Today, January 11, 2011, is national human trafficking awareness day, and by anyone’s guesstimate, there is little doubt that awareness about contemporary forms of slavery is widespread and growing.  Compared to even a year ago, much progress has been made in the U.S. and elsewhere to elevate the public’s familiarity with the issue.

The Freedom Center certainly has been a significant factor in this effort.  Our exhibition on modern-day slavery and trafficking, Invisible: Slavery Today, opened in October as the first permanent museum installation on these subjects anywhere in the world.  It has drawn good crowds and enthusiastic endorsements from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, as well as movie celebrity and anti-trafficking activists Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

Across the country, there are more media reports about trafficking arrests and convictions, which is a reflection of growing law enforcement attention to the issue. Police training is accelerating in cities and states, and new laws are being passed to increase penalties for traffickers.  Ohio reflects the growing focus on the issue.  The Ohio General Assembly passed in December a new statute making human trafficking a 2nd degree felony.  The law passed virtually unanimously following several years of inaction, which shows that legislators are paying attention to the issue. A statewide commission to examine the extent of trafficking in the Buckeye state was created two years ago by Democrat Attorney General Richard Cordray.  There is strong likelihood that the commission will continue under his Republican successor, Mike DeWine.

In the meantime, businesses, especially those with large, labor intensive operations, are starting to assess their vulnerability to worker exploitation.  Several companies, including The Body Shop, Manpower, and Lexis-Nexis, have become prominently engaged in combating exploitation.

But a realistic assessment must concede that while awareness is surely growing, there is scant evidence that trafficking is declining around the world.  In fact, it may be increasing, as vexing economic disparities force thousands — if not millions — of desperate people seeking work to fall victim to trafficking gangs.  Nor is there any evidence to suggest that the demand for sex, which is fueling both the multi-billion dollar pornography industry, as well as prostitution and child sex trafficking, is doing anything but growing worldwide.

Which leads to the question: is awareness truly helping to decrease the crime of trafficking and exploitation?

It’s difficult to say.  In large part, trafficking remains a hidden, elusive (‘invisible”) phenomenon, and reliable data is scant.  For example, if you accept the widely repeated number that there are 27 million people enslaved in the world, then you’d have to be dismayed with the paltry number of trafficking convictions in 2009 — less than 5,000 globally.  It’s also accepted, especially in the back-and-forth chatter on Twitter and Facebook, that trafficking is a mushrooming, $32 billion industry that is growing even faster than the global illegal drug trade.

If true, those are sobering reminders that abolishing modern-day slavery is going to be a tough, years (if not decades-long) battle.

Accepting that it’s going to be a long-term struggle is really the first step in raising awareness of trafficking and exploitation.  It very definitely will not go away without much more attention by law enforcement not just in Ohio, but also in Moldova and Brazil.  More resources — i.e., money — will be required to do battle with traffickers, who are in the business in the first place because they can make a lot of money exploiting the work or service of vulnerable individuals. Better methods must be devised to reach and warn especially desirable targets, such as teenage girls, about the dangers of trafficking. Nations are going to have to crack down on corruption, which some experts believe is a major factor in the expansion of trafficking. Every nation in the world has a law outlawing slavery; it’s time, isn’t it, for governments to seriously begin enforcing the rule of law.

In other words, and self-evidently, we can’t wish away the crime of slavery with platitudes and public service announcements.  It really is going to take time, effort, money and commitment.

Here’s a good place to start.  The United States’ primary anti-trafficking law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), needs both Congressional re-authorization, and more program dollars. The Obama Administration and the new GOP-controlled House hopefully will work in bipartisan fashion to not only maintain TVPA, but strengthen it with higher levels of funding.  You can let your voice be heard on this critical matter by e-signing a petition directed to House Speaker John Boehner and Senate President Harry Reid, asking them to lend their support and leadership on anti-trafficking.  You can sign the petition here.

Perhaps the strategy for 2011 is as simple as this:  moving from awareness to action.

The Associated Press news service has released an interview conducted last April with a Chinese human rights lawyer, who told of beatings and torture at the hands of government police, but who asked that his account not be made public unless he went missing.

