Slave trade: combating human trafficking.

Miller, John R.

The underground market in people, termed human trafficking, functions by the benign rules of supply and demand--which makes this market particularly grotesque because the commodity is human life and the exchange results in modern-day slavery. By describing trafficking in persons (TIP), the relationship between trafficking and prostitution, and US efforts to end this burgeoning phenomenon, I hope to convey the urgency of the new abolition movement and the limits of the market metaphor in suggesting an appropriate response to global slavery.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year--approximately two-thirds are ensnared in sexual slavery, according to US Government estimates. This number does not begin to include millions more captured in labor and sexual exploitation within their own countries. By definition, human trafficking involves force, fraud, or coercion--legally sanitized words that cover intimidation, kidnapping, beatings, rape, deceit, abandonment, and murder. Victims describe mind-numbing varieties of torture, psychological abuse, and physical deprivation that are at the heart of the trafficking experience.

Portraits of Exploitation

Those numbers should not obscure the tragedy to each individual. The following are confirmed examples of typical victims, although names have been changed:

At 15 Shadir accepted a job that promised good clothes and an education. It proved to be a case of false advertising--a typical ploy of traffickers--for the job actually took him to a rural village in India where he was forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day producing hand-woven carpets. His only payment was two helpings a day of lentils and rice. When Shadir was unable to work, he was severely beaten.

Twenty-something Sorina was promised a restaurant job. So she left home, in Belarus, and was flown to a foreign capital where criminals locked her in an apartment and raped her. Not allowing her out of the apartment, they used her as a prostitute. She became so desperate that she jumped from the bathroom window. Still alive, on the sidewalk below, the sex buyers ran down to the street and watched her die.

Neary grew up in Cambodia. At 17 her sister arranged for her to be married to a man who, for US$300, sold her to a brothel owner. For five years, Neary was used by up to seven men a day until she contracted HIV and was discarded because she became too sick to make money for the brothel. Neary died of AIDS at 23.

Silvia, a single mother living in Sri Lanka, answered an ad for a housekeeping job in Lebanon. Once at the job agency, however. Silvia was put in a line with other female job applicants to be inspected by potential buyers. She was purchased and taken to a fourth-floor condo where she was used as a domestic servant 20 hours a day. Forced to rummage through garbage for her food, treated as a prisoner, and beaten daily, Silvia escaped by jumping from a window. She is now permanently paralyzed.

New Forms of Slavery

These stories are typical of human trafficking worldwide. Several common themes emerge from these cases. Each victim is manipulated through the threat of violence or its use; each is a displaced person, in foreign circumstances that increase his or her dependence on the slaveholder; each represents a profitable input in an underground market but is also considered, paradoxically, a highly expendable input; and each is, practically, surviving in a reality that evades the intervention of law. As Dr. Kevin Bales writes in Disposable People, the new slavery "is not about owning people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about controlling them completely. People become completely disposable tools for making money." The slave victims I have met and the accounts anti-slavery advocates and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) submit to the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons confirm these common aspects of human trafficking.

Fundamentally, human trafficking deprives people of their human rights and freedoms. This is the most prominent reason that the US Government has assumed a leadership role in confronting this despicable practice, but it is not the only reason. Human trafficking is a multi-dimensional threat: it is a global health risk, profoundly harming individual victims and facilitating the transmission of disease including HIV/AIDS and fuels the growth of organized crime while weakening law enforcement entities. Too often TIP entails the participation or complicity of corrupt law enforcement agents who help by providing fraudulent immigration documents, allowing illicit border crossings, or protecting the oppressive workplaces and brothels where victims are trapped. Thus human trafficking undermines national security by eroding the integrity of national and local law enforcement and the rule of law.

The Supply of the Exploited

To explore the economic factors of human trafficking, let us return to the notion of an underground market. Much like the formal economy, as Dr. Bruce Wiegand writes in Off the Books: A Theory and Critique of the Underground Economy, underground markets are devoted to "the production, transport, distribution, and marketing of goods and services," although the underground market functions outside the legal system. Applying Wiegand's definition to the market for trafficked persons, we can substitute "procurement" for "production." Traffickers use a range of techniques to entrap victims, from kidnapping or drugging unsuspecting victims, to lying about non-existent restaurant or babysitting jobs, to using lovers, even spouses, in order to bring a victim into slavery, especially sex slavery.

