Priority Issue: Human Trafficking
Priority Issue
Our objective is to inform our members, and members of the public, about a serious and dangerous issue worldwide, that of the human trafficking business.
The issue has been gaining public attention in the last couple of years. It is a critical one and one worthy of our consideration. Trafficking is a violation of human rights in that it destroys lives while creating a 32 billion dollar business each year. It involves citizens in 161 of 192 countries. Trafficking is in many cases a trans border crime that affects all the regions of the world; 127 countries have been documented as countries of origin and 137 countries are countries of origin.
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Rationale
From a February 2009 UN report from the Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, a mandate emerged stated that the real challenge is not in just adopting strategies that will effectively lead to capturing perpetrators and pushing. Rather, it is preferable to put in place strategies which will focus equally on the victim by recognizing and redressing the violations suffered. We must recognize the dignity of victims and their right to survival and development. Thus, restorative justice is central to combat human trafficking.
WG-USA is in an excellent organizational position to focus on this issue. As the U.S. member of the International Federation of University Women we have connections to women worldwide, many of whom share our concern about this issue. Many of our members also have connections with influential women’s organizations such as the AAUW and the The Virginia Gildersleeve International Fund (VGIF). Those connections may be utilized in promoting concern about and action on stopping the violence against women.
Objectives
- To inform our membership.
- To raise awareness among women in the United States about the issue of trafficking.
- To create visibility about the issue, as it affects and is present in the United States.
- To assist communities in the U.S. to develop such awareness.
Strategies
Educate: Contact: Publicize: Partner!
For the Individual
- Form an on-line chat group.
- Conduct a survey of the status of local improvements in community awareness and action on the issue.
- Locate available shelters for victims of trafficking in your community/state.
- Inform yourself about CAST, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, 27 Things You Can Do, available at www.castla.org.
For Community Action
- Survey governmental and non governmental sources to \determine status of local/state laws and their enforcement. (This means identifying which agencies and organizations are responsible for enforcing anti trafficking laws.)
- Publicize the issue through local media and public forums such as parents groups and education groups.
For Action at the National Level
IFUW Resolution to be presented at the IFUW Triennial Conference in Mexico City, August 2010.
Anticipated Outcomes and Time Line
March 2010 to January 2011
Passage of the Proposed WG-USA resolution at the 2010 IFUW conference.
Increased awareness of the issue, from the local level to the international level.
Community-based briefings on the subject.
Helpful Resources
BOOKS
- Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky, Knopf. 2009
- Victor Malrick, The Johns, Arcade. 2009
- Victor Malrick, The Natashas, Arcade. 2004
- US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons
ON THE WEB
- WUNRN
- WUNRN: Trafficking – Manual for Human Trafficking Hotline Work
http://www.astra.org.rs/eng/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/SOS-Manual.pdf
5 Comments
“Priority Issue: Human Trafficking”
WUNRN http://www.wunrn.com
Ruchira Gupta, Founder President of Apne Aap Women Worldwide – http://www.apneaap.org
Seminar on A Human Rights Approach to Combating Human Trafficking: Challenges and Opportunities. Implementing the Recommended Principals and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking,” Organized by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland
I am Ruchira Gupta and I bring greetings from the victims and survivors of sex trafficking who are members of my organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide in India. We appreciate the attention that the High Commissioner for Human Rights has devoted to the issue of human trafficking and the fact that she has invited us to contribute to the Guidelines on Human Rights from a survivor-centric perspective.
The victims and survivors of human trafficking that I represent see visibility, accountability and access to all civil, political, economic and social rights as the best way to combat trafficking. They want their slavery to be acknowledged as slavery. They want all forms of their enslavement including prostitution to be not defined as a choice but to be acknowledged as the absence of choice. Nobody chooses to be born poor, female, low caste, fairer or darker in colour, or as an ethnic or religious minority.
Victims and survivors of trafficking want us to not accept their slavery as inevitable by simply trying to mitigate its circumstances through the offer of beds in shelters or condoms in brothels. They want us to dismantle the very system of trafficking by bringing traffickers and end users to book. They want a world in which it is unacceptable to buy or sell another human being and to create an economy in which one is not forced to sell oneself. They want Human Rights Principles to ensure their right to food, housing, education and livelihood to pave the way for their right not to be trafficked.
My organization has a membership of over ten thousand trafficked human beings. They are women and children trapped in prostitution. They were kidnapped, sold, coerced, tricked or forced into situations of exploitation. Some are as young as seven. They have been kept in small locked rooms and raped repeatedly. They live in absolute terror. Most die by the time they are thirty or thirty five. They never had a past, and now they hope to have a future.
We have been organizing survivors and victims of trafficking in groups to be able to collectively struggle for their own rights and entitlements. We have formed 150 self-help groups. These groups are demanding arrests of traffickers and end users, jobs, safe housing, and education as a combined best practice to dismantle the system of trafficking.
We have held conferences of survivors in different states in India to develop a survivor framework to combat trafficking. The first demand that survivors lay out in these conferences is that they want accountability. They want their exploitation to be recognized as a crime. They want states to admit that they are citizens of the state, whose human rights have been violated. They want protection. They want both their own state and the global community to provide them protection. They want those responsible for trafficking to be punished and stopped. They want interventions to focus on the responsibility of those who buy trafficked people such as buyers of prostituted sex and those “entrepreneurs” (traffickers, procurers, pimps, brothel owners, and managers, owners of plantations and factories and money lenders) who make a profit off trading in women and girls, boys and men.
