Human Trafficking Of The Mentally And Physically Disabled

There are few facets of human trafficking that are more desperately evil than the exploitation of the mentally and physically disabled. It has been a subject that we have touched on at COH before. But since that time there have been numerous documented cases of the trafficking of disabled persons. Whether this is a testament to the added scrutiny from governmental and non-governmental agencies in chronicling the phenomena or it is the rate at which these truly vulnerable people are being exploited, is not clear. What is painfully clear is this is one of the most gut-wrenching, cruel and horrific injustices in the world today.

In the 2012 T.I.P. report the US State Department outlines the issue this way:


"This Report includes recent reports of the abuse of deaf domestic workers in the United Kingdom, addicts forced to labor in fields in the United States, people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities enslaved in Chinese kilns, and persons with developmental disabilities forced to work as peddlers on the streets of India. Persons with disabilities remain one of the groups most at risk of being trafficked. Due to disability-based discrimination and exclusion common in many places, however, governments often ignore this risk factor or fail to make provisions for persons with disabilities as part of anti-trafficking efforts.

The stigma and marginalization of a person with disabilities creates a particular vulnerability. For example, parents who see no hope of jobs or marriage for their disabled children may place those children in exploitative situations with the intent of shedding a “burden” or seeking income. Where schools fail to accommodate students with disabilities, high drop-out rates leave them on the streets and at much higher risk of being trafficked in forced begging or other criminal activities. The commonly held view that persons with disabilities are not sexually active increases the risk of sex trafficking for persons with disabilities, especially disabled women and girls. For example, a Global HIV/AIDS survey conducted by the World Bank and Yale University showed that women and girls with disabilities were assumed to be virgins and thus targeted for forced sex, including by HIV-positive individuals who believed that having sex with a virgin would cure them.

Societal barriers limit the access of persons with disabilities to systems of justice. Lack of training of police, prosecutors, and judges on how to accommodate persons with disabilities (through, for example, sign language interpreters, plain language, and physical access) can leave victims with disabilities unable to provide effective statements and report the abuse they have endured. Laws expressly prohibiting people with disabilities from being witnesses, especially those who are blind, deaf, or have mental or developmental disabilities, leave such victims excluded from processes that should provide them with redress. Even when the justice system is not to blame, societal prejudices that devalue or discount the experiences of persons with disabilities can mean that their evidence is given less weight, and that sentences given to perpetrators may be lower than comparable cases where non-disabled people are the victims. This exclusion of persons with disabilities from the justice system in turn contributes to their being targeted by traffickers, who might assume that such victims will be less likely to raise an alarm or seek help."

*(bold italic print emphasis ours)

In 2011 Newsline online reported "a 20-year-old disabled man Sajad Chadar was rescued by the Khairpur police as he was being kidnapped. Chadar was the victim of a gang involved in the abduction of individuals with disabilities for purposes of trafficking to Iran and other Gulf countries where they are forced into beggary." What police found was over two hundred disabled and child trafficking victims.

 Sajad Chadar, 20, abducted from Pakistan and forced to beg in Iran.

Mujahid Shaikh, a 25-year-old disabled man was also trafficked to Iran, but managed to return to Pakistan. He recounted for police “The kidnappers are ruthless; ...[t]here are hundreds of people with disabilities, including children, living in the custody of Kashmir Jafri in Iran."

The article goes on to state: "Shockingly, often the very people who are ostensibly the caregivers of the handicapped victims are themselves guilty of complicity in their ordeal. There is a standard modus operandus. After a disabled candidate has been identified – usually hailing from an impoverished family – the trafficker will develop a link with his parents or guardian, and entice them to partner with him in a business enterprise involving their son/charge. He offers them money – that too in advance – for their compliance."

In 2009 Chinese authorities arrested 10 men for trafficking 32 individuals with physical disabilities and forcing them to work in brick kilns in the Anhui province. (2010 T.I.P. Report) "The report echoes a major scandal in 2007, when Chinese media found least 1,000 people forced to work as slaves in brick kilns in Shanxi province, following a father''s desperate search for his missing teenage son. Many of the brick kiln slaves were mentally handicapped people, some of whom were so confused they did not know where they had come from, media reported at the time." (DNA)

In Danny Boyle's movie Slumdog Millionaire criminals take homeless children and force them to beg. And to add to the sympathy factor some of the children are forcibly blinded. This fictional account resembles all to closely the reality and embodiment of the philosophy behind the trafficking of persons into forced begging. A child or homeless person may elicit certain sympathies and a few pennies from a stranger but add to that dynamic a disability and the sympathy and spare change grow.

