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What is human trafficking, and how can we help its victims?

What is human trafficking, and how can we help its victims?
By: 
Mary O'Shaughnessy

“Trafficking” is a sterile-sounding word used to describe an insidious form of modern slavery. Forced prostitution is a supremely poisonous version, and it often infects large sporting events. The Super Bowl, scheduled for February 2 at the Meadowlands – in our diocese – is just that kind of event.

What is human trafficking?

Readers often understand the term “trafficking” to mean only this seizure of intimidated, captive women and children and their entrapment into sex work. Human trafficking is that, but it also encompasses the trafficking of humans of all genders and ages into domestic labor and sweatshop work. It can refer to the transport of people, particularly runaways, within a country as well as across country borders.

Attorney Laura Russell, a member of All Saints', Hoboken and the diocesan Justice Board, has long been active in raising awareness of human trafficking both in her work as Supervising Attorney at The Legal Aid Society and as a deputy to Diocesan Convention and General Convention. Russell points out that the Super Bowl, like the World Cup, draws a huge, predominantly male demographic, and prostitution often follows such large sports events.

Russell explains that trafficking victims are often isolated through shame and fear. Domestic victims, often runaways, are initially enticed by a friendly trafficker who soon turns more abusive than the situation they originally fled. Some international victims are threatened with violence against their families if they should attempt to flee. Victims can be “not welcoming to law enforcement” because of lack of immigration status or other encounters with the law. Trafficking victims are beaten, and subjected to emotional and psychological abuse. Many are humiliated by their entrapment, and some feel shame. They say such things as, “If I had known, I wouldn’t have…” even though they were young adolescents when caught up.

This isolation and fear makes it very difficult to produce hard counts of the number of people affected. The Bureau of Justice Statistics collects data on a biennial basis, and the latest period for which they have a report ended in 2010. The 2,515 cases were just those opened by federal task forces, and so does not begin to cover the local, state, and international efforts to fight trafficking. Whether or not numbers and statistics can be gathered, the human cost in suffering cries out for our attention and assistance. The Polaris Project Polaris Project and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime have estimates and comments on the nature of information gathering. Russell points out that a single trafficking victim “can be sold for years” and over time can reap “thousands of dollars” for the perpetrator.

In 2012, Russell presented a resolution to General Convention’s House of Deputies that called on the Episcopal Church to recommit to protecting and supporting survivors of trafficking. In this, she continued the work started in 2000, when General Convention passed its first resolution directly addressing human trafficking. In Newark, the 2010 Diocesan Convention addressed the issue, with a resolution to use resources gathered by the Women’s Commission across the diocese.

Whether the 2015 General Convention will be able to focus on trafficking is very much an open question, however. As Russell says, the focus will be on the restructuring of the Episcopal Church, and while this inward turn may be critical to our ability to do mission, it may for a time take energy away from this issue. Budget cuts, of course, are part of this.

How can we help victims of human trafficking?

How can congregations and individuals actually put these resolutions into effect? How can we look out for, and help, trafficking victims?

Russell says that it is very difficult for individuals to help one-on-one. Sex trafficking survives and thrives because there is a market, and the market can only be eliminated through changes in culture and attitude. Even finding locations is hard – “Johns don’t want to go to bad neighborhoods,” she points out. So, trafficking is most likely occurring in our own backyard, completely unnoticed.

One project that is in place for the Super Bowl, in concert with area hotels, involves soap. Interfaith and ecumenical groups are working to wrap hotel soaps with wrappers printed with an anti-trafficking hotline number. The event S.O.A.P. up Super Bowl 2014, taking place January 25 and 26, 2014, is one such effort. This is an evolution of a tactic used in early efforts to combat domestic violence: Lipstick tubes had a domestic violence hotline number tucked into them, on the rationale that men don’t look into cosmetic cases. This project is part of an outreach to hotels, which includes training for their staffs on detecting the presence of prostitution and trafficking.

January 11 is Human Trafficking Awareness Day in New Jersey. The NJ Coalition Against Human Trafficking has a downloadable Action Idea Booklet [Word format] which includes a section with ideas and resources specifically for religious communities, ranging from simple efforts to more involved ones. Prayers and other resources for congregations are being posted on the Justice Board page of the diocesan website. During Diocesan Convention, workshops on trafficking will take place so that deputies may gather more information for their congregations.