Research suggests connections exist between migration and criminal forms of exploitation such as human trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery. Certainly, constellations of risk are seen in certain migrant communities and migration corridors. However, it is not known how many of the world’s estimated 40 million victims of modern slavery are also migrants.
Traffic is a unique and powerful program presented by Lucy Liu that addresses the issue of human trafficking in Asia-Pacific. Told through the stories of real people, the show features Ana, trafficked from the Philippines and forced into prostitution; Eka, an Indonesian woman, trafficked into forced domestic servitude in Singapore; and Min Aung, from Burma, trafficked to Thailand and imprisoned for 2 years in a factory.
The primary aim of the study was to provide baseline estimates of prevalence of forced labour among children (aged 10 – 17 years) and adults (aged 18 and over) working in the cocoa sector in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, as well as updated estimates of the number of children (aged 10 to 17 years) exposed to child labour.
400,000 to 500,000 Moldovans are estimated to work abroad; approximately a quarter of the working population. Many are looking for a way out of poverty; others simply want to build a better life for themselves and their families. For some women and girls, these dreams of a better future become their worse nightmares. Some are raped, abused and systematically exploited.
While previous qualitative research has exposed select forms of modern slavery in the Pacific, this report provides a comprehensive assessment of modern slavery in the region. The report draws on existing peer-reviewed and grey literature, Walk Free’s 2019 assessment of action taken by governments to address modern slavery, as well as information gathered through semi-structured interviews with anti-slavery stakeholders in eight countries in the region: Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu.
In a world where global flows of people and commodities are on the increase, crimes related to illegal trafficking are creating new concerns for society. This, in turn, has brought about new and contentious forms of regulation, surveillance and control. There is a pressing need to consider both the problem itself, and the impact of international policy responses.
This authoritative work examines key issues and debates on human trafficking, drawing on theoretical, historical and comparative material to inform the discussion of major trends. Consolidating current work on human trade debates, the text brings together key criminological and sociological literature on migration studies, gender, globalization, human rights, security, victimology, policing and control to provide the most complete overview available on the subject.
Suitable for students, academics and scholars in criminology, criminal justice, sociology and international relations, this book sheds unique light on this highly topical and complex subject.
The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority1 citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. This report estimates that more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019, and some of them were sent directly from detention camps.
“Powerfully raw, deeply moving, and utterly authentic. Rachel Lloyd has turned a personal atrocity into triumph and is nothing less than a true hero. . . . Never again will you look at young girls on the street as one of ‘those’ women – you will only see little girls that are girls just like us.” – Demi Moore, actress and activist.
With the power and verity of First They Killed My Father and A Long Way Gone, Rachel Lloyd’s riveting survivor story is the true tale of her hard-won escape from the commercial sex industry and her bold founding of GEMS, New York City’s Girls Education and Mentoring Service, to help countless other young girls escape “the life.” Lloyd’s unflinchingly honest memoir is a powerful and unforgettable story of inhuman abuse, enduring hope, and the promise of redemption.
This Note proposes a new litigation strategy for vindicating the rights of trafficked workers. It argues that class actions, an increasingly popular mechanism for holding traffickers liable, are insufficient. Through an original analysis of federal class actions predicated on the Traf- ficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), I show that courts are reluctant to certify classes of traf- ficked workers and that class actions too often fail. As an alternative to class actions, this Note suggests that state attorneys general invoke their common-law parens patriae power to bring suits against traffickers under the TVPA. This strategy would preserve many benefits of the aggregate- litigation model while sidestepping the challenging procedural terrain of the modern class action.
To be a moral witness is perhaps the highest calling of journalism, and in this unforgettable, highly readable account of contemporary slavery, author Benjamin Skinner travels around the globe to personally tell stories that need to be told – and heard.
As Samantha Power and Philip Gourevitch did for genocide, Skinner has now done for modern-day slavery. With years of reporting in such places as Haiti, Sudan, India, Eastern Europe, The Netherlands, and, yes, even suburban America, he has produced a vivid testament and moving reportage on one of the great evils of our time.
There are more slaves in the world today than at any time in history. After spending four years visiting a dozen countries where slavery flourishes, Skinner tells the story, in gripping narrative style, of individuals who live in slavery, those who have escaped from bondage, those who own or traffic in slaves, and the mixed political motives of those who seek to combat the crime.
Skinner infiltrates trafficking networks and slave sales on five continents, exposing a modern flesh trade never before portrayed in such proximity. From mega-harems in Dubai to illicit brothels in Bucharest, from slave quarries in India to child markets in Haiti, he explores the underside of a world we scarcely recognize as our own and lays bare a parallel universe where human beings are bought, sold, used, and discarded. He travels from the White House to war zones and immerses us in the political and flesh-and-blood battles on the front lines of the unheralded new abolitionist movement.