In her book Trafficking for Begging: Old Game, New Name author Iveta Cherneva states that in forced begging situations a handicapped child earns three times more than a healthy child. A survey by the Stop Child Begging Project in Thailand found that disabled children earn as much as 1000 baht a day, as opposed to a healthy child beggar who earns 300 baht a day. Well over 3 times as much.

While forced begging makes up a large percentage of the exploitation the disabled face around the world, sex-trafficking is also a very real, deeply disturbing reality for persons with disabilities. 

In a sex slavery case that U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips called "among the most horrific ever prosecuted". Four Missouri men who paid a fifth man to either watch him torture a mentally disabled woman online or torture her themselves; sexual and physical torture that lasted five years, until one of her abusers induced a heart attack while suffocating and electrically shocking her on Feb. 27, 2009. You can read the full horrific account here. It is deeply disturbing and NOT for the weak at heart. And reveals that the victim was 16 at the time her abuse began.


This March another Missouri man pled guilty to sex trafficking two women into prostitution, including a mentally disabled woman. Federal prosecutors say 26-year-old Carl Mathews of Breckenridge Hills forced the women into sex in the St. Louis area from 2010 through October 2012. Authorities say the mentally disabled woman was forced to sleep and use the bathroom in a closet, and was supplied with little food. The woman was also beaten and set on fire. ( Associated Press)


In a case study from the 2012 T.I.P. report Saeeda, a deaf Pakistani woman, was ten years old when she left Pakistan for Manchester, England for a job as a domestic worker. For nearly a decade, she was abused, raped, and beaten by her employers, a Pakistani couple. Now in her 20s, Saeeda told the courts that she was confined to a cellar and forced to work as a slave.

During the four years that investigative journalist Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his book, "A Crime So Monstrous," he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents and says he is most haunted by an experience in a brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.


UNICEF reports, “[s]ocial beliefs about disability include the fear that disability is associated with evil, witchcraft or infidelity, which serve to entrench the marginalization of disabled people”  As a result, these children wind up in orphanages where they are much more susceptible to violence. Women and girls with disabilities are especially vulnerable to physical and sexual violence which puts them in danger of unplanned pregnancies due to sexual exploitation.

A child who requires assistance with washing, dressing and other intimate care activities may be particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. Perpetrators can include caretakers, attendants, family members, peers or anyone who enjoys a position of trust and power (UNICEF, 2007).

Not only are disabled children dumped off into the system and stripped of their inalienable human rights, but as they grow up they are blacklisted from employment. (UNIAP, 2007).  In Cornell University’s 2007 Disability Status Report, they show that the employment gap between individuals with and without disabilities is 42.8%, in the United States alone (Baker, 2008). This enormous gap in employment exacerbates the vulnerability of poverty that these individuals experience by denying them access to a self-sustaining life with gainful employment. (traffickingproject.org)

Along with superstition, religious pretense has often been used as a justification for exploitation. In India the devadasi are young girls given to the temple of the goddess Yellamma to serve as sex slaves. The disabled fall victim to similar practices of religious exploitation.

"Outside a Muslim shrine in a dusty Pakistani city, a "rat woman" with a tiny head sits on a filthy mattress and takes money from worshipers who cling to an ancient fertility rite.  Nadia, 25, is one of hundreds of young microcephalics -- people born with small skulls and protruding noses and ears because of a genetic mutation -- who can be found on the streets of Gujrat, in central Punjab province.  Officials say many of them have been sold off by their families to begging mafias, who exploit a tradition that the "rat children" are sacred offerings to Shah Daula, the shrine's 17th century Sufi saint.

