Category: Featured

When considering modern day slavery, we are most likely to cite victims of sex trafficking, domestic servitude and forced labour: those who, under false pretences of job opportunities or threats of violence, are imported from their country of origin and made to work for their employers for no wage, often living in appalling conditions and experiencing abuse, malnourishment, working for over 12 hours a day. However, what is not often considered is the existence of coerced, exploitative labour within this country of vulnerable citizens, both immigrants and nationals.

The most recent recession led to a huge increase in cases of homelessness, a stretching of soup kitchen and safe house resources, many of those sleeping rough suffering from alcohol and drug addictions. The abundance of vulnerable individuals marginalised from society provides easy pickings for those seeking to exploit. Gangs approach the most desperate with a lure of employment, yet after accepting the offer, workers are coerced into 5am to 11pm shifts for as little as £2-£3 per day. Rather than a gateway out of poverty, such exploitation feeds a vicious cycle: they are homeless because they are exploited, and exploited because they are homeless.

These gangs reportedly target open soup kitchens as well as penetrating indoor food banks, pretending to be homeless in order to gain access to potential victims. Whilst these gangs often work independently for their own ends, many make up ‘recruitmen
t agencies’, supplying workers to larger construction corporations, big businesses thereby complicit in the extortion.

Last year 511 were exploited in this way, however this is a gross underestimate. The new draft of the Slavery Bill aims to reduce evidential burdens with clauses on human trafficking for exploitation as well as slavery, servitude and forced labour. Whilst this may help those victims of forced labour, it will mean nothing for those coerced by the gangs into cheap labour. As it is legally perceived as consensual employment, such extortion will remain particularly hard to prosecute; those destitute are perceived to have ‘chosen’ to be exploited. The gangs and ‘recruitment agencies’ thereby rely on such legal impunity.

Exploitative labour is not just as a problem for the road workers of Jharkhand, the migrant construction workers in Saudi Arabia or the sweatshop workers of China, but as a global problem for the developed and developing world. And for the solution to an international problem, we need an international reaction.

Bronte Philips

Throughout time, across continents and cultures, there has been no crime more greatly persecuted than the offense of being born female. In the name of honour, family, and religion, their most basic rights are habitually abused, the women themselves a matter of property. International women’s day this Saturday provides a chance to shout for those who have no voice.

Nothing on a national level compares to the global scale of violence against women, which the organisation UN women calls “pandemic”. In many countries, women are routinely denied not only the right to education and healthcare, but the right to feel safe, valued and unique, recent studies revealing that 54% of children are not in school – and over 64 million are child brides, more than the total UK population. Female genital mutilation affects 140 million, a figure thought to explain why pregnancy complications are the main causes of death amongst 15-19 year olds.

This year, International Women’s Week calls for change in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where UN forces have failed in protecting women from rape as a weapon of war even within refugee camps. They demand support for women in Egypt who have seen a rise in gender-targeted assault, including highly invasive “virginity tests”. They call for women’s rights in Afghanistan, where honour-killing and self-immolation of girls as young as 14 are frequent consequences of child marriage, the withdrawal of UN troops threatening to worsen the situation.

Yet there are many issues which will not be drawn attention to: women are the greatest casualties of poverty, with 10% of Nepalese (many in their 20s) suffering from uterine prolepsis caused by early child birth and carrying heavy loads. India’s degrading attitudes towards women boosts a thriving sex industry, with 20,000 sex workers working in Kamathipura, many trafficked children – after all, girls under 16 charge four times the price. One woman is raped in India every seven seconds – and these are the statistics we know about.

Those who speak out for women’s rights face even greater risks of persecution. This does not just include the Malalas, the politicians, the journalists, but those who deal with women daily as part of their career – teachers, health and security workers. In Amnesty’s report on Afghan women, a gynaecologist told of how her son had been shot because his mother helped rape victims. Yet even in the most dangerous environments, women’s rights groups provide support and hope for a better future. Despite assassinations of group members, ‘Women for Afghan Women’ has helped more than 8,000 women since 2007. Such movements are lighting candles for women of other communities, creating their own counter-epidemics. The resistance is contagious.

As an international community, we cannot continue to support an environment where women’s issues can remain silent. There is a difference between what is culturally relative and what constitutes the systematic abuse of human rights. Without imposing any ‘western’ priority, we must support the women looking to change their society – from the inside out. They need our voice, your voice.

Bronte Philips

Under the label of ‘human trafficking’, modern day slavery is easy to sanitise. Whilst now not endorsed by governments, the practice of human trafficking continues to spread rapidly on a global scale, operating effectively under the streets, under immigration controls and under communities, affecting countries of deportation, transit and destination. But modern day slavery isn’t based on attitudes towards gender or race. It exists and grows for the same reasons that any other business exists: supply and demand. Where there continues to be a demand for cheap labour, sex slaves and domestic workers, and a large supply of vulnerable individuals, there will be those who seek to benefit from the gap in the market.

Human trafficking is the largest growing illicit business and, according to ILO (International Labour Organistation) estimates, the second largest source of illegal income worldwide, exceeded only by drugs trafficking.

Amnesty International defines human trafficking as “the possession of people by improper means, such as force, threat or deception, for the purpose of exploiting them”, improper means defined by UN Protocol as anything from “violent coercion… abduction… fraud… [or] deception”. Human trafficking covers many forms of exploitation, from sex work (including prostitution of minors) to enforced/domestic labour, and even the non-consensual removal of human organs.

