Human Trafficking 101

This post has been on the tips of my fingers for a very long time.

As many of you know I am in the midst of a fellowship at Polaris Project, which is an anti-slavery group that works to combat human trafficking by changing policy, providing knowledge and helping victims. Since I've been at Polaris for a little over a month now, I thought it would be a good idea to spread my "knowledge" of the human trade to my loyal readers.

For some of you, human trafficking may be something you are aware of or have even worked on yourself. For others of you, however, this thought of the buying and selling of human beings may be completely new, and quite possibly unbelievable. However, after spending a month of my time in the client services department of Polaris Project, and after meeting several women who have, themselves, been trafficked, I can tell you, for sure, that this does exist.

Let me tell you a little bit about human trafficking.

First off, let me define it. I won't give you the legal definition, but I will give you a conglomerate of many different definitions I have heard.

Human Trafficking is the overpowering of one person's will by force, fraud or coercion in order to make a profit off of their labor or commercial sex acts.

This is something that happens globally, not just in South East Asian or Eastern European Countries. The United States is not only one of the biggest destination countries for these men, women and children, but people in the United States also traffick their own citizens. It is important to note that the word "Traffick" means the buying or selling of something, not necessarily the transportation of something. Therefore, it is possible (and often happens) that someone is trafficked--kidnapped or coerced into a situation--in his or her own city and exploited there as well, making it a trafficking situation even though he or she never crossed borders.

One misconception that I had before working with Polaris was that most of the situations of trafficking were foreign nationals being brought to the United States. In fact most of the current information and movies about human trafficking focus, almost completely, on the international situation, whether focusing on brothels in other countries, or foreign men and women brought to the United States. However, there are brothels in the United States (in Chapel Hill, NC, in fact...) and there are United States citizens who have been trafficked within United States borders. In fact, all but one of the clients that I have met or helped have been citizens of the United States.

So what I'm going to do is try to give you a broad sweeping view of what human trafficking entails. I'll leave the individual questions up to you...to post as questions in comments for further posts, or to ask me individually, as I will either be able to answer your question or ask the panel of experts that I work with and get back to you.

Before I begin I want to point out that there is a broad scale of experiences in any of the following fields, from good experiences where people are there by choice and treated well, to exploitation to trafficking. In the broad spectrum of things, only a portion of them fall into trafficking. Therefore while some people have good experiences and some have bad experiences, not all have trafficking experiences.

Labor Trafficking

Labor trafficking is not commonly known of in the United States. In fact, most people assume that labor exploitation goes on in other countries, but not really in the U.S. Unfortunately, that's not true. The problem is bigger than just in other countries. So here are the different areas that trafficked people are commonly found in:

Domestic Workers: A surprising number of people are trafficked for household work. These situations are incredibly easy to exploit because usually the workers are foreign and cannot speak English, and the do not know their way around, or don't have the proper documentation (either their traffickers took it, or they are illegal immigrants). While they may technically be able to leave, their situation forces them to continue to stay--and the people they work for know this and take advantage of it.

Agriculture/Food Workers: Many workers in these areas are exploited, but some are trafficked. Both situations are wrong. Again, these workers are often foreign nationals who are used by the owners of farms or processing plants. Often times these owners will use labor brokers to get their workers. These labor brokers are the real traffickers, and force the men and women into their situations through confiscation of documents or through debt bondage--where someone had to pay a fee to get to America, and now have to work it off. However, usually what happens in the debt bondage situation is that the labor broker will keep finding ways to make the worker go into more debt--for example, charging an outrageous amount of money for food or living necessities. The fear comes through threats of beating or threats to the family members back home.

Random: One of the saddest/craziest stories that I heard through my Polaris training was one where a family brought over 50 deaf Mexicans to New York City and forced them to go out on the streets every day with little cards and trinkets that stated that they were deaf and asked for $1. If they didn't meet their daily quota they got beat at night. They were deaf and didn't know the language. They had no way to get out.

Labor trafficking is prevalent throughout the United States, from food processors, to hotels, and even sometimes the magazine crews that to your door. You have to remember that not all cases are trafficking (not EVERYONE who comes to your door selling magazines is a trafficked person...), but it might be worth your time to just make sure they are in a legit situation.

Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking is really the reason why I became interested in the anti-slavery movement. Images of women trapped in brothels or bought as sex slaves made me angry and I wanted to move towards an end. The more I learned about human trafficking for sex purposes the more disturbed I got. While the brothels and the massage parlors bothered me I had never thought twice about women who were caught in prostitution. Whether you agree with a woman's right to sell her own body or not is not really the issue, and it wasn't the issue that I thought about either, but moreover I always considered it her choice. Come to find out, there aren't very many women who are out there by choice. There are no hard and fast statistics on this (mainly because women are afraid to tell on their pimps, and even if they do they are rarely believed), but most women in prostitution are either trafficked or have been in the past. Only a few are out there because they "want" to be (and even then, is our society and economic system really prostituting these women out?).

More than that, however, consider the social stigma that comes along with being a prostitute. While pimps get praised with Academy Award winning songs such as "It's Hard Out There For a Pimp", when "Pimp My Ride" is a good thing, and when calling a man a "Pimp" or saying that he is "Pimpin'" as a reference to his popularity, women who are the victims of these men are looked down upon and arrested, but rarely rescued from the hopeless situations in which they dwell. Pimps are not cool, they are not good, and it is certainly not "hard out there". Pimps are men who have almost always trafficked the women who they advertise on street corners, through craigslist (yes, craigslist), and in strip clubs.

Not only that, but these traffickers (usually men) are just meeting the demand for an even less stigmitized or recognized population...the johns who are visiting these women and paying the pimps. Johns who are caught (IF they are caught) rarely get punished with more than a fine or a slap on the wrist, yet you could easily argue that they are the whole reason that sex slavery exists. If there is no demand, there is no supply. If there is demand there will be some kind of supply. And the supply can literally be anyone who has any kind of vulnerability. Pimps and traffickers can prey very easily on young women, and they often do. The average age of a trafficked woman is 12.

Trafficking exists everywhere. And trafficking is slavery. And we should all be abolitionists...every single one of us.

To learn more please go to the Polaris webpage. If you want to donate you can do it through my fundraising page at change.org.

If you would like to know more, please, don't hesitate to ask me. If I can't answer the questions, I'll find you an answer as soon as I can.

I want to leave you with this quote by Thomas Jefferson that is found on his memorial...

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free..."