It sounds like a hackneyed Hollywood script, but it’s not.  The lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, has disappeared into the dark reaches of the vast Chinese official bureaucracy, and no one knows where he is, or even if he is still alive.

Gao, according to the AP, was held by Chinese authorities for 14 months in 2009-2010, and subjected to beatings, isolation and other flagrant civil and human rights abuses.  When he was finally released, he recounted his ordeal to the wire service, with the stipulation that nothing be reported unless something happened to him — like a letter from the grave that is the staple of dozens of espionage or mystery movies.

Two weeks after the interview, he disappeared again. His family and friends say they have not heard from him in the more than eight months since. Police agencies either declined to comment or said they did not know Gao’s whereabouts.

According to AP, Gao had been a galvanizing figure for the rights movement, advocating constitutional reform and arguing landmark cases to defend property rights and political and religious dissenters, including members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. His disappearance in 2009 set off an international outcry that may have played a role in winning his brief release last year.

Among democracy and rights campaigners, Gao appears to have been singled out for frequent, harsh punishment beyond the slim protections of China’s laws.

It’s a stunning revelation about life in a nation that is exerting its economic, political and military muscle on the world stage.  Reports of  human rights abuses, incidents of human trafficking and severe labor exploitation, emanating from China are increasingly commonplace. Yet the world — including the United States — is largely silent about these officially sanctioned practices.

Gao, apparently, is viewed as a threat to the Chinese government.  How else to explain his harsh treatment, which has gone on for years.

In his April interview with the AP, Gao said that police seemed intent on casting him into a limbo that kept him at their whim.

“Why don’t you put me in prison?” Gao said he asked Beijing police at one point. “They said, ‘You going to prison, that’s a dream. You’re not good enough for that. Whenever we want you to disappear, you will disappear.’”

The Public Security Ministry, which oversees police forces, did not respond to telephoned and faxed inquiries about Gao. Police in Beijing, Shaanxi and Xinjiang — locations where Gao said he was held — declined comment on his current predicament as well as his past treatment.

SPECIAL NOTICE:  DUE TO EXPECTED WINTER STORMS, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL APRIL 15, 2011.

Did you know that January is National Slavery & Human Trafficking Month?

On January 11 at The Underground Music Venue (1140 Smiley Ave., Cincy, 45240) Paul Bernish, Director of Antislavery and Human Trafficking Initiatives at the Freedom Center, will be speaking at The Power of 1 event.

Tickets for The Power of 1 event are $8.00 for advanced purchase and $10 at the door.  There are special group rates for groups of 15 or more.  All proceeds go to organizations who fight human trafficking around the world.  Doors open at 4:00 p.m.

The Power of 1 is an event that will open your eyes to the dark world of child trafficking and modern-day slavery.  The event features speakers who are on the forefront of fighting this horrible crime, as well as music, and videos that will inspire you.  You will also have  a chance to experience what a brothel looks like and find out what other anti-trafficking organizations are doing.

Speakers for the event include: Peter Everett (Destiny Rescue, USA Base), Laura Lederer (Founder, Global Centurion), Rob Morris (Co-founder, Love 146), Paul Bernish (Freedom Center), Theresa Flores (Trafficking Survivor, Author), and Amber Robinson (Author, Mercy Rising).

For more information about The Power of 1 click here.

The Freedom Center also invites you to see Invisible: Slavery Today during National Slavery & Human Trafficking Month.  It’s the perfect time to education yourself on contemporary slavery around the world. For more information about Invisible: Slavery Today click here.

You’ve probably asked yourself, as you passed by one of those increasingly ubiquitous nail “salons” that are a staple of most shopping malls, who are these women — most of them Asian — and how did they end up in this place?

The hint of an answer can be seen in law enforcement charges of human trafficking against several people in Zanesville, Ohio this week. Those being sought or already arrested are Asian immigrants, police say. They are suspected of operating a multimillion dollar nail salon business in the Buckeye state, using women trafficked into the U.S. from Southeast Asia, who are given false papers and forced to work as indentured servants for little or no wages.

Not all nail salons are operated this way, of course.  Many if not most are legitimate businesses whose employees are paid and not compelled to work. But the nature of the business makes it ripe for exploitation, law enforcement officials say, because salons are labor intensive and profits depend on low operating costs.

