Opposing Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery

Vatican City- Church and police authorities and non-government organizations (NGOs) came together recently in the Vatican under the Santa Marta Group headed by Cardinal Vincent Nichols to discuss and share their experience and listen to each other. They discussed greater cooperation in combating the global scourge and horrific crimes of human trafficking of vulnerable people into modern slavery. Such cooperation is absolutely essential to find an efficient global response and local action to save the victims and challenge the criminals.

 

Human trafficking is rife in both the developed rich world and in the poorer developing countries and Eastern Europe that are the source of the victims of slavery. Pope Francis has rightly called it a crime against humanity and convened the grouping in his Santa Marta residence. Anti-trafficking is now on top of the Church agenda since hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees fall victim to human traffickers as they seek refuge from violence, oppression and hunger.

  

The Migrants and Refugees Section of the Vatican has addressed the issue at a conference in Rome recently. The conference resolved to come up with a plan of action to guide and inspire both church and civil society to respond to the challenge of human trafficking.

  

Human trafficking is a crime against persons where, by force or false promises, they are taken from one place to another, treated as commodities and objects without human dignity or rights and are exploited and forced to work with little or no pay when placed in a situation of abuse and coerced servitude or slavery.

 

Many people may think forced labor or slavery is a thing of the past when thirteen million Africans were kidnapped, chained and herded like animals into the slave ships and transported across the Atlantic to the cotton and sugar fields of North and South America. There they were made to suffer a life of cruel slavery. The rich of the United States and Europe became richer on their forced unpaid labor.

 

Human trafficking of victims into slavery has never really disappeared. It is all around us. Iit is underground in the criminal world. But the victims could be serving our drinks in a bar or cleaning our hotel room or working in our fields or factories. We seldom think about the condition of the foreign workers in the rich developed world and ignore the enslaved in the sweatshops or trafficked into brothels of Europe or Asia and South America. Here the sex tourists and travelling sex offenders abuse vulnerable women and children enslaved in bonded labor as sex workers.

 

The traffickers earn huge amounts of money with no investment. Today human traffickers facilitate the enslavement of as many as 42 million people worldwide. Men, women and children suffer intolerable conditions of forced unpaid labor and are sold to gang masters, to factories, fishing fleets or sex bars where they are forced to work for very little or no pay.

 

Many are told they have debts to pay for food and transportation and board and lodging.  They are cheated and trapped and become victims of bonded labor with so-called loans that they can never pay. Many are given drugs and made addicted and have debts to the drug dealers and can never escape the clutches of the human slavers. There are threats of violence against them or their families that keep them in a state of docility and fear. There is no consent or freedom of choice in modern slavery. Their life knows no peace, only fear and intimidation.

 

There are over a million children enslaved, many of them are in the sex industry. It is tolerated, accepted and seldom opposed by even Christian populations. The citizens allow sex slavery to thrive by their apathy and indifference. They don’t see the human misery that surrounds them in society as the neon lights of the sex bars flash their lurid invitation to abuse and rape the captured slaves.

 

Husbands are corrupted and broken homes and abandoned families are the result. Child abuse drives children to run away into the streets where traffickers easily recruit them. About 70 percent of sex workers were first sexually abused as children in their own homes.

 

In the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries, most brothels and sex bars operate with a government permit. Although prostitution is illegal, it thrives with the connivance of the authorities. The President joked recently in India that he would offer virgins to the tourists to lure them to the Philippines. The victims are subjected to violence, forced abortions and exposed to venereal diseases and HIV-AIDS. 

 

The first thing to do to combat human trafficking is to support preventive education to help people in the supply countries be aware of the dangers of trusting traffickers and labor recruiters. Where the trafficking is prevalent, education campaigns are needed to awaken the conscience and sensitivity of the public to the plight of victims. We must provide the public with an opportunity for easy safe reporting of abuse through a hotline.

 

We can deploy a trained, church-based awareness and rescue team to save victims and educate the public. It should have a paralegal officer to respond to the hotline reports of incidents of human trafficking and modern slavery and child abuse. More professionally run therapeutic centers for the victims are very necessary. In these homes, the victims can find protection, therapy and comfort and legal assistance. An uncorrupted police unit trained to respond and collect and present evidence to a skilled prosecutor before a just judge is essential to have justice for the victims. The team would give training seminars to parents, teachers, duty bearers and clergy to train them to be aware and teach them to recognize and report human trafficking. We must act together to end this evil and save the victims.

