of New York's Social Science Research Council, she's based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

"The policies that have been undertaken with the aid of this inflated discourse on trafficking have created stereotypes about migration which I think are counterproductive and also dangerous. It puts migrants into the position of victims or as criminals. In the public imagination that is very negative and for the migrants themselves. It creates a sense of alienation from the society in which they're now living."


Corinne Dettmeijer-Vermeulen is the Netherlands' National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings, she works independently and reports to the Dutch government.

"We have, at this time, a problem with many Nigerian girls. As soon as they come to the Netherlands they are being trafficked to Belgium or Italy and put into prostitution. Now, if the solution could be that you could ask them who paid for their ticket before they got into the plane and who they were going to see, you could prevent them from being trafficked through the Netherlands into the other countries but that's a moral issue." "We have tried to decriminalize the prostitution sector by legalising it, by making it liable for permits and we have seen that it really doesn't work that way. Many of these women in the legalized sector are being forced and violently treated so the Dutch government is now thinking are we on the right track?"


Suzanna Hof is the International Coordinator of La Strada, a network of human rights organisations that aim to prevent human trafficking.

"With the current political situation in Belarus it's very difficult for students even to leave. You also see that not many people from Belarus are being trafficked, though we can never really know, but in general we're not seeing them pop up very often. So you could argue that closing the borders is effective. At the same time you can say that we opened the borders for a lot of new European member states and for the first time in the last two years we see more trafficking cases from Poland and the Czech Republic even in the Netherlands. So it's very difficult to find proof for the best solution. We should look much more at implementation of law and legislation and the national and International level."

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CNN's Untold Stories: Trapped

CNN International's World's Untold Stories ran a four episode series called "Trapped", which followed the stories of Nigerian women who had been trafficked to Denmark. Michelle Mildwater, a psychotherapist and project leader for www.hopenow.dk/ was the consultant and narrator for the series. The first shows aired in February, and the second half ran in March.

Show One:

The first show told the story of Anna, a Nigerian woman who was trafficked to Denmark. She explains the trauma of the work she was forced to do, the terror she felt every day, the beatings she endured upon trying to escape, and how she could not go to the police knowing she would be deported back to Nigeria, where her traffickers await a payment for themselves.

The show also spoke with a Danish NGO that offers medical services to victims, and the representative explained how from 2003 onward, there has been a significant increase in Nigerian women who have come to seek services.

By the end of the show, Anna was caught during a police raid, and was set to be deported as an illegal immigrant working illegally in Denmark. No mention of any attempt of an identification process or anything.

Unfortunately, CNN does not provide a way to embed their videos, but you can access the program here on their website.

Show Two:

This is the story of Joy, who is a Nigerian woman also trafficked to Denmark with false documents, but was caught at the Danish airport where upon Danish authorities arrested her for falsifying documents. She has been in prison for six months, and has given up attempting to seek asylum. No one has attempted to identify her. Joy's illiteracy holds her back from helping herself. She will be deported without any assistance to her situation.

The link to the second show is here.

Show Three:

In the third show, Michelle follows Joy back to Nigeria. It gets a little deeper into her personal story. Joy is from outside of Lagos and she has been bought and sold since she was ten years old within Nigeria, then trafficked to Mali and then Denmark. After being caught in Denmark illegally, she was deported back to Nigeria with 100 Euros, which she promptly had to pay to Nigerian authorities to release her from the airport. Despite seeking help with an evangelical Christian community, she was turned away for not being able to contribute some money for her stay.

Here is the link to the video. 

Show Four:

Michelle travels to a village outside Benin City. She interviews some people in the village. A woman explains that none of her children are able to go to school so she is trying to teach her children to read, despite the fact there are little to no resources. Some women even offered for Michelle to take their children. One mother explains she does not want her daughter to stay in Africa; she wants her to go somewhere, anywhere to get an education.

Michelle also spoke to a woman who sold her house for her children to be taken to get jobs, but she never heard from them again. Another woman also sent her daughters to Europe, and she believes her daughters are working as hair-dressers, but she has not heard from them either. There is this automatic assumption that Europe is full of great jobs and that even poor, African women are able to get them.