Nadia, 25, and a microcephalic, seen here in July 2008, sits outside the Shah Daula's shrine in Gujrat, in central Punjab province. Nadia was just a young child when she was dumped at the shrine 20 years ago in the dead of the night. Her parents were never traced. (allvoices.com)

According to local legend, infertile women who pray at Shah Daula's shrine will be granted children, but at a terrible price. The first child will be born microcephalic and must be given to the shrine, or else any further children will have the same deformity.

"Some of these children, the handicapped ones especially, are accompanied by relatives," he told AFP. "But begging gangs also look for poor parents who will sell them because they are a burden to feed and shelter."  Sohail said his department had busted more than 30 gangs across the province involved in exploiting street children, some of which had broken the limbs of children so that they would earn more as beggars." (AFP)

With current refugee crises around the world the disabled find themselves at extreme risk for trafficking. "Migrating may be particularly challenging for a person with a disability. In the context of forced migration, persons with a physical or mental disability may benefit less from early warning systems and may also be more easily disoriented during the process of flight. Assistive devices may be lost or left behind, creating another layer of vulnerability in an already dire situation. In addition, although denying an immigration application solely on grounds of disability (and leaving a disabled person isolated or permanently separated from their group) is a human rights violation , such cases have been recorded in different countries of the world." (The International Organization for Migration)

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As always, from all of us at COH, thank you for being a voice for the voiceless. And when it comes to the most vulnerable among us, the children and the mentally and physically disabled, please let your voice be ever loud, ever clear, and ceaseless in its resolve. This evil must end, and in our lifetime. Please call the National Human Trafficking hotline 1-888-3737-888 if you suspect trafficking. Do not be afraid to ask questions or to speak up if something just doesn't seem right. And in the cases of the disabled remember their ability to communicate or even appreciate the severity and urgency of their situation may be severely inhibited or even totally compromised. 

Human Trafficking In The News 12-09-2012

Stories of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, modern slavery and human rights abuse in the news. Click the bold titles for a link to the complete story. And as always thank you for caring about justice, for being a voice for the voiceless, for not ignoring the great evils of our day and doing something about it. Thank you!

My current home state of Mississippi received an embarrassing and unacceptable "D" in their efforts (or apparently lack there of) in combatting human trafficking. 17 other states failed. See how your state did below. A special thanks to Shared Hope International for their tireless efforts to call the US to accountability bout this crime of crimes.

Shared Hope International has released their 2012 State by State report card grading each state on their commitment and accomplishments in fighting human trafficking within their borders. Follow the link and click on your state to see the grade they received.

Music and entertainment icon MTV is training young people in Southeast Asia to use social media to raise awareness about human trafficking.  It is part of a global campaign to end the practice and event organizers and participants say social media amplifies the message. 

Actress Mira Sorvino (below) on Thursday called upon a crowd of 200 state legislators to take the lead in battling human trafficking, telling them they were on the front lines of the fight against “modern-day slavery” and repeatedly singling out Wyoming as the only state in the country that has failed to tackle the issue.

Friday President Obama signed Senator John Cornyn's Child Protection Act of 2012 into law. The aim is to take a more aggressive stance against sexual exploitation and human trafficking. In a press release from the attorney general's office, Senator Cornyn is quoted as saying, "We need to provide law enforcement with every tool they need to crack down on the most vile criminals ... And protect the innocent young people who fall victim to these heinous crimes."

President Obama today signing into law the Child Protection Act of 2012 (H.R. 6063), a bipartisan, bicameral bill authored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) to better protect children from sexual predators. Chairman Smith, along with other supporters of the bill, joined the President at a signing ceremony at the White House.

From the Washington Times: some visible signs that may be used to help identify victims of human trafficking and questions that law enforcement, medical personnel, school and shelter personnel, and even the general public can use to help to identify victims of human trafficking.  Recognizing that someone has been trafficked can be the first step in saving their life.

And finally, last but not least, a great way for you to turn your passion for justice into the reality of freedom this Holiday Season!!

International Justice Mission's 2012 Gift catalog. For just a few dollars you can help give a child or a whole family the gift of freedom. Please let your generosity match the horror that you feel that these evils can even exist in today's society. Thank you!

The War On Women: Gender Based Violence And Human Trafficking

A young woman fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women since the 1990s. Millions have been killed. In Rwanda, up to half a million women were raped during the 1994 genocide.

