Over the last five months, many reports and statements have alerted us about a possible rise in human trafficking during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. As we discussed this in some detail in a webinar hosted by the ILO last week and had released a statement on the topic earlier this year, I thought of doing a companion piece to my last week’s blog. My intention in going back to the same theme is to start an honest discussion with like-minded colleagues so that together we can take steps to turn this challenging time into a transformative one.
Some of the reports that talk about the possibility of a rise in trafficking cases during and after COVID-19 are very nuanced and cautious. They often start with disclaimers that it will not be possible at this stage to assess the impact of the pandemic on human trafficking. The authors go on to share data on the disruptions in assistance measures to trafficked persons during lockdown periods, inadequate healthcare for victims and caregivers in shelters, challenges of online counselling and delay in court proceedings and repatriation plans. These reports also detail the multiple vulnerabilities faced by migrant workers and those in the informal economy and argue that the impending global economic downturn will lessen people’s capacity to resist exploitation, including human trafficking.
Many statements, on the other hand, do not see any need to explain their claims, they just state that the pandemic will definitely result in a large number of people being trafficked. Some authors refer to specific groups of people such as children and migrant workers or people on a certain route such as the North Africa and Europe migration corridor. A few reports mention both trafficking and smuggling while others talk about trafficking and modern slavery. There are statements that elaborate on the similarity between COVID-19 and human trafficking. Some even go a step further and declare that human trafficking is the pandemic.
It was early 2000. My colleagues from GAATW International Secretariat and I were in a small village in Battambang province of Cambodia. With us were colleagues from Cambodia Women’s Development Agency (CWDA), one of our member organisations from the country. Our Feminist Participatory Action Research project focussing on Cambodia and Vietnam had reached its ‘Action’ phase and the community researchers were taking us to meet some of the trafficked women who participated in the research. One of the ‘Actions’ was providing ‘Assistance’ to trafficked women. Most of the women had chosen to start small businesses and a few had opted to return to school. The women we spoke to were enthusiastic and hopeful that their future life would be better than what they had experienced in the past. They talked about their fear and excitement about returning to school as older students. They discussed the challenges of running a little noodle shop or a small salon in their locality and how they must be careful about family using up all their profits.
One young woman, let’s call her Kanya, was the most talkative person in the group. She was overjoyed about having been able to return to school. She was happy that she looked younger than her real age and did not attract much curiosity from her younger classmates. Kanya tried out her few sentences in English on me and was thrilled when she understood my reply. When the meeting finished, she insisted that we should visit her family. Her house was on our way back to Battambang so we agreed to drop by. As our car stopped near Kanya’s house and we went down along with her, a small crowd started to form in the lane. All eyes were on us. A group of people, mostly young girls and some boys, followed us as we walked towards her house. They were asking questions to Kanya and looking at us. The crowd stayed on for the entire half hour or more that we were at Kanya’s place talking to her parents. Her mother told us how keen Kanya had always been about her education, how it was lack of money that had forced her to discontinue her studies and how grateful they were about the support she was receiving from ‘the project.’ She also said that she was worried about Kanya not earning anything because she was back in school.
On the way back I asked our Khmer colleagues if the young girls who were crowding around Kanya’s house were going to school. ‘Most of them would not have had any schooling and others might have dropped out. Many must be working to contribute to the family income,’ I was told. Coming from India, this was not a new scenario for me. What was new was education support as victim assistance. I was new to anti-trafficking work, new to the NGO world and not familiar with these action steps. ‘What happens to those who are not trafficked? There must be many Kanyas among those children and they must be wondering how and why she got the support to study while they did not. How long can this project support her education? Is it not the state’s responsibility to ensure education for all children? Her mother is already worried about the loss of income because of her return to school. What if she is forced to pull her out of school? Are there other NGOs advocating for the right to education for all?’ I went on and on. My colleagues understood my concerns. In fact, they also had very similar worries. We were convinced that the assistance that may come to a trafficked person is by its very nature temporary. If it reaches the person at the right time, it will have some positive impact but victim assistance alone is not enough and it certainly cannot replace the state’s responsibilities towards its citizens.
