The Trafficking Blog

Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter just came out with The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today.  If you are looking for an informative book about slavery in the United States, this is almost certain to be a good one.  Kevin is a social scientist who’s been a huge resource and inspiration in the past for various people in the abolitionist movement and Ron is an historian who has written on slavery both ancient and modern.  They’ve been working together to put out The Slave Next Door, and a blog entry by Ron is included below with permission.

Kevin Bales is a man who brings the tools of social science to the problem of slavery.  Essentially, he learned one day that slavery–yes, actual slavery!–was a cause being agitated against by a few people at an event he happened to be attending, and he was horrified to learn slavery still continued.

He decided to make a difference, so he brought his skill set to bear on the problem.  The result was Disposable People, one of the most informative books one can read on the subject of trafficking. It garnered considerable praise and went on to inspire many modern-day abolitionists.

Julia Ormond, for example (the star of Sabrina and Guinevere in First Knight, among many other things, and a wonderful woman) learned a great deal about slavery from Kevin’s book when she was asked to become UNODC’s Goodwill Ambassador for Human Trafficking.  Her testimony before Congress on the issue was both informative and inspiring, and Kevin (along with many others) had a part in inspiring her to that.  He provides thoughtful analysis of a subject that most people are too discomforted to touch with a ten-yard-pole, and is president and co-founder of Free the Slaves.

–Terry Lee Wright

“A Blight on the Nation: Slavery in Today’s America”

The American humorist Will Rogers once said, “It ain’t that we’re so dumb; it’s just that what we know ain’t so.”

Certain things we know to be true. We know that the South kept slaves, and the North fought a righteous war of liberation. We know that the slave trade was legal right up to the Civil War. We know that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves, and that the United States has been slavery-free ever since. These things we know – and none of them are true.

On the other hand, most of us do not know that slavery not only exists throughout the world today; it flourishes. Slavery is legal nowhere, yet it is practiced everywhere. With an estimated 27 million people in bondage worldwide, this is twice as many people as were taken in chains from Africa during the entire 350 years of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. In seeking to place blame, we’re tempted to point to the “emerging nations” as the culprits, whereas in fact slavery exists in such “civilized” countries as England, France, Spain, Italy, Israel, Ireland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, China…and the United States. Most Americans are clueless that slavery is alive and flourishing right here, thriving in the dark, and practiced in many forms in places you’d least expect.

As a student of history, I’d always assumed that slavery ended with the Thirteenth Amendment. Some years back, I had written nearly an entire book on the pre-Civil War slave trade when I stumbled on an account of slavery – in present-day America! My first response – a common one, as it turns out – was denial: “No way. Slavery has had no place here since the time of Lincoln.”

Only after extensive research did I discover that slavery has always existed on this continent, from the days of its European discovery right up to the present day. Christopher Columbus enslaved the Taino Indians, setting a precedent that was followed by every European power to claim land in the New World. Slavery became the social and economic order. After the Civil War, and for decades right up to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, planters practiced a form of debt bondage known as peonage, binding workers and their families to the land in an unending cycle of slavery. For over sixty years, our own government has enabled worker abuse and slavery through the mismanagement of its “guest worker” program. And now, with the global population more than tripled since World War II, and with national borders collapsing around the world, people – in their desperate quest for a way to survive – have become easy targets for human traffickers. And once again, America is a prime destination.

So how many slaves are we talking about? According to a U.S. State Department study, some 14,500 to 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the United States from at least 35 countries and enslaved each year. Some victims are smuggled into the United States across the Mexican and Canadian borders; others arrive at our major airports daily, carrying either real or forged papers. The old slave ship of the 1800s has been replaced by the Jumbo Jet. Victims come here from Africa, Asia, India, Latin America, and the former Soviet Republic. Overwhelmingly, they come on the promise of a better life, with the opportunity to work and prosper in America. Many come in the hope of earning enough money to support or send for their families. In order to afford the journey, they fork over their life savings, and go into debt to people who make promises they have no intention of keeping, and instead of opportunity, when they arrive they find bondage. They can be found – or more accurately, not found – in all 50 states, working as farmhands, domestics, sweatshop and factory laborers, gardeners, restaurant and construction workers, and victims of sexual exploitation. These people do not represent a class of poorly paid employees, working at jobs they might not like. They exist specifically to work, they are unable to leave, and are forced to live under the constant threat and reality of violence. By definition, they are slaves. Today, we may call it human trafficking, but make no mistake: It is the slave trade.

