Combating Human Trafficking

The position I now hold, Ambassador-at-Large to Combat Human Trafficking, one of four at-large ambassadorships in the Department of State, allows me an almost schizophrenic view of sorrow and hope--of forces of malignant oppression and positive change.

I have witnessed, and talked to people who have suffered profound degradation. And I have also witnessed the rapid impact of global social action because the movement to end human trafficking is changing the world.

I must begin with a story, because these are the true life stores that fuel the new abolition movement.

Four months ago, on my first trip to Southeast Asia, I met Aye Aye Win, a young Burmese woman who dared to search for work beyond her own tortured country. A recruiter painted a beautiful picture of work in a neighboring country. Aye Aye assumed substantial debt to cover up-front costs required by the recruiter for this job placement.

Together with some 800 Burmese migrants, many children, Aye Aye was "placed" in a shrimp farming and processing factory. But it wasn't a job. It was a prison camp.

The isolated 10-acre factory was surrounded by steel walls, 15 feet tall with barbed wire fencing, located in the middle of a coconut plantation far from roads. Workers weren't allowed to leave and were forbidden phone contact with any one outside. They lived in run-down wooden huts, with hardly enough to eat.

Aye Aye is a brave, daring soul. She tried to escape with three other women. But factory guards caught them and dragged them back to the camp. They were punished as an example to others, tied to poles in the middle of the courtyard, and refused food or water. Aye Aye told me how her now beautiful hair was shaved off as another form of punishment, to stigmatize her. And how she was beaten for trying to flee.

Beaten. Tortured. Starved. Humiliated. Is this not slavery??

Out of this heartless story spring several strong positive signs.

First, the shelter where I met Aye Aye is a wonderful place. It is fully funded by the Government of Thailand. Around the world, there are far more shelters and programs to serve victims of human trafficking.

Second, Aye Aye was rescued in a raid led by Thai police. Raids such as this one were unheard of just four or five years ago.

Around the world, as a function of U.S. Government leadership, there has been a real paradigm shift in awareness about human trafficking, and a sensitivity that victims are just that--victims, not criminals or illegal aliens. There is a growing refusal to accept enslavement as an inevitable product of poverty or human viciousness. It is not just poverty and desperation that make human trafficking possible, but also the extreme greed and sadism of the exploiters and the catalyst of corruption.

The U.S. Government estimates that approximately 800,000 people are trafficked internationally each year; millions more are enslaved in their own countries.

Every day, all over the world, people are coerced into bonded labor, exploited in domestic servitude, and enslaved in agricultural work and in factories.

Migrant workers, a population of 120 million according to the International Labor Organization, are particularly vulnerable to the evils of slave laborand sex trafficking.

Worldwide, the reason most victims are trafficked is to be turned into commodities in a massive global sex industry. Approximately two-thirds of transnational human trafficking victims, each year, are pulled into the commercial sex industry.

And victims keep getting younger.

Recent research confirms that despite very different economic realities, GDPs, cultural contexts, and levels of government commitment to confront human trafficking, four countries that might be dissimilar in many ways--Jamaica, The Netherlands, the U.S., and Japan--all share a situation of sex trafficking and sex tourism ruining lives, yet going largely unnoticed, due to "a culture of tolerance."

Well, over the last five years, at the federal level, we are no longer tolerating the extreme human rights abuses of sex trafficking.

The U.S. Government, since December 2002, follows a national security directive that defines prostitution as inherently harmful and dehumanizing. It draws a direct connection between prostitution and human trafficking. It's probably the most feminist language you'll find in any policy statement written in the last seven years!

Quoting the directive:

"Our policy is based on an abolitionist approach to trafficking in persons, and our efforts must involve a comprehensive attack on such trafficking, which is a modern day form of slavery. In this regard, the United States Government opposes prostitution and any related activities, including pimping, pandering, or maintaining brothels as contributing to the phenomenon of trafficking in persons. These activities are inherently harmful and dehumanizing. The United States Government position is that these activities should not be regulated as a legitimate form of work for any human being." 

The facts support this policy conclusion: normalized, tolerated, regulated prostitution is a clear driver for sex trafficking. And as this market flourishes, the most hideous acts of brutality are occurring.