There’s a bittersweet irony to the Zanesville human trafficking arrests. Zanesville, in east central Ohio, was a significant stop on the antebellum Underground Railroad, the secret network used to shepherd escaping slaves to freedom. The area was settled by pioneer settlers from New England around 1800. Many were strongly abolitionist, and became quickly involved in assisting escaping slaves. Today, the Putnam Underground Railroad Education Center (PURE) tells this history in a small but compelling and fascinating museum. Diagonally across from PURE Center is the Putnam Presbyterian Church where Reverend William Beecher (brother of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe) preached antislavery sermons. Another significant figure, A. A. Guthrie, the President of the Ohio Abolitionist Society, lived one block away.

One cannot help but wonder whether the women trafficked into Ohio are part of a perverse, 21 Century underground railroad that, instead of moving people to freedom, is transporting vulnerable individuals into slavery.

Anyone engaged in the anti-human trafficking cause today is bound to notice a certain sameness to the ongoing discussions about the issue. It’s no surprise that people are passionately against modern forms of slavery, abuse and exploitation, and it is certainly good that they communicate that passion at local meetings, regional and national conferences and especially by posting their outrage at traffickers and concern for victims in the social media world. I know, because I often do this myself.

Yet cumulatively, I feel a growing sense that modern-day abolitionists (again, myself included) are existing in an echo chamber where our thoughts, ideas and suggestions are repeated in a continuous loop, with very little that is new or insightful about the issue and what to do about it.

There’s a lot of conventional wisdom, as a consequence, that may actually be preventing us from seeing the issue clearly and objectively.

This point came home to me rather abruptly in an early December during a meeting with three visitors to the Freedom Center from Thailand. One runs an anti-trafficking NGO; the other two are police officers who deal with the reality of trafficking every day.

I asked about efforts in Thailand to raise public awareness about sex trafficking, which, as most everyone asserts, is virtually endemic in this south Asian country. All three, through their interpreters, gave me an insight about the situation in their homeland that I had not heard, or considered before. Yes, they said, sex trafficking is a major issue in Thailand. But forced labor was the the much broader and difficult trafficking issue. Thousands of men, women and children from Cambodia, Myanmar, Viet Nam, as well as Thai citizens, were working as virtual slaves in back alley sweatshops and isolated manufacturing plants throughout the country. This, they said, was Thailand’s trafficking nightmare.

What they said called into question my assumptions about Thailand. More broadly, their comments about what’s the real problem in their country was a reminder that it’s always helpful to question long-held assumptions about the nature and extent of trafficking in the world.

A similar reminder came from an article on Huffington Post about a person who’s engaged in the trafficking issue, but is an iconoclast who has no problem challening conventional thinking about the problem. Laura Agustin, who describes herself as the “Naked Anthropologist,” delights in going against the grain of the anti-trafficking establishment on her website, http://www.lauraagustin.com/ and in her controversial book, Sex at the Margins.

Agustin recently took part in a “debate” at a well-publicized anti-trafficking conference in, of all places, Luxor, Egypt.  The conference attracted the usual coterie of celebrity abolitionists, government officials and anti-trafficking leaders, but Agustin was apparently not on the guest list until the BBC asked her to participate in a debate on trafficking trends. Her presence set sparks flying, as recounted in the Huffington Post interview.

The point of all this is to say that while the anti-trafficking movement is still in its infancy, it would be a shame to cut off internal debate just because some may have already determined the parameters of the issue.

There’s much about trafficking and forced labor that we don’t know (because the data is so suspect and many of its victims remain invisible) and much that we don’t know we don’t know. Outliers like Laura Agustin provide a valuable check on reality. If we want to abolish slavery and trafficking — and we’re all agreed on that — let’s keep an open mind, and regularly tip over our apple carts of assumptions.

A new report in Britain claims that police inactivity — a consequence of inadequate training and indifference — is leaving traffickers free to ply their criminal trade with little fear of arrest.

According to a report in London’s Independent newspaper, criminals who traffic hundreds of children into and around the UK are not being adequately investigated or prosecuted, according to the country’s leading child-protection unit.

