Category — Labor Trafficking

Female slaves rated before donkeys and after male slaves in biblical importance; in the same way, they were of vital importance to war economies. In Aida‘s Egypt, slaves’s tasks included everything from washing their captors to building pyramids:

Slavery was an integral part of the ancient world. Though Roman slaves slowly accrued rights, and men in the various Muslim slave armies* rose to the highest positions of power, it seems likely that most slaves in the ancient world would be considered victims of human trafficking today.

Aida was a Nubian princess captured by the Egyptian army and forced to work in the Pharaoh’s household in both the musical and opera of her life. As a soldier, Aida’s trafficker could claim additional status for the number and quality of the slaves he captured.

Though most soldiers in 1960s Vietnam did not need pyramids built, modern slaves were integrated into their wartime economy just the same. In the scene below, a group of American soldiers are judging a “Miss Saigon” contest, where the winner is raffled off to a service-member. Kim is a 17 year-old orphan, traveling to Saigon to work in a bar where she does not appear to know she will sell sex:


In the second act, Kim has a child by a soldier and is stripping in Bangkok, where in the end she kills herself to force her boy’s father to take care of him.

War and human trafficking interact negatively. Soldiers are far from social norms at home, while occupied peoples are profoundly disadvantaged. Women like Aida will be treated as representatives of the enemy, and objects for use or sale. When the regular economy is disrupted, women like Kim may be pushed, tricked, or forced into commercial sex.

Next week, we’ll consider why victims of trafficking stay with their traffickers.

*The term “slave armies” may sound anachronous, but is is an apt descriptor for the thousands of children enslaved in the Lord’s Republican Army in Uganda.

A young person from a large family is sold to slave traders, who sell him to a rich man in a far-away country who never pays him for his labor and where he is sexually accosted by his employer’s partner. When he fights back, he is thrown in jail; the partner’s sexual attacks is treated as a joke. There is also victim-blame here as well, because his brothers decided to sell him into slavery as punishment for his lack of tact.

I am writing of course about Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

The family’s role in human trafficking is disturbing. Whether it is sisters forced by their traffickers to recruit their cousins or younger sisters, or parents selling their children, it is upsetting to contemplate.

Another famous fictional family abused a younger sibling for free labor–Cinderella. Sticking strictly to the Disney version, the young woman does not appear to be labor trafficked, just exploited:

Her maltreatment as a minor and domestic servant stretched from emotional abuse to physical violence. The distinction between labortrafficking and labor exploitation is a subtle distinction and Disney’s candy-coating smears the story into pleasing lines, making itdifficult to see.

Both Cinderella and Joseph get help from a higher power to get out of their situations, both waiting patiently to be saved. In real life,they might get help from a nosy neighbor, a non-profit in their area, or law enforcement and had to tell their stories dozens of timesbefore finally being safe.

Next week we’ll cover economic push factors into commercial sex, using Fantine in Les Miserables.

In the musical Oliver!, Oliver Twist is an orphan living in Mr. Bumble’s workhouse. When Oliver famously asks for more gruel, Mr. Bumble sings:

There’s a dark, thin winding stairway without any bannister,
Which we’ll throw him down and feed him the cockroaches served in a canister.

After Oliver’s uppity request for more food, Mr Bumble wanders through London’s streets trying to sell him in “Boy For Sale”:

Knowing Mr Bumble’s character, his motivation for selling Oliver is cash. The man who buys him is an unpleasant undertaker named Mr Sowerbury. Within 12 hours of being bought, Oliver has been terrorized, beaten, and denied food.

Mr Sowerbury’s interest in buying a person are probably the same as the Thénardiers’s for buying Cosette in Les Miserables–cheaplabor. Where Oliver is sold to the undertaker, Cosette owed her captivity to the fraud of two innkeepers, the Thénardiers. The couplehad promised Cosette’s single mother, Fantine, a safe home for her child while she worked in a factory. With her mother away, theytreat Cosette like a slave.

Below a man who owes Cosette’s mother bargains with the Thénardiers for her freedom:

Cosette and Oliver were trapped in domestic slavery because their parents were unable to care for them, and then taken advantage of bytheir caretakers. Those caretaker-traffickers used threats of violence, emotional manipulation, debt bondage and their positions ofauthority to enslave the children.

Though Oliver and Cosette were both eventually saved by upper-class men in their communities, many children (between 100,000 and300,000 a year domestically in the United States) are never saved. You can help save them.

Next week: competing visions of prostitution, comparing Moulin Rouge and The Man of La Mancha.

Slave is a charged term. It may conjure images of antebellum plantations or Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary. Naming an act slavery demands such density of drama, implies such historical tragedy that its use must be earned.

Does modern human trafficking look like the slavery against which Sojourner Truth fought?

A form of slavery which existed in the lifetimes of Ptolemy and Jesus (and Charlemagne and Elizabeth I and FDR and you and I), is the sale of one person to another. Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum depicts it clearly: Not only is Pseudolus trying to buy a woman from Marcus Lycus, but he himself is enslaved to his naive master, Hero. Today, both greedy Marcus Lycus and well-intentioned Hero would be human traffickers; in Rome, they were citizens.

Less charming is the following depiction in Jesus Christ Superstar, where men are selling weapons and drugs and women are selling themselves in the Temple:

The women above are renting themselves rather than permanently selling the way in which the women in Forum were sold. Whether people can rent or sell their own bodies is another field of spirited debate (link NSFW). But the culture of selling people and access to their parts is clear in both clips above.

Is our culture like that?

Many people in the anti-human trafficking movement believe that the slave houses, markets, and auction blocks were not defining characteristics of slavery, but its expression in a given time. Today a man might be sold through an ad on Back Page, a woman through a go-go bar, or a child through a phone call. And with our current slave system, they can be sold again, and again, and again. But slavery is putting a price on a person, and that is what we do today.

Next week, we’ll cover why some people sell their children/buy other peoples’ children.

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.“  These are the words of Steve Biko, anti-apartheid activist jailed under the so-called Terrorism Act in South Africa in 1977. For 24 days Biko was interrogated and beaten before recieving hospital treatment; he subsequently died later that year in the custody of the South African Police. [Read more →]

This week I authored a blog “Private Sector Leverages Comparative Advantage to Fight Slavery” for the Hudson Institute. Please see below for an excerpt: [Read more →]

There is often discussion around key touchstones of the anti-trafficking field.  But what exactly are these touchstones? [Read more →]

If you talk to people who are passionate about combating human trafficking, they will likely tell you they are “abolitionists,” and that this movement is working towards eradicating modern-day slavery.  If “abolition” is our ultimate goal then I think it is important for us to define what we mean.  What will it take to get us there? [Read more →]

In December 2008, I had the honor of attending the signing of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act reauthorization – named after British abolitionist William Wilberforce – in the Oval Office. When the original 2000 Act was revised by Congress in 2005 our legislators mandated that the Department of Labor create a list of products made by forms of human trafficking: forced labor and onerous child labor. [Read more →]