Saturday, April 28, 2012

the South lost the Civil War, right?

The Reporter - A discouraging amount of human trafficking still exists:

'via Blog this'

A discouraging amount of human trafficking still exists
  • Posted: 04/27/12 06:43 pm
    • Slavery ended in the United States in 1865 when the South lost the Civil War, right? By law, the answer is yes. But in reality the answer is no. Human trafficking and bondage, which are tantamount to slavery, go on to this day in the United States and elsewhere. One might reasonably expect human bondage to be a shrinking — if not disappearing — phenomenon. Instead it is growing here and around the world.
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      A State Department annual report on human trafficking showed last year that there were at least 12.5 million people worldwide trapped in the modern equivalent of bondage. More recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there may be as many as 27 million persons trafficked worldwide.
    • Trafficking is defined by federal law as the “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” Sex trafficking is still the most common form of trafficking and it is defined as taking place when, “a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age.”
    • Just how common is it in the United States? You might be shocked to learn, as was I, it is not as rare as one would hope. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2008 and 2010, federally funded task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation. Most were for suspected sex trafficking, but about one in 10 were for trafficking in forced labor. The Department of Health & Human Services also reports between 14,500 and 17,500 people from other countries are trafficked into the United States each year.
    • Trafficking is (often unwittingly) supported by big businesses that either buy products made by forced labor or who may even hire employees who are being trafficked (i.e., forced to turn over their earnings to middle men who “own” the workers.)
    • Why aren’t there laws against this? In fact, there are. In January, California’s Transparency Act took effect. It requires any manufacturer or retailer with worldwide annual gross receipts of at least $100 million that does business in California to explain what it is doing to combat forced labor and trafficked persons in its supply chain. The law is expected to apply to 3,200 global companies.
    • Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., has introduced a similar bill in Congress called the Business Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act. Both laws exemplify the extent to which big business profits, directly or indirectly, from forced labor or human bondage. Some international employment agencies profit directly, as do restaurants and manufacturers. For others profits are indirect, when forced labor is used to produce goods.
    • There even still exists the enslavement of entire families. The International Labour Organization estimated in 2011 there were nearly 6,000 families who live and work in the brick kilns in Chengalpattu area of Kanchipuram, India. Kiln owners hire and indenture entire families, who can only find work by taking out high-interest loans to pay off debt or for housing and food when they move into the modern-day equivalent of “company towns.”
    • How is this taking place in today’s supposedly humane world and why don’t we hear more about it? There is plenty of media coverage of the issue, but it seems to fly beneath the radar. Maybe we here in the United States are too preoccupied with maintaining financial equilibrium through the recession and its aftermath. But nothing much will change unless there is mass outrage about what is going on and government action to crack down on perpetrators.
    • Bonnie Erbe is host of PBS’ “To the Contrary With Bonnie Erbe” and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. Email bonnie.scrippshoward@gmail.com.

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