Why do they go to all this trouble? Money, and no small sum. Human trafficking is extremely profitable, contributing some US$9.5 billion to the world's underground economy, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. The far-flung trafficking patterns that characterize this tragic market defy common sense. Young boys from Bangladesh and Pakistan are trafficked to the Gulf States to serve as camel jockeys, where they are kept in a half-starved state to maintain their small body size. Nigerian women wind up abused in prostitution on the streets of Western European cities. Colombian women entertain men at bars in Japan. Indonesians clean houses in Singapore. Each trafficking victim represents a profit center that continues to generate income for his or her exploiter, compared to illegal commodities such as drugs or arms that represent a one-time transaction.

Where is this seemingly limitless supply of trafficking victims coming from, and what factors contribute to sustaining this supply? Desperate and gullible populations, especially in developing and transitioning countries, are susceptible to the promises made by recruiters (including family members) of a better life in another place, especially promises of paid work, marriage, or domestic service. Poverty, and the hope of a better life, create the conditions in which so many incidences of human trafficking occur. But poverty alone cannot explain the growth of TIP over the last 15 to 20 years when worldwide poverty has slightly decreased.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The ease of global transportation and communication is an important enabling factor. The frequency of international travel serves as a cover for human trafficking; cell phones create sprawling networks of criminal agents serving as recruiters, brokers, transporters, receivers, and distributors of the abused product--an unwitting human soul.

The worldwide increase in guest worker programs has also contributed to the ready supply of human trafficking victims. Increasingly, especially in countries that receive significant cash remittances from workers employed abroad, government-sponsored employment programs train rural woman and girls to work as domestic servants in homes far away, where they are vulnerable to exploitation. Social practices such as "fostering," a practice mainly in Africa where children are given to relatives for schooling in exchange for the child helping in the household, often serve as a cover for human trafficking. Social disruption such as war, or political transition entailing widespread displacement as has occurred in the countries of the former Soviet Union, create the conditions for an increased supply of potential TIP victims. Gender discrimination--and an attitude regarding the expendability of women and girls--can serve as a fatal rationale for indifference toward child prostitution and trafficking in women and girls. And softening the ground for most trafficking schemes is corruption, which typically characterizes circumstances that facilitate human trafficking or the conditions that allow it to thrive.

The Dark Forces of Demand

The rudimentary market model tells us that supply is just potential inventory until it is put into motion by the forces of demand. Unfortunately, there is tremendous demand for low-cost labor in innumerable settings, from brick kilns in India to camel racetracks in the Middle East, from massage parlors in Los Angeles to Karaoke bars in Tokyo, from circuses to blue jeans factories to beer bars the world over. The exploiters invest very little in their human inputs; the endless supply of new victims makes it more economical to replace a slave as soon as he or she is used up.

Thus the economics of human trafficking include a huge demand for low-cost, vulnerable people in settings where the rule of law is felt only faintly. In these places, such as brothels, private homes, farms, and factories in obscure locations, the employer, overseer, pimp, or guard maintains near total control over the subject.

Western demand for sex slaves is encouraged by the ubiquitous presence of pornography and the glamorization of prostitution in films such as Pretty Woman. But in developing countries, too, there is often general social acceptance and rationalization of prostitution--even where it is illegal--which contributes to the domestic demand for victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

Because sex trafficking forms such a large part of human trafficking (66 percent of transnational TIP according to US Government estimates) and because prostitution is so inextricably linked to sex trafficking, we must pay special attention to how prostitution fits into the marketing metaphor. Superficially, it is a simple supply-demand equation. But that is only if you never ask questions about the life experience of those used in prostitution.

