Evening Exchange; 2806; Human Trafficking

You know fights with evil. And when I came here I earned nothing. It was a false dream. In the end I was here working and I was a slave. The truth about modern day slavery. Next an evening X-Day. You may think of slavery as a time in American history when African people were brought to this country and were sold into servitude. However history shows that slavery and human trafficking have been in existence for some five thousand use today. Approximately 27 million people worldwide are exploited in the areas of domestic work farm labor factory work and sexual

exploitation. Here to discuss this worldwide epidemic of human exploitation and modern day slavery is Kevin Bales of the organization Free the Slaves. He's author of the book ending slavery how we free today slaves. Kevin Bales welcome to evening it's great if we turn to you. Also we have. With us Rene Huffman a social worker with the D.C. organization incorporated who's anti trafficking project is raising the awareness of human trafficking in immigrant communities here in the Washington area where they help with the Welcome to the USA. Kevin allow me to start with you. Why is human trafficking around the world apparently on the rise. There are a couple of reasons but one of the most important has to do with the fact that we've undergone a population explosion on the planet Earth and it has generated I think something everyone remembers about a billion people who live in in the world. What about a dollar a day. That's an enormous. Who are all very very

horrible and exploitable people that pool is grown so large now that in fact it becomes very easy to trick and to force people into situations of trafficking and slavery. What parts of the world are we seeing the highest incidence of human trafficking. Well in human trafficking it is the fundamental rule is that people flow from poorer countries to richer countries. So almost every poor country has people reading and being taken away and trafficked into slightly richer countries richer countries until finally when you. Come to the richest countries of all like the United States. You have people flowing in from all very large number of countries in the United States more than 90 countries in fact are represented in trafficking victims. When people think of the modern Atlantic slave trade they think of maybe three factors people being transported from one part of the world to another. People being forced to work without compensation and people being forced to people being held against their will.

When we talk about slavery today exactly what are we talking about the three attributes that you just described for the transatlantic trade are exactly those that we would use to determine if a person was in slavery today if a person is held against their will. Violence is used to control them. They're paid nothing and they're being economically exploited. That's what has always defined slavery throughout all of human history. Well there are people who would say today clearly that cannot exist today it was a Baathist we know it was a violence because you read about it in the history books of the baldest in the 19th century What's it doing around today. We abolished legal slavery. We also about wish to burglary you know tend to. And it said something about adultery but I don't think it all stopped. And it's the same thing with slavery. Sadly slavery has never ended never ended in the United States there's never been a single day in the history of this country without slavery. And today we're actually seeing a fluorescence a growth because of that a very significant enlargement of the number of people who are inflatable.

What form does it take around the world. And is it any different in the United States. Well it is different in the United States to many of the more traditional forms of slavery around the world but only the largest number of people in slavery today are those who are caught in traditional forms of debt bondage slavery in South Asia India Pakistan the all places like that. How do they acquire that. They borrow money usually to meet a family emergency. But here's the trick it's sometimes hard for Americans to grasp. They don't borrow the money and then pay it back with their labor when they borrow the money they put themselves their own bodies as collateral against the loan so the money winder owns them and their family and all of their work until the debt is repaid. A wounded man overworked they can't pay them back. So I've met families in their fourth and fifth generation of slavery or against in the original debt equivalent to something like $10. It's funny because you know payday loans are controversial in this country because the interest rates tend to

be so high that a lot of people simply will never be able to pay them back. The difference with what you are talking about is that they won't have to sacrifice their freedom and their lives in order to pay off those loans. If that's what's happening around the world and especially in South Asia what form is slavery taking in this country. Well in this country slavery is again as it has the same attributes that you describe people who are totally controlled but most of the people who come to slavery in the United States come here for the same reasons that you or I would if we were in their situation. In other words they're hoping for a job. They're hoping for a chance for a better future they're hoping for a chance to meet their own kids. And someone says to them Would you like a job. We can sort you out with a great job as a waitress in Washington D.C. and things will be good for you and you can send money home when they end up here. They take away their documents they brutalized them they assault them they may rape them they put them into all kinds of exploitive situations and they control them by violence. Pay them nothing and use them to make a profit.