There are many instances where victims are forcibly trafficked, abducted, or else threatened by torture or violence against their family; indeed, 23% of rescued victims last year were children. However, the far greyer area of human trafficking occurs when consent is engineered. According to an Amnesty report (‘False Promises’), there is an epidemic of what they call “trafficking for forced labour”: poverty-stricken workers, under the illusion of a better life for their families in the ‘promised land’ states of the Gulf or Malaysia, end up working 21 hour days under the threat of sexual abuse, little food and an even smaller salary. Their passports are confiscated, and their loans taken out to buy the one-way ticket to paradise act as metaphysical shackles, effectively enchaining them to a lifetime of labour, misery and anonymity. Equally, women promised careers as dancers or even university education become sex workers in the red light district of Amsterdam or prostitutes in British brothels.

There an estimated 27 million adults and 13 million children around the world today (the total population of Argentina) who are victims of human trafficking. And these are only cases we are aware of – human trafficking will continue to increase in scale as drugs traffickers turn to human trafficking as a higher profit, lower risk enterprise. After all – 15 terrified sex workers are less easy to detect than 15lbs of cocaine.

Yet despite its scale, the crime remains quiet within the media. We are all content to believe that such cases only occur within less-privileged, more densely populated areas of the UK. But slavery isn’t an outdated problem – only last year, a cross-county raid uncovered ring-leaders of a sextrafficking gang operating on the streets of Cambridge, rescuing numerous women taken from south-east Asia.

Amnesty International aims to halt the abuse of human rights caused by human trafficking by putting pressure on governments to prevent the ‘promised land’ illusion, and by aiding groups such as the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, which measures the UK’s involvement within the issue. To support their efforts, the Cambridge Amnesty group meets every Sunday at 5pm at the Gatehouse, Clare College.

Bronte Phillips

originally published by TCS – http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/comment/0031783-easier-to-smuggle-than-cocaine.html

The plight of Afghanistan is one as complex as it is sorrowful. After decades of conflict spanning from Russian invasion, through American proxy war, civil war, Taliban domination and the War on Terror, the state of human rights is as crushed and mangled as the flattened buildings of Kabul. In light of the imminent U.S. withdrawal of troops from the country, concerns for the protection of women’s rights have become increasingly serious.

To promote awareness of the issue, Cambridge Amnesty hosted a film screening of the documentary ‘A View From A Grain of Sand’, directed by Meena Nanji on her second visit Afghanistan with the primary aim of comparing life under Taliban rule to conditions after the regime’s expulsion. It retells the horrors of the great power shifts within Afghani decades of conflict by following three women drastically impacted by the reign of the Taliban: Sharpiray, a teacher in the permanent refugee camp of New Shamsitu, Dr. Rooena, a doctor in the same camp, and Wajia, a member of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), a women’s campaign group for equal rights, education and healthcare.

Under Taliban rule, as the film documents, strict laws such as the banning of women’s activity outside of the home without accompaniment by a ‘mahram’ (close male relative/husband) were enforced with severe punishments in an effort to create their interpretation of an Islamic state. Yet the intent behind Nanji’s lack of censorship of Taliban brutality (including clips of public executions) is not to shock for the sake of being shocking: this is the harsh reality of Afghan life within a country branded the hardest place to be a woman.

And yet the documentary serves a purpose in exposing a context unknown and unimaginable for many: a not-too-distant history of a pre-conflict, pre-Taliban, progressive Afghanistan. Clips of women walking through the lush gardens of Kabul in swinging sixties miniskirts and engaging in lecture debates possess an all-too bitter contrast in comparison to shots from under burqas of women beaten in the street for wearing noisy shoes. The Wahabi Islam of the Taliban on top of years of conflict appears to have completely erased such a liberal identity from Afghani history.

Whilst women’s rights in Afghanistan under the relative protection of UN forces has offered a number of the 80% of Afghan illiterate women aged 15-24 an opportunity to attend school, the artificial installation of such rights by the international community without an accompanying culture shift has caused many activists and an even greater number of Afghani women to fear for their lives and rights after UN withdrawal. Suspicions that Karzai’s fragile government, still permeated by civil war barons, will compromise these rights during the peace process with the Taliban are ever increasing, as quiet reversals in policy occur more and more frequently: cuts in the number of council seats for female representation, and a criminal code redraft protecting perpetrators of domestic violence. This stands without mentioning the increased evidence of a culture of violence on an individual level – a culture including acid attacks, beatings and killings as well as suicide attempts and self-immolation inflicted by the women themselves. And the recent decision to reinstate the punishment of public stoning for adulterers in the redraft of the penal code (article 21 & 23) only provides a sad confirmation of these suspicions: women are not seen as worthy of protection even within the eyes of the government. The spectre of brutal Taliban human rights abuses looms over the Afghan people like a waking nightmare.

Yet the picture ‘A View From a Grain of Sand’ presents is not an altogether hopeless one. Nanji’s direction is closely tied to the efforts of RAWA, within the country itself as well as in the dusty refugee camps now permanent settlements for many Afghanis. Nanji’s protagonists present a powerful image of the grit of Afghan women as they jeopardise their safety in fighting women’s rights abuses.

All of this is, of course, does not mute the degree of tragedy in the failure of the UN exit strategy. However, a less than successful international military intervention and an anti-female sentiment entrenched by decades of conflict does not give the global community a license to ignore the struggles of the Afghan women. Helping end the struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan does not have to involve a grand imposition of Western democratic values; the Amnesty International campaign focuses instead on supporting and protecting those involved in campaigning for women’s rights, and most importantly of late aiding women to get engaged in the peace process. Giving these cries a voice, outside as well as inside Afghanistan, must become a fundamental role for the international community to play in ending the brutal abuses of women’s rights – a vision inherent to ‘A View From a Grain of Sand’, and a role crucial to the Amnesty campaign.

Bronte Phillips

originally published by TCS http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/