Reigniting the Abolition Movement

In 1807 England became the first major slave exporting country to abolish the Transatlantic slave trade through the tireless work of individuals such as William Wilberforce. The trade was officially banned in all major importing countries by the end of the nineteenth century. However, slavery still exists today. Currently about 27 million people are enslaved around the world. They make our clothes, pick coffee beans and cocoa, serve food in restaurants, make bricks, and are forced to sell their bodies in cities around the world, all with the constant threat of violence against themselves or their family. Slavery is not as obvious as it was in the nineteenth century but it is right in front of us.

It is so well hidden from us that we watch films such as Slumdog Millionaire and do not realize that we are being shown several examples of child trafficking. The blinded boys who sing for alms, the young girl who is forced into prostitution, these are the faces of human trafficking. It is in front of us daily but we often do not recognize it for what it is.
The trade of men, women, and even children, trafficked both within their own countries and across international borders, generates $32 million annually in profits. This exceeds the black market for arms, and many believe will pass the drug trade in the near future. An estimated 15,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year. Trafficking is different from being smuggled into the country. Trafficking involves the use of coercion, violence, or kidnapping in the moving of a person. A young woman who is told of a job in the United States as a secretary and is brought into the country only to have her passport taken away and is forced to work in a brothel or clothing factory for little or no pay, is a trafficking victim and protected under federal law. Women and children are uniquely at risk for trafficking, eighty percent of those trafficked across transnational borders are women and girls. Seventy percent of female trafficking victims are forced into commercial sexual exploitation.

The problems of commercial sexual exploitation and sex tourism have grown exponentially due to new forms of transportation, information technology, and increased global interaction. It is now easier to get young girls and women out of their rural villages with the promise of a better life, it is now easier for a man from the United States to travel to Thailand for “business” and for him to visit the red light district of Bangkok than ever before. It is now easier, because of the advent of the Internet, to sell minors for sex with anonymity. The resurgence of a global human slavery market presents new challenges.

Legislation alone cannot end this covert, vast trade. It will require the diligence of communities, police officers, and politicians to uproot and destroy trafficking rings, shut down illegal brothels and forced labor farms and factories, and bring the traffickers, pimps, and madams to justice. This will, at first require tougher legislation. By increasing the risk for a trafficker, from a fine or light jail sentence to a long-term jail sentence the trade will become less profitable. On the demand side, increasing the penalty of buying sex or utilizing forced labor will create another situation where the trade becomes less profitable by decreasing demand. These laws, however, will be nearly useless without the commitment of communities and police officers. In San Diego, the police force was one of the first in the nation to be trained in identifying trafficking victims. It is incredibly common for trafficking victims in the commercial sex trade to be mistaken for and punished as prostitutes. The San Diego police department, with the help of local non-profits learned techniques to identify and assist trafficking victims, in a manner that would not endanger the victim or the victim’s family. The expansion of this program to other police departments and other community groups will be useful, at least in the United States, in fighting human trafficking. Internationally, it will vary by country as to the best methods for informing the public and law enforcement about trafficking and getting them to cooperate with international efforts to stop the trade.

Another angle that can be worked by many agencies, organizations, and governments is to aide in a community’s development. Though not all cases are caused by poverty or lack of communication with urban centers, a vast number of survivors are from developing countries and from rural areas. Often these rural communities are unaware of the danger of trafficking or, as is sometimes the case, a child is sold to provide money for the rest of the family’s survival. There are cases of forced labor in which a family is forced to work to repay a loan (taken out at a time of crisis), which can never be repaid, regardless of how much work they do. I saw this first hand in Guatemala last March. A poor indigenous community just outside Antigua suffered from an epidemic, and was unable to pay for medication. A wealthy Guatemalan man told them that he would buy the medicine if they gave him their land deeds. Out of desperation, they handed over their land and are still unable to keep their harvests. They may never regain their land through work. However, there is hope for that community and others. The women called upon the Guatemalan government to teach them Spanish (the indigenous languages are not widely spoken) and now they are able to sell their woven garments and crafts to tourists. This money has been used to educate their children and build medical clinics, thus helping the next generations to come out of the cycle of poverty and exploitation. By providing pathways out of poverty, we reduce the biggest bargaining chip that traffickers have, desperation and fear.

Human trafficking seems like a large, volatile, and dangerous monster to attempt to defeat. And it all seems incredibly daunting and overwhelming to begin all at once, but incrementally we will be able to chisel away at the chains that bind so many and bring to justice those responsible.