April 2012
37 posts
Who's complying with the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act?
The Act: As of January 2012, requires companies with more than US$100m in sales worldwide that do business in California to clearly post on their websites the steps they are taking to address human trafficking and slavery.
The Rationale: If consumers know what companies are doing, they can support good practices with their dollars. [That’s the idea behind the New York City Urban Project / Price of Life upcoming LOGOFF creative work day! Are you going?]
Compliance: A University of Delaware study found that about a quarter of eligible companies have not posted the information as required.
Who’s doing it right? The study reports that:
The Jones Group, whose brands include Jones New York, Anne Klein, Rachel Roy and Nine West, [i]s an industry leader in this area, as its disclosures not only addressed all elements but also contained supporting evidence for each of its statements.
How to identify & report suspected human trafficking: →
miamiherald.com
If you’ve ever wondered how to know it when you see it …
If you’ve ever wondered what you should do about your suspicions …
Read this. Share this. And if you see something, speak up. You could be someone’s lifeline.
{Props to the Miami Herald for publishing this important information!}
“I remember the police officer pulled over and arrested me. I told him I had just been raped and he said, ‘Raped? You haven’t been raped. You’re a prostitute.”
—Trafficking survivors speak up in Salt Lake City symposium.
Why doesn't she just leave?
Have you ever wondered why a trafficking victim would stay with her trafficker? Why someone who is being abused doesn’t run away? Why a victim may find it difficult to testify against her abuser?
Read this first person account by a trafficking survivor for a fuller picture of this complex question.
By the time the trafficker spotted me in that New Jersey shopping mall, I had already been broken down.
As traffickers are skilled predators, they look for girls that are withdrawn and quiet. They prey upon minors with emotional brokenness as my trafficker did in late June, 1992, soon after my eighth grade middle school graduation.
Child sexual abuse paralyzes many children with the inability to differentiate a healthy relationship from an exploitative one. I, too, thought that exploitive relationships were the norm. Prior to meeting my trafficker, I was already used to relationships based on deception.
Many victims do not understand their fundamental right to say “No.” They often fail to understand ownership over their bodies. I didn’t run away when my trafficker demanded that I agree to prostitute.
This was not because I wanted to stay but rather because I didn’t understand that I had another option.
“I feel like my God has not forsaken me.”
—
A 19 year old woman from Mali, whose trafficking case was taken on by a South Texas Law School’s Human Trafficking / Immigration clinic.
The article describes the difficulty of finding a way to help this woman within the current legal framework, and how the students ultimately settled on an asylum claim based on fear of genital mutilation — something that makes an easier legal case — even though it wasn’t the heart of the problems faced by this woman:
The Human Trafficking Clinic, contacted by Catholic Charities, quickly began exploring legal routes for asylum. But at each turn, it seemed, roadblocks emerged.
First, the law students considered a political asylum request. But that applies only to those fearing persecution in their home countries; the girl’s persecution occurred here.
Next, they looked at the Violence Against Women Act, which protects victims of domestic abuse. But that applies only to the spouses, parents or children of U.S. citizens; the girl’s abuser was her aunt.
One day, almost in passing, the girl mentioned that her grandmother was pressuring her to return to Mali for an arranged marriage. If she did, she told the students, she would first have to undergo female circumcision - a required ritual in her tribe.
“It was shocking to hear that. To her, it’s a part of her culture,” said [a member of the clinic]. “To us, it’s a girl our own age going through something awful.”
It also made a compelling asylum claim.
Read the full article for the woman’s story.
Proposed Hawaii laws to assist trafficking survivors
Little more than a year ago, Hawaii was one of only four states in the country without an anti-human trafficking law. Today, our state stands on the precipice of becoming a national anti-trafficking leader.
Hawaii is poised to pass an assortment of new laws that will protect commercially exploited minors and provide services to survivors. The Senate is considering bills that would, among other things:
- Require places most likely to participate in human trafficking to exhibit a poster displaying the national human trafficking hotline number.
- Allow sex trafficking victims to petition to have prostitution-related convictions and arrests vacated from public records if the violations were the result of force, fraud, or coercion.
