Resources for Teachers – Background - 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.

Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery

Resources for Teachers

 

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Background

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A Blight on the Nation: Slavery in Today's America

www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/commentary/data/000122

Overwhelmingly, they come on the promise of a better life, with the opportunity to work and prosper in America. Many come in the hope of earning enough money to support or send for their families. In order to afford the journey, they fork over their life savings, and go into debt to people who make promises they have no intention of keeping, and instead of opportunity, when they arrive they find bondage. They can be found—or more accurately, not found—in all 50 states, working as farmhands, domestics, sweatshop and factory laborers, gardeners, restaurant and construction workers, and victims of sexual exploitation.

These people do not represent a class of poorly paid employees, working at jobs they might not like. They exist specifically to work, they are unable to leave, and are forced to live under the constant threat and reality of violence. By definition, they are slaves. Today, we call it human trafficking, but make no mistake: It is the slave trade.

Modern Day Slavery - Veronica Pugin  April 13, 2009

claremontportside.com/index.php?/20090413236/International/Modern-Day-Slavery.html

Beyond the abuse involved in the commercial trafficking of women and children, human trafficking also entails all forms of forced labor, debt bondage, coerced domestic labor, and military conscription of children. Victims of human trafficking do not freely choose their occupation nor do they prefer it to their former lives; instead, they have been forced into a situation far worse than they had ever consented to. A majority of those victimized have little access to education, have a low rate of economic opportunity, experience a great deal of civil and political strife, or are migrants. The people in these situations tend to be more vulnerable to the traps of the traffickers.  In many regions of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, certain traffickers befriend street children, trick them into believing that they would provide guidance, and then ultimately sell them as sex slaves or as domestic servants.

Human trafficking is all too real, filmmaker discovers

www.baptiststandard.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9124&Itemid=53

Shortly after reading the article, Dillon and his band played a small town near the Black Sea. The crowds were raucous and energetic, treating Dillon and his bandmates like they were the Beatles. After the show, he met one of his new fans, a teenage girl who believed she had paid someone to make travel arrangements for her to go to the U.S.   But her story didn’t add up. She believed she was going to the U.S. for a more comfortable lifestyle—working in a fast-food restaurant. Remembering the Times article, Dillon dug deeper, asking the girl to show him the paperwork for her travel arrangements.   She had none. Dillon sat her down and explained to her that she was being swindled and most likely would become a victim of human trafficking. He told her that she likely would be sold, beaten and raped, never living the life she thought she was a plane ride from.

The toughest part wasn’t explaining what most likely was this girl’s fate, Dillon said. It was watching her decide to take the chance anyway.

IOM’s Busatti: We’re fighting the ugly face of globalization

A CANDLE IN THE DARK - "Sometimes we feel we are trying to bring to shore a boat that is at the edge of a waterfall," Busatti says. But he adds that seeing the smiling faces of the victims after they have been rescued keeps him and his colleagues going. He says sometimes he feels he cannot take any more when he sees children and single mothers forced into prostitution, but he adds: "We are always caught in a paradox. We feel that our help is marginal in comparison with the size of the evils of this industry. But, of course, it does not mean we stop assisting.”

Body Shopping

"We don't really know how many people are trafficked for organs," Scheper-Hughes says, adding that a conservative estimate of the number of trafficked kidneys was 15,000 each year. There are 'strong cases' documenting coercion in sale of organs in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Israel, India, and the United States. Poverty seems to be a prevailing feature in trafficking in persons for the purposes of organ removal.

Slave Trafficking Alive and Well in 21st Century

In his contribution to the journal Foreign Policy, Skinner wrote how rampant human trafficking networks are around the globe, saying the world now is seeing the largest number of humans working as slaves in history.

Modern slaves are not the metaphorical expression that laborers in difficult industries use to refer to the toughness of their jobs. The term refers to more than 10 million people scattered worldwide forced to work without appropriate compensation or to repay inherited debt or at gunpoint.  According to the International Labor Organization, 12.3 million people labor under duress in the world, including an estimated 1.39 million women who work as sex slaves.