When I can see that happening in rural areas far away from the scrutiny of law enforcement officials. But hey we're in the Washington area. It's the nation's capital. We have more law enforcement agencies collectively here than anyplace else probably on the planet. Surely there can't be slavery in the Washington area. Well that's the hard part is it's modern day slavery is very hard to find. Traffickers are very smart and they know how to run like that. Mining what we see happening in the Washington D.C. area are cases of domestic servitude. So it could be a woman I met in a house in a very isolated neighborhood. So law enforcement or anyone for that matter HOW DO THEY KNOW that person is there using domestic servitude instruction work restaurant where sex trafficking as well in commercial sex brothels massage. Those are kind of the main things that we see in the D.C. area. Happening today. Well we do read the occasional story of some embassy official who happened to bring what he or she described as a relative here to work for them and to keep that person as a virtual

prisoner but you seem to be saying that it's much more widespread than that. Yes it is very much more widespread and especially in the Washington D.C. area with so many immigrants with so many international organizations that bring their nationals from other countries here. It's happened so. Person has come here from other clubs. They bring people here. Discoverable so they hold on to the documents and keep them in virtual slavery. What can you do about that right. Well you know right now is trying to educate the public about what human trafficking is because we know that we as one organization cannot find all the traffic persons out there in the Washington D.C. area. We need the help of community members who need the help of service providers. We need the help of law enforcement and we've done trainings to law enforcement and service providers health hospitals in the past. And what we're really trying to do now is to talk to the actual members in the communities in the immigrant communities about what human trafficking is so that if we tell one person they can tell another person with the hopes that

someone may see something and intervene. Kevin in your book ending slavery you talk about a Washington area resident from West African nation of Cameroon. Can you tell us about his experience his experiences it is a wonderful experience and I have to say he's very representative of a trend in the United States about one third of all the people who come to freedom from slavery in the United States today come because a citizen. Exactly the kind of people that Rene is trying to reach. We see something wrong and does something about it. So about a third. Not from law enforcement actually from what we call good Samaritans. People do the right thing. Lewis was at a family gathering for Thanksgiving. He was using his video camera. He saw this one girl that he didn't recognize. He was wondering about her she seemed a little there a little depressed a little kind of running down the aisle. Trying to stay out of the picture stay out of the picture because she she knew it was a funny situation for her he asked him questions questions the answers didn't quite add

up. It finally turned out when he had a chance to talk to her that in fact she had been brought over to be a domestic by someone from Canada not a member of his family and then had fled and ended up with one of his relatives but the relatives didn't have any idea what to do with it. And and Lewis felt very shocked by the fact that he had this this this person who was apparently a slave in his own family as a rescued site. He took her in and begin to help her find her feet and get some education and then one day he asked her Do you know of any were young women in the situation and she said well yes I I know two. And he then went out as a private citizen and rescued those two young women and brought them back to his house and helped them get on their feet and paid for their education. So he's a modern day hero. How many more misses are there over there maybe 15 or 20 that we could point to that we know about and we don't know how many we

don't know about but in many ways the forgive me but the but the most important question is how many potential Louis's are out there. Because Rene's got to look out to Washington D.C. and say. A lot of you are actually still seeing slaves every day and your wives when you don't know it. But if you're just worried a little bit checklist you could become a loose you could become the Good Samaritan to help so without sleep. Indeed when they when you talk about briefing law enforcement officers and briefing citizens would you tell them what should people be looking for if you're talking about a person who was afraid of death be afraid to reveal themselves. What should we as citizens be looking for when we say you visit a home go to a party or find ourselves in any situation like this. Right the biggest piece of information that we want people to walk away with is kind of the mental checklist that have been so you stated before about can a person leave their job is someone speaking for them. Are they allowed to come and go as they please. Either 18 years old or not in school and they are under 18 and not in school. Are they under 18 in

prostitution. Does someone take in their documents they don't have their passport or their or their ID and why and if we can start to get people to learn what those checklists and say hey something looks funny going on in my neighbor's house maybe I should call and just have someone check it out. We're not asking community members in law enforcement to be. Experts what we want is for people to start learning what is human trafficking What are some of the signs and what to do you would have caught our youth is one organization in the D.C. area and there's other places as well. When you talk about sexual exploitation and prostitution it means clearly that these I guess usually young women are coming into contact with complete strangers however those strangers usually described as johns don't want to be discovered themselves. But I suspect they find themselves in a situation where somebody is obviously being kept a prisoner they might want to do something about it. Is there a special different kind of briefing that you can give the people who are johns or potential John. I was going to leave that there. I think that I have hired a population to target because

