Most of the news media attention to modern-day trafficking and slavery has been on sex trafficking: international sex slavery and tourism, which Nicholas Kristof has so diligently covered; sex trafficking into the U.S., in which women who hoped to work here legitimately were, instead, kept under armed guard and sold in massage parlors, strip clubs, and online; or young American girls lured, coerced, or forced into sex work, whom traffickers shuffle from one U.S. city to another to make it harder for them to escape. And, indeed, sex slavery is a horrifying violation of human dignity.
But the more common form of slavery is for non-sexual forms of labor. The Polaris Project, which runs the U.S. government’s trafficking hotline, estimates that 80 percent of its calls come about other forms of labor trafficking–debt bondage and labor exploitation “by fraud, force, or coercion,” as U.S. law defines trafficking–into industries that include farms, restaurants, construction, landscaping, nail or hair braiding salons, hotels, nannying, and more.
I’m looking into this because, well, I’m just that kind of gal. While I’m working on a longer piece, I thought I’d offer you some extremely interesting databases of trafficking and slavery cases. The first database is the University of Michigan Law School’s Human Trafficking Database. Dip in to find out what might be happening in a restaurant or public construction project near you. The project that runs that database depends on student volunteer labor, so they know it’s not complete, but it’s still fascinating. The second, based on the Michigan database, was more recently begun by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. A lot of the cases in the UNODC database are sex trafficking cases, in part because many governments are generally more willing to prosecute those than the labor cases. Sex traffickers don’t pay taxes. Labor trafficking and slavery, in some countries, undergirds extremely powerful economic sectors.
More on this human rights violation another day. Until then, make good use of this these caches of information on human wrongs.