At the heart of the story are the slaves themselves. Their stories are heartbreaking but, in the midst of tragedy, readers discover a quiet dignity that leads some slaves to resist and aspire to freedom. Despite being abandoned by the international community, despite suffering a crime so monstrous as to strip their awareness of their own humanity, somehow, some enslaved men regain their dignity, some enslaved women learn to trust men, and some enslaved children manage to be kids. Skinner bears witness for them, and for the millions who are held in the shadows.
In so doing, he has written one of the most morally courageous books of our time, one that will long linger in the conscience of all who encounter it, and one that – just perhaps – may move the world to constructive action.
Fifteen years ago, in October 2003, Congress passed a law allowing trafficking victims to recover civil damages for trafficking in federal courts. Trafficking survivors have brought a total of 299 cases under this provision, demanding justice from an array of defendants. This report analyzes a decade and a half of labor and sex trafficking civil litigation in federal courts. What are the trends, challenges, and innovations.? This report provides quantitative and qualitative assessments of the past 15 years of civil litigation under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003. It tracks the statute’s geographical reach, types of cases, victims’ countries of origin, methods of entry into the United States, case outcomes, and damages awards. Finally, the report identifies challenges that trafficking survivors continue to face as they fight to hold their traffickers accountable.
Although slavery is illegal throughout the world, we learned from Kevin Bales’s highly praised exposé, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, that more than twenty-seven million people – in countries from Pakistan to Thailand to the United States–are still trapped in bondage. With this new volume, Bales, the leading authority on modern slavery, looks beyond the specific instances of slavery described in his last book to explore broader themes about slavery’s causes, its continuation, and how it might be ended. Written to raise awareness and deepen understanding, and touching again on individual lives around the world, this book tackles head-on one of the most urgent and difficult problems facing us today.
Each of the chapters in Understanding Global Slavery explores a different facet of global slavery. Bales investigates slavery’s historical roots to illuminate today’s puzzles. He explores our basic ideas about what slavery is and how the phenomenon fits into our moral, political, and economic worlds. He seeks to explain how human trafficking brings people into our cities and how the demand for trafficked workers, servants, and prostitutes shapes modern slavery. And he asks how we can study and measure this mostly hidden crime. Throughout, Bales emphasizes that to end global slavery, we must first understand it. This book is a step in that direction.
This toolkit builds upon the foundational guidance already published, focusing on CEDAW’s Optional Protocol and the potential for human trafficking individual complaints. The toolkit provides an overview of CEDAW and the Optional Protocol; a snapshot of the CEDAW Committee’s jurisprudence on human trafficking; and maps out strategies to use this mechanism to protect the rights of trafficked women and girls.
Boys strapped to carpet looms in India, women trafficked into sex slavery across Europe, children born into bondage in Mauritania, and migrants imprisoned at gunpoint in the United States are just a few of the many forms slavery takes in the twenty-first century. There are twenty-seven million slaves alive today, more than at any point in history, and they are found on every continent in the world except Antarctica.
To Plead Our Own Cause contains ninety-five narratives by slaves and former slaves from around the globe. Told in the words of slaves themselves, the narratives movingly and eloquently chronicle the horrors of contemporary slavery, the process of becoming free, and the challenges faced by former slaves as they build a life in freedom. An editors’ introduction lays out the historical, economic, and political background to modern slavery, the literary tradition of the slave narrative, and a variety of ways we can all help end slavery today.
Halting the contemporary slave trade is one of the great human-rights issues of our time. But just as slavery is not over, neither is the will to achieve freedom, “plead” the cause of liberation, and advocate abolition. Putting the slave’s voice back at the heart of the abolitionist movement, To Plead Our Own Cause gives occasion for both action and hope.
The time has come to build an international network of lawyers and advocates who have the tools they need to bring the right cases to the right courts. In May 2015, the Freedom Fund and the Human Trafficking Pro Bono Legal Center brought together leading human rights lawyers, advocates, and litigators from around the world for a meeting in London. The conversation centered on how best to bring strategic litigation against states and private actors in order to combat trafficking and modern-day slavery. This document shares many of the key issues discussed at the meeting, including important lessons learned from successful litigation. It also highlights a number of persistent gaps that must be bridged in order to identify, prepare, and successfully prosecute cases that can lead to systemic change.
