We can’t imagine turning our backs on a vulnerable person in obvious distress — no one expects to turn away from a bully targeting a child in a schoolyard, from a thief scoping out an unaware victim, or an employer endangering workers in unsafe conditions. But when exploitation is less recognizable, less in our faces, it is harder to do the right thing.
Such is the case with human trafficking, because this horrific human rights crime is often not blatant or out in the open. The fact is, it is too easy to overlook modern slavery’s victims, because they are often hidden, even in plain sight.
Recent cases in North Carolina and Florida demonstrate human trafficking is sometimes hidden right on our doorsteps. If your neighborhood listserv is like mine, it lights up when teenage door-to-door salespeople come knocking. While there is abundant skepticism about the motives of these children, that mental energy might be better spent considering whether they are among the 1.6 million youth between ages 12 and 17 who experience homelessness each year.
These vulnerable youth — who may have left home because of abusive or drug-addicted parents, or because they were kicked out for identifying as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual or transgender — are often preyed upon, removed from familiar surroundings and trafficked to a distant city where they have no contacts, identification or money. Just last month, two men pled guilty to trafficking two teenaged girls all the way from North Dakota to North Carolina, forcing them to work for scant pay in a door-to-door magazine sales scheme.
Next time you’re vacationing and encounter a hotel cleaning staff member, give him or her a second thought. According to last year’s Urban Institute report, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 10 percent of the trafficking victims they interviewed worked in the hospitality industry.
In many forced labor cases, people are lured from their native country and enter the U.S. legally. Upon arrival, they are stripped of their travel documents, threatened, and forced into work long, grueling hours in inhumane conditions for a tiny portion of the promised wage in hotels, restaurants, nail salons and factories. Trapped without a command of the language, no identification, insufficient funds to return home and little knowledge of their rights or surroundings, the reality of a labor trafficking victim is harsh.
Forced labor is also entrenched in the supply chains of products we use and enjoy every day. From our dressing rooms to our kitchen table, we have a moral responsibility and an economic imperative to understand whether trafficked laborers have picked the cotton in our favorite jeans, the grapes in our red wine, or the cocoa beans that went into our hot chocolate.
While these are just a few of many examples of modern slavery that go unnoticed, there are reasons for optimism. We’ve seen marked improvements in identifying human trafficking in the United States and globally. News reports, policy discussions at local, state and national levels, and awareness activities during times like National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month are driving greater awareness, particularly of sex trafficking.
There are also some bright spots to celebrate in our efforts to prevent labor trafficking: California’s enactment of the Foreign Labor Recruitment Act holds the promise of protecting foreign workers from unscrupulous labor recruiters, and the state’s steady, albeit slow, implementation of the Transparency in Supply Chains Act.
There are many things we as a society should demand of our leaders to advance prevention of trafficking and support for its victims and survivors. As the new Congress begins its work, we urge members to take these actions:
— First and foremost, policymakers should develop and implement comprehensive policy solutions that that strive to understand and address ALL forms of modern slavery. This means making sure labor trafficking survivors are included in proposals to provide more robust survivor services, and it means our government partners must adopt a comprehensive approach by responding to all facets of human trafficking.
— Second, policymakers must invest resources in preventing human trafficking. This means voting to reauthorize the Runaway and Homeless Youth Trafficking Prevention Act so that vulnerable teens get the shelter, services and support they need to avoid the sex and labor traffickers targeting them. It also means passing federal legislation to ensure that foreign labor recruiters that do not threaten the integrity of our visa system.
— Finally, it means honoring the voices of human trafficking survivors. This means passing the bipartisan Survivors of Human Trafficking Survivors Empowerment Act, a bill to strengthen our federal, state and local efforts to combat this modern slavery by creating a survivor-led council for government officials to hear directly from survivors with a diversity of perspectives on what works and what doesn’t.
It is hard to do the right thing when we don’t even know a problem exists, but we must make it our obligation — and demand of our policymakers — to understand human trafficking in all of its ugly forms so that no victim remains hidden, and so that our investment in fighting modern slavery leaves no one behind.
Melysa Sperber is director of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