The vast majority of women in prostitution do not want to be there. Few choose it or seek it out, and most are desperate to leave it. A 2003 study in 9 countries led by Dr. Melissa Farley, first published in the scientific Journal of Trauma Practice, found that 89 percent of women in prostitution want to escape. Children are also trapped in prostitution--despite the fact that international covenants and protocols impose upon state parties an obligation to criminalize the commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Few activities are as brutal and damaging to people as prostitution. Dr. Farley's field research concluded that 60 to 75 percent of women in prostitution were raped, 70 to 95 percent were physically assaulted, and 68 percent met the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder in the same range as treatment-seeking combat veterans and victims of state-organized torture. Beyond this shocking abuse, the public health implications of prostitution are devastating and include a myriad of serious and fatal diseases, including HIV/AIDS. Moreover, the path-breaking five-country academic study conducted by Dr. Janice Raymond, concluded that research on prostitution has overlooked "[t]he burden of physical injuries and illnesses that women in the sex industry sustain from the violence inflicted on them, or from their significantly higher rates of hepatitis B, higher risks of cervical cancer, fertility complications, and psychological trauma." It is this violent reality that makes the application of market solutions to prostitution particularly in appropriate.

Controlling Human Trafficking

State attempts to regulate prostitution by introducing medical check-ups or licenses do not address the core problem: the routine abuse and violence that dominate the prostitution experience and brutally victimize those caught in its netherworld. Prostitution leaves women and children physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually devastated. Recovery can take years, but some never recover.

The limits of the market metaphor come in understanding sex trafficking: to conceptualize this unique global crime as a market implicitly lures us into a framework that posits regulation on the one hand, and minimal government intervention on the other, as logical approaches to sex trafficking and prostitution. Yet prostitution is not the proverbial "oldest profession" but the oldest form of oppression. Legalization, regulation, and normalization of prostitution obscures the violence at its heart and ignores that prostitution is a magnet for more trafficking victims. Organized crime networks do not register with the government, do not pay taxes, and do not protect prostitutes. Legalization simply makes it easier for them to blend in with a purportedly regulated sex sector and makes it more difficult for prosecutors to identify and punish those who are trafficking people.

The Swedish Government has found that much of the vast profit generated by the global prostitution industry goes into the pockets of human traffickers. According to the Swedish Ministry of Interior, "International trafficking in human beings could not flourish but for the existence of local prostitution markets where men are willing and able to buy and sell women and children for sexual exploitation." To fight human trafficking and promote equality for women, Sweden has aggressively prosecuted customers, pimps, and brothel owners since 1999. Two years later, Sweden saw a 50 percent decrease in female prostitutes and a 75 percent decrease in men buying sex. Trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation decreased as well. By contrast, where prostitution is legalized or tolerated, there has been an increase in the demand for sex slaves and the number of victimized foreign women--many likely victims of human trafficking.

As a result of the prostitution-trafficking link, the US Government concluded that no US grant funds should be awarded to foreign non-governmental organizations that support legal state-regulated prostitution. To address the larger overall phenomenon of human trafficking, the US government has taken action at home and abroad. The United States has strict penalties of up to 30 years in jail on those who prey on children abroad and has focused on cracking down on human traffickers within its borders. Because human trafficking is transnational in nature, partnerships between countries are critical to win the fight against modern-day slavery. The United States is reaching out to other countries by increasing awareness at the UN General. Assembly, cooperating with other governments, and providing more than US$80 million to other countries in the fight against this challenging problem.

Market analysis can help us understand today's people trade; market alternatives in the form of legitimate jobs may even reduce the trade. However, the market characteristics of human trafficking should not distract us from its unacceptable reality, as unacceptable today as slavery was in the antebellum United States. As US President George W. Bush said in his second Inaugural Address, "No one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."

AMBASSADOR JOHN R. MILLER is a senior adviser to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and director of the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

RELATED ARTICLE: TRAFFICKING TROUBLE

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

In 2004, the number of trafficking prosecutions was especially heavy in Europe, Eurasia, and South Asia (darkest areas) while such cases were fewer in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and the Near East. The statistics represent the number of criminal cases pursued, which is not necessarily the number of human trafficking victims across the world.

US Department of State