Published in The Portland Alliance, April 2006
In a city famous for its politicized public citizenry, the
nonprofit civic organization City Club of Portland stands out as a
respected forum for community education. Its Friday Forums series was
established to bring pressing civic issues to concerned citizens, and
on Feb. 17 the topic of pressing social concern discussed was human
trafficking.
Portland is in the midst of a slow awakening
on just how pervasive modern human slavery is here in the United States
and globally. The problem of slavery has always plagued humans, but
globalization in the past 15 years has exacerbated the situation. In
that time, trafficking in human beings has reached epidemic proportions
as desperate searches for work have been fuelled by economic disparity,
gender inequality and the disruption of traditional livelihoods.
Traffickers face few risks and earn huge profits, greater profits than
drug and arms trafficking by some estimates, because unlike drugs and
weapons, human slave labor is repeatedly exploitable. Criminals
prosecuted for trafficking drugs receive higher sentences than those
found guilty of trafficking human beings into slavery.
Consistent statistics on the number of victims and size of organized
criminal trafficking rings are nearly impossible because trafficking is
by its nature an underground business. Efforts are currently being
taken by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) to develop a database comparing statistics
gathered around the world. By most estimates, the overwhelming majority
of victims are female and trafficking for prostitution accounts for
about half of all trafficking while exploitive farm work, factory work,
and domestic servitude make up the other half.
As the
problem has grown, so has the attention the issue is receiving among
human rights organizations and governments tasked with responding to
the increase in victims. Following the lead of Amnesty International,
the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and other international
organizations committed to abolishing slavery, this spring the Daywalka
Foundation will set up at Portland State University’s Hatfield School
of Government to continue its anti-trafficking advocacy. Daywalka
Executive Director Christopher Carey spoke at City Club’s Friday Forum
about the scope of the problem, “The U.S. State Department estimates
that 600,000 to 800,000 people a year are trafficked across
international borders. The International Labor Organization estimates
that upwards of 12 million people live as slaves as a result of
trafficking in the world today. In South Asia this problem is
particularly acute.”
Carey is a lawyer who has spent the past
few years building the Daywalka Foundation to the international success
story it has become. Started by activist and humanitarian Mark West, a
close friend of Carey, Daywalka’s original focus was on educating young
Nepalese girls to keep them from being trafficked. Raising money so
girls could attend school is necessary because sexism that favors boy
children over girl children results in uneducated girls particularly
vulnerable to traffickers. In the spirit of focusing energies on girls
and women, the name Daywalka is a pseudonym for the first trafficking
survivor who told her story to the founders ten years ago.
Supplying school fees was helpful but advocates wanted to try a more
integrated approach, so money was raised to send students from Seattle
University to Nepal to learn in deeper detail how to provide more
ambitious, longer-lasting aid. One of these students, Sahar Romani,
went on to become a program assistant and created Kalam, a poetry
curriculum for stigmatized youth that helps build self-confidence and
the student’s thirst for more education. It’s estimated 80 percent to
90 percent of trafficking victims are females, therefore women from a
variety of castes were trained as teachers and to become positive
female role models to the girls around them. Information about the
tricks and lies of prosperity told by traffickers and pimps are part of
that education.
But the education of victims did not address
the corruption of law enforcement and judges. Corrupt courts rife with
bribery from brothel-owners and other profiteers don’t effectively
prosecute criminals, and too often children rescued from brothels were
placed back into the hands of traffickers.
Carey elaborates,
“One of the most effective ways we have found to insure justice to
victims and survivors is hiring private attorneys to help represent
those victims and survivors. They help provide them access to all
services of justice, not just healthcare but prosecution, reintegration
and repatriation, and job training as necessary.”
In 2002,
political instability in Nepal became particularly heated and it was
determined Daywalka’s continued presence could put their colleagues in
danger. The program was disrupted and energies turned toward preventing
trafficking in the United States. Daywalka’s primary model has been
using Women and Children Security Resource Centers (WCSRC) to create
collaborations between law enforcement, social service providers,
public health agencies, shelters and other nongovernmental
organizations. The joint venture with Portland State University’s
Hatfield School of Government will largely focus on integrating
Portland’s services in much the same way. Other goals of the merger are
to produce a comprehensive anti-trafficking library and to put on a
training conference that would train public servants likely to
encounter trafficking victims in identifying victims and provide them
the help they need.
Also high on Daywalka’s agenda is the
passage of Oregon’s first anti-trafficking legislation. The past few
years have seen incredible movement by the federal government to
address the issue. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was
signed into law in October 2000 and was amended in 2003 to close
loopholes and provide more specific protections for victims. In April
2003, the PROTECT Act was signed into law to allow prosecutions of
Americans who travel abroad to abuse minors.
The Bush
Administration has taken most of the credit for the recent mobilization
against slavery, but the true story is one of many people involved in a
bipartisan cooperation all too rare in modern American politics. Back
in 1999 the late Paul Wellstone introduced the International
Trafficking of Women and Children Victim Protection Act in the Senate
and his legacy is well-known to liberal and conservative
anti-trafficking advocates. In January 2006 President Bush signed the
Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act after Sen. Sam
Brownback (R-Kansas) and Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) joined with Rep.
Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) to push forth the anti-trafficking
legislation. Rep. Maloney has also pioneered against trafficking by
working with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to put sex
tour operators in New York out of business.
States are
following the federal government’s lead in pursuing traffickers within
their borders. The first state to pass specifically anti-trafficking
legislation was Hawaii in 2004. Act 92 makes it a felony offense, with
a sentence of up to five years in prison, to sell or offer to sell
travel services for the purpose of engaging in prostitution and
authorizes suspension or revocation of a travel agency registration for
violations. Most states have laws against promoting prostitution, but
Hawaii is the first state to specifically criminalize the activities of
sex tour operators by recognizing the link between prostitution and
trafficking: “The purpose of this Act is to promote and protect the
human rights of women and girls exploited by sex tourists . . . In so
doing, the legislature forcefully declares Hawaii’s unequivocal
opposition to any form of sex tourism, whether it is child sex tourism
or sex tourism involving adults.”
Because Oregon is situated
between California and Washington and those two states have the largest
trafficking problems in the country, Portland is a conduit city as well
as a destination for criminal rings that run up and down the West
coast. Liz Rogers from Catholic Charities, a service-providing agency
for trafficking victims, spoke after Christopher Carey at the City Club
Friday Forum about the difficulties in going after traffickers when
Oregon has no anti-trafficking law, “Most trafficking victims want to
be safe and they want this to stop. They want the people that are doing
this to be stopped and to be punished. It’s really difficult when
you’re working just under a federal law without state legislation
support to go after traffickers.”
A working group recently
formed to create an anti-trafficking bill for Oregon. Advocates from
the Daywalka Foundation, Catholic Charities and other local
organizations dedicated to stopping slavery in Oregon are planning to
introduce the bill, LC38, in the next legislative session. Still in its
very early draft form, the bill would make involuntary servitude
punishable with imprisonment and fines. If it passes it would place
Oregon among Hawaii, Washington, Florida and Texas as states with
anti-trafficking laws. A number of other states have formed legislative
task groups on human trafficking and have bills pending, but Oregon’s
position on the domestic trafficking route and longstanding reputation
as a progressive leader for the rest of the country make passing an
anti-trafficking law here a priority.
“Whenever I talk to my
students about these things,“ says Carey, “they always accuse me of
bumming them out and depressing them because they feel helpless and
overwhelmed. But whenever I travel overseas I’m always struck by the
resilience of the human spirit and humans to overcome seemingly
insurmountable odds.”
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