According to the U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report: 2007, 80% of transnational trafficking victims are women and girls. This means generations of women systematically eradicated from society through enslavement in the sex industry. Their bodies abused into oblivion, their souls cremated in the fires of lust and greed. Girls as young as seven brutally raped in a sex industry that views females as a commodity with the very youngest girls demanding a premium for their virginity.

(Above) Sreypov Chan, at 7 the Cambodian girl was sold into slavery by her mother and raped as many as 20 times a day. The building behind her where she was enslaved. Read her incredible story here.

Worldwide, one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, had her genitalia mutilated or been abused in some way, most often by someone she knows, including her husband or another family member; one woman in four has been abused during pregnancy. One in 5 women has been raped or the victim of an attempted rape. In many societies women are often held responsible for the violence against them, and in many places laws contain loopholes which allow the perpetrators to act with impunity. In a number of countries, a rapist can go free under the Penal Code if he proposes to marry the victim.

Child victims of Forced Genital Mutilation.

In countries with very little rule of law these percentages spiral upward at a perverse rate. When woman are afraid of violent retribution, when they lack confidence in the ability of of law to protect them, they are often silent, even complicit in the exploitation of their daughters.

A young victim of gender violence. Her burn very intentionally placed.

6 out of 10 of the world's poorest people are women and girls. All over the world women wake well before dawn to go about the day's work, sometimes walking hours in one direction just to procure water for their family. Dark roads and deranged men leave these hard working woman at great danger for violent rape or worse. In the most extreme cases of poverty, families with starving children may feel that selling one daughter to save the lives of the rest of the household is an acceptable act in light of their desperation.

Sudanese women, waking the day, busy with their work, at extreme risk for violence.

Two thirds of all children denied access to school are girls. Illiteracy, ignorance and misinformation about every topic from sex to AIDS leaves girls extremely susceptible to violent exploitation. Not to mention that when girls are educated they feel much less desperate, believing that they have the means within them and the opportunity to rise above societal norms that often view them as property, or at very least, second-class citizens.

Part of the ongoing fight to stop violence against women is the structural transformation that comes from empowering young girls through education. Above, an International Justice Mission worker teaches kids about the dangers they may face and how to avoid them.

Sati, or bride-burnings along with other dowry related deaths, take the lives of as many as 60,000 woman a year in India. A poor girl's parents cannot afford the dowry required by her fiance's parents and so she is immolated or violated in some other gruesome way. There are many misconceptions concerning the practice of Sati and even a bit of romanticism involving Hindu mythology, but call it what you will, the reality is the number of dowry deaths are on the rise.

Indian victims of bride-burning.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, 121 (with plenty of Chinese towns over the 150 mark, mostly due to the countries one child policy). Azerbaijan is at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

Above, Chinese propaganda poster championing its one-child family planning policy. Below the rapid increase of female infant mortality since the inception of the policy.

In her book "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men", Mara Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance. By her count, gender-based abortions over the past three decades mean there are 163 million girls missing from the world.

This horrorific trend is often rooted in poverty although certainly a function of the continuing societal prejudice against the female gender. In the the last three decades technologies which reveal the sex of a baby in-utero such as amniocentesis and ultrasound, have been used as a "sex test" in countries where parents put a premium on sons or feel they can only afford one child. "Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later," reads one ad put out by an Indian clinic; the price of a sex test versus the cost of a dowry.

Ms. Hvistendahl predicts that such a gross gender imbalance is a harbinger of very bad things to come. And rightly so, as Columbia economics professor Lena Edlund corroborates: "The greatest danger associated with prenatal sex determination is...that a significant group of the world's women will end up being stolen or sold from their homes and forced into prostitution or marriage."

Child bride in Afghanistan. Cultural prerogative or child abuse? As the number of females decrease, the number of girls who are forced or sold into marriage will certainly increase.

