Redemption and Human Trafficking: The Role of the Church in Addressing the Modern Slave Trade.
| Author | Fletcher, Michael |
Introduction
There is an ancient evil that plagues the modern world, a crime against humanity that has raged throughout history and continues to rage today. It lurks in sickly, sinister alleys in Thailand. It sprawls across lush, sunkissed fields in Brazil. It creeps through hustling hallways of American public schools. It is known as modern slavery or human trafficking, and it is growing so forcefully that it has the "potential to reshape the world order." (1) Its hallmark is the violence that it uses against the vulnerable, forcing them into slavery to exploit them for profit until it becomes cheaper to kill them or dismiss them. Its victims include girls forced by pimps to have sex with strangers, young boys captured to work as child soldiers, and men and women held in permanent bondage to work off illegitimate debts. Human trafficking affects people of all races and religious backgrounds, forcing them into all kinds of bondage, and it is happening all over the planet.
Slavery in the Modern World
Human-trafficking researchers Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter tell the story of Sandra Bearden, a twentyseven year old wife and mother of a four year old son, who was convicted of torturing her twelve-year old maid. Seeking an economical way to obtain maid services, Sandra drove from her nice home in a Texas suburb across the Mexican border to an impoverished village near Vera Cruz. There, she offered a job as a maid to twelve year old Maria. Life in America could offer Maria opportunities she would never have in her world, and with her parents' permission, she accepted the job. Sandra then smuggled the girl back into America, where Maria's life turned into a nightmare. Sandra viciously beat Maria and worked her to the point of exhaustion. If Maria dozed off from extreme fatigue, Sandra pepper-sprayed her in the eyes. As Bales and Soodalter explain: "At one point, Bearden tortured the twelve-year-old by jamming a garden tool up her vagina. That was Maria's workday; her 'time-off' was worse. When Maria wasn't working, Sandra would chain her to a pole in the backyard without food or water. An eight-foot concrete fence kept her hidden from neighbors. After chaining her, Sandra would sometimes force Maria to eat dog feces." (2)
Maria was a modern day slave, and her story, though horrible, is unfortunately not unique. Today there are an estimated 35.8 million slaves in the world (3)--more than twice as many people that were taken out of Africa during the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade. (4) The International Labor Organization estimates that the world's slaves produce $150 billion in profits. (5) One of the most commonly accepted definitions of human trafficking comes from the United Nations' Palermo Protocol of 2000, which includes elements such as the use of threat, force, or coercion by perpetrators against victims; the utter control of perpetrators over their victims; and the exploitation of the victim for some sort of profit. (6) Interpol categorizes human trafficking into four types: 1) trafficking in women for sexual exploitation, 2) trafficking for forced labor, 3) commercial sexual exploitation of children in tourism, and 4) trafficking in organs. (7) The United States Department of State, in its annual report on the status of trafficking around the world, defines trafficking in seven categories, which include trafficking in child soldiers and domestic slaves. (8) Slavery, in fact, is so ubiquitous and takes so many forms that it has long evaded clear analytical categorization by researchers. (9)
Although the categories of trafficking are diverse and sometimes complicated, the experience of its victims is brutally simple: they are people "enslaved by violence and held against their wills for purposes of exploitation." (10) Ironically, many victims are at first willing participants in the ploys of their traffickers. In almost all cases, people who later become victims of trafficking have a financial or circumstantial vulnerability that creates an opportunity for someone else to profit from them. Traffickers find powerful ways to capitalize on these vulnerabilities, such as by finding people living in extreme poverty and offering them good-paying jobs in some location requiring relocation. (11) Many victims of trafficking leave their homes hoping to earn more money for their families. In cases like this, traffickers transport their victims and then inevitably renege on their employment contracts (if any were given to begin with), refusing to pay what they promised to their "employees." Traffickers resort to violence in order to maintain complete control over their victims, forcing them to perform hard labor for little or perhaps no pay. The people working under these conditions find that they are not employed--they are enslaved. Human trafficking is thus a convergence of violence, slavery, and poverty. Many of the world's poorest people are not merely disadvantaged, but are in fact enslaved by others who use violence to keep them in that plight. (12)
Survival for slaves in these situations is linked to their usefulness to their traffickers. If the ratio between slaves' earning potential and the effort to maintain them becomes unfavorable to the traffickers, they are often left to die of neglect or are killed outright. They are commodities, things to be used up and then thrown away. In the United States in the 1850s, slaves could sell for the equivalent of $40K to $80K USD in today's economy; today, the same sorts of agricultural laborers can be bought in India for $12-$23. (13) In the cruel economics of modern slavery, humans are cheap.
Modern slavery reaches into every corner of the world. Three hundred thousand children have been enslaved as child soldiers in at least thirty countries. (14) In conflicts in Uganda alone, there have been 20,000 children as young as five years old trafficked into army service, who besides fighting as soldiers are also forced to perform hard labor, serve as wives to commanders, and even beat other trafficked children, sometimes to death. (15) In Thailand there is a thriving commercial sex trade with estimates of up to 35,000 slaves (this does not include the many prostitutes who are not victims of trafficking). (16) In India there could be up to 20 million slaves held in bonded labor. (17) And while some forms of human trafficking are universally abhorrent, others are perpetrated less ostentatiously. Slavery is always criminal, but it can take the form of the common. Some slaves, such as illegal immigrants, might appear to be regular employees; they may be part of the cleaning staff at a hotel or the dishwashing crew at a restaurant. Others, like Maria, might be housekeepers for seemingly normal citizens living in normal neighborhoods. Still others can be rented for sex and are advertised online. Researcher Roe-Sepowitz, in her study on sex trafficking in Phoenix, Arizona, found 78,000 men were responding every day to the online sex ads for women and children. (18) Cutting across political borders and reaching into all sectors of society, human trafficking is without question a worldwide phenomenon.
Sex Trafficking
All human trafficking is founded in violence and harmful toward its victims, but sex trafficking is an especially horrific form that wreaks extreme physical and psychological damage on its victims. Across the world, sex trafficking often takes the form of large groups of women and children (but also men and boys) being taken from one location to another on false promises--such as better employment opportunities--and then brutally enslaved as commercial sex workers. (19) A different sort of sex trafficking, common to the United States, is the "pimp model," in which traffickers (called pimps), often working in loose networks, select and recruit their victims through careful strategies and tend to keep smaller groups of women under their control for longer periods of time. (20) In the "recruitment" process, pimps win over their future victims by befriending them and developing a trusting boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. In one typical case, a pimp named Corey Davis began dating Shamere McKenzie, a young, attractive woman who had attended college on an athletic scholarship and was a model student. Corey convinced Shamere to...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