Human Trafficking: The Worst Form of Labour Exploitation

LABOUR EXPLOITATION - Most migrant workers have chosen to move in order to improve their living conditions. But many are poor and vulnerable and some get trapped in the migration process or at destination and end up being exploited and abused, Anders Lisborg explains. ”It becomes trafficking when middlemen or employers take advantage of migrant’s vulnerability and sell them to a situation where their rights are violated. If they for example are not paid, not allowed to leave the factory or the compound or if they are physically or psychologically abused.” 

“When you boil down the words of UN’s definition of trafficking it is basically about addressing severe labour exploitation and lack of decent working conditions,in different sectors,” he says  “In others words, whenever you can talk about migrant workers being forced or tricked  into severe exploitation at the worksite or during tansportation  – then it is basically a case of trafficking.”

However, this does not mean that everybody have the same requisites and the same choices. “We know that the world in reality is not as fair as we would like it to be.” The important thing is that people can chose what to do and what not to do. And have the option to say stop,” he says.

Victims Of A Hidden Population - Human Trafficking

"You refuse to do it, but in the end you have to accept reality. You can run away, but where do you run to? You want to talk, but who do you talk to? You are totally confused." This was the plight of a young Nigerian girl who had been trafficked to Italy. When she realised that she had been lied to and that she would have to sell sex instead of working in a restaurant, as she had been promised, she cried non-stop for 5 days.

Unbearable to the human heart Trafficking in children and action to combat it [DOC]

ROOT CAUSES OF CHILD TRAFFICKING - There are many reasons why child trafficking occurs, but it is overwhelmingly a demand-driven phenomenon.  It occurs first and foremost because there is a market for children in labour and in the sex trade, and this is matched by an abundant supply of children, most often from poor families, who are easy prey for those who seek to make a profit by exploiting their vulnerability.

Complementing the forces of supply and demand that underlie trafficking are the infrastructure and trends associated with a rapidly globalizing world: increasingly open borders, better transport, and increased overall migration flows.  Globalization has provided impetus to both those who wish to migrate and those who traffic the unwilling. In 2000, the United Nations estimated that almost 13 million people, or 2 per cent of the world population, are on the move at any given time.

Human Rights Watch’s Statement to the IOM Council

A RIGHTS-BASED APPROACH TO MANAGING MIGRATION - Contrary to popular belief, human trafficking should not be understood necessarily or exclusively as an underground phenomenon run by criminal syndicates. Instead, trafficking often results from inadequate or faulty government policies that place certain groups of migrants and workers at greater risk of abuse and with little hope for redress. Anti-trafficking efforts must target and reform these policies. For example, poor regulation and monitoring of recruitment agents leads many migrants to become heavily indebted or deceived about working conditions. Sponsorship visas in the Middle East and Asia tie workers to their employers making it difficult for them to change employment in cases of abuse. And certain categories of work in which migrants are concentrated, such as domestic work and agriculture, are excluded from key labor protections.

Protecting the Innocent: Reducing Vulnerability to Human Trafficking in West and Central Africa

INNOCENCE LOST - Human trafficking is a global problem. But Western Africa is particularly hard hit.

q       Children - drugged, coerced, and forced to carry guns almost as big as themselves - become killers, child soldiers on the frontlines of savage conflicts (for example in Congo, Liberia, or Sierra Leone);

q       Boys, with stones tied around their ankles, are forced to dive into dangerous waters to untangle nets (like on Lake Volta);

q       Girls, caught up in conflict, are forced into sex slavery;

q       Children, who should be at school, are working long hours in coco fields or in mines (even here in Cote d’Ivoire) doing back-breaking work for almost nothing.

This has an impact far beyond the trauma suffered by these children. For how can West Africa build a peaceful and prosperous future if its youth is being exploited, recycled, and scarred for life?

Trafficking: return of the ‘white slavery’ scare?

