E. Benjamin Skinner<\/a>, a Carr Center Fellow this year and author of the 2008 book \u201cA Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.\u201d<\/p>\nSkinner\u2019s research, conducted both in public and underground, took him to child markets, trafficking networks, illegal brothels, and other slave venues in a dozen countries in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America. Even suburban America, he discovered, contains its own parallel universes of hidden slavery.<\/p>\n
CdeBaca\u2019s office every year rates nations around the world on their measures to fight slavery. The 2010 ranking \u2014 called the Trafficking in Persons, or TIP, report \u2014will include the United States for the first time. That announcement drew a brief burst of applause in the crowded hall.<\/p>\n
To illustrate the problem in the United States, consider the case of Shyima Hall, whose story was outlined in the 2009 TIP report. She was a teenager from a poor family in northern Egypt who was moved by a wealthy Egyptian couple to work in their California home. In exchange for up to 20 hours of labor a day, Shyima was locked in a windowless garage and paid $45 a month.<\/p>\n
CdeBaca mentioned another case, one of an \u201cescaped slave\u201d who fled from virtual imprisonment in an Arlington, Mass., home. Her passport was locked in a safe.<\/p>\n
He told other American stories: about the illiterate garment workers who studied the boss\u2019 dictionary one word at a time to compose a note that they threw over a high wall. (They were rescued.) And the woman who rushed up to a policeman in a Dollar Store with a desperate plea to escape domestic servitude: \u201cArrest me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Modern slavery will prompt \u201cthe next great abolitionist movement,\u201d said Skinner. He provided a chilling definition of modern slaves, who are so inadequately uncovered and protected: \u201cThose forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Skinner acknowledged that slavery is a \u201ccontentious term\u201d that some Westerners even sometimes equate to the drudgery of corporate jobs, mortgages, and credit card debt. But the world\u2019s real slaves are \u201cpeople that cannot walk away from their work.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the commercial enterprises that underlay slavery, Skinner said, potentially involve every consumer. To address the slave trade, he said, \u201ctakes all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Understanding modern slavery also invites comparison to the U.S. war on the drug trade, which has more resources and prominence, said Skinner. The annual budget to fight slavery, he said, is the equivalent to what is spent in a single day to combat trafficking in illegal drugs.<\/p>\n
Without disparaging the need to target drugs, Skinner asked a rhetorical question about which is more important: \u201cIs it a 15-year-old selling pot on the street corner, or is it a 15-year-old being sold on the street corner?\u201d<\/p>\n
Prosecution alone is not enough to stop modern slavery, said CdeBaca, who called for protection that extended beyond the courtroom, including provisions for social services. Ignoring the victim after the crime, he said, would only \u201creplicate\u201d the way the victim was treated by a trafficker.<\/p>\n
Meantime, there is the third \u201cP,\u201d said CdeBaca: prevention, which remains \u201can afterthought\u201d to most nations. Real prevention means more than policy pronouncements, public-awareness advertising campaigns, or \u201cinteresting documentaries,\u201d he said. It means stopping human trafficking at the source, in part by understanding the demands behind forced labor and commercial sex.<\/p>\n
Stopping trafficking at the source is also a matter of awareness, said CdeBaca in discussing the imprisoned shirt-makers and shrimp fishermen. Just as people are now aware of their carbon footprint, he said, they should be aware of their \u201cmodern-slavery footprint.\u201d That means taking a critical look at the goods and services they buy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe prevention-P,\u201d said CdeBaca, \u201cis where every American can play.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Examples of modern-day slaves could be the workers who make our cotton shirts, pick cocoa for our chocolate, and harvest shrimp for our dinner plates while imprisoned aboard ships at sea. Enslaved prostitutes \u2014 more than 1.3 million worldwide \u2014 also provide the labor force for much of the world\u2019s sex trade. Modern slavery\u2019s ubiquity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}