So far a large number of trafficking interventions have focused on the victim through rescue and post rescue care. While this has provided much-needed relief to victims and survivors, it has not made a dent in the trafficking industry. According to a study by the National Human Rights Commission of India, most traffickers state that they identify the demand areas before indulging in trafficking to ensure ‘prompt delivery.
In each of the survivor conferences, in state after state in India, and even in the conference organized by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the United Nations in New York last year survivors have repeatedly said they want the demand for trafficked sex and labour to be addressed. They say and I quote Fatima Nat Dhuniya, trafficked when she was 12 inBihar: “As long as buyers and traffickers exist, somebody will buy us and the slavery business will never close down.”
Our survivors believe that if the number of convictions goes up, the costs of operations of human trafficking will become untenable and the business models of traffickers will be disrupted and individuals who create the demand will be embarrassed by being identified.
The second demand that survivors are asking for in each of the conferences is access to all their economic and social rights along with their civil and political rights. They want more than a bed in a shelter or a condom in a brothel. They want access to safe housing, education and training, jobs, land and livelihoods based in open communities.
They want both the process of human trafficking to be tackled as well as its outcomes. In this context they say that border management is not the answer to trafficking. In fact, they say that trafficking is not always about movement of forced or deceived people across borders. It is also about those whose vulnerability is abused to trap them into situations of exploitation in brothels, sweatshops, and farms, sometimes in the very places where they were born. Those targeted for commercial sexual exploitation and cheap labour share key characteristics: poverty, youth, minority status in the places of exploitation, histories of abuse, and little family support. They want comprehensive protection programmes that address their vulnerabilities. They want legal protection tied in with viable economic options and the notion of rehabilitation to extend to community empowerment as well as individual empowerment.
They also want immediate relief from the violence, trauma and sever exploitation that they were subjected to. Trafficked women may be freed from their employers in police raids, but they are given no access to services or redress and instead face further mistreatment at the hands of authorities. Even when confronted with clear evidence of trafficking, officials focus on violations of their immigration regulations and anti-prostitution laws, rather than on violations of the trafficking victims’ human rights. Thus those women who are trafficked across borders are targeted as undocumented migrants and/or prostitutes, and the traffickers either escape entirely, or else face minor penalties. By making the victims of trafficking the target of law enforcement efforts, governments only exacerbate victims’ vulnerability to abuse and deter them from turning to law enforcement officials for assistance.
By allowing traffickers to engage in slavery-like practices without penalty, governments allow the abuses to continue with impunity. Some brave girls and women, and men are in a faceoff with traffickers and police in a small village Forbesgunge in my own country, India right now. Due to the failure of police to arrest traffickers, in spite of repeated complaints for the last six months, four 12 year old girls trapped in home based brothels, have already been prostituted and are being raped repeatedly. The police has refused to act in spite of political and judicial pressure and the traffickers have issued death threats to Apne Aap community members living in the red-light area. Unless law enforcement agencies take action against end users and traffickers no human rights programmes of victims and survivors can be implemented.
Apne Aap survivors have repeatedly been petitioning the Parliament of India to change its law to include more severe punishment for buyers and traffickers. Each country needs to amend its own laws to tackle this growing crime and tragedy. The Central Bureau of Investigation in India said that there are 3 million prostituted children in India today. This number has grown by seventeen times in the last fifteen years. No country can afford to delay in amending laws to change this rapidly growing crime.
I appeal to member states, including my own country to apply a human-rights based approach to identification, victim protection and support that is embedded in the UN Protocol and put addressing the demand for trafficking, exploitation of victims and abuse of a person’s vulnerability at the centre of the amended laws. We want the practical applications to not dilute, modify or change the UN Protocol. protocol but strengthen it in every way.
Ruchira Gupta,
Founder President, Apne Aap
http://www.apneaap.org
Dear Ms. Gupta and all brave survivors,
Thank you for your comments and advocacy for women and children worldwide who are subjected to this torturous criminal activity know as Human Trafficking or Modern Day Slavery. I beleive this falls under torture- that is, torture that is non-state actor torture which has been given little attention or is largely unrecognized.
I am currently co-chair of the Louisville, Kentucky Task Force on Human Trafficking whose goal is to bring awareness, education, and identification of victims and link them to services. Louisville is one of four US Federal relocation centers for refugees from around the world. Given that we have vulnerable populations of refugees, we also have major trafficking. My voice joins the survivors point that until the focus is on stopping and adjudicating the buyers (johns) and sellers (traffickers) then the ocean of victims will continue to grow. This message is often lost as there is tremendous resistance even on the Louisville Task Force to address the issue of demand. I believe this to be true as then they will have to look at who the buyers are: our husbands, fathers, uncles and brothers, and the mental, ethical, moral,and legal processes that occurs that will let these men objectify, marginalize, and indeed commit acts of torture on women and children of both sexes. If we do not bring the world to address demand, we will not win this war of torture.
Thanks, and may all the survivors voices and stories be told and heard and given the justice that is deserved.
Jeanette Westbrook MSSW
WestbrookJ@aol.com
(502) 451-8207
1827 Edenside Ave.
Louisville, Kentucky USA
For the tenth year in a row the U.S. State Department released its annual review of governments’ efforts to combat human trafficking on Monday, June 14, 2010. The report included the U.S.’s own struggles with the problem for the first time.
See the report at the US State Department website. http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/
Read an analysis by the Interpress Service here. http://wg-usa.org/groups/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Human-Trafficking-Report.pdf
Trafficking of children article of interest:
http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/whoops_report_uk_loses_half_of_rescued_trafficked_children
Background information about trafficking issues of Iraqi women.
http://www.thenation.com/article/154080/us-dodges-obligation-help-iraqi-women-trafficked-sexual