What is Human Trafficking?
Human trafficking, in simple terms, is when a person is made into a commodity—bought, transported, and sold as “property.” As if he or she were a shoe—though shoes are more expensive—the person is used at the whim of the ones controlling him or her, abused as they see fit, and often thrown away when of no more use. Control is maintained through coercion, fraud, or force. Human trafficking is the business of slavery. Kevin Bales defines slavery as “a social and economic relationship in which a person is controlled through violence or its threat, paid nothing, and economically exploited.”3
Danielle Bartholic (MA ’09) researched human trafficking in the U.S. and the sociological factors contributing to it as a part of her Communications and Culture degree from Trinity Graduate School. Human trafficking is difficult to deal with because it is well hidden; and so many people prefer not to see. “Slavery is everywhere, a hidden cancer, that metastasized through the trafficking rings made up by pimps, recruiters, and transnational traffickers. Simply put, it is difficult to determine the major centers because victims are always hidden and always moving.”
Human trafficking includes sex trafficking, bonded labor, contract slavery, religious slavery, war slavery/child labor, and domestic servitude. Danielle divided the factors encouraging the trade in humans into three categories: push factors drive people out of their current situation and location; pull factors attract people elsewhere; and enabling factors allow or reinforce the situations in which human trafficking more easily takes place.
Push factors include war and poverty. Traffickers will lure the poor with promises of a good job. Antonio is put to work in a restaurant in San Francisco and never allowed off the premises. Linh becomes the nanny for a Midwestern housewife, but instead of education, she finds long hours with no pay and, all too likely, sexual abuse in one form or another—it is estimated that 70% of trafficking victims are women, and many who are not trafficked specifically for sexual purposes still face sexual abuse.
A factor commonly used by traffickers is familial shame. In cultures where any occurrence of sex outside of marriage brings stigma, traffickers will abduct women, rape them, and then tell them they cannot go home because they will be ostracized. This pushes the women to accept the new situation. Where else can they go?
Pull factors include the demands for the services of slaves, whether sexual or labor-related: factories, farms, and restaurants are common. In America, an unexpected segment are those moms looking for a nanny or housekeeper. As Bartholic notes, one suburban mother in Texas smuggled in a twelve-year-old girl from Mexico, ostensibly intending to give her an education. But it ended in endless work, starvation, and torture.4
Enabling factors include globalization and the ease of modern transportation. Why is Chicago an international hub for trafficking? It is not because those trafficked primarily stay in Chicago. It is because of Midway, O’Hare, and the Port of Chicago.
Continue: What Can Be Done?
3 Kevin Bales, New Slavery: A Reference Handbook, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC-CLIO, 2004), 4.
4 Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter, The Slave Next Door : Human Trafficking and
Slavery in America Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3ff.