via CAAI
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
by Mary Ellen Manz
The scourge of trafficking in fellow human beings—once thought to have been eliminated with the end of slavery in the 19th century—has in recent years surfaced in a new form but with a similar goal: the forced use and abuse of others.
Three years ago, members of the Congregations of Religious Women from all over the world responded to a call from the International Organization of Migration alerting them to the ongoing crime of human and sex trafficking, a modern-day form of slavery. Sisters from all over the world, including the Maryknoll Sisters, took up the cause.
Maryknoll Sisters working in Washington and at the United Nations in New York monitor initiatives and legislation to combat the crime, while their colleagues in Asia and Africa work with at-risk women and vulnerable migrant laborers who are most frequently the victims of trafficking.
In Cambodia, Maryknoll Sister Helene O’Sullivan has been working with trafficked women and adolescents for years, helping women and children break free from traffickers and other abusive and violent situations. At the
Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center in Phnom Penh, where she serves, these victims find shelter, medical care, counseling and legal assistance, as well as encouragement and empowerment to begin new lives. The center offers literacy training, vocational training and life skills training to help them accomplish that.
O’Sullivan tells the story of Sina, whose case highlights the horrors some trafficking victims must live.
“When I met Sina, she was wearing a heavy cotton face mask because she had no teeth and her face had sunken in and though only in her 20s she looked 60 or 70 years old. Sina’s teeth had been cruelly yanked out of her mouth with pliers by the brothel owner as a punishment for anything he saw as not obeying him or trying to escape,” O’Sullivan says.
Sina came from one of the poorest provinces of Cambodia where dire poverty causes many teenagers to run away from home hoping to find freedom and a more prosperous life. Little do they realize that there is no way for a young girl to survive on her own.
“Starving and without money, she met a friend who took her to a brothel where Sina had no idea of the nightmare she had fallen into,” O’Sullivan says. “There were eight girls held prisoner and made to use their bodies for sex. If they refused or tried to escape, the punishment was to pull out one of their teeth with pliers, starting with a girl’s back teeth.”
By the time Sina was rescued by the anti-trafficking police unit in Phnom Penh, she had not a tooth left and her mouth was badly torn. After searching the city, O’Sullivan found a dentist with the proper technology to treat Sina. It will be a long, painful ordeal, but when the work is done, Sina will finally be able to remove her mask.
“While we were waiting to meet the dentist with Sina, the counselor from the center said to her, ‘This is the beginning of a new life for you,’ ” says O’Sullivan. “Sina looked at us and nodded.”
Elsewhere, other Maryknoll Sisters reach out to women from different cultures but who face similar dehumanizing fates.
Sister Bibiana Bunuan, a Maryknoll Sister from the Philippines serving in the African nation of Namibia, works to alert people to the dangers to their children.
“What saddens me most is that so many people, old and young, are not aware of trafficking,” Bunuan says. “When I give talks on this social issue, however, and ask participants whether or not they are aware of any missing young people, they do have stories to tell. One teacher told me that parents bring their own school-age children to places that promise them employment, but end up exploiting them.”
In Cambodia, O’Sullivan says, desperately poor parents have been known to bring daughters to brothels and sell them for $150. The girls are then forced to work off the debt and are often heated into working this way for years.
Elsewhere in Asia, Maryknoll Sisters Margaret Lacson and Elizabeth Kato in Japan work with Filipino women who have left their homeland for employment and a better life only to find themselves victims of deceit and abuse.
Many of the women who seek refuge at the Kalakasan Center for migrant women in Kawasaki, where Lacson serves, were brought north to work as “hostesses” in Japan’s “entertainment industry,” often euphemisms for prostitution or gateways to it
.
Lacson, who is also Filipina and speaks to the women in their own language, helps oversee the center, offering crisis intervention, followup counseling and skills training to help women better support themselves.
Yet the crime of trafficking—with its ends of forced labor and forced prostitution—isn’t just in far-off parts of the globe.
According to the U.S. State Department, out of the 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders worldwide each year some 14,500 to 17,500 of those victims are trafficked into the United States from all over Asia, Central and South America and Eastern Europe.
In his letter “21st Century Slavery—the Human Rights Dimension to Trafficking in Human Beings,” Pope John Paul II said human trafficking “constitutes a shocking offense against human dignity and a grave violation of fundamental human rights … in particular the sexual exploitation of women and children.”
So just as human trafficking—the second-largest and fastest-growing criminal industry in the world—is a modern form of slavery, our “global village” of instant multimedia information and global travel makes it a local problem.
Hence, it is no longer excusable for one to say, “I never knew.”
Maryellen Manz MM writes for Maryknoll Magazine.
Info: DVD on human trafficking:
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