For the first in our series we will screen The Trap, a film that explores how prisons and jails have become a recruiting ground for human traffickers in the States, taking incarcerated women into pimp-controlled prostitution. The film will serve as a platform to open up to a discussion on the phenomenon in the US as well as sex trafficking testimonies from the UK.
For the past 18 months, The Guardian has been investigating the role of the criminal justice system in feeding vulnerable women into America’s thriving domestic sex trafficking industry. With unique access in Florida, Massachusetts, and Chicago, the film follows the stories of women caught in the trap of criminal exploitation and incarceration and those trying to stop some of America’s most vulnerable women from falling under the control of human traffickers. Including encounters in Texas with convicted human traffickers and correctional officers who expose the fault lines that are allowing women to be released from prison straight into the arms of pimps and sex-buyers.
Directed and produced by: Annie Kelly and Mei-Ling McNamara
Director of photography: Alex Healey
Editor: Agnieszka Liggett
Executive producer Laurence Topham
Run Time: 30 mins
Chair
Juliana Ruhfus is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and interactive producer. She currently works as the the senior reporter for Al Jazeera English’s “People & Power” strand. Juliana joined Al Jazeera English in early 2006 and was part of the team that launched and defined the new channel and the People & Power strand in particular. In November that year her film about Liberian ex-combatants was chosen to introduce the channel’s programming content the day the channel went on air. Nearly 40 films later she has gone undercover in Turkmenistan and in Cambodian orphanages, produced the five part “Corporations on Trial” series, and her two-part investigation into the trafficking of Nigerian women for the Italian sex-trade is one of the most-watched People & Power episodes ever. In 2013 Juliana was named as one of the top 100 journalists covering armed violence by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV).
Speakers
Annie Kelly is a journalist, editor and filmmaker reporting on human rights, global development and social affairs for The Guardian and The Observer. She is also the editor of the Guardian’s multi-award winningModern Slavery in Focus series.
Dorcas Erskine was National Coordinator of the Poppy Project and prior to that the Director of Policy, Advocacy and Programmes at ActionAid. Her background is in working as a specialist on preventing and supporting women who have experienced violence, most recently in the Middle East. She started her career in the UK parliament and in corporate firms before joining the non-profit sector. Amongst other organisations, she worked with ActionAid Tanzania, the International Rescue Committee and a charity supporting female victims of trafficking.
Hazel Thompson is an award-winning British photojournalist. In the last decade, she has taken up assignments worldwide in over 40 countries for media organisations such as The New York Times, ABC News, Stern Magazine, Vogue, FIVE News, The Sunday Times, Observer Magazine, Le Monde 2 and Politiken. Her book ‘Taken’ is a photo documentary published in 2014 documenting Hazel’s life’s work, to investigate and expose the disturbing truth around India’s sub-culture of sex trafficking. Hazel immersed herself into Mumbai’s sex trade since 2002, and during this time she spent over 6 months living in Kamathipura, gaining unprecedented access into the second largest sex district in Asia. The result is an extraordinary glimpse into the secrets of Mumbai’s red light that reveals the moving real-life stories of girls tricked, trafficked and sold into 21st century sex slavery.
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“Sometimes they don’t even know where here is.”
In the build up to the Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust Women Conference, on Monday 27 October the Frontline Club hosted a debate on modern day slavery and human trafficking chaired by Prabha Kotiswaran, senior lecturer in Law at King’s College London and advisor to the ILO-DFID Anti-Trafficking Project.
Annie Kelly, a journalist working on The Guardian’s Modern-day Slavery in Focus Project, laid out some of the key drivers and structural causes behind human trafficking and slavery in the 21st century.
“We are very used to reporting on slavery as individual stories . . . but it is a $150 billion industry affecting, conservatively, 21 million people [ILO estimate] in all forms of modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking,” she said.
It is through these chains of exploitation that people are driven into situations of vulnerability. Through very modern forms: debt bondage and forced labour slavery has become “the bedrock of society, which pervades every corner and every aspect of our lives. Every commodity you use, every component in your phone, every place you travel to will have some link to modern slavery”.
“What has affected me,” Kelly said, “is just how effective a business model modern slavery and trafficking is at the moment, [and how it has evolved] from a high-cost, slow recruitment model to a very lost-cost, fast recruitment business. You would struggle to find another business out there that would give you the same return on investment.”
Kelly compared it to the global arms and drugs trade, explaining that whereas those deliver a one-time use product, with human trafficking you can reuse someone over and over again.
Modern-day slavery isn't just an issue of criminal justice, it's about people and what we value @frontlineclub
— WeAreTearfund (@WeAreTearfund) October 27, 2014
Importantly, she stressed that modern exploitation is not just in the buying and selling of people.
“The visible shackles you had 300 years ago have been replaced by far more subtle and invisible forms, such as economic exploitation. . . . Debt is a huge driver of forced labour, trapping millions of people across the world who feel they are unable to leave the work place.”
Monique Villa, CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, marked corruption as “the grease that moves everything” and spoke of the need for banks and NGOs to work together to implement ways of tracking and monitoring financial transactions to combat the internationalisation of the slave trade.
While the abolition of slavery in law was ultimately successful, Klara Skrivankova, from Anti-Slavery International, said that it had failed to solve the root problem – merely driving it underground. “While in most cases it is not the states who are the active organisers of slavery and forced labour . . . its now mainly private actors.”
“It’s a big business”, she said, but one which is able to exploit gaps in policy and corruption.
“In the UK we have laws against trafficking, we have laws against slavery and yet we still see every year thousands becoming victims of exploitation,” Skrivankova said. Yet despite deficiencies in the law the major problem still lies in perception: “People still think slavery is an issue of history.”
It is the daily consumption of goods and services which ensures a market reliant on the victims of modern slavery. “It is not something far away but something that touches our lives everyday.”
While emphasising the need for legislation and for governments to take the lead, Skrivankova also warned that the provisions within, for example, the UK Modern-Day Slavery Bill, failed to adequately protect victims, provide the support they need and would be unlikely to increase prosecutions.
Sam Whyte, head of policy and advocacy at UNICEF UK, was quick to highlight the importance within these draft legal provisions to protect victims and especially children.
What became apparent during the discussion was the enormous gap between the estimated 30 million slaves throughout the world and the 7,000 prosecutions that the US State Department says take place every year against traffickers.
“It is just extraordinary – the gap between problem and response,” said Kotiswaran. On one level is it’s a definitional issue: how these people, be they women who are sex trafficked, migrant domestic workers or children, are met with institutional apathy and states of denial.
Kelly and Villa challenged corporations to take the lead, either through legislative coercion or pressure from consumers, to perform a form of human rights due diligence and investigate supply chain exploitation, corrupt middle men, levels of debt bondage and third-party recruitment:
“Thirty years ago, most companies in the world started to outsource massively to the developing world without any knowledge of who was in the supply chain.”
Yet corporations are beginning to realise that when these supply chains are exposed “it can damage their brand in a matter of seconds”.
While agreeing with the need for corporations to prove that their supply chains are clean, Kelly countered that unless there is someone or some body holding people to account, the money being made by trafficking is just too high for any meaningful change to take place.
'Consumers need to be aware but it ultimately coming down to government and law' @frontlineclub #slavery
— Emma Moseley (@Emmam1507) October 27, 2014
For Skrivankova, the biggest block to change is a lack of political will:
“In the UK modern slavery is now a hot political topic. There are political points being scored on modern slavery but actually if you look in reality what is actually being done, how much money is being spend and how much difference a law will make the effect is minimal.”
Whether it is a lack of political will, an unwillingness of consumers to act, the inability or ineffectiveness of mass organisation or a general unawareness of the problem all agreed that the ultimate goal of eradicating slavery was achievable.
“It is an issue of shedding light . . . of informing,” said Villar. “The thing is – you have to open your eyes. Ultimately it is up to the consumer to ask the question. We can task the government to legislate but you get very quick actions by corporations and your can expect very big decisions by the consumers. Just think – 30 million, maybe 40 million is nothing compared to the dimension of humanity. The abolitionists 150 years ago could do it, so why can’t we?”
The Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust Women Conference takes place between 17th-19th November.
You can watch and listen to the event here:
, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
]]>Desperate for a better life, men, women and children risk perilous journeys for the promise of prosperity in the UK, Europe or America. Those who manage to reach their destination will often find themselves sold into a life of sexual exploitation, forced labour, street crime and domestic servitude.
Trafficking affects every continent and every country, and yet we are often unaware that it is happening all around us.
Ahead of the Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust Women conference, at which this subject will be discussed extensively, we will be bringing together a panel of experts to examine how we can tackle the problem of human trafficking. They will be discussing the scale of the problem and the action that needs to be taken to make slavery a thing of the past.
Chaired by Prabha Kotiswaran is senior lecturer in Law at King’s College London. She practiced law for four years at the New York law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton. She is on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and on the Advisory Board of an ILO-DFID anti-trafficking Project, Work in Freedom.
The panel:
Annie Kelly writes on global development, human rights and social affairs for The Guardian and Observer. She is currently working on The Guardian‘s Modern-day slavery in focus project.
Monique Villa is a journalist, business leader and advocate for women’s rights. She is the CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Klara Skrivankova is an expert on human trafficking and forced labour in the UK and internationally. She is Europe programme and advocacy coordinator at Anti-Slavery International.
Sam Whyte is head of policy and advocacy at UNICEF UK. She is leading the development of public policy and cross-organisational advocacy strategy on UK children’s issues, currently focusing on child trafficking, migrant children, and children’s human rights.
Picture: Reuters
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