human trafficking

my friend adam saw me writing this and told me that he wasnt sure what i was writing about but that he 'was going to be a human sitting in traffic later today.' that isnt quite the topic of this blog. i have wanted to blog about this for awhile now. its an interesting and very heavy topic in my opinion. its one of those were i had never heard of it until last year and since hearing about it ive come across something related to the topic at least once or twice a month. which is strange since i never came across anything for the first 26 years of my life. i dont know if its coincidence or if its just now receiving more of the publicity and awareness that it deserves, or if it something where it has sparked and peaked my interest so i seek it out or notice it more.

anyways, i have really been wanting to write about this for a long time but i havnt since i dont really know what to say. and i still dont, so i figured i would just post some of the stuff i have read about it and leave it at that. basically, for anyone that doesnt know, human trafficking is pretty much modern day slavery. it comes in many forms. the most famous or common one would probably be when little children (usually girls) are sold as sex slaves. this can happen in many countries, but seems to mostly occur in southeast asian countries, notoriously in cambodia. but there are other forms, like forced labor. sometimes one may not think of it as slavery, at least i never did, but when you are sold and in some sort of debt bondage and the people dont think they have any escape from their employer and they are working for 18 hours a day and are being paid pennies for their labor, then i would consider it slavery. and it is.

here is the wikipedia explanation of it.

and here is what i guess might be considered the main website for it (?). i dont know. but its url is humantrafficking.org so im sure they have quite a bit of information about it.

so last year while working for the judge we only had internet access to cnn.com. which was a good thing. well, i thought it was because i figured that it would require me to spend less time being distracted on the internet and more time actually working. that is true, but you'd be amazed at how much one person can explore one internet site when its all they've got and the alternative is writing a bench memo. you find yourself reading through all of the articles in every tab on the page. not that its a bad thing to learn about many areas. but it is a bad thing when your purpose is to avoid work and not to become a renaissance man. anyways, this article wasnt one that was hidden in the dark corners of cnn.com, but it wasnt a feature either.

here is the original article i read on cnn last january. it blew me away. i felt like the most ignorant american ever. it was bad enough learning that this goes on in our country, which i would never have supposed. it was terrible reading about how rampant it is in other countries. in my opinion its evil in its purest form. i remember after reading that article i was talking to my friend chase and telling him that i dont really know what exactly i am doing with my life or right now, but nothing i am doing could possibly be more important than doing something to stop this. i should drop out of law school and do anything that would somehow stop this horrific industry. sadly, it is an actual industry, people make money off of it. also sadly, i didnt drop out of school and i still havnt really done anything about it besides this blog post more than a year later.

before moving on with the my story, here are some other links that i found on cnn when trying to find the original article i read. doing a search on cnn brought up a lot of articles, just like if you were to do a search of this topic on google or any news site. again, this isnt anything new.

here is an article i found from 2004 that is from the ny times magazine. it is also interesting. and because im an aspiring attorney and all about presenting both sides to every argument or discussion, here is a critique of the times magazine article. note that the author of the critique isnt really saying that human trafficking doesnt exist or the sex trade doesnt exist, but the times magazine might be off on some of its figures. thats fine and im sure the numbers could be off. but the bottom line is that it does happen. i hope the numbers are off. i hope that there are not 10,000 girls under the age of 14 being sold as sex slaves each year. but its more than 1, and that is too many. so regardless of whether or not the numbers are correct, there is no argument that the problem and the issue does exist.

also, about the same time as the article that i found on cnn, anderson cooper was also discussing it. here is a video.


anyways, that was my first exposure to it. it randomly popped up in other places but especially last semester in my international law class. we discussed many heavy topics. i was practically reminded daily that i was an ignorant american as we learned about many different genocides and human rights violations that occurred and are occurring. i had heard about all of these things or places: rwanda, sierra leone, darfur, cambodia etc. but knew zero details about what happened or how bad things really were. it was a great class, loaded with heavy topics. some days were practically unbearable. i never saw the movie 'hotel rwanda,' but we watched an intense documentary about what happened.

