Resources for Teachers – Anecdotes - Human Trafficking, including
modern day slavery, contemporary slavery, debt bondage, serfdom, forced labor,
forced marriage, transferring of wives,
inheritance of wives, and
transfer of a child for purposes of exploitation. Also forced prostitution, child prostitution,
sale of children, and trafficking in children.
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Human
Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery Resources for Teachers |
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Anecdotes
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CAUTION: There is always a risk
in posting links to external websites.
Some of the following links may possibly lead to websites that present
information that is unsubstantiated or even false. Their authenticity has not been verified
and their content has not been validated. Ahsania Mission monitors 40,000 families Life changed for Zarina (not a real name) when she was separated from her
family. '1 got separated from my family when a man took me to Bombay in India
promising a good job,' said Zarina, a 16-year-old
girl at Krishnapur village of No-2 Lakkhanpur union in Sharsha upazila, Jessore. 'Siddique, an acquaintance, asked me about my family. I
told him that life was very difficult as we were very poor. He said that my
sister and brother-in-law already agreed to go to Mumbai in India with him
because he promised them jobs of Tk 5,000 a month.
If I accompany them then I shall also be offered such a lucrative job, Siddique promised. On return home, my sister and
brother-in-law said they would try their luck in Mumbai; I should accompany
them if I want to change my fate. Thinking helpless condition of day-labourer father, I agreed to their suggestion.' 'One day we set for Mumbai with Siddique'. On arrival in Mumbai, the man sold us to a
dance bar owner. 'A few months later, my sister and brother-in-law escaped
the 'hell,' but I was forced to stay back to do flesh trade there against my
will. Tales
of sex and sadness from inside Britain's oldest profession 'I'D BEEN
DREAMING OF A FUTURE AS A WIFE AND A MOTHER' - ALMA, 26 - Alma (not her real name) fell in
love with a man she met in Poland seven months ago. He said he wanted to
introduce her to his family. Under this pretence, he ended up kidnapping her.
He used a false passport to bring her to Manchester and force her to work in
a brothel. 'I had been working as a waitress,
dreaming of a future as a wife and mother,' Alma says. 'This man shared my
Muslim religion. I trusted him. When he locked me in his house, took away all
my money and possessions, I was terrified. But when he forced me into a car
and had a friend drive me to a foreign country where I didn't speak the
language or know anyone, I was beside myself . My
family went to the police but after a week I knew they wouldn't take me back
because, according to our religion, I was ruined. 'He beat me and made me live with
another girl who spied on me. She wouldn't leave me for a second and reported
to this man if I did anything that looked like trying to escape. He forced me
to work in the brothel, but the clients complained because I just cried all
the time. The manager asked me what was wrong. I didn't have the language to
express myself, but eventually I managed to explain. I don't think she felt
sorry for me, but she saw that I wasn't going to earn her brothel any money
because I would never willingly work. She helped me to escape and I went to
the police. This has damaged my life in all directions. I have no dreams now
and no hopes. I have nothing.' Owed Justice -
Thai Women Trafficked into Debt Bondage in Japan IV. PROFILES - In this chapter, Human Rights
Watch profiles four women who were trafficked from Thailand into servitude in
Japan. Human Rights Watch interviewed numerous women who recounted similar
experiences. POT - It was a big room and four or five other women
going to work in Japan were also kept there. I was surprised to be locked up
because I was not allowed any chance to say goodbye to my family, even over
the phone. I heard the agents talking about the price for each woman being
between 150-160 bai [1.5-1.6 million yen;
US$10,000-11,000], but I couldn't really understand what they were talking
about and did not realize that we were being sold into prostitution. KAEW - Kaew
explained that she had understood there would be some debt for the airplane
ticket and other expenses, but she had never been told how high her debt
would be, and she was shocked at the amount. "The other girls said to
me, 'that's a lot of debt and you're old; you'll never pay it off.' Then I
prayed that it would only take six or seven months to pay it off, and I went
with all of the clients I could. . . . The mama said to me, 'don't let your
period come, or you'll never finish paying your debt.'" So Kaew also took contraceptive pills daily, though she had
been sterilized at age twenty-one, so that she would not menstruate and could
work every day.(7)
