Modern slavery In India, a 6-year-old boy was kidnapped and forced to work in a carpet factory for six years before he was located and returned to his family.
horror tales surface
at isle conference
By Diana Leone
dleone@starbulletin.comIn the United Arab Emirates, 15-year-old Sara Balabagan was raped by her employer, and she stabbed him to death. Only after intense pressure by Filipino diplomats was she ultimately released from jail and returned to her family in the Philippines.
And in New York a young woman from Nigeria who escaped from domestic slavery was awarded $272,000 by a court, based on the pay she would have earned over nine years of 13-hour days at minimum wage.
And these are the tales with happy endings.
Many sobering stories were told yesterday at an international conference on modern slavery, also called "trafficking in persons," that brought about 350 attendees to Honolulu from as far as Thailand, Nepal, Pakistan and Europe.
"The Human Rights Challenge of Globalization in Asia-Pacific-US: The Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children" continues today and tomorrow at the Hawai'i Convention Center. The gathering of government, civil rights and social welfare representatives was organized by the Globalization Research Center and the East-West Center.
Many attendees are people who see the seamy underside of the "globalization" of the world economy and are trying to do something about it.
"There are 27 million slaves -- men, women and children -- being held against their will, forced to do work without pay and controlled by violence every day," said Kevin Bales, a consultant to the U.N. Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings.
It is estimated that at least 50,000 women and children are smuggled into the United States each year as sex or domestic slaves or to work in sweatshops. They are tricked into thinking they will get an education or money to send home to impoverished families, then are terrorized into staying, Bales said yesterday afternoon in his keynote address.
Some products of modern life have a surprising darker side, said Bales, such as cocoa from West Africa, which is often harvested by slaves who may be purchased for as little as $40. At that price, "you can throw them away if you don't want them," he said. By comparison, a slave in the American South in the 1850s would have cost the equivalent of $40,000, Bales said.
"When people eat chocolate, they're eating my flesh," one African man enslaved in cocoa work said in a short film based on Bales' Pulitzer-nominated 1999 book, "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy."
It is possible to make consumer decisions that do not encourage slavery. Bales' film depicted Indian carpet-makers that certify they do not use child labor. Their carpets only cost a few dollars more.
"We could eradicate slavery," Bales said, but multinational corporations, national governments and even the United Nations are "not going to do it unless there is a public outcry."
Current international spending targeted to ending human slavery is "about what it would cost for two army tanks," he said. Meanwhile, the traffickers, who often also deal in illegal drugs and weapons, are financed enough to pay off corrupt government officials.
Prosecuting traffickers is hard but worthwhile work, said Hema Bedi, president of the Society to Help Rural Empowerment and Education in Anantapur District of India. Ferdous Ara Begum, joint secretary for the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs for Bangladesh, called the conference "very important. It's a strong voice against trafficking and a place where we can exchange ideas and strategies for how to fight it."
Begum has applied to the Asian Development Bank for a $15 million grant that would be targeted at women and children in Bangladesh who are at risk for enslavement. The main risk factor, she said, is poverty.
She hopes to offer shelter homes for trafficking victims and to help women who want to work overseas to do so with legitimate employers, rather than be at the victim of traffickers. And she has plans to offer job retraining for an expected mass layoff of 1.5 million Bangladeshi garment workers in 2004 because of the end of contracts. By giving the workers other skills, they may avoid falling prey to slave traders, she said.
"Trafficking is the worst form of human rights abuse," Begum said. "It's modern-day slavery."