I think maybe there is one or two good ones out of the pool of bad but they're trying to hide them. Yeah I mean I get it personally have not done any any work with that part of that population. What happens invited something to look into you know one of the points you make in ending slavery is that you can end slavery around the world. Well we can do it in part because we don't have the problems they have in the pants. There's a law against it in every country no we don't have to pass any laws. It does not support any major industries or economies. Slavery it only generates about thirty two billion dollars a year. Now if they don't do a billion is a lot of my household but in the end would be an mind to them of the global economy however it is it's how many there are 1 percent as well as how much Americans spend on potato chips and pretzels and when you get there looking good. So it's in the global economy. We can afford it and everyone agrees fundamentally that it's wrong and it can come to an end but more important we now have been able to demonstrate that there are ways for bringing people out of slavery. There are

successful they can be scaled up around the world in different situations. And yes it's going to be tougher when we're dealing with criminal gangs like Russian mafia who are involved in human trafficking that's going to be the top into the spectrum. When you actually go to sedentary agricultural slavery in parts of Africa or parts of south Asia. Slavery is actually out where you can see it very well and it's also where you can get to people and where the slaveholders are not so rich and powerful they can't alter that situation and keep it all. So in the book we talk about all kinds of ways that have been demonstrated to be successful and say all we have to do is scale these up and it's going to change the it's going to change the history of the world. You know we as a culture tend to have somewhat of a knee jerk reaction to these situations when we find out that the garments that we are wearing are being made with slave labor when we find out that they're being made with child labor our initial tendency is to hate boycott the product. You say in terms of ending slavery. That won't

necessarily help. Why not. Well a boycott is a very blunt instrument. And the reality with almost all slave input into the global economy is that while there may well be slave threads of cotton in my shirt that I'm wearing now slave labor only represents a very tiny fraction of all cotton cocoa sugar coffee steel and so forth a lot. We have slave made products all around us but only with the slaveries a very small proportion of each one of those bought it. So if we start of way cause it means that for every 99 farmers in West Africa that don't use slaves there. To be hammered by a boy. So you're in fact going to create destitution potentially starvation even potential enslavement of poor farmers who have been pushed out of their livelihood by a boycott that we've done for the right reasons. But having the wrong that in fact what we've discovered is the right way or one of the right ways which is to enlist the industries themselves to act to clean up their own product chains by working with human rights groups. So with the cocoa

industry in the chocolate industry we've made enormous progress and shifted more than 15 million dollars from chocolate companies into anti-slavery work in ways that were beginning to clean up the cocoa product the slavery that it has in it in West Africa. And I know West Africa is a focus because I saw it on the Oprah Winfrey Show and whenever you see it on the Oprah Winfrey Show you know it's a focus. But when you mention coke I think I'm gonna Because that's one of the exports of Gama and I also notice that a youth is anti-human trafficking program tends to target African immigrants. Why is that. Well we're really targeting any and advance our current caseload and we have clients from Latin America Asia Africa and Eastern Europe. So it really tells you that anyone can become vulnerable to human trafficking and sow over the summer we had on an average project that was targeting African and Latino immigrant populations because we know that there's a void of information going to those groups about what is what is happening in our community.

Is there anything different that you can tell law enforcement officers than Utah citizens about how to spot the likelihood that someone is a victim of human rights. But with law enforcement officers what we're hoping is when they respond to a call say it's a domestic dispute. If they see someone sitting in the corner not allowed to speak maybe they should approach that person and ask a few questions or if they respond to some kind of a raid if there's something that looks not right if they know the basics of human trafficking that may be our one opportunity to help that person. And so the difference between them and average citizens is they have an opportunity to go into people's homes way more than the average citizen can. Would you point out of course couple is that slavery is illegal and we know that but what is the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. It was a federal law brought in in 2000. Quite a breakthrough in American legislation in fact globally because one of the key things that it did and it's something I think that Renee's organization uses very effectively is that it decriminalized victims of a very serious crime of a few. It's sounds crazy to say We

decriminalized victims of slavery but that's exactly what happened because previous to the passage of that law police would find someone in a situation that in fact was a situation of slavery but that the only way they were trained to see that person was as an illegal immigrant. So they instead of being treated as a criminal as a victim of crime would be treated as a criminal and they would be processed and reported which made it impossible in fact to bring any cases. If you if you could you deport all the victims it's hard to prosecute the perpetrator. With increasing activism when they are against so-called illegal immigrants in this area particularly in Virginia does that complicate the youths were evasive a lot of concerns for our project because it's hard already for someone to call another organization to ask for help especially if they're undocumented immigrant and now what they fear is of calling the police what may happen. Police can often be our greatest allies and finding some of these traffic price sense and so we're a little scared at how this

is going to progress and the Virginia area. Yes can I imagine that a lot of people let's given point about who find themselves in slaves here are people who came here looking for the American Dream looking for work looking for a better life. But is it possible that some people are so well first and foremost we have to talk about how traumatized people are as a result of being in that situation. And then secondly the effect the BEP trauma has on them in terms of how they feel about this country. First given talk about the trauma itself because obviously if somebody has been a victim of human trafficking if somebody has been held a slave that person even if a rescue does not necessarily want to share that experience with. Well absolutely. We're talking about a very serious kind of trauma and in fact some of the experts at at Harvard who wrote work on trauma say that victims of slavery trafficking. Have a unique kind of post-traumatic stress disorder called complex post-traumatic stress disorder because most trauma if you are say

