By Babukar Kashka
"After weapons and drugs, human trafficking is the third most lucrative criminal enterprise in the world." This statement, referring to three atrocious man-made murdering tools, appears on the presentation page of the multimedia web project on sex trafficking, The Price of Sex, a huge task undertaken by Bulgarian photojournalist Mimi Chakarova.
There are indeed millions of human beings who have fallen prey to human trafficking, a euphemism for slavery. And the outrageous fact is that the demand for slaves is rapidly increasing as the global economic and financial crisis generates more poverty, unemployment and hunger among the poorest of the poor who are in desperate need to survive at any cost.
In fact, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are "at least 12.3 million adults and children in forced labour, bonded labour, and commercial sexual servitude… at any given time."
Of these victims, the UN body estimates, at least 1.39 million are victims of commercial sexual servitude, both transnational and within countries. 56 percent of all forced labour victims are women and girls.
But slavery is claiming an increasing number of men as well. In fact, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) informs that a large percentage of trafficked people are male and the number is increasing.
HUMAN SMUGGLING
According to the U.S. State Department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, over one million persons are smuggled across international borders. "The common denominator of trafficking scenarios is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit a person for profit. Traffickers can subject victims to labour exploitation, sexual exploitation, or both", says the report.
This is exactly what traffickers do.
The report says that trafficking for labour exploitation, which claims the greatest number of victims, includes traditional chattel slavery, forced labour, and debt bondage; trafficking for sexual exploitation includes abuse within the commercial sex industry, mainly.
The report identifies as "severe" forms of human trafficking:
a) Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion; b) the recruitment, harbouring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labour or services, through the use of force, fraud, c) coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
"The impacts of human trafficking are devastating," the U.S. report says. "Victims may suffer physical and emotional abuse, rape, threats against self and family, and even death. But the devastation also extends beyond individual victims; human trafficking undermines the health, safety, and security of all nations it touches."
Nevertheless, more than 170 countries "are not doing enough to tackle the problem".
WOMEN AND GIRLS
Trafficking for sexual exploitation typically includes abuse within the commercial sex industry, says the report. Otherwise it includes exploiting victims in private homes, demanding from them both sex and work.
ILO estimates that women and girls total around 1.4 million victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.
The economic and financial global crisis has meanwhile affected severely East European countries, who became a major "exporter" of slaves, feeding the human trafficking business with both women and men for labour exploitation, and girls, women and children for sexual slavery.
The "importers" of sex slaves, it has been reported, are some oil-rich Arab emirates. They are becoming a major destination of women and girls sexual trafficking. The U.S. State Department estimates that over 10,000 women and girls are now forced into sex in Dubai only.
Meanwhile, another form of girls and women sexual slavery is taking place in a number of several countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo being the most clamorous case.
Humanitarian organisations report that more than 300,000 women have been violently raped by regular governmental troops, but mostly by armed groups apparently funded by giant foreign corporations.
These corporations are making substantially profitable business by extracting precious minerals, like cobalt, from Congolese mines. And these armed groups, used to terrify local population and keep control on the mining areas, would be among those who practice the child-soldiers form of slavery.
CHILDREN
Human trafficking covers numerous, abominable forms of child slavery; recruiting child soldiers is just one of them.
According to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, there are many tens of thousands of children exploited in conflict. "Child soldiers exist in all regions of the world."
The United Nations estimates that 57 armed groups and forces were using children in 2007, up from 40 in 2006.
And UNICEF calculates that as many as two million children are subjected to prostitution in the global commercial sex trade.
Child sex tourism is another form of "demand" for victims of child sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department.
"It involves people who travel from their own country -- often a country where child sexual exploitation is illegal or culturally abhorrent -- to another country where they engage in commercial sex acts with children."
Child sex tourism, the report says, is a "shameful assault on the dignity of children and a form of violent child abuse. It often involves trafficking, as a trafficking crime likely was committed in the provision of the child for the sex tourist’s exploitation".
DEBT SLAVES
Workers may also inherit debt in more traditional systems of bonded labour, according to the U.S. State Department report, which informs that traditional bonded labour in South Asia, for example, enslaves huge numbers of people from generation to generation.
A January 2009 report by Anti-Slavery International, a London-based NGO, concluded that this form of forced labour, traditionally more prevalent in villages, is expanding into urban areas of the region, rather than diminishing on an aggregate level, as the result of development and modernization.
At the same time, reports from Asian countries, like India, talk about increasing cases of suicide among poor farmers due to their incapacity to re-pay their debts, a circumstance that forces their young sons and children to replace them both in work and debt loads.
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
According to the U.S. State Department, rising unemployment leads to greater trafficking vulnerabilities. "Numerous international organizations have warned of the trafficking consequences of the ongoing global financial crisis."
In its January 2009 Global Employment Report, the ILO says that "the economic crisis is causing dramatic increases in the numbers of unemployed, working poor, and those in vulnerable employment."
It adds: "If the crisis continues, more than 200 million workers, mostly in developing economies, could be pushed into extreme poverty."
In Asia alone, the ILO predicted a worst-case scenario of 113 million unemployed in 2009. And money sent home from abroad will also drop.
Remittances from the region’s migrant workers slowed in late 2008, and the World Bank expects the decline to continue throughout 2009.
In a March 2009 report, the World Bank revised its previous forecast on declining migrant worker remittance flows to a more negative 5 to 8 percent decline for 2009; this follows 8.8 percent growth in remittances (to 305 billion dollars) in 2008.
The forced labour implications of the financial crisis are particularly stark for Asia, a region identified with an existing high level of job insecurity, continues the U.S. State Department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report.
Meanwhile, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that up to 70 percent of unemployment in South and Southeast Asia is in the informal sector.
ILO reports that Asia also has a high prevalence of existing forced labour; it is home to 77 percent of the world’s forced labour victims.
DEMAND UP
"The global economic crisis is also boosting the demand side of human trafficking", the U.S. State Department’s report says.
The UN is of the view that the worldwide rise in this form of modern-day slavery is a result of a growing demand for cheap goods and services.
And UN officials expect the impact of the crisis to push more business underground to avoid taxes and unionized labour, and anticipate increasing use of forced, cheap, and child labour by multinational companies strapped by financial struggles.
These facts are mostly based on findings by ‘big democracies’ and world institutions funded by them to a great extent.
But the ‘big democracies’ are too busy powering the ‘black holes’ of banks and carmakers with hundreds of billions, and the development and testing of new killing machines and wars.
Their economic interests leave little room for creating conditions for genuine democratic structures in which slavery has no place. – IDN-InDepthNews | GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES |
