At the root of the problem of human trafficking is the feminization of poverty
If U.S. estimates are correct, we may be reaching the point when as many people worldwide have been enslaved since the fall of communism as were shipped from Africa to Europe and the Americas. Some estimates put the number of Africans “trafficked” over 450 years at 12 million; a U.S. government estimate suggests that--worldwide--roughly 800,000 to 900,000 people a year are now trafficked across international borders, to become laborers, prostitutes, beggars, and organ donors.
Whatever the (in)accuracy of these estimates, the dimensions of the trade are staggering. But while in Europe asylum policy is always a headline news issue--as it was this week at the EU’s summit in Thessaloniki--the issue of human trafficking is still relegated mainly to features.
To make the suffering of victims news, rather than merely material for features on human misery, we need a government or two that is willing to treat the issue as a priority. Fortunately, the United States seems to be taking on the role.
The United States, which began three years ago to produce an annual report called “Trafficking in Persons” partly to shame governments into action, believes its pressure is forcing change. Ten countries received a better rating this year, including Armenia, Belarus, Russia, and Tajikistan.
This year it is threatening to add penalties to shame, by sanctioning countries that fail to comply with “minimum standards.” It is an important gesture. Similarly, its promise to focus more on the demand side of the business, such as sex tourism, could help.
So too could the examples that it cites of how to break the “supply chain”--on how to spot and capture traffickers and how to break their links with local officials.
Many of these efforts to break the supply chain, though, require the cooperation of victims and--despite a “minimum standard” that calls on governments to protect victims, treat them as victims rather than criminals, and provide them “with legal alternatives to their removal to countries where they would face retribution or hardship”--many Western countries have policies that effectively discourage victims from coming forward.
A woman who escapes her enforced prostitution usually faces the risk of deportation, either immediately--if they do not testify in court--or once they are no longer of help to the police. As a discussion paper of the European Commission put it, victims should be given residence for only as long “as the victim's presence is useful.” Once returned home, they face precisely the retribution and hardship that the report warns of. Most of the countries that “fully comply” with Washington’s minimum standards therefore seem to fall short in a critical area.
This policy of enforced return discourages victims. And by discouraging victims, governments reduce the chances of stopping traffickers and slowing the flow of “white meat.”
If victims are to speak out, hope of a new life needs to be offered. That is the approach adopted in 1999 by the Italians, who offer shelter, protection, residency permits, schooling, job training, and employment to victims, even if they ultimately do not give witness or are not called on to do so. Only Belgium and the Netherlands offer similar programs.
At the opposite end of the EU’s spectrum is Greece. In what is a national disgrace and also an indictment of the EU, Greece ranks alongside Kazakhstan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Uzbekistan in the worst tier of countries, those “whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.&rdquo ; No one should think that being a member of the EU automatically brings an improvement in attitudes or policies.
Another way of putting this is simply that we should to be humane: These women (and men) deserve asylum on humanitarian grounds. These are, after all, people who have suffered rape and other forms of mental torture and physical brutality.
But if there is one single way to reduce the flow of human traffic, it lies in the answer to the question why, in the post-communist world, women still take the risk of answering adverts for “waitresses,” “nannies,” “dancers,” and “models.”
Perhaps there are still girls and young women in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union who are simply unaware of the risks even a decade after this problem exploded. The United States should go beyond making education a “minimum standard.” It--and, of course, the EU--should step up efforts at public education.
But by now, hopefully, most women are aware that they are taking a risk. Why, knowing the risks, do they still gamble with their lives? Perhaps the key explanation, apart from the general desire for money and the allures of the West, is that women are among the biggest losers in the post-communist transition. There has been, as the experts call it, a “feminization of poverty.”
After the Soviet bloc’s revolutions of 1989 and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, women were the first to be laid off, rapidly accounting, for example, for two-thirds of Russia’s unemployed. For them and the girls who have become women over the past 12 years, the chances of a modest income and a degree of independence have fallen. In particular, poverty in rural regions--such as Moldova, one of the principal “source” countries--has become crushing. Add to that the frequently pitiful position of women in local communities (according to a women’s rights group in Ukraine quoted by the Economist, 30 percent of women in Ukrainian villages have been raped) and the desire to escape can be overwhelming.
If women’s willingness to take risks is to fall, the position of women in the countries most affected should be placed at the top of the human-trafficking agenda--and, more broadly, at the top of the agenda for aid to countries on the other side of the “Brussels curtain.”
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