Archive for June, 2008
The 2008 Trafficking in Persons report is out
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.
Words must be put into action to fight human trafficking – Assembly President
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.