undoubtedly, the worst video we watched in my opinion was a 20 minute student film about the child sex trade called 'fields of mudan.' here is also a preview of the film on youtube. again, its a really heavy topic. just the preview is hard to watch. i think you can get quite a feel for how sad and how terrible this is by just reading about it, but if you arent motivated to do something about it by reading about it, you will be after just watching the preview.

in our class we also had a professor at our school and she gave a lecture about human trafficking. she wrote an article about human trafficking which can be found here. if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you can download and read the full document. its free to do so. she provides a good explanation of human trafficking and looks at it from a legal perspective. she discusses the t-visa which is designed to protect people that have been victims of a form of human trafficking but also points out the sad reality that hardly any of these visas are actually administered which means that many victims are exported back to their country and to poor conditions and circumstances after finally being freed of their terrible state. like many things, its not an easy process to get a t-visa, so many people, although unarguably victims of trafficking, dont qualify and dont receive it after all they have been through.

here is an article from the times about it that i just read today. its a different form of human trafficking or slavery. this one is very common and now that i think about it, im sure it happened quite a bit in spain when i was there. we would always meet eastern europeans, or south americans that were literally working like dogs and were hardly getting paid. you dont think of it as slavery, but we dont really know the details of their situation either. it could be an employer just working them hard. it also could be an employer making them work 16-20 hours a day for a few dollars an hour and threatening to harm or kill the people if they left. they could have also entered into contracts, or what they thought were contracts where their family would be paid in their home country if they came and worked. they come, their family isnt paid, they dont know that though, all they know is that if they leave, their family wont get any money, so they continue to work in their terrible conditions. i think this occurs more often than we think and even here in america. i know i many times think that things like this are problems that other countries have, but its not true. it exists here. it may not be as rampant as it is in other countries, but its here too.

anyways, its a very heavy topic that always depresses me but i cant turn my back on it either. you cant read about something like this and just never think anything of it again. even if you dont do anything, it will always remain somewhere in your mind. trust me, it lingers. how could it not? as i said earlier, it evil in its purest form. really it is. can you think of anything worse occurring in this world? im not sure if i can. i dont think its worth going into a debate either about bad acts occurring in the world and which one is the worst. its sufficient just to agree that this is a really terrible thing.

so i have mentioned over and over about how bad it is and that something should be done. i wish that this was now the part where i present solutions. the human trafficking website has a page where it lists organizations that are fighting this and how you can send money to them or even volunteer with one of those organizations. i think that is a great start and its better than nothing. the professor in her article also presents legislative solutions to solving the t-visa problem and protecting these people.

its a tough situation though with no easy answers. i mean, i lie here in my bed as a western (culture) american and i just cannot even fathom the idea of trafficking a little girl as a sex slave. but you have people and cultures that think radically different than how i do. you have families that are starving and struggling to stay alive. i would never sell my daughter. ever. but what if i had 4 other children that were all starving and we had no money and someone was offering to buy my child and it was the only way i could get money and ensure that my other children would live? it changes the way you look at the situation. makes me sick and sad just thinking about it. that isnt always the case, but sometimes it is and its illustrative of the point that sometimes these problems are just the bad fruits of a bad tree. you can try to pluck the fruits, but the tree will just grow more. you have to fix the tree. this probably wouldnt happen if you didnt have people so desperate for money because they are so poor. at least not nearly as much. and im not saying that america doesnt have bad trees or that this is only a problem for other countries. we have many problems, including some of the ones mentioned. but its like the problem of gang violence. you cant just throw all the gang members in jail and think that your city will be rid of gangs. you need to fix your community. keep kids in school. give every child a mother and a father. get rid of drugs in the community. etc. etc. you have to fix the source.

anyways, i dont bring all that up just to put a downer on the solution and make it seem like its worthless or an impossible task to fix the problem so its pointless to even try. not at all. if that is what i have done then i have failed in writing this post. i guess i just brought it up to mention that like many things, its not some sort of quick fix. but if anything that should just be more proof about how bad the situation is and all the more reason to do something to correct this terrible wrong. what exactly should you do? im not sure, hopefully it wont take you a year to figure it out and it will be more than writing a blog post which only a handful of people will even read.