mugged you get hit over the head but the whole event is over in 30 seconds. If you're if you're made a slave your trauma your your ordeal can last for months years even decades. And that has an enormously different impact on on the human psychology and the human being's dignity and sense of self. I've certainly met victims of slavery who have been held in the United States whose level of trauma is such that they find it difficult to remain within the time zone that you know that they can't keep their mind straight in their memories they have it difficult to speak out about anything they may have recurrent kind of waking nightmares about their experience. It makes it very difficult though to bring them up as a witness and which is one of the saddest things is that they are so shaken mentally and they need so much the therapeutic help that they find it very difficult to actually express what had happened to them.

Particularly if you've got a good defense lawyer who wants to pick apart one of the things we've learned in the literature but prostitution and the men who controlled prostitutes commonly known as pimps as the pimps tried to control them tried to control the prostitutes by impressing on them how powerful they are. And in fact a lot of people who are working here as slaves are people who are working for some people who are truly fairly powerful the Embassy officials the business persons and the like to what extent is that problem that Kevin described reinforced by the ongoing fear of many slaveholders so to speak. And I'm glad that you mention that because that's one of the main reasons why. Traffic person don't we is because the traffickers instill all of the threats they instill fear if you leave police officers going to rush you into port you these people are this those people will do that to you it's this tremendous amount of build up and it's and it slowly wears down a person. And so over time even if it's two days like

Kevin was saying it doesn't matter how long the situation that ban them that the impact that it has on someone has worn them down. And so when we say we start to work with someone the first thing we're trying to do is just to establish trust because they haven't been able to trust anyone. And so in order to work with us it's a slow process I'm the social worker I can help you with this. This is the attorney she can help you with this we are here to help you and it can take a while for that client to really build that trust. Now of course it helps a lot to build up close the person who was holding the victim as a slave is arrested and incarcerated because I imagine a lot of people do not want to stay in the same area where there was former captives happened to be walking them roaming around. Absolutely true. However I'm afraid that in the United States we arrest and incarcerate a minute fraction of slaveholders. Dro an interesting coincidence here it is almost exactly the same number of people are in slaved each year in the United States newly in Slate as are murdered in the United States. About

17000. The clear up rate on murder is about 90 percent. So about 90 percent of murderers. We find them somehow or other and deal with them somehow as the clear up rate on new trafficking cases is somewhere under 1 percent. So we have a crime which is in fact a bundle of the extremely serious violent crimes rape assault and so on and yet we're only being able to arrest and prosecute less than one percent of the perpetrators compared to the same number 17000 murders each year something like 90 percent of the murders are caught and dealt with. That's from here in the United States. Is there a worldwide figure that you could give me and I wish they were but I can't because I guess in a lot of countries they simply don't keep these kinds of records at all. Tell us a little bit about free the slaves and what it does because I know that you came here to start the American chapter of Free the Slaves could you tell us what to do. Well our parent organizer or sister organization we call it is in fact the world's first human rights group. It was founded in 1787 to begin the anti slave

trade campaign in Great Britain. We've actually operated continuously since 1787. So we had a couple of successes in the past. And then in 2000 we established free the slaves as the American wing of that organization that we were involved in a number of things research advocacy and particularly project work overseas. So we work with families individuals whole communities that are in slavery and to help them to build new lives. That part's very important because one of the things that we learned very in that is crucial is that we never want to repeat the botched emancipation that occurred in this country make it six. We had four million people into an economy with no access to education or political station or social respect and subject to terrible violence. And we're still paying the price for not doing the liberation correctly. What are the main obstacles to the work you do in developing or underdeveloped countries

say in Africa or in South Asia. Interestingly enough the the greatest obstacles are not the slaveholders and not even the corrupt officials that we sometimes have to confront the greatest obstacles we have are all about resources. We have liberators that we can't guarantee their salaries more than three or four months ahead. We've got thousands of slaves in villages all over the world ready to come to freedom and we just haven't raised enough money yet to put the greed of workers in those buildings. Hopefully as a result of the work you're doing here in the United States you will be able to raise a lot more money. Governor Bill do you have a website where people can learn more about the organization. Previously our website is free the slaves are one word dot net free the slaves dot net to make sure we provide a link to that website Karen Hoffman. Can you tell us your website where US can go for more information on that you just have to traffic on your day. It's a why you see a that might be why you would be in order. Kevin thank you very much for joining us with a. Thank you very much for joining us I'm sure that this important subject will continue to command

attention around the world as well as in local communities in general a little bit of this in particular once again thank you both. And it's on change and that's about it. Stay Well good night.