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Not for Sale (Revised Edition)
David Batstone
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Not for Sale (Revised Edition)
David Batstone
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"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." âJim Wallis, author of God's Politics
"David Batstone is a heroic character." âBono
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 $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 the modern slave trade. 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 manifesto for universal freedom.
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Topic
Ciencias socialesSubtopic
EsclavitudChapter 1
Shining Light into the Darkness
Shining Light into the Darkness
Thailand
Chan was nine years old when his mother sold him to a factory owner in Mae Sai, Thailand. Mae Sai lies close to the border with Burma (Myanmar) and boasts a thriving black market in illicit goods. Chan and his sister fetched a price of twenty dollars each.
Following their sale, Chan and his sister joined eight other children in a factory, peeling small cloves of garlic. They worked in a single large room attached to a small office where the owner could sit and supervise his young laborers through a wall of glass. The kids worked long hours for no pay and scant meals. Peeling as many cloves as the owner demanded turned out to be almost impossible, and their punishment for coming up short was a sound beating.
They slept a few hours each night in a nearby apartment until the owner woke them up, shoved them into the back of a van, and brought them back to the factory. That became their entire existence: the factory, the van, and the second-story apartment. The children hardly had time to dream about their lives before they were soldâbefore they were slaves.
A RECIPE FOR MASS VULNERABILITY
The U.S. State Department rates Thailand as a Tier 2 country in its 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, citing rampant human trafficking in both its rural and urban regions. âThailand is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation,â the report explains.1 Additional studies, including a Time Asia cover story, confirm the proliferation of slavery in Thailand: âThe sordid traffic touches nearly every part of Asia. But Thailand and India in particular serve as hubs of the flesh trade: exporters and importers of children and adults on a massive scale.â2
So why does slavery thrive in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia? Four powerful forces collude to rip apart stable communities in the region: (1) rapid industrialization; (2) devastating poverty; (3) armed conflicts; and (4) exploding population growth. Though economists and political scientists may reach no definitive consensus about which of these four factors is paramount, they concur that Southeast Asia is passing through a period of radical transition. And whenever a social order undergoes seismic changes, the powerless suffer most.
Southeast Asia has made a dramatic leap toward industrialization in recent times. The regionâs base of production has shifted from subsistence farming to cash-crop agriculture and manufacturing (though not at the same pace in each country). Peasant families find it increasingly difficult to make a livelihood off the land. Often they head to urban areas in hopes of finding a job.
Though industrialization has the potential to stimulate growth in the overall economy, wealth is being distributed unevenly. 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 social inequalities that accompanied the process of industrialization in the Western world, of course. Although it is hoped that modernization in Southeast Asia will eventually bring economic progress to the many, in the short term the poor get tossed to and fro like flotsam on a raging sea.
For instance, Deena Dudzer documents in a study how the global financial crisis of 2008â9 fueled a significant rise in factory closings and a mushrooming in the number of Thais facing unemployment.3 âWhether parents or children, both have to struggle to survive,â a Bangkok aid worker laments to Dudzer.
The same economic forces hit Cambodia hard. At least one in every three of Cambodiaâs 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; and illiteracy rates among women far outpace those for men.4 While finding a job in Cambodia or Thailand can be difficult under any circumstances, an uneducated and impoverished woman does not fit the profile of workers most legal employers seek to hire.
Southeast Asia has experienced more than its share of armed conflicts over the past fifty years, which adds to social instability. Sirirat Pusurinkham, an ordained minister who leads an orphanage and small church at Prattachisuk, Thailand, asserts that the âsocial turmoil in Thailand provoked by World War II was a seedbed for the growth of prostitution in the country [and] . . . spurred the first example of a sex entertainment center for international tourists in Thailand.â5 The industry quickly boomed and led to broad commercial sexual exploitation.
In like fashion, the Vietnam War had a traumatic effect on the Vietnamese people and impacted the people of Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand as well. 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.
The present situation in Burmaâor Myanmar, under the current regimeâfurther demonstrates the far-reaching effect of armed conflict. A military dictatorship maintains a fragile hold over a bevy of tribal groups and warlords, each of whom fight for their autonomy. Violent conflicts can erupt at any given moment. A 2009 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) briefing verified that Burmese military groups force children as young as ten years old to serve as âportersâ and child soldiers in the intense conflict taking place in the Karen region close to the border with northern Thailand.6
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, more than 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 to sustain their young people. As harsh as it sounds, the youth are the first to become expendable.
Amid all these disruptions to social stability, slavery emerges as a tempting financial solution. Human traffickers commonly target children in destitute rural villages. The owner of a brothel in Southeast Asia can buy a woman or child for as little as twenty dollars. Virgins fetch anywhere from five hundred to as much as a one thousand dollars. To put those figures in perspective, one thousand dollars corresponds to three and a half times the average annual income in Cambodia.7
The sale of a daughter or (less commonly) a son in moments of financial need usually does not raise an eyebrow in Southeast Asia. In times past, a poor family might sell a child to a wealthy household to serve as a house servant or a field worker. In more recent days, the sex trade has raised the demand for slave children, and the impoverished masses generate the supply.
The precise number of parents who sell their children to traffickers in Southeast Asia cannot be easily assessed. A 2003 article in the UN Chronicle clearly pointed to the participation of family members in the transactions: âTraffickers often use local people in a community or village to find young women and children, and target families who are poor and vulnerable. In some situations, family members sell children to middlemen or traffickers.â8
A research study revealed that close to 35 percent of the Vietnamese families living in Cambodia sell a daughter into the sex trade, while another 25 to 30 percent seriously consider the option but do not follow through with the sale.9 The Vietnamese exist as a marginalized minority in Cambodia, so one must be careful not to generalize from this set of data. Nonetheless, the numbers reflect how widespread and culturally acceptable the sale of daughters can be.