Let me mention just one true story, that typifies the horror we find in case after case after case of sex trafficking:

A girl like a 15-year-old Lithuanian I'll call Ilka.

Ilka was promised a holiday job in England, and she was flown from Vilnius to London, accompanied by a Kosovar who had befriended her.

As soon as she arrived, the Kosovar turned her over to a Macedonian living in England who raped and then sold her to an Albanian for 4,000 pounds.

Ilka was enslaved in a series of brothels and re-sold seven times.Thankfully, she escaped and ran, half-dressed, to a police station in Sheffield.

The first three traffickers were found guilty of trafficking for sexual exploitation, and sentenced to 18, 15, and 7 years. It was the first case to be tried under an anti-trafficking law in England passed just two years ago.

Unfortunately too many people adamantly resist the extensive evidence that it is prostitution that creates the demand for sex trafficking victims.

They say they want to protect victims by regulating the sex industry, making brothels pay taxes, offering free medical check-ups-that is, to women and girls routinely being beaten up and raped.

Beaten and raped--they are terrorized. Clinical evidence documents that people used in prostitution want to escape. The majority exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder on the same scale as combat veterans or victims of dictatorships' terror, according to Dr. Melissa Farley in field research published in the Journal of Trauma Studies in 2003.

State-regulated prostitution is a huge magnet for sex trafficking, which provides a convenient cover for criminals and legitimizes the dehumanizing fate of those enslaved.

A few years ago, the U.S. Government offered a resolution at the Commission on the Status of Women that highlighted this link and called on countries to take steps to confront the demand for more victims.

Who resisted this resolution? Initially, the greatest resistance came from wealthy nations where the "culture of tolerance" for commercial sex is strongest.

These countries were shamed into agreeing to the resolution, but we still have not gotten far enough in confronting the demand for paid sex. There are few "voluntary" cases of prostitution in real life like that depicted in a velvety fashion in "Pretty Woman." Prostituted children, women, even men are trapped.

Trapped by the rapacious greed of their pimps and ravenous desire of johns enabling their victimization. We need to not just confront Europe and Japan about it, but educate our own citizens to this fact.

To emancipate slaves in prostitution, slaves rented to johns and pedophiles, as a nation, we must decide that it is not ok to buy a body for 30 minutes--buy a fellow human being--let alone for months or years.

Exploiters must be held accountable for the misery and degradation they cause. Justice requires that.

And exploiters should be held accountable for the death and disease they spread. Globally, people in prostitution have a high incidence of HIV. HIV prevalence among women trafficked into prostitution from Nepal to India is 38 percent. The rate of HIV infection exceeded 60 percent among girls prostituted prior to age 15, according to a study published earlier this year in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Here in New York, you have one of the few state laws that draws a connection between the demand for prostitution and the immense profits reaped by sex traffickers by making the act of buying sex a CLASS A misdemeanor, and criminalizing the flagrant activities of sex tour operators, whether they are offering sex in countries where prostitution is legal or not.

The New York anti-trafficking law was advanced by a remarkable coalition of feminist groups, faith-based groups, and service providers. It went into effect on November 1 and the great challenge will be implementing this path-breaking law. This is, to date, the best model law for the nation.

The office I head increasingly focuses on labor slavery as well as sex trafficking.

One of the trends discerned in field reporting for the 2006 and 2007 Trafficking in Persons Reports is the use of debt as a tool of coercion.

In both forced labor and sex trafficking, illegal or illegitimate debt is increasingly used to keep people in servitude. This debt is employed by traffickers as an instrument of coercion. How does this work?

People are enticed into fraudulent offers of work abroad that require a steep payment up front for the services of a labor agency arranging the job-or a payment that goes straight to the future employer. Traffickers and recruiters exploit this initial debt accrued as part of the terms of employment.

This all sounds very legalistic until you learn the terrifying circumstances in which debt captures an indebted worker.

Let me share with you a real life example. A contract labor agency in Bangladesh advertised work at a garment factory in Jordan. The ad promises a three-year contract, $425 per month, eight hour workdays, six days a week, paid overtime, free accommodations, free medical care, free food, and no advance fees.