She got her mother to send the pills from Thailand, so that she would not
have to buy them from her mama and increase the level of her debt. The route to hell living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1230692006 Olga, like all the other women,
was immediately sold - she was bought by a local bar owner. This pimp
instructed her to dance on a stage, and then rented her out to punters at
night. If she resisted, he beat her. Like the vast majority of trafficked
women, she learnt to become compliant in order to survive. Vigilance
Needed in Fight Against Human Trafficking The maid revealed that despite
being promised a part-time job and a work visa, her employer paid far less
than minimum wage, did not offer breaks, held her travel documents, isolated
her from calling her family, and threatened to call the police and
immigration authorities. She spoke little English and had no idea who she
could call for help. Sex
trafficking strikes closer to home than thought A bed, a teddy bear, and a roll of
paper towels are the only contents of a closet-sized room where a trafficked
13-year-old girl was sold for sex by pimps to 20-30 men a day. On Nov. 5, 2003, a woman taken
from the Lloyd Center shopping mall was found to have been drugged awake for
three straight days of sexual slavery by traffickers in Vancouver, Canada. Traffickers forced three dozen
Mexican men and boys recruited in Arizona to work 60 hours a week on farms
near Buffalo, N.Y. for $30 a week. Scale of African
slavery revealed Complicity: Much of this trade in children
often has the tacit collaboration of the victims' own families where it is
seen not so much as criminal activity but as a way for a large family to
boost its poor income. The story of
Joseph in Benin is fairly typical Online
Focus - Slavery in America Transcript of a NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Putting a Stop to the
Exploitation www.freedommag.org/english/vol36i2/page21.htm Concerned human rights activists
unite to end the scourge of sex slavery across all borders - by Tom Paquette Sexual
Slavery In Southern California Today? She was a teenage girl from an
impoverished village in Bangladesh. The American couple offered her transport
to America and a better life This is the testimony of Thuli, a young girl from Nepal who was trafficked to
India and sold into prostitution for Rs 35,000, the
equivalent of $720 A Honduras case study cited in United
Nations, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children When he was four years old, Iqbal Masih was sold into
bonded servitude by his parents, a common practice of poor Pakistani families
hoping to pay off debts owed to landlords and local merchants Child
Slave Caught in Glittering Traps SIKASSO, MALI, and SINFRA,
Ivory Coast - Mali's modern-day slave traders do not bother with abductions
any more. They lure victims with a smile. "Hey there," a stranger
called, leaning out the window of a dented white mini-van as it chugged to a
stop on a dirt road. Two teenage brothers looked up at the driver. He
introduced himself as Solo. "You looking for work? Slaves
to chocolate: thousands of boys toil on Ivory Coast cacao farms Aly Diabate,
from the country of Mali, was 12 years old when a slave trader promised him
$150 and a bicycle for working on a cacao farm in Ivory Coast The iabolish Complete List of
Slave Narratives Slave
Narratives from around the world Anecdotes
of Workplace Abuse in Malaysia I worked for a husband, wife, two
girls and a boy. Sometimes I didn’t sleep…. I would wake up at 5:00 a.m. and go
to sleep at midnight, sometimes 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m…. There were three families living
together in one big house and I was the only maid If my employers went out, they
locked the door from the outside and took the key I’m just a housemaid, I can’t ask
for anything. I am not allowed to talk to the neighbors I will go crazy here. They
don’t let me out, the employer won’t let me speak to anyone One employer explained: I think
it’s no good to let them out. If we allow them out, especially those
women from the village, they get influenced, they start to fight back If I asked for my salary, the
employer hit me I worked for my second employer for
two years. They cut my salary 2000 ringgit
(U.S.$526) in order to renew my passport In Malaysia, the agent or employer
holds the salary. If I want to buy anything, I had to borrow money from
my employer I want to send money home, but my
employer won’t let me Every day something made [my
employers] angry. Every day the woman hit me many times with a wooden
stick. Sometimes she slapped me, sometimes she hit me with a hanger or a
comb, sometimes when I was cooking, she hit my head with tools [My employers] were fussy and
cruel. If I washed the dishes and they were still a little dirty, she
would take the glass and hit me with the glass It was hard to work for them
because there was not enough food. I got food once a day. If I
made a mistake, for example, if we ran out of rice and I forgot to tell the