Michelle finds Anna, who is hiding from her traffickers and cannot go back to her village. Her traffickers are beating and threatening her parents, and she must move from place to place to keep away from them. Even calling her parents is risky. There are some nuns who picked her up at the airport, but due to limited funding, cannot help her for long. 

Everything comes back to money.

Here is the link to the fourth show.

Halfway Houses at Ports Protect Trafficking Victims

From the Inquirer:

THE PHILIPPINES- Fifteen-year-old “Ana” (not her real name) talks and dresses the way girls her age do. She wears trendy clothes imitated from models she sees in magazines and television shows. She also loves to have fun, and to sing. Beneath her smiles and bubbly personality, however, is a child in pain.

A female recruiter, who promised Ana a job as a storekeeper in Cavite, flew her from her home province of Bukidnon to Manila in January 2006. From there, she was brought to Cavite and forced to work as a guest relations officer (GRO) in a bar and, eventually, as a prostitute.

With three other girls—all minors—Ana was made to work from 4 p.m. till past midnight. If the girls refused to cooperate, “Steve,” a nephew of the bar owner, would beat them or douse them with water. Ana’s first customers were Coast Guard members who forced her to have sex with them for a fee. She took the experience with a grain of salt. “It’s OK. I was raped by my father when I was 7 years old,” Ana said, further revealing a darker part of her life.

For 10 months, Ana’s life was controlled by the bar owners, who offered her like a merchandise to patrons.

Stereotype
A store owner near the bars where she worked saw her plight and asked her to work in the store. In her new job, Ana tried to forget her past, but her immediate community had already stereotyped her as a prostitute. Every time she went to the market wearing shorts or revealing clothes, children would call her a “phagerper” or a prostitute, she said.

When the bars were raided by police, Ana was among those rounded up. At that time, she was tending the store near the bars. When the officers found that she was a minor, police turned her over to the local social welfare office, which, in turn, brought her to the Visayan Forum Foundation Inc. (VF), a nongovernment organization working for the welfare of domestic workers and victims of sexual trade.

The VF operates halfway houses in strategic ports across the country, like the Manila International Airport, North Harbor in Manila, Batangas International Port, Port of Matnog in Sorsogon, and Sasa Port in Davao. These are among the first crisis centers ever built in ports in Asia. Many of the victims are usually rescued in the ports.

Shelters
Locally known as the Bahay Silungan sa Daungan (BSSD), the centers house prostituted women and children who were found by authorities and those who ran away from their employers. They offer free food and temporary accommodation for up to six months while the victims await their return to their families. Most of the victims have been referred by the VF’s port partners.

The foundation’s social workers are trained to complement the investigation to build legal cases against suspected traffickers. They counsel victims to make informed decisions, to avoid falling into exploitative labor arrangement and prostitution, and explore the possibility of pursuing legal action.

With the help of the VF and the government’s Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT), Ana filed a case against her recruiter and the bar owners who forced her to work as prostitute. The campaign against human trafficking received a big boost when Republic Act No. 9208 or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act was enacted in 2003. Subsequently, the IACAT, spearheaded by the Department of Justice, was formed to help prosecute offenders.

Since the law was passed, however, government lawyers have managed to win only 10 cases against those accused of human trafficking, according to Senior State Prosecutor Deanna Perez, head of the IACAT secretariat. “The main problem is that witnesses back out,” Perez said. Victims refuse to cooperate for fear of reprisal. Even social workers and volunteers have experienced being harassed by recruiters, she said.

With regard to Ana’s case, a VF social worker said that after two hearings, the owners of one of the bars asked them to drop the case.

Read the full story

Child Trafficking in India

Another look at the role of supposed "aunts" and "uncles" as recruiters for traffickers.

Previously: Sex trafficking in the Middle East

From Express India:

Looking at 10-year-old Smita (name changed), playing and laughing with the staff at Childline in Gurgaon, it is hard to believe she is a victim of trafficking. While the Gurgaon police have registered a case of missing child, Smita’s story is indicative of a larger problem.

