Human Trafficking (Week Seven)

Slavery is illegal in every country and outlawed by several international treaties, including the Palermo Protocol from year 2000 , which has been fundamental in recognizing and defining the rapidly growing world-wide criminal industry of human trafficking. The exploitation and violation of human beings in the form of slavery has changed its name and its face, but nonetheless still exists, comprising a 32 milliard/billion USD illegal industry, second only to drug dealing, equal to the illegal arms trade, and, grievously, the fastest growing of criminal industries. Currently, there are an estimated 27 million modern-day slaves across the world, men, women and children, who are trafficked primarily for sexual exploitation, exploitative/forced labour, organ theft, forced begging or to be child soldiers.

The numbers are staggering and the forms of exploitation heart-wrenching, so much so that the reality of it all becomes very hard to grasp. While a trafficker can earn back in one week the money he or she has paid for a person trafficked into prostitution, victims of forced labour can be trapped in bonded debt for generations. Children forced into begging may often have inflicted injuries to attract more empathy, and babies are one of the most highly at-risk categories for organ theft. There are an estimated 200,000 – 300,000 known child soldiers in 20 countries today, brainwashed to kill as a way of living.   

Our teacher, Rochelle Potter, or Ro for short, has grown up as a missionary kid in Japan (and is consequently bilingual J). After completing her degree in Biblical Theology and Communications, she has dedicated most of her working life to fighting human trafficking. She shared with us some of her extensive in-depth knowledge on the topic, covering aspects such as push and pull factors, which make people more susceptible to falling pray to traffickers, push factors being things that push you to want to leave a region (such as low employment, lack of educational opportunities, political corruption, armed conflict, famine or drought) and pull factors being things that attract you to a new region (for example relative freedom or job opportunities). Ro also explained how we as consumers create a market traffickers are answering to, and as a result of a lowest price philosophy and a global economy that decreases accountability, we buy and eat products harvested by slaves.  

Ro emphasized that there are tons of things we can do to fight trafficking. “We’re going to die as a movement if we don’t find ways to take action; we need to translate awareness into action,” she underlined, which brought me back to a comment from Janna from the first week of teaching in reference to at-risk children: “How much more aware can we be. I get tired of people making an issue out of an issue. I want us to stop talking about this and start joining the people who are already doing this”.

So instead of going in more detail into the statistics, facts, definitions and subcultures related to human trafficking, I would like to encourage you to do some research on the topic, and then think and pray about how you can translate your increasing awareness into action. It’s also important to realize that in addition to rescue and restoration, prevention is a significant factor in fighting the trafficking of humans. Investing in the lives of children, especially at-risk children, and supporting families address some of the root causes for trafficking. Buying wisely, preferably fair-trade and local products, is also something all of us can do to decrease the demand for products that involve slave labour, as well as pushing companies to be accountable.

You may not be called to dedicate your life to anti-trafficking like Ro has done, but that doesn’t mean you can do nothing at all. Ro left us with an exercise she asked us to think about. I’d like to share it with you as it might help you come up with ways to increase awareness and take action on the topic. She suggested we come up with different ways to take action if we have

                                                          one minute

                                                          one hour

                                                          one day

                                                          one week

                                                          one month

                                                          one year

                                                          or one lifetime to give.

In one minute, for example, you can buy fair-trade chocolate instead of chocolate made from cocoa beans harvested by trafficked children in West Africa or you can ask if your favourite coffee shop offers or would consider offering fair-trade coffee. In one day you could write an article on the subject and in one year or a lifetime you could make a significant impact on the life of an at-risk child. Just to put a few ideas out there J