Nor are native-born Americans immune from slavers; many are stolen or enticed from the streets of their own cities and towns. Some sources, including the federal government, estimate in the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens – primarily children – at risk of being caught in slavery annually. Although these figures may be uncertain, even inflated, the precise number of slaves in the United States, whether trafficked in from other countries or enslaved from our own population, is simply not known. The simple truth is, we’re looking at a crime that lives in the shadows; it’s hard to count what you can’t find.

What is particularly infuriating is the fact that this is a crime that, as a rule, goes unpunished. For the moment, let’s accept the government’s estimate of about 17,000 foreign nationals trafficked into slavery in the United States per year. Coincidentally there are also about 17,000 people murdered in the US each year. The national success rate in solving murder cases is about 70%; around 11,000 murders are “cleared” annually. But according to the US government’s own numbers, the annual percentage of trafficking and slavery cases solved is less than 1%. In 2007, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division obtained 103 convictions for human trafficking, with an average sentence of 9 years.

And to further complicate matters, when they are rescued, slavery survivors often deny their situation.  There are several reasons for this: the language barrier, a deep sense of shame, fear for their lives and those of their families in their country of origin, and a sense of obligation to pay their debt. In addition, the traffickers work to brainwash them to fear the police and immigration officials. And in some instances, they come to identify with their keepers.

We don’t yet know how President Obama will respond to the human trafficking crisis; it’s too soon to tell. But we do know that the response under the Bush Administration was inadequate on any number of levels. In a speech on trafficking, Bush once stated, “We’re beginning to make good, substantial progress. The message is getting out: We’re serious. And when we catch you, you’ll find out we’re serious. We’re staying on the hunt.” Strong words. But the unvarnished truth is, with less than 1% of the bad guys apprehended, and less than 1% of the victims freed, the flow of human “product” into America continues practically unchecked.

Finding out about the slave next door is the kind of knowledge you can’t “unlearn”; the only question is, what do you do with the information once you have it? It’s a question we must all answer for ourselves. We tend to think of our America as the country where slavery has no place; the dire truth is, we are pretty far from freedom, and it will take a lot of work and dedication – by the government, and by us – to make it so.

-Ron Soodalter

The Slave Next Door by Kevin Bales (www.freetheslaves.net)and Ron Soodalter ( www.RonSoodalter.com )

Majlinda, in River of Innocents, is a fictional character.  It’s hard for us to read her story even though we know she’s fictional, because it’s a hard story–but its message is profoundly hopeful, and she is valiant.  She’s a heroine.  She’s someone who shows us the strength we can find in ourselves when others need us, someone who acts as a surrogate mother to the stolen children around her because they need her to, someone who is broken but also forges herself into someone incredibly strong.  We are proud of her, and feel terrible sorrow for what she endured even when we see the dream of a world without slaves that her suffering is for.  And we know, fundamentally, that she is a fiction–a realistic one, one we can believe in, and someone who is real to us, but still a fiction and a character whose sorrows are meant to do good.  She suffers to show us the reality.  It wounds us to see it, but it also makes us stronger.  It gives us the hope of truly building that world without slaves, it gives us the hope of moving beyond a place where we buy and sell our kindred spirits for tuppence and a stiff drink.

But Majlinda’s name comes from someplace simple.  The month of May.  Springtime.  A taurus.  A name with a feminine ending so it doesn’t sound masculine to an American ear, but a name that sounds strong when it needs to be, like the summer wind.  An Albanian name, because she’s an Albanian character.

I came across this today.  A story from the guardian about another Majlinda.  An Albanian girl, thirteen instead of seventeen, trafficked to Greece, brought back to Albania and taken to Italy by speedboat, a year in Florence, moved by car to Amsterdam.  Trapped sometimes physically, sometimes psychologically, and enduring the things we don’t like to talk about.  Dark things, like Majlinda.  Beating.  The first rapes, the twenty clients a night.