She was brought to Gurgaon over a month ago, along with other children and people from Siligudi — on the border of Assam and Bengal. “My aunt is really nice. She often brings a lot of people from our village and gets them jobs in the city so that they can make money,” says Smita. She is completely unaware of the fact that she is being exploited: “I had to come because after my father and brother died last year, I had to help my mother make money. And it is easier to get jobs in the city than in our village.”

Childline workers are convinced there is a big human trafficking racket waiting to be unearthed in the suburb. At the moment, they are focussed on trying to locate the “aunt” who brought Smita to Gurgaon. “In my five years of working with trafficked children, I have so often heard of these aunts and uncles, who are nothing more than middlemen bringing cheap labour into the city in return for a commission,” says Anil Mishra, a Childline officer.

Smita was brought to the suburb along with her mother and older brother, whom she has not met for the last two and a half weeks. “My mother and brother got a job soon after we arrived and since then they have not come to visit me. My aunt kept me back to train me better in household chores and promised if I learnt fast I would soon be able to get a job for myself,” says Smita.

Read the full article

"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

Selling Immigrants Into Sex Slavery

*This article touches on the involvement of a trafficking victim's relatives or friends during recruitment.

From the LA Times:

She came all the way from Eastern Europe to treat her daughter's asthma. Instead, once in Dubai, the 27-year-old Moldavian woman found out that she was lured into the city to literally be sold as a sex slave. Her Ukrainian friend had actually planned to offer her to a local for nearly $8,000.

A few days ago, this case was brought to a court in Dubai, where the 36-year-old Ukrainian broker was charged with sexual exploitation, according to media reports.

But this is likely only the tip of the iceberg of human trafficking to the Persian Gulf. Many people from poor Asian and East European countries go to the oil-rich region to work as domestic servants, labor workers or secretaries but find themselves actually forced into involuntary servitude and sexual practices, according to human rights organizations.

It's rather recurrent to hear stories of men and women from these areas bought by pimps and coerced into prostitution until they pay their "debts." The sad reality of sex trafficking is the other side of the coin for a region portrayed as a hub for trade and economic prosperity. An extensive Feb. 23 report on the topic by Reuters' Lin Noueihed described one victim's misery:

Aysha sold her wedding gold to pay traffickers $200 to find her and a cousin jobs in Dubai. A world away from her village in Uzbekistan, she was forced to work in a disco and expected to offer sex. Beaten by her Uzbek boss when she shooed prospective clients away, she and her cousin fled and hid in airport toilets for two days, surviving on tap water.

Some Gulf countries are becoming aware of this problem and have recently drafted stiff laws to combat trade in humans. Last month, in the UAE, officials promised to build shelters for victims of human trafficking.

More trafficking articles from the Middle East

Indian Welders and Pipefitters File Case Against US Employer

From the Times of India:

Some 500 Indian workers caught in what they claim is a human trafficking racket have asked the Indian government to protect their families in India from vengeful recruiters even as they filed a class action anti-racketeering lawsuit in the US against their American employer.

The workers, at the centre of human traffic storm in Mississippi and Louisiana, received a surprise telephone call from minister for NRI affairs Vayalar Ravi on Sunday as they held a meeting of the alliance of guest workers for dignity in New Orleans. They said the minister promised his support for their effort to break up what they say is a human trafficking racket by a major US company and Indian recruiters.

While the workers sought a meeting with the Indian ambassador in Washington DC to explain their case, the embassy has already directed the consulate in Houston to investigate the matter. Meantime, the workers also sought the minister’s intervention in preventing the recruiting company in Mumbai, which sent them to the US under false assurances, from intimidating their families in India following the flap.

The case involving the Indian workers and their alleged exploitation is more than a year old. Sometime in 2006, hundreds of welders and pipefitters, mostly from Kerala, responded to a series of advertisement placed by a recruiting company run by Mumbai-based Sachin Dewan promising green cards and permanent residency in US. Over 600 workers from all around India and some from the Gulf paid Dewan up to Rs 10 lakh (about $ 25,000 in today’s rates), often selling their homes and raising loans, for the promised "American dream".

