Introduction

A Gallup poll conducted in 2012 reported just under a third of the United States population drink at least one cup of coffee on an average day, while regular coffee drinkers reported drinking just under three cups of coffee on an average day. Looking back, these numbers have changed negligibly from 1999 to 2012. About a quarter of the people polled considered themselves to be addicted to coffee, but only about a tenth of those polled reported wanting to cut back on their coffee consumption.

From these statistics, it is clear coffee is a major part of US culture, but like many other commodities Americans consume, we do not consider where the coffee we drink daily comes from. Some of the countries that produce the coffee we consume regularly include: Colombia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Yemen, Indonesia, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and within the US, Hawaii. Continue reading Human Trafficking in Context: Coffee Production →

In this blog post, I want to discuss human trafficking, specifically labor trafficking, in the context of mega sporting events and especially the Olympics. International sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup require a lot construction of buildings and stadiums in relatively short amounts of time. For example, when a city hosts the Olympic Games, an entire village is created for spectators and athletes to enjoy their time there. These projects requires hours upon hours of work, and many workers. Because of the heightened need for workers in a short time frame, labor trafficking has become a major avenue for getting these workers. Unfortunately, this often gets overlooked by the focus on sex trafficking. We have heard countless stories and seen articles about how things like the Super Bowl and the Arnold Classic create a high demand for sex trafficking, and while this may be true, the reality is that labor trafficking is also highly prevalent in these types of situations and is most often not talked about. It is a problem that must no longer go on hiding underneath the attention of sex trafficking.

Continue reading Human Trafficking and Forced Labor in the Context of the Olympics and Major Sporting Events →

In December 2014, authorities found ten Guatemalan migrants, eight of whom were minors, living in dilapidated, unsanitary trailers in Marion, Ohio.¹ The children had been smuggled into the United States, some of them lured by the promise of education.² However, after entering into US custody, the victims soon found themselves living in squalor and working in forced-labor conditions at Trillium Farms, one of the United States’ largest egg producers.²

The victims were forced to live in substandard trailers, “in order to keep the victims under the Defendants’ control, to isolate them from others, and to force them to pay more money… in the form of rent, in addition to their smuggling debts,” which, for some of the victims, were secured by the retention of deeds to their parents’ properties in Guatemala.² Threatened with violence, including harm to their families, the victims were forced to perform physically-demanding labor for twelve hours per day, six or seven days a week.² They were made to surrender their paychecks, receiving only small amounts of money for food and other needs.² According to the federal criminal indictment, “the Defendants used a combination of threats, humiliation, deprivation, financial coercion, debt manipulation, and monitoring to establish a pattern of domination and control over the victims, to create a climate of a fear and helplessness that would compel their compliance with the conspirators’ orders, and to isolate them from anyone who might intervene to protect them from the conspirators and expose the conspirators’ unlawful acts.”²

Continue reading Failed by the Government: Guatemalan Minors Placed into Custody of Traffickers →

A Brief Introduction

The problem of human trafficking is now of major global concern.  Immense resources, at national and international levels, are expended to research and combat human trafficking.¹  However, it was not always the case that human trafficking was considered such a priority.  The story of how human trafficking gained such widespread attention is intimately tied to how human trafficking is now legally defined.  To understand this connection, there are several legal doctrines to understand.

White Slavery and Anti-Vice Crusades

Newspaper clip from 1910, Chicago (open source)

In the mid-19th century, the concept  of “white slavery” emerged to articulate a concern for women and a disdain for sexual commerce.  In both the United States and Britain, anti-vice vigilance groups raised public consciousness about “public women” who were seen as victims of male domination and their corrupt morals. For excellent research on U.S. anti-vice politics, and the role of the 1910 Mann Act in regulating women and migrants, see Jessica Pliley’s excellent book Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Harvard UP).  These concerns for vice were ultimately codified in the 1910 International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, a document of the League of Nations.

The underlying concerns of the convention grew out of domestic (national) policies aimed at regulating vice (sexual commerce) and a desire to create government coordination in the event of foreign women appearing in commercial sex.  The document states:

“Each of the Contracting Governments undertakes to establish or name some authority charged with the co-ordination of all information relative to the procuring of women or girls for immoral purposes abroad … Each of the Governments undertakes to have a watch kept, especially in railway stations, ports of embarkation , and en route, for persons in charge of women and girls destined for an immoral life.”

Significantly, in 1921 the League of Nations revises the convention, named the International Convention on the Traffic in Women and Children.  This document brought two important changes to legal doctrine.  First, “white slavery” was renamed the “traffic in women” so that all women regardless of race or ethnicity could be seen as possible victims.  Second, the term “traffic” signified the importance of women’s movement across borders, and thus shifted focus on “trafficking” from a domestic to international issue.²

Continue reading Human Trafficking Law →