Continued from page 2
Finally, at the age of 21, Kim escaped her tormentor. She initially planned to run away and never turn back. Yet she received news from her family in India that the minister had trafficked two of her cousins into the United States in order to take her place.
Kim mustered the courage to take her case to the local police. The minister was arrested, convicted, and sent to jail. Today Kim owns a retail store in the Boston area and volunteers her time to prevent more vulnerable women from falling into sexual exploitation and enslavement.
To write this book, I conducted hundreds of interviews with young girls from Cambodia, Thailand, Peru, India, Uganda, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. I encountered this essential storyline time and again. Of those individuals extracted out of impoverished countries and trafficked across international borders, 80 percent are female and 50 percent are children.
Widespread poverty and social inequality ensure a pool of recruits as deep as the ocean. Parents in desperate straits may sell a child, or at least be susceptible to scams that will allow the slave trader to take control of their sons and daughters. Young women in vulnerable communities will be more likely to take a risk on a job offer in a far-away destination. The poor are apt to accept a loan that the slave trader later can manipulate to steal away their freedom. All of these paths carry unsuspecting recruits into the supply chains of slavery.
“The supply side of the equation is particularly bleak,’” says U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). “While there are 100,000 places in the developed world for refugee resettlement per year, 50 million refugees and displaced persons exist worldwide today. This ready reservoir of the stateless presents an opportunity rife for exploitation by human traffickers.”
IN PREPARATION FOR my journey to monitor modern global slavery, I had steeled myself emotionally to end up in the depths of depression and despair. To be honest, I made some unpleasant stops there. The day I went undercover to investigate a brothel in Phnom Pehn, for instance, broke my heart. A brothel owner invited me to take my pick of any one of the 13-year-old girls that crowded the sofas in front of me. A few extra bucks and I could have two of them for the night, he offered. I could not bear to think of these little girls passing through this ritual a dozen times each night.
But my journey did not end at the station of despair. The prime reason: I met a heroic ensemble of abolitionists who simply refuse to relent. I felt like I had gone back in time and had the great privilege of sharing a meal with a Harriet Tubman or a William Wilberforce or a Fredrick Douglass. Like the abolitionists of old, these modern heroes refuse to accept a world where one individual can be held as the property of another.
Kru Nam is one of those abolitionists who operates on the front lines in the fight against sex slavery. She is a painter who decided to use her natural gift to bring healing to street kids in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Once she turned the kids loose with paintbrushes, they created a series of disturbing images that added up to a horror story. Kru Nam soon realized that most of the kids came from Burma, with a sprinkling of Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians. Painting became a way they could tell her how they had arrived on the streets of Chiang Mai.
The Burmese boys spoke of a well-dressed, Thai gentleman who visited their village accompanied by a 14-year-old Burmese boy who wore fine-tailored clothes and spoke Thai fluently. The man explained to parents that he was offering scholarships for young boys to attend school back in Thailand. Though the tribal people of Burma are reluctant to part with young girls, they give more license for sons to travel afar in search of a livelihood. Many families agreed to let their sons go with the Thai man. Once they reached Chiang Mai, the Thai man immediately sold them to owners of sex bars and brothels.
The boys living on the streets were the lucky ones; they had escaped. They told Kru Nam that many more boys remained captive in the sex bars. Her blood boiled. She could not stand by and do nothing.
Kru Nam did not exactly have a plan when she marched into the sex bar for her first raid. Only her mission was clear: rescue as many of the young boys that she could find. She did not even attempt to negotiate with the owner; she knew better than to waste her time. But to her disappointment, only six boys sat at tables entertaining the male customers. The other boys were out on “dates” with the johns. She had no need for histrionics. One by one she approached a table where a boy sat and calmly said, “Let’s go, I’m taking you out of here.” Several moments later, she was leading six little boys out the door and to her safe house in Chiang Mai.
Soon she organized street teams to scourge the night market of Chiang Mai and connect to young children recently departed off the bus from the northern Thai-Burmese border. Recruiters for the sex bars also trolled the streets on the hunt for vulnerable kids. It became a life-and-death contest to find them first.
One day it struck Kru Nam that if she moved upstream before the kids hit Chiang Mai she would have an edge over the recruiters. So she moved about 40 miles north to the border town of Mae Sai, a major thoroughfare for foot traffic between Burma and Thailand. Nearly 60 boys and girls today find safe refuge each night at Kru Nam’s shelter. Kru Nam is irrepressible. She does not have a large organization standing behind her—a skeletal staff of three assists her and she receives modest funding from a tiny non-governmental agency based in Thailand. What she does have is a burning passion to rescue young boys and girls so that they do not fall into the control of slaveholders.
Kru Nam does not know Lucy Borja, who rescues girls and boys forced into the brothels of Lima, Peru, nor has she met Padre Cesare Lo Deserto who steals trafficked girls away from the mafiosos of Eastern Europe. But she shares a special calling with these characters whose stories are featured in this book. Not one of them went out looking for slavery. Each simply reached out a compassionate hand to a refugee in need or a homeless street child, and it exposed them to the ugly undercurrent of human trafficking. Their passage from a single act of kindness to fighting for justice on a grander scale is the quintessential story of the abolitionist.
To inspire others to join their movement is the overriding purpose for writing this book. Although Kru Nam is brave and resourceful, she cannot single-handedly stop sex trafficking in Thailand. The size and scope of her project is about the norm for abolitionist organizations. They sorely need reinforcements, a new wave of abolitionists, to join them in the struggle.
ALL OF US wonder how we would have acted in the epic struggles of human history. Imagine we lived in rural Tennessee in 1855 and Harriet Tubman came to our door. “We are smuggling fugitive slaves across an underground railroad, and we need safe houses where they can receive shelter, food and rest. Will you help us?” she might have said. If Harriet Tubman came calling, would we have stood up and been counted amongst the just?
Or what if we were in the company of Jesuits who established a mission in the New World in 1624? The Spanish slave traders warn us to dismantle our mission where the natives work and keep their tribal structure intact. “We control this territory,” they would have said, “and you are undermining our lucrative trade in natives.” Would we have stood up and been counted amongst the just?
We live right now at one of those epic moments in the fight for human freedom. We no longer have to wonder how we might respond to our moment of truth. It is we who are on the stage and we can change the winds of history with our actions.
A bit overdramatic? I do not know any other way to express the urgency of rescuing one million children whom UNICEF estimates are forced today to sell their bodies to sexual exploiters. In a single country, Uganda, nearly 40,000 children have been kidnapped and violently turned into child soldiers (boys) and sex slaves (girls). In South Asia each day millions of children are forced to crush rocks in a quarry or roll cigarettes in a factory. The destinies of children around the globe hang in the balance, and they are powerless to break free.
As Edmund Burke presented the challenge so eloquently two centuries ago, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”
Share This Article
Email Comments
As Printed PDF