- Immunize minors acting as a prostitute from prosecution for prostitution charges (patrons and pimps may still be prosecuted, however).
- Create a task force charged with crafting a comprehensive state plan for furnishing coordinated services to human trafficking survivors.
Read the full article for more about the proposed laws and how they could transform trafficking in Hawaii.
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eepurl.com
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“The Bible says we have to help the widowed, orphaned, oppressed, imprisoned, ‘the least of these. I want the students to be moved to go out and do public service, to become professional, hardworking, committed advocates.”
—
Naomi Bang, adjunct professor at a Human Trafficking / Immigration clinic at South Texas College of Law, senior attorney at a local law firm, and former assistant U.S. attorney.
Read about how Professor Bang’s students are learning and making a different here.
Resource alert:
New book on food / food politics with chapters on the slave trade behind coffee/ chocolate (including reporting on “good guys” and “bad guys” and suggestions for what to do):
No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Food Revolution, by John Robbins
{Price of Life is not endorsing this book; this is just an FYI.}
How Many Slaves Produced Your Seder? →
huffingtonpost.com
Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, has partnered with Slavery Footprint to produce an activity for Passover based on the larger Slavery Footprint survey. It can be downloaded from our website for free. Ask your seder guests the question: How many slaves produced the goods on our table? Challenge them to commit to take action.
As the seder begins, we say metaphorically, “This year, we are slaves. Next year, may we be free people.” Let us hope that by next Passover, our feasts of liberation will be made without slave labor and that more people will be free.
“Currently in the state of Oregon, you do less time for selling women than you do for selling drugs.”
—
Jeri Sundvall-Williams, former trafficking victim now running for Portland, OR City Council. Read her inspirational story here.
She goes on to explain that because drugs get more jail time than pimping,
gangs have taken [selling human beings] as a moneymaker. They’ve been doing it for years but it’s really become more popular. Gangs will trade women across Blood-Crip lines or whatever because women are worth less than drugs to them, but they also will do less time in jail for selling women than they will for selling drugs.
If laws reflect a society’s values, what does this say about us? What kind of laws would we have if we valued the lives of human beings of all backgrounds as priceless, made in the image of God?
“It’s great to be a small piece of a puzzle that is this huge movement to stop human trafficking.”
—
Myles Laroux, master of ceremonies for an LSU student group’s annual 5K race to raise funds for a safe house for trafficking victims and help students understand the problem. The group has held the 5K for four years, and raised $10K this year.
You can’t solve the problem alone, but you can be a piece of the puzzle.
Some numbers:
{From comments by Yuri Fedotov, the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, at a daylong General Assembly (UN) meeting on trafficking. Click through to learn more about the context behind the numbers.}
“This is about something much more fundamental, and that’s who we are as a people. It’s about respecting and protecting human dignity.”
—
Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), who recently testified at a Congressional hearing on “Labor Abuses, Human Trafficking, and Government Contracts: Is the Government Doing Enough to Protect Vulnerable Workers?”
As David Isenberg writes on the Huffington Post:
Because this is a continuing problem new legislation has been introduced in Congress to address it. In the House it is H.R.4259 — End Trafficking in Government Contracting Act of 2012. In the Senate it is S.2234.
That bill would prevent trafficking abuses by requiring contractors with contracts over $1 million to implement compliance plans to prevent trafficking including destroying or confiscating passports, misrepresenting wages or work locations, or using labor brokers who charge exorbitant recruiting fees.
It improves accountability by requiring that a contractor notify the inspector general if he or she receives credible evidence that a subcontractor has engaged in prohibited conduct, requiring the inspector general to investigate such instances and requiring the inspector general to investigate all those instances, and with that require swift remedial action against the contractor.
And, it improves enforcement of anti-trafficking requirements by expanding the criminal prohibitions that prevent fraudulent labor practices typically associated with trafficking.
Click through for the full article about the hearing and proposed legislation.
Is Big Business Beginning to Take a Stand Against Human Trafficking? →
reuters.com
A private equity fund run by Goldman Sachs Group has agreed to sell its stake in the media company that runs a sex trafficking forum back to company’s management, a spokeswoman said on Sunday.