Why would a parent sell a child? For most of us, there is absolutely no circumstance under which we would consider such a transaction. (We should pause, however, to remember that U.S.-based anti-trafficking groups have documented cases of American parents selling their children into slavery. Check out www.SlaveryMap.org to review the range of trafficking cases inside the United States.)
One cannot ignore how the Thai cultural and religious environment places women in a vulnerable position. Buddhist religious traditions reinforce the relegation of females to second-class status. In Thai (Theravada) Buddhism women cannot even reach the highest levels of spiritual enlightenment. The best they can hope for in this lifetime is to build up enough good karma to be born male in their next life. The reverse logic also holds true: to be born female in this present embodiment suggests that a woman acted wrongfully in her previous existence.
Cultural racism also runs deep in Thailand, which further assists traffickers in ârecruitingâ children from indigenous groups that reside primarily in rural parts of the country and throwing them into the sex industry in Bangkok, Phuket, or Chiang Mai.10
Truthfully, refugees all over the world walk a perilous path. They become a minority in a new society, often without legal standing, and more powerful individuals seek to exploit that vulnerability. For example, Thai traffickers today view the Burmese population as a deep recruitment pool.11
Kru Nam: An Artist Turned Abolitionist
A painter with a university degree in art may not be the most likely candidate to be a child rescuer, yet Kru Nam operates on the front lines of the antislavery movement in Thailand.
She could not ignore the young street kids who lived along the aqueducts that surround Chiang Mai, the largest city in northern Thailand. One day she decided to take empty canvases, brushes, and tins of paints down to the riverfront and learn the kidsâ stories. Once she turned the children loose painting, they created a series of disturbing images that added up to a horror story.
Kru Nam discovered that most of the kids did not come from Thailand; many originated in Burma, with a sprinkling of Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians tossed into the mix. The kids shared with her their tales of how they had arrived on the streets of Chiang Mai.
The Burmese boys spoke of a well-dressed Thai gentleman who had visited their village. Accompanying him was a fourteen-year-old boy who wore fine-tailored clothes and spoke Thai fluently. The man explained to their parents that he was offering scholarships for young boys to attend a fine school back in Thailand. He would pay their school fees and cover their living expenses. âLook how well this child from your region is doing,â he said, pointing to his young Burmese companion. âIf you let me take your son back to Chiang Mai, I will do the same for him.â
Though the tribal people of Burma are reluctant to part with young girls, they give more license for sons to travel afar in search of a livelihood. Quite a few families, therefore, agreed to let their sons go with the Thai man. Once the boys reached Chiang Mai, the trafficker immediately sold them to owners of sex bars.
The kids who lived along the riverfront told Kru Nam that they were the lucky ones. They had escaped. Many of their friends remained captive in the sex bars. Her blood boiled. She could not stand by and do nothing.
Kru Nam did not exactly have a plan when she marched into the first sex bar she ran across that night. She did not even attempt to negotiate with the owner, assuming that would be a waste of time. Her mission was clear: rescue as many of the young kids as she might. In that first bar, several kids sat at tables entertaining male customers. One by one she approached each table where a child sat and calmly said, âLetâs go.â Moments later, she was leading six young kids out the door and to her shelter.
Though Kru Nam made several more impromptu raids on sex bars, she eventually had to tread with more caution. Owners put the word out that they would kill her if she walked into their bars. âShe is stealing our property,â they said in outrage to each other.
Chan: A Cruel Destiny
Chan did not comprehend why his father so often left their home to cross the border into Thailand. He was too young to realize that his father was a drug smuggler. His dad would depart early in the morning and rendezvous with his Thai supplier. Then he would return to Burma and deliver the drugs to the dealer. As the middleman in the exchange, he received a tiny share of the profits yet faced the most serious risks. The military regime that rules Burma does not deal lightly with freelance drug smugglers.
Chanâs life changed irrevocably one evening when Burmese soldiers burst into his home yelling his fatherâs name. The soldiers shot Chanâs father at point-blank range as Chan and his family, screaming, huddled together on their sleeping mats. The family waited for the guns to be turned on them, but the soldiers ignored their screams, turned on their heels, and marched out the front door, leaving them unharmed.
During the ensuing three-day mourning period, Chan recalls neighbors bringing small bits of food, which was all that they could afford to share. His fatherâs body was cremated at the temple on the third day, according to Buddhist custom. The family returned home destitute.
Chanâs mother quickly realized that she could not feed her family and went to the streets as a beggar. It did not take long for a trafficker to locate his fresh prey. Noting that this woman had two children, no husband, and zero source of steady income, the garlic-factory owner persuaded her to sell Chan and his sister. Only a month passed between his motherâs arrival on the streets as a beggar and the transaction that turned Chan from a little boy to a forced laborer.
CHILDREN AS A LABOR FORCE
In its 2009 State of the Worldâs Children report, UNICEF estimated that around the globe more than 150 million children aged five to fourteen are working each day. The report indicates that 45 percent of Cambodiaâs children are working. The numbers are lower for other countries in the Southeast Asia region but remain nonetheless alarming: Vietnam has 16 percent of its children laboring; Laos, 11 percent; and Thailand, 8 percent. The report offers no figures for Burma, largely due to the difficulty of obtaining accurate data from such a closed society.12
The International Labour Organization (ILO) also has consistently documented child labor and its detrimental impact. In its study Give Girls a Chance: Tackling Child Labour, the ILO estimates that 100 million girls around the world labor in dangerous working conditions that harm their health and development and reduce their educational opportunities.13 âTrafficking for labour is closely l...