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 Human Rights Day: At least 14,000 people are trafficked into U.S. each year
TERRE HAUTE — Progress is being made to spread the word on one of the most egregious of human rights violations – human trafficking, said Kathleen Desautels, an active prison chaplain in Chicago.
“The progress is, five years ago, you would not get 35 people to come to a presentation. The word ‘trafficking’ and the fact that we call it modern slavery is now accepted. People get it,” she said Tuesday following a presentation at the Ninth Annual Terre Haute Human Rights Day, held on the campus of Indiana State University.
This year’s theme was “stop human trafficking.”
Desautels is a Catholic sister with the Sisters of Providence and has worked the past 24 years in Chicago. In addition to being a prison chaplain, she is a staff member at 8th Day Center for Justice in Chicago.
The center works on economic, political and human rights issues, she said, “and trying to see the interconnectiveness of how our economic liberal capitalism, which is a global system we have, creates this kind of race to the bottom of the economy.”
Human trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for commercial sex, labor or services through use of force, fraud or coercion.
At least 14,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year, a conservative estimate, Desautels said.
Her presentation centered around the 2006 film “Dreams Die Hard” from filmmaker Peggy Callahan, which chronicled the story of three people who became enslaved in the United States.
Maria Suarez came to the U.S. as a legal resident with her family in the Los Angeles area. Just before turning 16, she wanted to contribute to the household income. She was tricked into staying with a man at least 65 years old “who bought her for $200,” according to the film.
Suarez was told her family would be hurt, so even after police visited the home where she was forced to stay and was physically and mentally abused, she said everything was OK.
Suarez was later wrongfully blamed for the murder of the man, killed by a neighbor. She spend more than 22 years in prison, plus an another five months in jail when she could have been deported, before being helped by the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking (CAST).
The film also showed a man, “Miguel,” who came from Mexico to work in fruit fields in Florida to send money home to help his sick son. He was enslaved, later under threat of guns, to work for nearly nothing before being freed.
A girl from Africa thought she would receive an American education in exchange for babysitting, but became enslaved as a domestic servant in Maryland, before she managed to run away.
“What is the root?” of human trafficking, Desautels asked.
“The root of most of this is for commercialization, the money or for control. It is also a source of cheap labor so that you can get money. It is the old saying that money is at the root of a lot of our problems,” she said.
Desautels suggested people take steps to stop cheap labor, such as asking grocery stores where they get coffee, chocolate or lettuce, often harvested by immigrant workers. “Ask if they buy fair-trade products,” she said, “which are products produced by people getting a fair wage.
“If you don’t get an answer, ask the following week. You have to be a gnat. You want to bother people just enough to make them uncomfortable” to get an answer, she said.
(2010-04-21 / Terre Haute Tribune Star)
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