In recent years, a motley crew of government and police forces in America and Europe, feminist activists, fundamentalist Christian outfits and celebrity campaigners has turned human trafficking into one of the biggest issues of our time. They claim there is a new ‘slave trade’, that tens of thousands of people – especially women and children – are being sold across borders and into bondage every year. Salacious newspaper reports (in respectable broadsheets as well as the tabloids) tell us of ‘the teenagers traded for slave labour and sex’; of African children that are ‘nothing but a commodity… traded for tawdry sex and living under the fear of voodoo’; of Eastern European women moved across Europe ‘like cattle’ to service sex-hungry kerb-crawlers in Britain, Spain, France and Germany (7). The anti-traffickers paint a picture of uber-Dickensian global squalor, of Conradian darkness, where women and children are bought and sold by evil gangs, and then forced into labour and kept in their place by threats of murder or voodoo vengeance.

The evidence for these sinister claims is murky indeed. No one doubts that illegal immigration is a messy business. Migrants from some Eastern European countries and from Africa are denied free movement around Europe. Thus they frequently have little choice but to pay middlemen for fake passports, risky forms of transportation and other favours. Those who do make it into Britain, France or Germany have to live beneath officialdom’s radar or risk being deported back to their country of origin: this means they can easily be exploited, becoming beholden to dodgy employers who pay them shockingly low wages and provide them with shoddy housing. But enslaved? Victims of voodoo? Little more than ‘cattle’ or ‘commodities’ driven and shipped around Europe like animals? Such claims seem to spring from the anti-traffickers’ fevered and borderline-xenophobic mindset, rather than being based in reality.

Literary Happenings: Book details human trafficking in world

"Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade — and How We Can Fight It" by award-winning journalist David Batstone (HarperCollins; $15).

Filled with victims' stories, reformers' struggles, political trends and opportunities for individual involvement, "Not for Sale" is a literary spark capable of igniting real change in the fight against human trafficking. Fascinating, well-written and readable, the book also includes an extensive list of Web sites, resources and organizations that are making a difference.

MODERN-DAY SLAVERY - Important Information About Trafficking in Persons [PDF]

-MODERN-DAY SLAVERY - Important Information About Trafficking in Persons

-MODERN-DAY SLAVERY - Important Information for College Students about Human Trafficking

-[poster]  SAY NO TO SLAVERY  -  FORCED LABOR IS ILLEGAL

-HIGHLIGHTS OF THE U.S. ANTI-TRAFFICKING LAW: THE VICTIMS OF TRAFFICKING AND VIOLENCE PROTECTION ACT OF 2000

Who's afraid of ... human trafficking?

Nathalie Rothschild says the promiscuous use of the term ‘trafficking’ to describe migration across borders is leading to new and stringent restrictions on free movement around the world.

Task Force Battles Human Trafficking

www.ktsm.com/news/local/5541796.html

Alternatively, see … archive.thepoint.gm/For%20the%20records1.htm

It's important to establish the difference between human smuggling and human trafficking. Smuggling is when people pay to be taken across the border illegally. Trafficking, on the other hand, goes a lot further. In many cases, victims of human trafficking are detained against their will and forced into slave labor.

"Once the victims arrive in the United States, the traffickers then tell them, 'You know what? You're not free to leave. You owe me five, ten... In some cases we've heard 20-thousand dollars for taking care of your travel to the United States. Now you're going to work it off.' " Paul Pinon heads the El Paso Police Department's Human Trafficking Task Force.

The New Global Slave Trade

Most people think of slavery as a purely historical phenomenon. In fact, the practice thrives around the world today. The same factors that contribute to economic globalization have given rise to a booming international traffic in human beings, often with the connivance of national governments. Fighting this scourge successfully will take more than another UN treaty: Western nations must use their military might.

Global solution needed to eradicate human trafficking, says expert

Heyzer traced the dramatic growth in migration and trafficking flows to so-called “push and pull” factors. Push factors would include uneven economic growth, war and armed conflict, natural disasters, high levels of gender inequality, and family violence. Prosperity and stability in medium and high growth countries and regions act as pull factors creating increased demand for imported labor in what Heyzer termed as the “global workplace.”

Migrant workers are cast under two categories: highly skilled professionals demanded by the new global economy and technologies; and the much larger group composed of semi-skilled and unskilled workers willing to take low wages, insecurity and dangerous work, said Heyzer.

