Having trouble viewing the email below? Please click here.
Police in Baldwin, GA, recently stopped the driver of a white Jeep Cherokee for not having the taillights on. When they looked inside, officers were surprised to find eight Latino males squeezed into the vehicle, part of an alleged human trafficking operation. The exposure to human trafficking was apparently a first for Habersham County, which is in the northeast part of the state. But it’s a thriving business in many other parts of the U.S. and the world.
Jagdish Prajapati was in his 20s when he left India in 2001, on the promise of a high-paying job and the chance to stay in the U.S. indefinitely. But he and about 50 other men from his homeland landed at a factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma as welders of heavy equipment – inadvertent pawns in a human trafficking operation. As alleged in a later court case, the men were forcibly kept on the company’s grounds and made to work for about $2 an hour. They were told by the traffickers that if they tried to escape and get help, they would be mistaken for terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks in New York City. Until Prajapati and the other men were helped by members of a local church in 2002, they said they were treated like “virtual slaves.”
Slavery may seem like history, but human rights groups say that the condition is alive and well, with an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide. They are young women and children who are often kidnapped or lured away from their families and forced into prostitution or pornography; they are young boys trapped into becoming child soldiers or doing other dangerous work; and they are young or older men and women exploited in sweatshops, brothels, homes and agricultural fields, among other places, toiling in unsafe and unsanitary conditions for little or no money or benefits.
Florrie Burke, a psychotherapist and human rights advocate who has been involved in anti-slavery efforts since 1996 says that human trafficking, “is a very hidden and lucrative crime. It’s right up there with drugs and arms. Billions of dollars are being made.”
Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, recently estimated that human trafficking is a $32 billion a year business. He is urging governments worldwide to ratify a protocol banning the practices of transnational commerce in people for sexual slavery, illegal domestic labor and adoption. He is also calling on the international community to take measures to reduce the demand, end the impunity of those engaged in human trafficking and protect the victims.
“It is about human rights, peace and security, development and family health,” he said at a U.N. General Assembly meeting on trafficking in mid-May. “In the most basic sense, it is about preserving the fabric of society.”
Burke agrees. She is the principal coordinator for the Freedom Network Training Institute, which is the training arm of Freedom Network USA, a group of more than 25 organizations focused on helping trafficking and slavery victims in America.
The Institute recently received a $100,000 Special Opportunities grant from the Public Welfare Foundation to help train law enforcement and social service agencies and organizations to identify and intercede in cases of modern-day slavery. The agencies help ensure that victims, who may be undocumented and who may have been caught up in illegal activities, are not treated as criminals. Most significantly, the Institute’s training helps expand the network of experts who can uncover the hidden atrocities traffickers and their employer accomplices can inflict.
Despite a 2000 federal anti-trafficking law, the U.S. State Department estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people, primarily women and children, are trafficked to America each year from other countries. (The Department also estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year.) But trafficking and slavery operations don’t just target foreign-born victims smuggled into the U.S. Homegrown sex traffickers have been caught trying to sell U.S.- born children as sex slaves.
And the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Foundation grantee that represents more than 4,000 Latino, Haitian and Mayan immigrant farm workers in Florida helped expose a case of homeless men who were transported to agricultural fields while they were kept strung out on drugs and locked up at night. In the past decade, the Coalition has helped jumpstart prosecutions that freed more than 1,000 workers. In what is said to be one of the largest slavery prosecutions in Southwest Florida, six suspects were charged with forcibly holding more than a dozen people. “They made them sleep in box trucks and shacks, charged them for food and showers, didn’t pay them for picking produce and beat them if they tried to leave,” according to a January 2008 article in the Fort Myers News-Press.
Burke has seen similar horror stories. Nearly a decade ago, she provided services to 60 deaf Mexicans who had been smuggled into the U.S. and forced to peddle trinkets at New York City subway stations. She also helped a young woman named Maria who was brought to the U.S. from Central America when she was 19 to take care of a child, with a promise of good pay and an opportunity to go to school. But when Maria arrived in New York, she was expected to be on call 24 hours a day, to care for the child, a newborn and an elderly grandparent. Her identity documents were locked up and she was not allowed to go out on her own. She slept on a mat on the floor, was given very little food, and the small amount of money she received had to pay for her personal necessities.
Many traffickers and exploitive employers are never brought to justice, but effective enforcement is not impossible. The factory in Oklahoma where the men from India worked and its owner, John Pickle Jr., were tried in federal court in 2006 and were found liable for fraud, false imprisonment and civil rights violations. Fines of more than $1.3 million were imposed as restitution to Prajapati and the other survivors and for the violations against the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The case is still in the courts, but, in the meantime, Prajapati has obtained a green card, is gainfully employed and has become an anti-trafficking activist.
For more information, please visit www.freedomnetworkusa.org/.
2008 Annual Report
To learn more about the work of the Foundation and of our grantees, please see our 2008 Annual Report, Going Forward.
Public Welfare Foundation
1200 U Street NW
Washington, D.C.
20009-4443
ph. 202-965-1800
info@publicwelfare.org
For media inquiries:
Diane Camper
Communications Officer
202-965-1800 ext. 242
dcamper@publicwelfare.org
Web site | Contact
Public Welfare Foundation 1200 U Street, NW Washington, DC 20009-4443
© 2008 Public Welfare Foundation. All Rights Reserved
Remove me from this list