After having a baby, she went to a group of Catholic nuns who reach out to prostitutes.  They helped her back to Albania, but her family was ashamed and told her she was dead to them.  She was in a shelter in Tirana when the article was written.  She was also seventeen years old after four years of being a slave.  That’s as old as River’s Majlinda was when she began her story.

The truth is, every victim is River’s Majlinda.  Every survivor, every person who goes through this terrible crime.  We let this continue, and we don’t have to.  Ask yourself what you can do, and you’ll find an answer.  It’s not nothing.  It’s something.  Even if it’s something small.

These stories make me sick.  They make us all sick.  These young women and men are our kin, born in a slightly different life and walking down a slightly different road, and then…

The rest is not silence.

It’s slavery.

So make a difference.  Stand up, and make a difference.  Talk, shout, scream, do, volunteer, donate, teach, ask, believe–even believing we can end slavery is a step–believe you can make a difference and then do.  Even a small one.  Isn’t the chance of freeing a slave worth a little effort?

While the realities of human trafficking are always harsh on a personal level, it is important to look beyond our own revulsion at the practive of slavery and to see the causes of that slavery.  We can call it an economic problem or a social one and phrase it in terms of opposing forces of morality and immorality or we can examine it in the framework of violence against women; today, it’s important to remember its economic roots.

We’re in the middle of a global economic recession that started because of a bubble in the U.S. housing market (effectively, the extension of credit by financial agencies without any evaluation of the applicant’s ability to repay, plus bundling these mortgages together and trading them) and a new kind of contract called a CDS (effectively, an insurance policy against something that you don’t have to own being worth less than an agreed upon amount; they all became due at the same time when the economy went downhill) and a few other factors.  How does that affect human trafficking?

The good news is there’s a lot less disposable income, which means both (1) fewer people are able to spend money on prostitution and (2) the gap between the rich and the poor for the most part decreases, at least in absolute terms.  That gap (look up the Gini coefficient) contributes to the supply and demand of trafficked women because of its connections with disposable income and standard of living.

But the bad news is worse for many.  Simply put, if you have less money–particularly little enough that you or your family are in what you see as desperate straits–it’s a lot easier to be exploited, to not ask so many questions when given the promise of a new life, to want to believe the friend of a friend who promises you a new life with him in America or Germany or Canada.

It’s also bad because criminals will feel it in their pocketbooks, which means they will increasingly turn to low-risk high-return investments like human trafficking in order to buoy their profits.  People who aren’t involved will want to get involved, and because there are fewer people with the money to buy prices will go down in established settings, and women in those settings will be more disposable than ever.

Remember, today slaves cost far less than they did when slavery was legal in the United States, and the slaveowner doesn’t have even the tiny legal responsibility toward his slaves he did back then.  Economically speaking–though the practice of slavery has always been abhorrent–slaves were very expensive once.  Now that they’re relatively cheap, they’re worth a lot less to the criminals who buy them, and so are more disposable and more vulnerable to abuse.

And they die of HIV in their mid twenties.  It’s not a pretty picture.  Help us end it: talk to your friends about it, talk to your family, spread the word about slavery.  It’s one of the worst human rights abuses in the history of man, but we can make a difference in the fight against it.

Best Regards,

Terry Lee Wright

The US State Department’s Trafficking In Persons Report for 2008 is out.

For those of you who don’t know, the TIP report is an annual report that the State Department has been releasing since 2000, under an Act of Congress then passed.

This legal and actual history of trafficking is of course far older than some of the recent legislative activity, such as the UN’s anti-trafficking protocol and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (which began the TIP reports) might lead us to think. The Mann Act, for example, was passed in 1910 as “The White-Slave Traffic Act” to fight slavery, although its vague language was used to criminalize a far broader range of activity.

But the TIP Report is hugely influential in the realm of anti-trafficking policy, and its numbers for people who are enslaved each year are among the most widely-quoted in the world. Those numbers are unchanged this year, as it cites the 800,000 people–80% women and up to 50% underage–taken across international lines every year as slaves, and the range of estimates from 4 to 27 million people enslaved worldwide at any given time.

What strikes me first about the report is not the numbers, and not the introductory statements or the grading of countries into tiers according to their response to trafficking: it is the human element. Next to the numbers, there’s a story, a true story, that’s one of those 800,000 people. There’s nothing extraordinary about it, really; it could have been any of millions of stories in the world today not very different from it. Here is this one: (Skip to the end if you can’t keep reading.)