Instead, upon arrival, workers (who were obliged to pay exorbitant advance fees) had passports confiscated; were confined to miserable conditions; and prevented from leaving the factory. Months passed without pay, food was inadequate, and sick workers were tortured. Because most workers had borrowed money, at inflated rates, to get the contracts, they were obliged through debt, to stay.

The sad truth is that we find workers across the globe holding on to the thin hope that they will eventually get paid, or that conditions will improve--because if they leave, there is no hope that they will be able to repay the debt.

Debt bondage is criminalized under U.S. law and included as a form of exploitation related to trafficking in the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (UN TIP Protocol).

But traffickers seek vulnerabilities in migrant laborers, who themselves are often fleeing repressive governments or dire economic situations at home, are prime targets.

A second global trend we have seen is the frequency and sheer brutality of domestic servitude. Private homes are another sphere which often escapes the law. In many countries around the world homes become prisons of involuntary servitude for domestic workers. And of course, it's happening here in the U.S. as well. Many of you are certainly aware of the case in Long Island of two Indonesian maids allegedly enslaved for five years by a couple who treated them in sub-human ways.

I recently returned from a trip to the Gulf. It is disheartening, and unacceptable, that so many wealthy countries in the Near East, which have significant enough resources to make progress up from the the lowest tiers of our annual global report, are doing little to confront this problem.

These are countries which rely heavily on foreign migrant labor. Practices such as sponsorship laws create conditions that make guest workers particularly vulnerable to trafficking in the region.

Take Nour Miyati, an Indonesian woman who sought a brighter future for her nine-year old daughter. She worked as a domestic for four years in a Middle East state. She was treated fairly and was able to send money back home so that her daughter could stay in school. Then her fate took a turn under a new employer confined her to his house, denied her pay, and tortured her. Injuries she suffered to her hands and feet resulted in gangrene that required the amputation of her fingers and toes.

Tragically Nour was twice victimized. Despite having escaped these horrific circumstances, she was arrested for 'running away' under the country's sponsorship laws.

Such laws give employers excessive authority over workers, allowing them to control movement and legal status. Workers may escape abuse in private homes or work sites only to find that their 'sponsor' denies them an exit permit to leave the country.

In my work leading the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons I urge governments in the Gulf and elsewhere to limit the power of sponsors and strengthen the rights of foreign workers, often viewed as second class citizens. I did so in Oman, Bahrain, UAE and Kuwait within the last two months.

We also noted in the annual report a lack of progress on rule of law which can be traced to official corruption and complicity in the exploitation, on the one hand, and indifference on the other.

Desperate migrant laborers are vulnerable to force, fraud and coercion-omnipresent tactics used by traffickers in cases of labor slavery-in a climate of official indifference where this crime is, typically, not criminalized, but considered a civil, regulatory offense.

Trafficking in persons is one of the dark sides of globalization. But turning people into commodities kept, bought, and sold is not a necessary part of the growing global economy. We can not ignore the unique challenges to vulnerable populations both at home and abroad the human trade represents.

At the heart of U.S. Government efforts to end human trafficking is a commitment to human dignity-a desire not only to rescue people, but restore dignity.

So, what can we do--what can you as individuals, as legal advocates, prosecutors or NGO activists do to help end human trafficking?

• Agitate for legislation which will protect vulnerable populations. 
  
  
• Help build public awareness: Open forums like this one in professional associations, houses of worship, community centers, universities, hospitals, and at house parties are key to understanding the issue and key to victim identification. 
  
  
• Donate time, energy and money to NGOs engaged in the fight. Representatives from two of the best groups are with us tonight: CATW and Equality NOW.
  
  
• Encourage colleagues in the media to report on these violations of human dignity. 
  
  
• Work together as individuals and multilaterally with other nations at the UN as it has followed our leadership and is launching a Global Initiative.

Thank you for your attention, and for caring enough to be here. We have an abolition movement at home and abroad to address a contemporary form of slavery. Thanks for what many of you have done, and thanks for what some others of you may do in joining the fight.