Not for Sale

The Return of the Global Slave Trade--and How We Can Fight It

David Batstone

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780061998836
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061977770
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Etica e religione

“Human trafficking is not an issue of the left or right, blue states or red states, but a great moral tragedy we can unite to stop . . . Not for Sale is a must-read to see how you can join the fight.” —Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics

“David Batstone is a heroic character.” —Bono

In the revised and updated version of this harrowing yet deeply inspirational exposé, award-winning journalist David Batstone gives the most up-to-date information available on the global slave trade and the $31 billion human trafficking epidemic. With profiles of twenty-first century abolitionists like Thailand’s Kru Nam and Peru’s Lucy Borja, Batstone tells readers what they can do to stop this modern slavery. Like Kevin Bales’ Disposable People and Ending Slavery, or E. Benjamin Skinner’s A Crime So Monstrous, Batstone’s Not for Sale is an informative and necessary social justice manifesto for universal freedom.

Batstone’s harrowing investigation delivers a powerful call to action, detailing:

• A Harrowing Investigation: An unflinching look at the $31 billion human trafficking epidemic, from the brothels of Rome to the garment factories of California.
• Inspiring True Stories: Profiles of heroic, twenty-first-century abolitionists like Thailand's Kru Nam and Peru's Lucy Borja who risk everything to rescue the enslaved.
• A Powerful Call to Action: Award-winning journalist David Batstone provides concrete steps readers can take to join the fight for universal freedom.
• In-Depth Social Justice Journalism: An essential, updated investigation that stands with classics like Kevin Bales' Disposable People and E. Benjamin Skinner's A Crime So Monstrous.

1

Shining Light into the Sexual Darkness: Cambodia and Thailand

I paid good money for you!”

How Srey Neang loathed those words. They made a claim on her, excusing any abuse, justifying every chore.

The old woman bought her not long after she turned seven. Srey Neang’s parents were struggling to care for five children in a camp for internally displaced Cambodians. The camp was situated near the border with Thailand where food was scarce and jobs nonexistent. The old woman and her son came to the camp seeking a young girl to be a house servant. Her parents sacrificed one child for the survival of her siblings.

Memories of her family now lurk in shadows. She recalls playing in a dusty field with other children. Are those kids rolling on the ground her brothers and sisters? Rumors that her parents were Khmer Rouge militants follow Srey Neang. Of course, pinning that history on a child could be a form of manipulation. A daughter of the Khmer Rouge merited a tragic karma.

The old woman lived in a small structure; a single space served as bedroom, kitchen, and living room. At night, Srey Neang pulled out a mat to sleep on a knotty wood floor in the corner of the house.

She cooked the woman’s meals, bathed her, washed clothes, scrubbed the floors, and performed any other chore demanded of her. Her master demonstrated neither affection nor malice; she expected only obedience. Srey Neang was never once addressed by name. “Hey you, get me some water,” the woman would say, or “Girl, go sweep the floor.” Did the old woman know her name? Some days Srey Neang whispered her own name softly to herself simply so that she would not forget.

Three years passed, and then her master turned very ill. Some days the woman did not even rise from the bed. During that period Srey Neang rarely left the house; morning and evening she tended to the dying woman’s needs. The loneliness felt heavy at times.

Once the woman died, her son acted decisively to consolidate his mother’s property. “Pack your stuff,” he ordered Srey Neang no more than an hour after burying his mother. “You now will serve my family.”

Srey Neang grabbed the few clothes she owned, rolled them up in the sleeping mat, and departed the old women’s home for the final time. The son lived on the other side of the village, perhaps a walk of fifteen minutes. Though short in distance, the journey transported her to a new and dangerous universe.

Srey Neang sensed the rotten air as soon as she arrived. The wife of her new master treated her gruffly, as if to blame Srey Neang for an unwanted intrusion into her home.

She now had four people to serve—the married couple and their two young children. Srey Neang worked steadily from the break of day until the final member of the family fell asleep at night. Yet no effort proved good enough for her owners. Both husband and wife beat her with a reedy switch for the slightest offense: the porridge was too salty, or the front door of the house had been left open. Often they beat Srey Neang for things she did not even do.

No matter, it was their right. After all, they would declare, “We paid good money for you!”

A RECIPE FOR MASS VULNERABILITY

In June 2006, Cambodia was ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. The report card, published annually by the U.S. State Department, pulled no punches: “Cambodia is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor.”¹ The report further declares that “corruption, lack of training and funding for law enforcement, and a weak judiciary” stand in the way of Cambodia “making significant efforts” to eliminate its slave trade.

Unfortunately, Cambodia does not stand out as an exception in Southeast Asia. Sex traffickers in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Burma also move women and children across borders with brazen disregard for law enforcement—and oftentimes with their help! The majority of their victims end up staying in Southeast Asia to service a robust sex industry. The sex bars and massage parlors in Phnom Penh, for instance, are highly populated with young girls from Laos and Vietnam. Southeast Asia is one of the world’s largest exporters of sex slaves as well to brothels in Japan, China, Australia, Europe, and the United States.