ILO estimates 218m child labourers in world

“Unfortunately, most of the national actors where the problem of bonded labour prevails have neither the technical capacity nor the political will to effectively address a problem of such a magnitude. Governments must focus on children in bondage,” stated SPARC National Manager-Promotion Fazila Gulrez.

She said there were three types of bonded labourers, adding, “The first is when a child inherits a debt carried by his/her parents. Another form of bonded labour occurs when a child is used as collateral for a loan. Finally, a child worker may enter into bondage when the parents request an advance on future wages they expect to earn.”

A Report on Debt Bondage, Carpet-Making, and Child Slavery

www.iabolish.org/slavery_in_depth/carpet-slavery-india.html

OVERVIEW - In Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Dr. Kevin Bales estimates that there are at least 27 million slaves in the world today – more than at any other time in human history. Slavery is on the rise around the world for the simple reason that unpaid, forced labor constitutes an excellent (though brutal) means to economic profit. For callous businessmen, slaves are disposable people who toil to meet the global market’s demand for goods. The lower a good’s production costs, the more competitive it will be on the global market.

Sex Trafficking Victims: Disposable or Human

There are those who would argue that human trafficking is the inevitable outcome of poverty and that some poverty-stricken people choose willingly to be involved. But, as Ambassador Lagon pointed out, “There is a growing refusal to accept enslavement as an inevitable product of poverty or human viciousness. Corruption is typically poverty’s handmaiden in cases of human trafficking.”

Russian Mob and Human Trafficking

www.renewamerica.com/columns/kouri/050719

From Himalayan villages to Eastern European cities, people -- especially women and girls -- are attracted by the prospect of a well-paid job as a domestic servant, waitress or factory worker. Human traffickers recruit victims through fake advertisements, mail-order bride catalogues and casual acquaintances. Upon arrival at their destination, victims are placed in conditions controlled by traffickers while they are exploited to earn illicit revenues. Many are physically confined, their travel or identity documents are taken away and they or their families are threatened if they do not cooperate.

Women and girls forced to work as prostitutes are blackmailed by the threat that traffickers will tell their families. Trafficked children are dependent on their traffickers for food, shelter and other basic necessities. Traffickers also play on victims’ fears that authorities in a strange country will prosecute or deport them if they ask for help. A major purveyor of these de facto slaves is the Russian organized crime syndicate. Brutal, cunning and ruthless, these 21st Century mobsters present a new threat to US national security.

Slavery: A Worldwide Evil - From India to Indiana, more people are enslaved today than ever before

In 1993, Abdul Momen traveled to the town of Tungipara, 25 miles from Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, where 1,000 children, mostly girls, were reported missing. A dozen mothers told him the same tale: Their children had left with labor contractors who promised good jobs in the Persian Gulf.

The Slave Experience

How does a person become enslaved? How are slaves treated? What is the mental toll of slavery? How do slaves become free?

Fighting Slavery in 2006

MODERN-DAY SLAVERY - The most common stories are of young women and girls who are lured from poverty-stricken places with promises of work as servants or nannies, only to find themselves turned into shut-in sex slaves in alien countries where, even if they do escape, the authorities are often inaccessible to them. There are also men and boys, offered well-paying labor in faraway locations, only to be told when they arrive that they must work off the (previously unmentioned) costs of their transportation, and that their passports, wages, and freedom will be withheld until they do.

Different forms of human slavery

Despite centuries of struggle, slavery has not been eradicated from our world. Slavery is readily found on the farms of India, the heritable debt-bondage brick making kilns of Pakistan, and the cocoa plantations of Cote d'Ivoire.

Slavery thrives in the rug loom sheds of Nepal; the sex-slavery brothels of Manila, Thailand, Japan and the U.S.; the water-carrier chattel in Mauritania; the charcoal-making camps of Brazil; child prostitution in Ecuador; and child camel-jockey riding for the wealthy Sheikhs in United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.

Migrant trafficking exists for sexual labor throughout visa-free Canadian borders and into the U.S.A. Slavery exists in the garment manufacturing sweatshops of Los Angeles and New York, in the numerous sex clubs of St. Paul and Minneapolis, or domestic servitude in the wealthiest homes in Paris, London, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., just to name a few.

