You have the day off today because a slave-driver thought the Bahamas was India

Enjoy your ill-gotten holiday.

Massage parlors and sex slavery

Via Texas Monthly:

There are things that Kamchana doesn’t remember. This would include the period, six or so years ago, when she arrived in this country from Thailand and was moved from city to city so often she could not keep the names straight, much less spell or pronounce them. In “Boustons,” “Atanda,” “Mayarmei,” and other cities, the places she worked all looked the same inside and out, with the words “spa” or “massage” in the name and the neon Open signs always on. The front windows were usually blacked out, and there was often an ATM in the tiny lobby, which was furnished with cheap, overstuffed sofas where the women sat, their arms and legs crossed, dressed in lingerie or bikinis, waiting for customers. When the men arrived, their pick for the hour would walk them down a darkened hallway to a dim room with a massage table and soft music playing. In other rooms they’d wash them with warm, soapy water on a table. They’d finish with some variation of a “happy ending,” the massage parlor euphemism for intercourse, oral sex, a hand job, or whatever else the customer might ask for. Kamchana was then in her late thirties, but she looked younger, a fleshy woman with a persuasive smile and, even in the worst of times, an irresistible warmth. Her boss christened her “Kiki,” because her Thai name was too hard for Americans to remember.

The customers rarely seemed to grasp that the women were captives. They didn’t see the other rooms: the kitchen in the back with the overflowing ashtrays, the overloaded electrical outlets for the rice cookers and frying pans, the washer-dryers and the security cameras. These so-called spas were as tightly run as maximum-security prisons: Without permission, no one got in—or out. Kamchana (her name and nickname have been changed to protect her identity) shared cramped, windowless bedrooms with women from Korea, China, and Thailand, all her belongings crammed into one small rolling suitcase. Every two weeks she was loaded up and moved to another city, another spa, another room that looked just like the one before it. Like so many of the women on the circuit, she was being held until she paid off the debt of tens of thousands of dollars that she had taken on in exchange for passage to the U.S. They had told her she would be working it off in a restaurant, but the job description had changed once she arrived. “It is like sleeping with your husband, that’s all,” Kamchana’s first boss told her. She mostly worked 12-hour shifts, sold by the hour to men of different colors and creeds, rich and poor, grandfathers, husbands, fathers, sons. Sometimes her shifts lasted 24 hours.

Most people who are aware of the existence of human trafficking think that it happens in faraway places, like war-torn countries in the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, or Eastern Europe. Few can imagine that slaves are brought into the U.S. to work in restaurants, factories, and sexually oriented businesses (SOBs to those in the know). In fact, across the country, tens of thousands of people are being held captive today. Depending on whom you ask, Houston is either the leading trafficking site in the U.S. or very near the top, along with Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York City. There are obvious reasons for this dubious accolade: Houston sits at the center of major highways between Los Angeles and Miami and between the U.S. and Latin America. It has a sprawling international airport and a major international port. It is diverse in a way that allows immigrants to disappear into neighborhoods that are barely policed. It’s also a place with an enormous appetite for and tolerance of commercial sex: From the days of the first oil boom, the city has drawn single men who’ve left smaller towns and poorer countries in search of work and then quick and easy companionship.

Predators in the rubble

The Atlantic’s Nicollette Grams foresees explotation of displaced and orphaned children after the Haitian quake:

When the earthquake struck the impoverished island country last Tuesday afternoon, human traffickers suddenly gained access to a new population of displaced children. With parents dead, government offices demolished, and international aid organizations struggling to meet life-or-death demands, these kidnappers are in a unique position to snatch children with very little interference.

In today’s world, the twin causes of human slavery—poverty and vulnerability—increase exponentially after natural disasters. When the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004, trafficking gangs moved quickly, seizing children and selling them as prostitutes in nearby Malaysia and Jakarta. In 2008, after floods devastated the Indian state of Bihar, groups of children were lured out of relief camps and sold to brothels across the nation.

I’ve seen many such stories up close. For the past three years, I’ve worked in India for International Justice Mission (IJM), a human rights agency with twelve offices around the world. Rescuing victims of slavery and sexual exploitation are our specialties, and natural disasters unfailingly bring us new business. One of my first cases dealt with a widowed mother and her six children who had been trafficked after a drought destroyed their livelihood. A local kiln owner, who was in the business of offering good jobs to drought-affected villagers, had approached them with an opportunity. The desperate widow took the bait and found herself and her children forced into slavery at a brick kiln with no hope of escape. The widow was subjected to violent physical abuse and raped repeatedly by the owner and his cronies.

In Haiti, as in India, human trafficking is a problem at the best of times. Even without the pandemonium unleashed by a 7.0 earthquake, an estimated quarter-million Haitian children are trafficked within the country each year. These slaves, known as restavecs, are typically sold or given away to new families by their own impoverished parents. Physical and sexual abuse is common for restavecs. Many owners use the girls as in-house prostitutes, sending them to live on the street if they become pregnant.

Not all of these trafficked children end up as domestic slaves within Haiti—plenty of others are promised work in the Dominican Republic but are instead sold to work in agricultural fields or brothels across the border. Poor children who escape a life in bondage most often end up in street gangs; if they are fortunate, they may be accepted into overcrowded orphanages.

No new “Dollhouse” this week

It’s been co-opted by some sport thing. But that gives all of you who haven’t been watching (VERY BAD WHY HAVE YOU NOT BEEN WATCHING) the perfect chance to get caught up on Season II, available on Hulu.

But in all seriousness, next week’s episode (airing 10/23) will explicitly address the themes of exploitation and human trafficking which have hencesofar only dealt with through science-fictive allegories. If there’s any dramatic television–at least on the networks–worthy of conversation in this space, it’s Dollhouse.

State Department: Human trafficking on the rise

Via AHN:

The global recession is pushing workers to become more vulnerable to human trafficking, and employers to seek cheaper and/or forced labor. Trafficking, which affects 12.3 million people worldwide, includes forms of involuntary labor that don’t involve the physical transport of victims such as the illegal trade of human organs.

“The last year was marked also by the onset of a global financial crisis, which has raised the specter of increased human trafficking around the world,” the State Department said in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report. “As a result of the crisis, two concurrent trends-a shrinking global demand for labor and a growing supply of workers willing to take ever greater risks for economic opportunities-seem a recipe for increased forced labor cases of migrant workers and women in prostitution.”

I can’t help but wonder if the assertion that the recession is fueling the slave-trade is accurate or not (correlation ≠causation et al). Though it seems likely, other factors might be at play; the widespread of wireless telecommunication technology, for example, might be making existing operations more efficient.