 

The Daily Crime against Humanity

 

I drove from Olongapo City to Subic town recently and pointed to the journalist the row of shuttered, dilapidated and closed-down sex bars that lined the road at Calapandayan, Subic. It is evidence of the success of an anti-trafficking operation conducted by the Preda Foundation social workers with the help of the Philippine police and an agent of the US Homeland Security where as many as 15 young girls were rescued from the horrible life of forced prostitution.

 

Some younger minors, so traumatized after being trapped and abused for over a year in this kind of sex slavery, were in need of therapy, support compassion and friendship and hope for a better life. They came to the Preda Home for Girls and have made a recovery and are empowered to testify.

 

Others had been newly recruited for jobs as food servers in the hotels at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone but were forced into prostitution in a sex hotel. They were freed and were brought to the homes in a town south of Manila by the government social workers. They were later intimidated by the sex mafia and were too scared to testify. The bar operators walked free except one US national who is on trial.

 

That is the common course for the victims. They are poor, helpless and need strong support, witness protection and encouragement to find justice but sadly the government agencies do not provide these services effectively.

 

The long term success of that operation is that we had volunteer retired federal police from Australia who went undercover as sex tourists and infiltrated the sex bars and clubs. (see www.preda.org links to YouTube ‘Children of the Sex Trade” and  “The Raid” of ABC New York).

 

These secret surveillances are hopefully still ongoing around the Philippines and are popular with retired police and have many sex tourists and bar operators worried today because they don’t know if the sex tourist downing a cold beer and chatting beside them is a fellow exploiter of young girls or a retired police officer on a undercover mission for the Philippine police.

 

These retired officers are good men determined to save children and working to end sex trafficking and slavery. The evidence could put the bar operator and owner in a filthy jail cell where he could die of malnutrition or disease. These kinds of operations are very necessary to curb the growing abuse of younger teenagers disguised as adults with fake documents.

 

It’s a crime against humanity, according to Pope Francis, who  has spoken and has acted to bring together police and church leaders to find a more effective response to this crime that destroys young lives. The Santa Marta Group of senior police officers, diplomats and church leaders brings together the energy and resources worldwide to combat this evil trade in human beings. It was first held in Vatican City in the Santa Marta guest house where Pope Francis lives from which the group got its name. Last week, they had their annual meeting in New York. They need to work faster.

 

As many as 21 million people are in slavery in the world today in its various forms. Many are children under 18 year of age who are sex slaves without rights or freedom. They are held in the sex bars, clubs, houses and hotels where prostitution is rampant. Most young girls are without identity, freedom of choice and are usually lured into debt and scared to escape.

 

Their families may have taken advance payment on the child’s  so-called “salary” and are threatened if the minor runs away from the sex bar, the pimp or the human trafficker. It is a false argument to claim the girls are working to support their  families back in the province. Some do but most apparently don’t. Poverty and inequality is at the heart of the problem.

 

Their documents showing them as adults are fake or those of an elder sister.  Prostitution is illegal in the Philippines but this is ignored. Children as young as 14 are offered for sex on the street and sex bars.

 

Corrupt officials are getting payments from the human traffickers and club owners. So outside police are needed. That’s why I promote the formation of a multi-national police force with jurisdiction wherever they are assigned to investigate traffickers using trained undercover officers.

 

Local mayors give operating permits to the sex bars. Such government approval is at the heart of the crime. In the Philippines alone, there is an estimated 100,000 minors trafficked and sexually exploited every year. The worldwide business is worth US $ 110 billion, according to the UK’s Anti-Slavery Independent Commissioner Kevin Hylan, a dedicated campaigner.

 

What is needed is action on the ground to rescue, protect, heal and help them recover and testify and bring the criminals to justice. That is not there sufficiently. That’s why we need a special human trafficking court in each region on which two international retired judges will sit trying the child abusers and human trafficking suspects. A new law for this can be passed if there is commitment.

 

But one thing is certain: this crime is the shame of humanity and the blight of each nation. To fail to act against it is to condone it and silence about abuse is the greater crime.