21st Century slavery

MORE SLAVES NOW THAN EVER - Today, 21st century slavery has changed a little from Solzhenitsyn's 1974 portrayal. The numbers and profits have increased, as well as the clandestine methods of human trafficking--moving victims from one location to another and still to another. According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], human trafficking alone generates a staggering $9.5 billion in yearly revenues worldwide. The International Labour Office [ILO] estimates that figure to be $32 billion each year. Moreover, there are more slaves today than any other time in human history. Worldwide estimates are that 27 million men, women, and children, even babies, are in slavery today, at any given time, a number much greater than any other period in recorded history and exponentially growing.

Our Children Used

Part 2: ENSLAVED AND FORGOTTEN - Many believe that the future is bright for our children. And yet, many children of this world are enslaved, trafficked, and forgotten. Here is the tragic reality of the loss of innocence.

Vigilance Needed in Fight Against Human Trafficking

All of the media stories depict sex trafficking. Sex trafficking, however, is only one of the many types of human trafficking that violates a person's rights, safety, and dignity. Human trafficking also refers to the ways people are recruited and then forced into labor such as factory work, agricultural work, domestic servitude, restaurant work, and servile marriage.

More than 12 million are trapped in forced labor worldwide. ILO releases major new study on forced labor

The report is the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken by an intergovernmental organization of the facts and underlying causes of contemporary forced labor. It was prepared under the Follow Up to the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work adopted by the ILO in 1998 and will be discussed at the Organization's annual International Labor Conference in June.

The new study confirms that forced labor is a major global problem that is present in all regions and in all types of economy. Of the overall total, some 9.5 million forced laborers are in Asia, which is the region with the highest number; 1.3 million in Latin America and the Caribbean; 660,000 in sub-Saharan Africa; 260,000 in the Middle East and North Africa; 360,000 in industrialized countries; and 210,000 in transition countries.

Trafficking in the Americas

TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN FOR SEXUAL EXPLOITATION IN THE AMERICAS  An Introduction to Trafficking in the Americas -  written by Alison Phinney, Intern at the Inter-American Commission of Women of the Organization of American States and the Women, Health and Development Program of the Pan American Health Organization 2001

Trafficking in Persons: the New Protocol

www.unodc.org/unodc/en/trafficking_protocol_background.html

Every year hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are trafficked illegally all over the world. Most of us assume that these people are willing participants in a criminal transaction. We believe that they are simply looking for an escape from poverty. Rarely do we pause to think about the specific problems they encounter when they are being smuggled or what happens to them afterwards. The reality reflects a very different picture

Draft United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime

DRAFT PROTOCOL AGAINST TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AND CHILDREN - As trafficking in persons, especially women and children for forced labour or "sex slavery", becomes increasingly linked to transnational organized crime, Governments have decided that a separate legal instrument -a Protocol against Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children- is needed to fight it.

U.N. anti-trafficking drive hits culture barriers

www.humantrafficking.org/updates/639

Global efforts to crack down on human trafficking are handicapped by lack of information from countries whose cultures have not deemed some forms of slavery to be a crime, U.N. officials said on Monday.  The United Nations is trying to raise awareness that two centuries after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished, millions of adults and children are sold into prostitution or made to work in degrading conditions for little or no pay.

Costa told a news briefing during a break in the meeting: "When families (in Asian villages) sell their daughter, it's not out of poverty necessarily, it may be cultural."

A diplomat close to the UNODC said its campaign was running up against cultural traditions in some significant developing nations that tolerated human trafficking and related slave labour outlawed by U.N. conventions.

Trafficking In Women and Children

ACTS OF TRAFFICKING - The following are deemed acts of trafficking committed either by a person or an entity when done for the purpose of prostitution, pornography, sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery, involuntary servitude or debt bondage: (a) to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor, provide or receive a person on the pretext of domestic or overseas employment, training or apprenticeship; (b) introduce or match for a consideration any Filipino woman to a foreign national for marriage for the purpose of trading her for prostitution; (c) offer or contract marriage; (d) undertake or organize tours and travel plans; (e) maintain or hire a person; and, (f) adopt or facilitate adoption.  Any undue recruitment, hiring, adoption, and movement of persons and children for removal or sale of organs or for the children to engage in armed activities in the Philippines or abroad are also considered acts of trafficking.