employer, she wouldn’t give me food for two days The grandmother was always
angry. She never let me take a break. She always complained about
my mistakes. She also hit me When the lady went to drop off the
children to the grandmother’s house, the man would stay at home…. He
raped me many, many times The agent said I will take care of
old people. They promised me 350 ringgit [U.S.$92.10]
a month, with four months deduction actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies/38-testimonies/54-testimony-of-alina
"I met my boyfriend at my
girl-friend’s house. He had been dating me for a month already when he told
me he was going to marry me. My boyfriend told me we could earn some money
for our wedding if we went to work in Greece at his friend’s company. We would stay for three months
there to earn enough money and come back. I was extremely happy. I could not
believe all that was happening to me. He took my passport and all necessary
papers and said that he would take care of visa and travel arrangements. I
was so happy and careless that I did not even ask to see the tickets or
documents. The day of departure came. We took the plane and instead of Greece
we landed in Dubai. He took me to a hotel and said
that he was going to see his friend and would be back soon. Two hours later a
man came to take me to another hotel saying that I was his property. I could
not understand, I kept saying that it was a misunderstanding and that my
friend would come soon. I had come to Dubai for another purpose. The man told
me that my friend had sold me to him, that from now
on he would have my documents and I had to do whatever he told me to. He said
that the next day I had to move to another place and serve all the clients he
would send to me. actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies/38-testimonies/56-testimony-of-anita
I felt very scared that evening
and I refused to eat anything. I soon noticed that many men were coming in
and out of the house and I realized it was a brothel. I began howling and
shouting. I said that I wanted to leave. Renu Lama
told me that I was ignorant. She said that I did not just come easily and I
could not go easily. She said that I had been bought and I would have to work
as a prostitute in order to pay them back. On the fourth day that I was in
the brothel, my first client came to me. I refused to have sex with him. He
had already paid so he grabbed me and tried to rape me. I fought him off. He
had managed to get my clothes off but he was very frustrated because I was
resisting him so much. He stormed out and asked for his money back. A couple
of the brothel owners (voluntary prostitutes) came in and beat me. When they
were done, the same man came back in. Some of my associates overheard
the owners saying that they were also planning to sell me to a brothel in Sarat because I was too much trouble. I decided that I
could not wait until the boy returned from Nepal. I had to try again to run
away. I asked some of the other girls to run with me, but they were too
afraid. We had been told that we would be killed if we tried to run away. But
I had determined that I would rather die than stay in the brothel. The other
girls pooled their money together and came up with two hundred rupees. In
exchange for the 200 rupees, I promised that if I made it out alive, I would
get help for them. actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies/38-testimonies/57-testimony-of-bopha
Bopha lived in a rural village and
married at 17. Her husband immediately took her to a hotel in another village
and left her. Bopha discovered the hotel was a
brothel and tried to escape, but she was forcibly detained and told she must
pay off the price the hotel owner had paid for her. actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies/38-testimonies/60-testimony-of-den
Deng, in her late 20's, was
recruited in her native Thailand to travel voluntarily to Australia where she
was told she could make lots of money as a prostitute. Upon arrival in
Australia, however, she was met by traffickers who took away her passport and
locked her in a house. actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies/38-testimonies/66-testimony-of-er
"My name is E.R. and I am from Elbasan.
When I was 15, my parents married me, against my will, to a man aged 35, whom
I did not love. So started my miseries.
Not too long afterwards, I abandoned him and returned to my family.
But my parents did not accept me back because I had dishonored them by
leaving my husband. I had no support and nowhere to go. I got acquainted with
a boy who was 20 who said he loved me and promised to marry me. He convinced
me to go to Italy for 'a better life.'
I thought my sufferings now were at an end, but I did not know the
real hell that was expecting me. I was compelled to work on the street. I did
so for nearly three years. My exploiter savagely battered me frequently,
mainly when I did not bring home the required sum or when he faced drug
trafficking problems. |