So why does sex slavery thrive so in Southeast Asia? Four powerful forces collude to rip apart stable communities in the region: 1) devastating poverty; 2) armed conflicts; 3) rapid industrialization; 4) an exploding population growth. Though political scientists and economists may reach no definitive consensus about which of these social forces is paramount, they all would concur that Southeast Asia is passing through a period of radical transition. Whenever a society faces seismic changes, the powerless suffer most.

The impoverished masses of Cambodia represent the economic challenge. At least one in three of Cambodia’s 15 million people live below the poverty line today. Cambodian women, above all, do not get the chance to study formally or learn vocational skills; 41 percent of the country’s adult women are illiterate.² While finding a job in Cambodia can be difficult under any circumstances, an uneducated and impoverished woman does not fit the profile that most legal employers seek to hire. Desperate to secure the well-being of their parents or perhaps their own children, a poor woman can become easy prey for a trafficker.

The present situation in Burma—or Myanmar under the current regime—demonstrates the far-reaching impact of armed conflict. A military dictatorship maintains a fragile hold over a plethora of tribal groups and warlords, each of whom fight for their autonomy. Violent conflict can erupt at any given moment. As a result, Burmese families fleeing the violence or looking for a more sustainable livelihood pour into neighboring countries.

Refugees all over the world walk a perilous path. They become a minority in a new society, often without legal standing, that more powerful individuals will seek to exploit. So traffickers today view the Burmese population as a deep recruitment pool. According to one reputable organization that monitors sex trafficking in Thailand, nearly two-thirds of the girls brought into Thai brothels during the past five years came from Burma.³

The Southeast Asian region at large has experienced more than its share of armed conflicts over the past fifty years. The Vietnam War obviously left a dramatic mark on the Vietnamese people. It’s easier to overlook the long-term impact of that war on the people of Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. Combatants are not the only casualties of war; communities take years to heal from the wounds. Many hill tribes in Laos, for instance, have yet to regain their mooring. Cambodia, meanwhile, went on to experience the Khmer Rouge and its “killing fields,” then sunk deep into its own civil war. The Cambodian conflict only ended after Vietnam invaded the country and propped up a regime to its own liking.

Added to the chaos of civil conflicts, Southeast Asia has made a dramatic leap toward industrialization. Its base of production has been shifting from subsistence farming to cash-crop agriculture and manufacturing (though certainly not at the same pace in each country within the region). Peasant families find it increasingly difficult to make a livelihood off the land. In many cases, they head to urban areas in hopes of finding a job in a factory. In Thailand, for example, nearly 10 percent of the population migrated from the rural areas to industrialized centers over a three-year period from 1993 to 1995.⁴

Although industrialization may stimulate growth to the overall economy, the distribution of wealth is not being evenly distributed. An elite sector benefits from the concentration of land and capital and makes financial arrangements that do not take into account the needs of the poor masses. Students of history recall the social crises that accompanied the process of industrialization in the Western world. While it is hoped that modernization in Southeast Asia eventually will bring economic progress to the many, in the short term the poor get tossed to and fro like flotsam on a raging sea.

As if the foregoing trends do not bring enough of a challenge, a population boom puts added strain on the region. In many countries of Southeast Asia, over half the population alive today falls under the age of fifteen. Confronted with a scarcity of jobs and food, local communities do not have sufficient resources for their young people. As harsh as it sounds, the young are the first to become expendable.

Amid all these disruptions to social stability, slavery emerges as a tempting financial solution. Extreme poverty contributes to family breakdowns and deserted children. Human traffickers are most successful in finding young girls among destitute rural villages. Best estimates indicate that thirty thousand Cambodian children are exploited in the sex trade and as many as one-third of these are under eighteen years old.⁵

The owner of a brothel in Southeast Asia can buy a women or child for as little as $50. Virgins fetch anywhere from $500 to as much as a $1000. To put those figures in perspective, $1000 corresponds to three and a half times the annual average income in Cambodia.

Annie Dieselberg—A Light in the Darkness

Annie Dieselberg embraces abolition as her vocation. She calls her Bangkok-based project NightLight Design, playing off the image of a light that brings to safety individuals who are lost in darkness. The creativity that fuels her project matches the compassion that brought it into existence.

When Annie launched NightLight Design in 2005, she aimed to offer an alternative for young girls who work in commercial sex bars. Annie and her husband had worked in various Christian ministries in Thailand for more than a decade. Witnessing so many women in Bangkok engaged in demeaning sexual exploitation drove Annie to dream in full color. She could continue to help broken individuals after predators had disposed of them, or she could confront the problem head on. She chose the steep path.

Annie is accustomed to taking the road less traveled. She grew up for most of her childhood in Zaire, the daughter of parents involved in international church ministry. In her teens, her parents relocated to Thailand. Annie spent one year living with them in Thailand, and then attended boarding school in India. After high school graduation, she showed up at the University of West Virginia wrapped in a salwar and sporting bangles on her wrist. “The other students did not know what to make of this strange white girl with blonde hair who dressed and acted like a total foreigner,” Annie says with a laugh as she reminiscences. “I may have looked like any other American, but I sure brought some unusual ideas to the classroom.”