Demand & the child sex trade

DEMAND -  The child sex trade, like all trades, exists not because there is poverty but because there is demand and supply

The Link Between Prostitution and Sex Trafficking [PDF]

Prostitution and related activities—including pimping and patronizing or maintaining brothels—fuel the growth of modern-day slavery by providing a façade behind which traffickers for sexual exploitation operate

Trafficking: A Threat to Women Worldwide

www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/1374/

“Trafficking.” It’s a bland euphemism for a despicable crime committed primarily against women and children. It involves the theft and sale of human beings into lives of bondage, sexual abuse or both.

Trafficking and the Commodification of Women and Children

by Richard Poulin, professor, Ottawa University.  This article examines industrialization of the sex trade and the mass production of sexual goods and services structured around a regional and international division of labor which has resulted in the commodification of women and children

Stolen Lives: Trafficking of women

Gathering for what moderator Swanee Hunt, director of the Women and Public Policy Program, called a "grim subject," a group of experts met in the Kennedy School Forum to talk about the trafficking of women and girls worldwide and what, if anything, can be done to stop it

Ten Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution

by Janice G. Raymond.  As countries are considering legalizing and decriminalizing the sex industry, this article urges you to consider the ways in which legitimating prostitution as "work" does not empower the women in prostitution but does everything to strengthen the sex industry

Prostitution: Reality Versus Myth

www.women21.or.kr/news/W_English/W_News/W_News_View.asp?ENID=13&page=1&Rpos=2

There are many myths about prostitution _ that women become rich from prostitution; that women prostitute themselves to support expensive habits; that it is a job like any other; that it could even be a harmless, part time job for college girls wanting to earn tuition; or that women do it because they like it.  These myths could not be further from the violent reality of prostitution

Child Soldiers

In 2003, an estimated 500,000 children under eighteen years of age served in the government armed forces, paramilitary forces, civil militia, and armed groups of more than eighty-five nations, and another 300,000 children were active in armed combat in more than thirty countries. Some of the children were as young as seven years of age

Millions 'forced into slavery'

Between 5,000 and 14,000 people are said by the group to have been abducted into forced labour in Sudan since 1983.  There are also problems of forced labour in Mauritania where, the London-based rights group says, little has been done to secure the release of slaves or punish those who use them despite the abolition of slavery in 1981.  In Brazil, the report says, more than 1,000 people were rescued from forced labour last year, but many more remain enslaved on Amazonian estates.  The report says that in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh province, many women, children and men are forced to accept landlords' cash advances and work all day long for no wages.  Many of those who are forcibly employed across the world are children.

Human trafficking from Iran to Gulf Shiekhdoms

Shargh daily, May 26 – A group of Iranian boys and girls will be sold in an auction today in Fojeyreh, United Arab Emirates

The Opposite of Free Love

Dispatches from the World of Human Trafficking by Jennifer Goodson

Child Labor Rules Don't Ease Burden in Bangladesh

Under the association's program, designed in 1995 at the urging of the United States, the apparel industry has all but wiped out child labor. What's more, garment makers have sent nearly 10,000 children who once toiled in their factories to school, a considerable accomplishment in a country in which 35 percent don't make it past primary grades. But to many people here, the program doesn't feel like much of a success

How can something so sweet taste so wrong?

by Athena Sydney   After reading this article, chocolate may not taste so sweet – for the circumstances under which the cocoa laborers work, are bittersweet to say the least, atrocious is the word that comes to mind

ANGOLA: Children victims of witchcraft accusations

In some areas of Angola the belief in witchcraft is strong, and an accusation of sorcery can lead to violent and sometimes lethal retribution by the community.

Leonora, “P” and the human traffickers

On the other hand, “P”s older brother is perceived as the personification of success despite the fact that a whole dark world is hidden behind his external dignity. He was forced into human trafficking during his tender years and later decided to become a trafficker himself. He returned to the village to perform a most valuable service for his ringleaders. He is now the local recruiter for the new victims of the human trade, those that are needed to meet the growing demand.