Jennifer Suchland, Associate Professor, Ohio State University, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., @mightykale
What is the relationship between policing, state violence and anti-trafficking? That is the question we should double-down on at this historical moment, as global outrage and protesting demand justice for the Black lives killed by racist police. There is a deep and serious connection between anti-trafficking strategies and systems of oppression and violence endemic to policing, border control, prisons, detention centers, and surveillance. These systems are sources of violence that remain at the center of the anti-trafficking apparatus because human trafficking is primarily understood and approached as a problem of criminal justice. While countless activists and scholars have exposed these connections, the most dominant approaches to anti-trafficking still actively align or are complicit with systems of injustice such over-policing, deportation, and mass incarceration.
At this moment, some anti-trafficking organizations and advocates have denounced racism but have not taken a hard look at how their work may implicitly support racist, anti-migrant, heteropatriarchal policing. Playing on the widespread public sympathy for “modern day slavery,” anti-trafficking advocates often validate and reinforce policing and criminal justice institutions. For example, in my local context of Columbus, Ohio, Mayor Andrew Ginther highlighted the Police and Community Together Team (PACT), a special force created to address human trafficking, as the main positive example of community policing in his first public response to the mass protesting against police violence here. PACT was created in 2018 when the previous vice squad was disbanded in the wake of the police killing of Donna Dalton, a 23-year-old white mother of two who was murdered by police. Vice Squad Officer Andrew Mitchell detained Dalton on the pretense of picking her up for solicitation. Instead, he forced her to have sex to gain her freedom. In self-defense, Dalton stabbed Mitchell in the hand for which Mitchell fatally shot her three times. Mitchell was already under FBI investigation for kidnapping and had at least eight complaints of misconduct since 2016.
The Covid-19 pandemic has hit people engaged with sex work in Norway extremely hard both due to the lack of income and other financial problems, as well as the shutting down of health and social services for people selling sex. Whilst the government has established and provided crisis support for industry, businesses, workers, freelancers, self-employed people and so on, sex workers have not been offered any help. Except for the offer from some municipalities to cover their expenses to leave the country.
In the last months, PION has established a crisis fund helping sex workers with money for food and basic needs while the health and social service providers support those who are in need with food and other help via digital contacts.
In addition, sex workers must deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in an already hostile and repressive political environment caused by the increasing criminalisation and conflation of sex work, migration and human trafficking in the first decade of 2000 which led to the ban on purchasing sex in 2009.
In February, GAATW organised a meeting ‘Women, work & migration: community-led initiatives in Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha’. It took place in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, with representatives from seven civil society organisations that work with women and marginalised communities in the three states. The purpose was to discuss and understand the structural factors that cause the inter-state labour migration of women from these three origin states.
The discussions were focussed on developing a holistic approach to human trafficking and labour migration issues through community-led initiatives. The aim of this work is not to stop the workers from migrating, but instead to identify the structural drivers pushing them to migrate and the ways in which we can empower local communities and create better livelihood options for them. With a strong community work and engagement with the workers, the aim is to improve the economic conditions of the community, for example, by focussing on the implementation of government schemes and programmes on livelihood generation, education, health care, child care etc. The community work should ensure better linkages between different government schemes for empowerment of local communities and especially women workers.
At the meeting, participants emphasised that the aim of our work is to strengthen community-level engagements with the marginalised communities, as well as with adolescent girls and women. But in this process, it is equally important to build the capacities of community workers as they are crucial in strengthening the community-level work: first, because they identify the local issues that are important to the women and second, because they will play an active role in addressing these issues later on.
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Over the last five months, many reports and statements have alerted us about a possible rise in human trafficking during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. As we discussed this in some detail in a webinar hosted by the ILO last week and had released a statement on the topic earlier this year, I thought of doing a companion piece to my last week’s blog. My intention in going back to the same theme is to start an honest discussion with like-minded colleagues so that together we can take steps to turn this challenging time into a transformative one.
