First Week

My onsite internship with Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz cannot begin until I turn eighteen, so I’m filling the interim by reading research already done on the subject found at the Glendale Community College library.

On my first day of independent research leading up to the start of my internship, I began with a stack of books: each one talking about human trafficking, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, the process of commodifying persons and using their bodies to make a profit. Human trafficking is a business; it follows the principles of supply and demand, and the misconceptions surrounding human trafficking allow many traffickers to escape charges pressed against them.

What is Human Trafficking?

Common misconceptions:

1) Human trafficking is any sort of illegal transport of humans, and consent to be smuggled is the same as consent to be trafficked (if you knew you were going to be working as a domestic servant, you signed up for the situation and you should have known better)

2) Trafficked people are all undocumented immigrants

3) It only happens in developing nations to poor, uneducated women and girls

4) There has to be physical restraint or bondage for the person to be enslaved

5) Human trafficking is synonymous with sex trafficking

Reality:

1)       A lot of the misconceptions come from confusing human trafficking with smuggling, as both definitions involve the transfer or harboring of individuals. Smuggling is different from trafficking, however, in that smuggling always involves transnational movement and trafficking can occur within a country’s borders. Smuggling does not carry with it the promise of exploitation, either. Smuggled persons have freedom of movement and the ability to change employment (as their relationship with their smuggler is often terminated upon reaching their destination) and, while they are performing an illegal action, are not always victims of human trafficking: this boundary is blurred when the consent they originally gave to be transported to work in another country is found to have been violated or to have occurred under duress or false pretenses.

2)      Trafficking can and does occur within countries. Renting Lucy by Linda Smith tells the story of girls and women in America who were coerced to leave their homes and to perform commercial sex work without pay or protection from anyone other than their pimp. The story in the book is not an unusual one, however. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are an estimated 100,000 – 300,000 children trafficked in the United States today. The average age a person in Arizona is first trafficked is 14.

3)      There are national and international definitions of human trafficking, as human trafficking is both a local and a global issue. The United Nations defines human trafficking as “recruitment, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons by threat or use of force”. The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) describes severe forms of trafficking as: a) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not yet attained 18 years of age; or b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. Trafficking victims are sold into slavery; slaves are trafficked people; the two are inseparable and by misrepresenting trafficking victims as servants or willing participants we are doing a gross injustice to all those who are victims. And the list of potential victims is a long one. Slaves can look like the sixteen year old boy doing farm work or washing dishes, the fifty year old woman buying groceries or watching children on a playground, the twelve year old girl with a significantly older boyfriend and a new purse. The Slave Next Door by Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter tells the story of several victims in the United States: a group of girls who were stolen from their homes in the Midwest, threatened, beat, made to sell wares at a nearby mall, and forced to dance, strip, and have sex with countless men; a small girl named Maria who was bought from her parents, beaten, fed dog feces, and forced to work up to twenty hours a day as a domestic servant for a middle class woman in Texas; Antonio, a man who could not afford to take care of his elderly and sick parents, who accepted money from a man to pay his parents medical bills and wound up picking tomatoes in Florida for 16 hours a day making far below minimum wage.

4)      While it is not uncommon for trafficked persons to be bound or for their movements to be restricted to a small guarded space, there is no requirement that they be physically restrained in order to qualify as trafficked. Many traffickers keep their victims through coercion, abuse, false promises, and debt. In the case of Star, one of the girls in Renting Lucy and many other sex trafficked persons, the pimp promised love and affection, rewarded her for making money by buying her purses or paying for her to get her hair and nails done, and by apologizing and soothing her after he hit her for acting out of line.

5)      Human trafficking includes sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and domestic servitude.

Thank you so much for reading!

Savannah Lane