"Modern day slavery". Prostitution in Thailand

To every one of us being a child means playing, laughing, eating ice cream, being surrounded with loving and caring parents. For children in Thailand however, this is just a mere image of the impossible. Thousands of them are tricked, drugged and then sold or abducted into prostitution

The Salvation Army's Fight Against Modern Day Slavery

www1.salvationarmy.org/usw%5Cwww_usw_sdm.nsf/0/90F7CF12ABD64CDF88256EEF00832652?opendocument

Human trafficking is an umbrella term used to describe all forms of modern-day slavery. Yes, SLAVERY! No longer is this a term from the past, but a horrific and growing reality in our present and, unfortunately, our future. There are 27 million slaves in the world today; amazingly, it is a number surpassing any this planet has seen before. Victims are controlled through force, coercion, threats, or manipulation; they are bought and sold; they are used; they are devastated physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Many of these victims are women and children

Human Trafficking for Forced Labor Might Exceed Perception

www.globalmarch.org/news/260407.php

Human trafficking for forced labor might be a greater problem than the more widely known problem of trafficking for sexual exploitation, says Kristiina Kangaspunta, the chief of the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

“We don’t know that much about forced labor issues,” she acknowledged in an April 26 interview with USINFO.   “We don’t know, but it seems that it might be that forced labor is a bigger part of the human trafficking than human trafficking for sexual exploitation.”  She cited an enormous number of places that could absorb the forced labor of men, women and children:  restaurants, hotels, bars, agriculture, domestic and construction work.

Interpol Official Discusses Human Trafficking, Internet Pornography

Interview with Hamish McCulloch, the assistant director of Interpol and the head of the agency's human-trafficking sub-directorate. He also discusses the problems of both trafficking and child pornography on the Internet

Best Practices to Address the Demand Side of Sex Trafficking [PDF]

This report describes efforts to address the demand side of sex trafficking. It defines the demand and describes its different components. It describes laws, policies, and programs aimed at reducing the demand for prostitution in communities and entire countries.  It includes a review of research on men’s behavior and attitudes towards prostitution and researchers’ analyses of men’s behavior and motives to purchase sex acts

US decries 'modern-day slavery'

Victims worldwide "are subjected to threats against their person and family, violence, horrific living conditions and dangerous workplaces," the report says.  They end up working as cheap labour, some on construction sites, others in clothing factories and many in brothels.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell called the practice an "abomination against humanity" and said Washington would work to put an end to it.  The report lists the root causes for trafficking as "greed, moral turpitude, economics, political instability and transition and social factors".

The Myth of the Migrant

reason: What do you make of the State Department's claim that 800,000 people are trafficked each year?

Agustín: Numbers like this are fabricated by defining trafficking in an extremely broad way to take in enormous numbers of people. The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons is using the widest possible definition, which assumes that any woman who sells sex could not really want to, and, if she crossed a national border, she was forced.

The numbers are egregious partly because the research is cross-cultural. The US, calling itself the world's moral arbiter on these issues, uses its embassies in other countries to talk to the police and other local authorities, supposedly to find out how many people were trafficked. There is a language issue —all the words involved don’t translate perfectly, and there is a confusion about what trafficking means. People don't all use it the same way. Even leaving aside language issues, we know the data aren't being collected using a standard methodology across countries. 800,000 is a fantasy number.

reason: Is there a legitimate core of abuses that need to be addressed?

Agustín: Some conscientious people talk about trafficking as applicable to men, transsexuals, or anyone you like, no matter what kind of work they do, when things go very wrong during a migration. When migrants are charged egregious amounts of money they can't possibly pay back, for example. However, we've reached the point in this cultural madness where most people mean specifically women who sell sex when they use the word "trafficking." They usually mean women working inside brothels.

reason: So there is an attempt to conflate the terms prostitution and trafficking?

Agustín: There is a definite effort to conflate the terms in a stream of feminism I call "fundamentalist feminism." These feminists believe there is a single definition of Woman, and that sexual experience is key to a woman's life, soul, self-definition. This particular group has tried to say that prostitution is not only by definition exploitation but is trafficking. It's bizarre but they are maintaining that.