Conference to spotlight
trafficking in humans

A forum will look at the growing
problem of labor exploitation

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By Treena Shapiro
tshapiro@starbulletin.com

Sometimes, young girls are enticed into moving to urban areas for jobs, only to find themselves forced to work in the sex industry.

Some women are recruited to be maids or food service workers in other countries, but upon arrival their travel documents are taken away, and the women are forced into slavery or the sex trade.

Between 700,000 and 4 million people a year around the world, primarily women and children, are forced into essentially modern-day slavery, according to a study released last week by the U.S. State Department.

Trafficking in persons -- the illegal transport and sale of humans through coercion and fraud to exploit their labor -- is the fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the Asia-Pacific region, said Nancie Caraway, director of women's human rights projects at the University of Hawaii's Globalization Research Center.

While there are few documented cases in Hawaii, she said she would be surprised if it is not happening here. "Hawaii is a gateway to Asia, and we know it's a problem (there)," she said.

In 2001, Daewoosa Samoa Inc. factory owner Kil Soo Lee and two others were charged in federal court in Honolulu with conspiring to hold up to 250 Vietnamese and Chinese workers in involuntary servitude in America Samoa.

"Asia is a prime supply region where vulnerable workers are coerced into bonded labor as forced prostitutes, agricultural workers, domestic servants and sweatshop laborers," she said.

Caraway is the director of a three-day international humanitarian conference on human trafficking that begins Nov. 13 at the Hawai'i Convention Center. The conference, funded with a $200,000 federal grant, is expected to attract 300 to 500 human rights leaders and women's rights advocates.

Don Radcliffe, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service district director for Hawaii and Guam, said he has not heard of any fraud cases in Hawaii, in which women and children have been lured to the country on false pretenses, but alien smuggling occurs frequently.

"We've had boats (carrying illegal immigrants) come into Hawaii in the past, and I'm sure we'll have more in the future," he said.

"We have alien smuggling routinely at the airport," an average of two or three cases a month, he added. Those cases usually consist of small groups of people being escorted by a smuggler using counterfeit or illegal documents.

Annually, about 40 to 50 illegal aliens are caught coming into Honolulu Airport and more than 100 in Guam, Radcliffe said. Most come from Asia, with the vast majority from mainland China.

Caraway said she wants local law enforcement officials to participate because they tend to treat possible human-trafficking cases as vice crimes, detaining and deporting the victims instead of trying to find the persons who illegally brought them in.

But Radcliffe said migrants entering the United States with smugglers are treated as illegal aliens, not criminals, and deported.

"It's the smugglers we're really trying to prosecute," he said.