COMMENTARY
Slave trade preys on society's most vulnerable
By Nancie Caraway
"It was a big room, and four or five other women going to work in Japan were held there. I was surprised to be locked up because I was not allowed to say goodbye to my family, even over the phone. I did not realize that we were being sold into prostitution."
Associated Press library photo • April 27, 1998
Those shocking words are not the lament of an 18th- or 19th-century concubine, but the voice of a young Thai woman trafficked into modern-day Japan's thriving criminal sex industry. This dehumanizing practice is characterized by the United Nations as a human-rights crisis in Asia and the Pacific. As many as 5 million people a year are caught in this booming criminal underworld. An extensive report conducted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 2000 notes that as many as 50,000 people a year are forced into slavery in the United States as domestic servants and sweatshop workers, or forced into Internet porn and the sex industry. No one has determined the extent of trafficking in Hawai'i, although it is a gateway and transit point from Asia.
The Japanese government in 1998 was ordered pay $2,300 to this South Korean woman and two others who were forced to become sexual slaves for soldiers during World War II.
Trafficking in people is the downside of globalization. This trading of bodies is a modern-day form of slavery that preys on society's most vulnerable populations: workers, migrants, refugees, stateless people, women and children. The human misery caused by this global trade involves the recruitment, transport, harboring and often sale of people exploited for their labor. These trafficked individuals, such as the Thai girl mentioned previously, are the commodities of a transnational criminal industry that generates billions of dollars (third after trafficking in weapons and drugs) in a global criminal economy.
On Wednesday, some of the world's leading human-rights professionals will address "The Human Rights Challenge of Globalization in Asia-Pacific-US: The Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children," at an international conference at the Hawai'i Convention Center.
The Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, in partnership with the East-West Center, is convening some 300 experts — as well as trafficking victims — from Asia and the Pacific — a recognized "supply and demand" trafficking area — to address what has become one of the United Nations' major humanitarian concerns. Stakeholders in this effort to stop human slavery include trade unionists, government officials, law enforcement officials, researchers, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations such as the International Labor Organization, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and advocates representing Human Rights Watch, the antipoverty and justice group Oxfam, Anti-Slavery International and Free the Slaves.
Featured speakers — such as Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of UNIFEM; Vitit Muntarbhorn, head of the Thai Sub-Committee on the Rights of the Child; and researcher Kevin Bales — have shocked Western audiences who are unaware of the extent of human slavery by revealing what an integral part trafficking plays in generating profits for global corporations as well as criminal syndicates.
Bales, whose book "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy," was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, has traveled to impoverished regions documenting modern slavery. He has calculated that as many as 27 million people are in bonded labor today. Bonded labor, or debt bondage, occurs when people give themselves into slavery to repay a loan or debt they have incurred or have inherited from a family member.
"There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade," is the bombshell message that Bales wants American consumers to understand. There is no supply without demand, he reminds us, because trafficking in people and slavery are driven by increasing demands by Western consumers in markets that seek ever-cheaper goods and services: sex, soccer balls, clothing, maids and chocolate.
What are the causes of such human degradation? Widespread economic inequality, the low status of women and girls, corruption, lax law enforcement and punitive immigration policies.
Conference attendees will hear the voices of previously trafficked women telling their stories of enslavement and liberation, women from Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand — and even from Hawai'i. They and other victims need lifelines to crawl out of bondage. Their message is clear: Hold governments' feet to the fire; generate the political will of those in power to enforce the many international/regional conventions and policies outlawing trafficking. And more importantly, punish those who profit by this brutal form of human-rights abuse.
Nancie Caraway is director of women's human rights projects at the Globalization Research Center, University of Hawai'i-Manoa.