Thirty-two year old “Sandro,” from the interior of Mexico, found himself in a migrant shelter in Tijuana. A recruiter approached him in the shelter and urged him to come to the U.S.-Mexico border to “take a look.” As they neared the border, the recruiter (knowledgeable of the shift change in the border patrol), pushed him over the border and instructed him to “run.” Sandro was guided by Mexican traffickers to a “safe house” where he was tied to a bed and raped about 20 times. He was then transported, at gun point, to another “safe” house in San Diego and forced into domestic servitude. Eventually, he was taken to a construction site during the day. His pay check was confiscated by his traffickers. He felt he had no recourse since he lacked even basic identification papers. His abuse continued when one of his traffickers forced him at gunpoint to perform sexual acts. He was later rescued and has since received temporary residency in the United States.

This is normal; this is what we have to change.

The elements are often different, here and there. But every life, every single one of those numbers, is a real person.

News from from UN News Centre – Women, Children, Population on June 3, 2008, 1:00am

Global and regional pacts must be put into action if the world is to tackle the scourge of human trafficking, a $32 billion annual industry, General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim said today in New York.

» See the Article

New York State is generally divided into two areas: New York City at the southernmost tip, and everyplace else. Upstate New York has some absolutely spectacular wildlife, wonderful forests, nice rivers, farms of all sizes–many of them traditional in different regards–small towns and cities, etc… New York City is the kind of city that makes most other cities seem like they aren’t cities at all–the “downtown” area of most cities is nothing next to Manhattan.

Obviously the difference between NYC and the rest of the state has all kinds of political and socioeconomic dimensions–where do taxes go, what kind of diversity are you likely to run into in New York City vs. Upstate, what corruption do you have to deal with, what’s Republican and what’s Democrat, what’s the Gini Coefficient, etc…

But while New York City is someplace we’re likely to think of when we think of Human Trafficking in the US, upstate New York is not.

Slavery isn’t confined to our biggest cities. It may not be happening within fifty miles of us–but it may also be around the corner, no matter where we live. Eleven women were found held as sex slaves in the quiet suburbs of Western New York last December, and consider: (1) those are only the ones we know about, (2) slavery isn’t confined to suburbia, and (3) sex slavery isn’t the only kind. From a WBFO article:

“LEWISTON, NY (2008-05-15) Western New Yorkers were shocked in December when a police sting closed down several massage parlors operating a sex slavery business. But members of the local human trafficking task force say no one should be surprised. Members of the task force and others gathered Wednesday to begin educating the public on who is being victimized and what is being done to stop it.”

“Amy Fleischauer is coordinator for Trafficking Victims’ Services at the International Institute in Buffalo. She said the community can not pretend it is not happening here.”

She goes on to identify the Buffalo Niagra region as a significant spot for human trafficking. It’s “a pass through and training ground for Toronto and New York city,” she says, and she points to local demand aside from that, not only for sex slaves but also slaves kept for agricultural and domestic labor. And she adds, because people do not know, that “some are United States citizens, and include women, girls, men and boys.”

It’s important to say that it happens to our citizens, because it does, and that fact helps to drive the problem home. Yet I dislike emphasizing that part, because we shouldn’t care who it’s happening to: we should care that it’s happening. If the slave next door is a Tibetan girl, I should care no less than if she’s an American. It shouldn’t matter what labels we put on her; she is real.

Still, it drives the terrible realities of slavery home, and we often care a little more, when we realize it could happen to our friends. It could happen to us. It could happen to our children.

It’s been an interesting road getting to this point–from first learning that slavery existed today, to wondering if I’d be able to make myself write a rape scene that wouldn’t make the reader slam the book shut, to writing River of Innocents and editing it, getting feedback from a very few (and wonderful) test readers, and ultimately publishing the book.

It’s not easy for a Romantic to write about a subject so dark, and it wounds me to see characters hurt–even when it must be done. But at the end of the day, I have a good story and an honest one, even though it’s terrible and dark and hopeful all at once.

Since I announced River’s release on Thursday, around 2,000 people have been trafficked across international borders–and that’s not touching the domestic trafficking numbers, which are a lot higher. "Trafficking" has a very specific definition that the UN ratified and sociologists and feminists spend a lot of time with, but for some reason it sounds much gentler to me than "slavery," and there’s nothing gentle about what trafficking is.