This timely and innovative book analyses the lives of new female migrants in the EU with a focus on the labour market, domestic work, care work and prostitution in particular. It provides a comparative analysis embracing eleven European countries from Northern (UK, Germany, Sweden, France), Southern (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus) and Eastern Europe (Poland, Slovenia), i.e. old and new immigration countries as well as old and new market economies.
It maps labour market trends, welfare policies, migration laws, patterns of employment, and the working and social conditions of female migrants in different sectors of the labour market, formal and informal. It is particularly concerned with the strategies women use to counter the disadvantages they face. It analyses the ways in which gender hierarchies are intertwined with other social relations of power, providing a gendered and intersectional perspective, drawing on the biographies of migrant women.
The book highlights policy relevant issues and tries to uncover some of the contradictory assumptions relating to integration which it treats as a highly normative and problematic concept. It reframes integration in terms of greater equalisation and democratisation (entailed in the parameters of access, participation and belonging), pointing to its transnational and intersectional dimensions.
This study for the European Commission focuses on due diligence requirements to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for abuses of human rights, including the rights of the child and fundamental freedoms, serious bodily injury or health risks, environmental damage, including with respect to climate.
The images of human trafficking are all too often reduced to media tales of helpless young women taken by heavily accented, dark-skinned captors—but the reality is a far cry from this stereotype. In the Middle East, Dubai has been accused of being a hotbed of trafficking. Pardis Mahdavi, however, draws a more complicated and more personal picture of this city filled with migrants. Not all migrant workers are trapped, tricked, and abused. Like anyone else, they make choices to better their lives, though the risk of ending up in bad situations is high.
Legislators hoping to combat human trafficking focus heavily on women and sex work, but there is real potential for abuse of both male and female migrants in a variety of areas of employment – whether on the street, in a field, at a restaurant, or at someone’s house. Gridlock explores how migrants’ actual experiences in Dubai contrast with the typical discussions – and global moral panic – about human trafficking.
Mahdavi powerfully contrasts migrants’ own stories with interviews with U.S. policy makers, revealing the gaping disconnect between policies on human trafficking and the realities of forced labor and migration in the Persian Gulf. To work toward solving this global problem, we need to be honest about what trafficking is – and is not – and to finally get past the stereotypes about trafficked persons so we can really understand the challenges migrant workers are living through every day.
The SlaveFree Today Podcast is an extension of the work of SlaveFree Today and the Journal of Modern Slavery with our focus on practical solutions in the struggle to end…
Trafficking for Begging: Old Game, New Name reveals an ugly industry – the exploitation of beggars as a form of human trafficking. The book gives a voice to the thousands of begging victims and uncovers the aspects of this criminal activity. Apart from the legal and social discussion, the study looks into psychological theories as to why people give money to beggars.
The author suggests ideas for public campaign messages that can break the exploitative cycle of trafficking for begging taking into consideration these psychological explanations. If you liked the movie Slumdog Millionaire, it is likely that you would also be touched by the main message brought by Trafficking for Begging: Old Game, New Name.
This report has been prepared by the International Labour Office pursuant to an agreement between the ILO and the World Bank to carry out third-party monitoring on the incidence of child labour and forced labour in the World Bank-financed projects in agriculture, water and education sectors in Uzbekistan. Third-party monitoring by the ILO was also undertaken and reported on annually since 2015.
Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the world’s key regions for the trafficking of illegal goods. It is home to an international trade in small arms, nuclear smuggling rings, human trafficking, contraband and counterfeit goods, illicit currency and smuggled medicinal drugs. The scope and mechanisms of such trafficking, however, are far from understood.
An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia brings together key researchers and cartographic specialists to provide a unique overview of the major forms of illegal trafficking in the region. Featuring 32 specially drawn full-color maps detailing the trafficking hubs, counter-trafficking facilities and border status for each of the trafficking activities, together with political, historical, topographic, ecological and linguistic regional maps, the atlas provides an unparalleled reference resource that will be welcomed by professionals and academics across a wide range of disciplines.
This preliminary study investigates how consumers understand modern slavery and their role in perpetuating and/or eradicating modern slavery, bringing together a unique collaboration of investigators who are at the forefront of consumer research in consumption ethics.
From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.
With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.
They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS.
Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty.
Deeply felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Sky is essential reading for every global citizen.
Construction is a bipolar industry. On the public side, we create inspirational buildings, pushing the boundaries of architecture and technology; solving ever more difficult challenges. The dark side – the systematic exploitation of millions of vulnerable migrants – is rarely acknowledged, even by the clients and multinationals that commission and create our shiny new cities. Our sector is rife with human rights abuses. Bonded labour, delayed wages, abysmal working and living conditions, withholding of passports and limitations of movement are all forms of modern slavery.