When they arrived in US, they discovered that there were no green cards. Instead, the workers found themselves working for Signal International, a major marine construction company, on ten-month "H-2B’’ visa that bonded them to work for it. Most of the work stemmed from the post-Hurricane Katrina labour shortage in the Louisiana-Mississippi region.

The workers, many of them sent to Pascagoula, Mississippi, say they found the living conditions horrible. They were placed in cramped quarters, 24 to a 24x36 room equipped with bunk beds. They were given substandard food, for which Signal charged them $ 1050 per month, although the company claimed to have hired an Indian cook from New Orleans.

"Welding and pipe-fitting are high stress jobs. We could not even have a decent nights sleep before undertaking these dangerous jobs," said Sabulal Vijayan, a former Signal worker who first began organizing his colleagues for a protest last March, told TOI. Vijayan, who was subsequently fired by Signal, is now on a special extended visa to help US authorities in investigating the case with help from the New Orleans Workers Centre for Racial Justice.

Vijayan says when Signal and recruiter Sachin Dewan saw workers organizing they threatened him with deportation and began retaliating against the dissidents. In one incident, the company sent in armed guards to apprehend the protesters in a pre-dawn raid, as a result of which he says he attempted suicide by cutting his own wrists. "I was desperate...I was ready to die," he says. Signal, on its part, denies all charges and say the company has gone out of its way to make the workers comfortable, spending up to $7 million to build plush new housing facilities.

The living condition has been inspected by local authorities and found to be adequate (dissenting workers say the company dressed up the living quarters before the inspections). The company also denies it has anything to do with promising green cards or permanent residency to the workers, who come under the H2B guest worker visa. The workers allege that Signal was fully aware of Sachin Dewans misleading ads and that company representatives worked closely with Dewan in the recruitment process.

The case eventually attracted the attention of local rights activists, including Saket Soni and Stephen Boykewich, who began to counsel the workers. Amid growing local media attention, more than 100 workers last week escaped the Signal "labour camps" where they had been housed and demanded that the US department of justice prosecute the traffickers. In a demonstration that local TV stations aired, they threw their hard hats en masse at the gates of the company.

The workers say Signal continues to recruit fresh Indian workers through a new Mumbai recruiter S Mansur & Company, who they suspect is a front for Sachin Dewan. They are now demanding that the Indian and US governments put an immediate halt to this international trafficking ring.

Read the full article



Part II, From the Sify News:

A group of about 100 Indian victims of human trafficking in the US has found support from Overseas Indian Affairs Minister Vayalar Ravi who has promised all help. The workers, who on Wednesday quit working for Signal International at the Pascagoula shipyard in Mississippi, met in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Saturday to discuss their course of action, said Stephen Boykewich, a media spokesperson for the New Orleans Workers' Centre for Racial Justice that is helping them.

The workers were recruited by Dewan Consultants of Mumbai, and brought by Signal, a marine construction company, to the US over a year ago and made to live and work in abysmal conditions.

“The workers demand the US to prosecute Signal for human trafficking and the Indian government to punish recruiter Sachin Dewan,” Saket Soni, director of the New Orleans Workers' Centre for Racial Justice, told IANS.

Ravi has written to the Indian ambassador in the US, Ronen Sen, to investigate the matter and said his ministry would also issue a show-cause notice to Dewan. The workers have thanked Ravi for his support and are inviting Ambassador Sen to New Orleans for a meeting. “We will present evidence that Signal International and recruiters in both countries conspired to exploit hundreds of Indians in a labour trafficking scheme,” said Sabulal Vijayan, a former employee of Signal and one of the rebelling workers' leaders, in a press release issued by Boykewich. “We also want Ravi to direct Dewan and his associates to refrain from contacting the workers' families in India and intimidating them,” Vijayan added.

Dewan Consultants has distanced itself from the controversy saying its contract with the workers had ended last year.

The workers met officials of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Friday. They also plan to report themselves to the Department of Justice as trafficking victims. Their future course of action will depend on whether they are allowed to stay on and work, as victims of human trafficking generally are.

Besides those who quit, 200 other Indians are still working under similar conditions at the Pascagoula shipyard. “They perhaps don't want to risk leaving at this stage, but will be welcome to join the action that other workers are planning,” Boykewich said.

Read the full article