Vulnerable children could be at risk thanks to a lack of knowledge and resources to catch their traffickers, a study from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) reveals. The report says that public sector cuts could exacerbate the situation, with two specialist police units in effect already closed.

The CEOP report claims that as many as 287 children were identified as “potential” victims of trafficking in the UK in 2009-2010.  About one-third of the kids were trafficked into the sex industry, the report claims.

The study is viewed as another argument for Britain’s participation in a European Union-led anti-trafficking initiative, which the British government so far has refused to join.

Mexico, the United States’ troubled neighbor to the south, appears headed towards “failed state” status.  What does that mean?  A failed state is one in which the foundations of civil society are dysfunctional or non-existent. Failed states are countries in which government appears barely — if at all — in control of law, justice and human rights.  It describes a nation in which lawlessness in the form of drug trafficking, human trafficking and violence are widespread and growing.

Mexico is not there yet, but it is coming close. The latest example of Mexico’s widening chaos is a report that more than 15,000 people were murdered in 2010 alone in a rampaging drug war that the government of President Felipe Calderon is handling with increasingly brutal military tactics. It’s become so dangerous South of the Border that the participating schools in this year’s Sun Bowl football game have been warned not to cross in Juarez from El Paso, for fear of assault, robbery — or worse.

Calderon’s government says the situation is well under control. But a withering assessment by Edgardo Buscaglia, an organized crime analyst and professor at Mexico’s ITAM university, says that as much as 77 percent of Mexico’s economic sectors is under at least partial control by crime gangs.

“Political corruption at the highest level is the mother of all crime problems,” Buscaglia said.

In such an environment, violations of essential human rights are commonplace, and human trafficking thrives.  Police and government corruption, weak law enforcement, economic disparities and abject poverty — all in abundant presence in Mexico — are among the primary causes of exploitation and trafficking.

It is an unstable situation with important ramifications for the United States.  It will be interesting to observe how the Obama Administration and the new Congress handle this growing national security problem right next door.

As expected, outgoing Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland has signed into law a bill that makes human trafficking in the Buckeye State a felony crime.

The bill was approved by the Ohio General Assembly during a lame duck session, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support. Enactment removes Ohio from the handful of states that did not have a separate anti-trafficking law on the books.

Those convicted under the new statute could face as much as eight years in prison.

Anyone who’s seriously interested in understanding the nature and extent of human trafficking in the world need look no farther than the People’s Republic of China.  The Freedom Blog has written extensively on human rights violations in this enormous and increasingly powerful nation, in which state-run capitalism gives everyday Chinese workers and families the quintessential Hobson’s Choice: economic security in exchange for limits on personal freedoms and unconscionable abuse of essential human rights.

Thus it is hardly surprising to learn, as we did this week, that the Chinese government’s Orwellian attempts to limit family size have resulted in a litany of human and civil rights abuses. The latest report published Tuesday by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, documents breadwinners who lose their jobs after the birth of a second child, campaigns that reward citizens for reporting on the reproductive secrets of their neighbors and expectant mothers dragged into operating rooms for late-term abortions. As reported in the New York Times, as 2010 marked the 30th anniversary of the so-called one-child policy, officials have been praising such measures for preventing 400 million births. A smaller population, they argue, has helped fuel China’s astounding economic growth by reducing the demands on food production, education and medical care.

Using such extreme internal controls, China has developed the world’s second largest economy, and it will soon threaten America’s standing both as the economic paragon of efficiency and productivity.  Imagine the outcry if the United States initiated a policy that families could only have one child or face criminal charges.  Yet our official response to Chinese malfeasance over the years has been stony silence and tacit acceptance, other than the occasional tepid scolding that China needs to change its repressive policies.

On the human trafficking front, China is quickly gaining the reputation as the world’s leading haven for forced, exploitative labor.  Last week it was revealed that a factory in far western China had forcibly dragooned dozens of mentally disabled people into crushing rocks used to supply the country’s construction industry.  Now, it’s been reported, police in southwest Guizhou Province have over the past two years broken up 47 human trafficking rings, detained 81 suspects and punished 450 people.  Mind you, this is just one province and relatively under-populated. The report, in China Daily, goes on to state that human trafficking is a major problem in rural China. “Though fewer cases have been reported in recent years,” China Daily says, “women from poor households are still sold as brides. Moreover, baby boys are abducted so they can be sold to childless couples or couples who want a son rather than a daughter.”