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If you have ever loved a girl, ever stood knees knocking stomach fluttering on the precipice of romance, ever stared tenderly into your daughter's eyes, ever benefited from the nurturing love of a mother or grandmother- then raise your voice today for women. And if you are a woman please stand in solidarity with your sisters. Please support International Justice Mission as they rescue girls from the sex trade, as they fight for widow's rights, as they educate young girls of the risks of exploitation that surround them. Please support My Refuge House as they restore the battered broken lives of the victims of sex trafficking. Give generously to organizations like Samaritan's Purse and Respire Haiti that work tirelessly to end poverty and rescue those most at risk. Please remember, this is a fight for the soul of humanity.This is the fight for the future of us all.

Silence is complicity. Please be a voice for the voiceless.

Mother's Day.

Mother's day is Sunday, May 8th. A day when we celebrate the wonder of a woman's capacity to create life and to love it to distinction. And in that spirit of celebrating love and life and all things feminine, let us remember, that around the world, woman and girls are trapped in the horror of sex-trafficking and slave labor. So on this Mother's day why not send Mom a card telling her that you love her times infinity and that you have donated on her behalf to a cause you knew she would love, like helping International Justice Mission in stopping the sexual exploitation and forced labor of women and girls, and My Refuge House in restoring the lives of girls who have been trafficked into the illegal sex trade.

This mother was freed from slavery in a South Asian rock quarry by International Justice Mission.

And if you still wanna get her flowers please use 1-800-Flowers or FTD who now offer Fair Trade flowers. “Fair Trade” assures consumers that workers, many of them mothers themselves, receive decent wages in safe conditions.

And if Mom likes beautiful hand-made local jewelry, hairbands, hair clips and more, you can buy them at our lovely friend Rebekah's Etsy store called Beetlebutton. All proceeds go to stop human trafficking!

One of Rebekah's hairclips. All her creations are one-of-a-kind, made from vintage and recycled materials.

From all of us at COH. Thank you for being a voice for the voiceless! Happy Mother's day!

Words.

A friend of mine overheard a customer at McDonalds ordering a McGangRape. The fast food worker never missed a beat and filled the man's order. According to Urban Dictionary.com the "McGangRape" is a sandwich from McDonalds similar to the McGangBang (Double Cheeseburger split with a McChicken inside) only you add an apple pie. The subtle difference, the site explains, being that "you know the apple pie doesn't want to be there."

The site even adds context clues for the uninitiated:

"Hey Mike did you get the McGangbang for lunch today?"
"Nah, I upgraded to the McGangRape!"

(This is different than the "McGangRape" that occurs " when someone or a pair of people do some serious killing online while playing any type of online game, preferably COD [Call Of Duty]." And again in context, "Dude we just did a real McGangRape on them mother f@*%ers." )

McGangRape the sandwich on the other hand, is a double cheeseburger from McDonalds with a 4 piece McNugget in between the two patties and Sweet &Sour sauce drizzled on top of the Chicken nuggets. Again, similar to the McGangBang minus the extra bun, lettuce, and mayo.

The McGangBang

Recently COH interviewed Actress Shannon Ivey about the brutalization of an eleven year old girl in Clevland, Texas. Last November 18 men gang-raped the child, filmed and posted the footage online.

Gang-rape is a vicious, hate-filled, unconscionable crime. NOT a fast food sandwich!!!!

Every year, around the world, as part of their conditioning, trafficked children are gang-raped by their pimps to break the child's will.

Gang-rape is twisted, demonic, sexual dehumanization. NOT an especially rousing round of video gaming!!!!

When words like gang-rape are emptied of their true meaning. When they are divorced from reality, or re-appropriated for some other use, they cease to be able to affect, to shock, to facilitate change. When words like slavery are used to refer to our jobs, when our bosses become slave-masters, when our spouses our ball and chains, those words are emasculated, sanitized, and become completely useless.

As people with a conscience, as modern abolitionists, we must take these words back. We must re-connect them to the horrific reality they denote.

30 million people are enslaved today in the world. Some in very real chains, daily terrified by their very real slave-masters. To lesson the impact of those words is to dilute the tears of the victims, to marginalize their suffering and to make mockery of their pain.

A terrified child enslaved. Picture by Amnesty International.

We must ask ourselves, if our girlfriend was gang-raped, if our child was enslaved, would we be so cavalier about using those words so carelessly? Would the bitter sting of those words ever leave us? No. Every time we heard them they would sucker-punch us with shock and make us sick with sorrow.

Just like they should now.