I am pleased to announce the release of River of Innocents.

One of the worst crimes in the history of man is human slavery. Unfortunately, it didn’t end in the American Civil War; it was only outlawed. Today there are thousands of slaves in the U.S. and millions more overseas. They’re real people, just like you and me, but they’ve been sold or tricked or kidnapped into slavery.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought a tremendous fuel to the abolitionist movement in the time leading up to the Civil War. It helped to free the slaves, by making the slave human to the world.

River of Innocents is an Uncle Tom’s Cabin for today’s world, where slavery is still very much alive. Today’s slaves are real people, flesh and blood and beating hearts, and more of them are sold each decade than were sold in the entire 400-year-history of the African slave trade.

River of Innocents: In a world of stolen children and broken dreams, the seventeen-year-old Majlinda struggles to hold on to her humanity. She has no control over her life or even over her own body, yet where people are disposable, where rape is part of the normal day, and where guards watch her every move, Majlinda strives to create a family out of the stolen children around her and to give them hope when all they know is fear.

River is a novel about that hope and that terrible fear, about ideals in the face of despair, about the strength we find in ourselves when others need us, and about slavery as it is. If we are to end today’s slavery, we must first know of it; here is the story of Majlinda’s long struggle to be free.

www.riverofinnocents.com

River is what I’ve been working on lately–you can confirm what I’ve said about slavery via the “Slavery in the Media” link off of the web site, or by doing a web search for “New York Times Magazine The Girls Next Door” or “Human Trafficking.”

I wrote River because I learned about people not very far from me who were kept locked up and were rented out ten and twenty times a day and more. “Rented out” in the sense of “raped by men who paid to have sex with them.” On their best days, they might only be raped a few times.

When you learn about something this bad, one of the first things you do–after you can feel anything through the rage, the sadness, and the disbelief–is you ask “What can I do about it?”

River of Innocents was the answer. Uncle Tom’s Cabin worked 150 years ago: it made a difference and helped to free thousands of slaves. River of Innocents is Uncle Tom’s Cabin for slavery today. It is a part of what I can do–of what we all can do–to free the slaves.

Please read it, and talk about it, and spread the word: Slavery is real. Slaves are real. They’re in the world today, and we can help to set them free.

~ Terry Lee Wright

Please post this all on your blog–here’s a link to the html–or write your own message about it. Promotion code ttb7q530 gives a 10% discount at the publisher’s website through the end of May.

Remember, every day thousands of people are enslaved for the first time. Every day counts. We can make a difference–but we need to start now. Every day counts.

As a condition for EU Membership, the EU required that Romania deal with it’s so-called "orphan problem." Romania had many massive orphanages, and the EU’s goal was to make Romania get these children out of state custody and into the homes of families. When the orphanages were shut down, some of the children did find families–but often families took them for the money the government offered, and did not care for them. It became far more common following Romania sought EU membership to see homeless children in the street.

In Romania, tens of thousands of children are left at hospitals each year because mothers simply can’t afford to care for them–without the orphanages, where would they go? This is not to say that mothers don’t care, for surely the orphanages and the notion of a ward of the state is a part of the culture; but now that the standards of the EU change that part of culture, where would the children go?

Tragically, all-to-often the answer is that they go into the hands of traffickers. Italy has seen an increase in Roma youngsters trafficked for sexual exploitation, and an increase in Roma children trafficked to beg on the streets.

Sources: 2007 Tip Report, Italy

Welcome to traffickingblog.com

My name is Terry Lee Wright, and I created this site convinced of the necessity to combat slavery.

Today there are thousands of women on our shores, and millions more overseas, who live as slaves. They are real people, flesh and blood and beating hearts. Some are kept slaves by physical barriers, by locked doors and guards and surveillance cameras. Others are held hostage by threats made against them or their family or their friends, by drug dependencies their captors have forced on them, by debt-bondage where the debt is largely or entirely ficticious, or simply by being isolated in a foreign place where they know neither the culture nor the language, where the only person they can understand is their pimp.

This story is not a fiction; it is played out every day. Every day, thousands become slaves for the first time.