The crime gangs typically kidnap women and children in China’s poor southwest provinces. They then sell the victims to central and eastern China, reducing the chances the victims can return home.

These kinds of reports make you wonder whether any effective response to human trafficking on a global scale can be achieved as long as China continues on its path of building economic self-sufficiency through the use of forced labor and blatant disregard of even the most basic human rights.

Trafficking — the transaction side of modern-day slavery — appears to be nowhere near the depths of perversity.  Trafficking of humans, especially children, is one of the most depraved of crimes.  Drug trafficking, of course, has caused the ruin of untold millions of people but enormous profits for criminal gangs.  And now we have the Dante-like specter of trafficking in human organs.

According to reports, European Union police are seeking factual backup to claims by a Council of Europe investigator that people detained by the Kosovo Liberation Army were shot to death to sell their kidneys on the black market.

The evidence of Chinese enslavement continues to mount with — more often than not — barely a whisper of concern by the Beijing government.

The latest example comes from the remote Xinjiang province, where the manager of a construction materials plant employed a dozen people, including some who are mentally disabled, to grind rocks into powder. The manager is alleged to have denied the workers adequate food, clothing or shelter, and administered regular beatings.  Several of the workers were held in stark conditions for as many as four years.

The manager is on the run, while his wife is being held by police.

There is nothing new or unusual about incidents like this one.  What is newsworthy is that reports about these exploitations are increasingly being reported inside China, causing some consternation but so far little in the way of government action.

Viewed through the lens of morality (at least our cultural understanding of what is moral and what isn’t), most Americans would say the trafficking of human beings for profit and exploitation is a moral outrage.

But that’s not the way other cultures look at this issue; in fact, lawyers defending some defendants in trafficking cases are claiming that, according to the cultural norms of their defendants, trafficking is neither immoral nor a crime.

Which raises a provocative and highly charged question:  can “cultural difference” be used as a defense for certain crimes?

This is the question raised in a recent article from the Associated Press. At the heart of the issue is the thorny philosophical debate that has existed from civilization’s earliest days.  Are values like morality absolute . . . concepts that apply to every situation and provide society with a clear demarcation of right from wrong, or relative — dependent upon widely varying cultural differences in individual circumstances?

The debate is not taking place in a vacuum, the AP article emphasizes.  Increasingly, lawyers for defendants accused of human trafficking are arguing in court that while trafficking may be perceived as an evil in Western cultures, it has an entirely different meaning in other situations. Case in point:

Bukie Adetula, a lawyer representing Togolese immigrant, Akouavi Kpade Afolabi, who was convicted of human trafficking and visa fraud charges at her 2009 federal trial in Newark, argued that what prosecutors called clear-cut signs of modern slavery were considered protective measures in African culture: restricting telephone access, holding the girls’ passports, and forbidding them from going out of the house unaccompanied. Prosecutors alleged Afolabi brought at least 20 girls between the ages of 10 and 19 from West African nations on fraudulent visas to New Jersey, effectively enslaving them and forcing them to work in African hair braiding salons for no pay.

“America is supposed to be a country made up of so many different cultures, so, yes, make the laws, and enforce the laws,” Adetula said. “Do not make different sets of laws for different people, but look to the interpretations of acts, before you say: ‘Oh, it’s an offensive act, it’s against the law, it amounts to human slavery.”

Prosecutors, not surprisingly, reject the cultural difference argument. “We don’t want to water down our rule of law,” said Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, who argues that cultural defenses, in most cases, shouldn’t be considered mitigating factors.

“There are some cultures where fathers kill their daughters because they get involved with a man,” Scheidegger said. “That would not be exonerating at all in my view — that’s a crime and it should be punished as a crime — and punished the same as anyone else who commits that crime.”

As trafficking prosecutions involving people from widely divergent cultural backgrounds increase, it will be interesting to see whether defendants will use the cultural difference argument, and whether judges and juries will acknowledge law’s relativity — or its absolute distinction of good versus evil and right from wrong.