Even today, her appearance can be deceiving. Frankly, she does not cut an imposing figure—in her early forties, a mother of four children and of slight build and stature. She could be a “soccer mom” at any suburban park.

Fire in the belly—no better description fits Annie’s persona. Only time will tell if she is constructing a castle in the air, but there is no doubting her commitment to the cause. She speaks and acts with the intensity of a Hebrew prophet.

“Women on the streets may look like they are free when you tour Bangkok, but they are not!” Annie begins her orientation to the sex trade. “Trafficked women are often moved around, and many of them do not know the language or the money currency. They feel alone, isolated from friends or family who might give them a helping hand.”

So Annie decided to step in and be that helping hand. In early 2005, she took a visiting American church group to a sex bar. While the men in the delegation remained outside praying, Annie led a small team of women inside.

“We sat down with a young woman—only twenty-two years old with two children of her own,” Annie says, recounting the episode. “She told us how much she hated working at the bar. When I asked her where she would like to be, she told me that she would like to be home with her kids.”

So Annie and her spiritual sisters paid the bar owner 600 baht (roughly $15) to “rent” the woman for the night—the standard price a customer pays for a full evening of “entertainment.” The payment unexpectedly turned into a redemption fee.

Over the previous year Annie had taught herself how to make jewelry. So she spontaneously offered the bar girl a job to work alongside her producing jewelry for commercial sale. The young woman accepted and became employee #1 in NightLight Design.

Annie did not even have an office or work studio for her company at that moment. So she told the (now retired) bar girl to meet her at a McDonalds restaurant in central Bangkok. With the waft of burgers and fries deep in their nostrils, Annie delivered to the young woman her first training session in jewelry production. She then sent her new employee off with a suitcase of beads and stones under her arm.

Srey Neang—A False Rescue

Srey Neang, at twelve years old, learned to anticipate when her masters would beat her. Not that she could do anything to prevent it. She paid for every failure or misfortune with blows from the reedy switch. She endured the abuse in silence. Yet whenever the opportunity arose, she would run from the house and, at a safe distance, release the pain screaming inside her.

That was precisely her condition when Sovanna found her. He lived in Phnom Penh but often came to her small village to visit relatives. Though he looked sixteen, Sovanna was actually in his early twenties and had a wife in the Cambodian capital.

“So what did those ogres do to you this time?” he would ask sympathetically.

Sharing the story with Sovanna did not take away the sting, but it made her feel better to talk about it.

One afternoon, after a particularly bad beating, Sovanna planted a subversive idea: “Hey, these people treat you like a dog! Why don’t you come to Phnom Penh and live with my family?”

Srey Neang looked long and hard at Sovanna; could he be kidding? His next comment erased her doubt: “My mother could use your help in her shop. You could attend school and work for her on weekends.”

Her heart made a leap. Though she could not imagine what life in a busy city might be like, it had to be better than this living hell. Together they devised an escape plan.

One week later, Srey Neang was living in Phnom Penh. Sovanna’s mother immediately put her to work, dispatching Srey Neang out to the city center with a tray of fresh-baked cakes to sell. In the evenings Srey Neang would tend the shop that the family ran out of its home. Neighbors came to buy cigarettes, alcohol, and an assortment of sweets.

School, however, dropped off the agenda. Only once did Srey Neang ask when she might take classes with other kids in the neighborhood. Sovanna responded that the family needed her to work full-time to cover her expenses.

Sovanna otherwise continued to show her kindness. He often would take her with him to run errands around Phnom Penh. She especially liked visiting the riverfront, where they would watch a parade of small vessels move in and out of the city.

Sovanna’s wife, Ly, quickly became jealous of the tight bond that Srey Neang had developed with her husband. Though Srey Neang still had not reached fourteen, Ly convinced herself that the two were involved romantically. Ly would become cross whenever they returned from an outing. Her anger eventually turned abusive. She began calling Srey Neang “that little Khmer Rouge bitch.” After a nasty fight with Sovanna, she would scream at her husband, “Get out of this house, and take your little prostitute with you!”

Neither Sovanna nor Srey Neang could persuade Ly of the innocence of their relationship. Srey Neang sensed danger. A child walking alone, bereft of family and community, always has cause to fear.

Pierre Tami—If Heaven Could Cry

In 1994, Pierre Tami established Hagar Shelter in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as a haven for women who had fallen victim to violence and sexual exploitation. Since its establishment, Hagar has provided assistance to over one hundred thousand women and children through its social programs and economic projects.

Despite this resounding success, Pierre does not feel totally satisfied: “I get discouraged at times because there are so many tragedies, so many people dying, so much poverty and helplessness, and there is only so much I can do.”

This humble confession speaks volumes about Pierre’s character. He stays focused on the needs and rarely brings a conversation around to his accomplishments. But truth be told, Hagar r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher