Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery

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Are slavery and bondage still extant in the world today? Difficult to imagine but sadly, true. Millions of people around the world still suffer in silence in slave-like situations of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation from which they cannot free themselves. Trafficking in persons is one of the greatest human rights challenges of our time.1

It appears that both abject poverty and the dearth of economic opportunity are separate but related forces that drive people to uproot themselves from the familiar comfort of home and to make themselves vulnerable by trusting others as they take a chance on the possibility of finding something better elsewhere. Regrettably, this trust is sometimes betrayed.

When Joseph from Benin was 13 years old, a stranger arranged with his parents for him to go to neighboring Togo to make a better life, but of course it didn’t turn out that way. He was made to work from 5 A.M. to 11 P.M. every day as a domestic servant and he was regularly beaten. After saving money for three years, he was able to afford to phone home. This ultimately brought about his rescue by an uncle.²

It is a common practice to persuade a young woman to leave home and to move to a wealthier neighboring country where she can work in domestic service, child or adult care, or as a waitress in a restaurant or a bar, or perhaps as a dancer. Upon arrival, her passport, visa, and return tickets are taken from her and, effectively, she is imprisoned, either physically or financially or mentally. She is made to work as a domestic slave or as an agricultural or factory worker, under slave-like conditions, or in a brothel. She sees virtually none of the money that she earns, and eventually she will be sold.^{3, 4}

PBS reported⁵ that Thonglim Kampiranon, a 43-year-old mother of two from rural Thailand, was one of three Thai women trafficked to Los Angeles to work in a suburban home and in a restaurant located in a shopping mall. The three were promised decent treatment and $240 a month wages. But instead, Khampiranon says that she and the other women received six years of exploitation and abuse, working as slaves. Khampiranon often worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And in the six months prior to her escape, she received no pay. She had to wake up at about 6 or 7 A.M. and start cleaning the house. Around 10A.M., she would be taken to the restaurant where she would work until about midnight. When she got back home, she could only have a few hours sleep and then had to wake up and start cleaning the house again the next morning Khampiranon says they controlled her and the other Thai women by confiscating their passports, censoring their mail and restricting contact with the outside world. To maintain obedience, Khampiranon says that they threatened family members in Thailand.

Slavery can be a trap that never lets go. Exploited workers, subjected to slave-like labor conditions, may be held by restrictions on their freedom of movement, by induced indebtedness, confiscation of papers, late payment or non-payment of wages, and by the threat of denunciation to the authorities with the implication that this would be followed by deportation. A young woman may initially agree to be transported in order to enter the sex trade, but later find herself trapped by threats of violence, physical restriction or debt-bondage. Modern “sex slavery” is an unfortunate reality

Human Rights Watch estimates that every year, 800,000 to 900,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders into forced labor or slavery-like conditions. Trafficking includes all acts related to the recruitment, transport, transfer, sale, or purchase of human beings by force, fraud, deceit, or other coercive tactics for the purpose of placing them into conditions of forced labor or practices similar to slavery, in which labor is extracted through physical or non-physical means of coercion, including blackmail, fraud, deceit, isolation, threat or use of physical force, or psychological pressure.⁶ The UN International Labor Office (ILO) reports that Asia has three-quarters of the 12.3 million people believed to be in forced labor worldwide.⁷

It is important to clarify the difference between trafficking and smuggling. Trafficking differs from smuggling in that there is the intent to exploit the individuals who are trafficked. The key elements of a trafficking relationship are the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud, deception or abuse of power, while smuggling generally implies a degree of consent between the transporting agent and the smuggled individual. Trafficking implies an absence of such consent, during at least some stage of the trafficking cycle. In the case of trafficked children, the issue of consent is irrelevant. Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol on Trafficking states that the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered “trafficking in persons”, whether or not force, coercion and deception are involved.

A second distinguishing feature of trafficking focuses on the conditions to which a smuggled worker is subjected in the destination country. Through corrupt government officials, unscrupulous labor agents, and poor enforcement of the law, economic migrants may be deceived or coerced into situations of forced labor and slavery-like practices. If the work is exploitive, involving illegal forced labor or debt bondage, or is below national and international labor standards, this too is trafficking

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1. U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2003, [http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2003/]

2. BBC News, Scale of African slavery revealed, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3652021.stm

3. Eugen Tomiuc, World: Interpol Official Discusses Human Trafficking, Internet Pornography, 2003, [http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/news/2003/05/sec-030514-rfel-142137.htm]

4. International Labour Organisation, Forced Lobour, Child Labour And Human Trafficking In Europe: An ILO Perspective, 2002, [http://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/ipec/publ/policy/brussels_traffpaper2002.pdf]

5. Jim Lehrer, PBS, Slavery in America, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june01/slavery_3-8.html

6. Human Rights Watch, http://hrw.org/reports/2004/indonesia0704/4.htm - _Toc76201455

7. NGUOI Viet Online, U.N. agency urges Asian nations to end forced labor,

http://nguoi-viet.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=25113&z=42