by Jimmy Carter
The trafficking of girls from Nepal into India has been the focus of much international attention. UNICEF reported that as many as seven thousand women and girls are trafficked out of Nepal to India every year, and around 200,000 are now working in Indian brothels. They are induced to leave their home communities by promises of lucrative jobs in Kathmandu or across the border in India, marriages to attractive husbands, free education, training to be beauty technicians, teachers, or nurses or to sell popular consumer products. Some girls have been forcefully abducted from the streets. Once in the hands of their traffickers, they are transported to their destination, raped, beaten, or drugged into submission, and then delivered to a brothel to service numerous men each day or to an “owner” who can use them as slaves. Escape is discouraged by warnings of worse physical punishment, incarceration under vigilant supervision, or threats to the girls’ families back home.
Top Nepalese law enforcement officials inform me that they know of the many thousands of Nepalese women enslaved in sexual or other servitude every year, but that it is quite easy for the traffickers to obtain false high-quality passports and visas to transport them to rich communities in a foreign country. There are orders from some Arab nations for women who will serve as second or later brides, mostly for the work they will be forced to do within their husband’s household. The books I have read about the lucrative global system of slavery always cite Nepal as one of the worst examples. Neither the former monarchy nor the new democracy (still struggling to form a government and draft a constitution) provides protection for poor and vulnerable families, in which parents often bemoan the birth of a daughter and celebrate with the community when the newborn baby is a boy. Every effort is made to educate boys, but fewer than 5 percent of women are literate in some of the poorer communities.
We have visited Nepal several times, to climb in the Himalayas and more recently to help monitor their elections and help them form a government. While there to prepare for the election held in November 2013, Rosalynn and I had an opportunity to meet with a group of young women who had escaped sexual slavery. The organization that was helping with the rescue and providing protection was known as Stop Girl Trafficking (SGT) and was financed largely by a longtime friend of ours, Richard Blum. He and Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first to climb Mount Everest, are the founders of the American Himalayan Foundation, which has many other benevolent projects in the region. Richard explained to us on the way to Kathmandu that SGT had been working closely with the Rural Health and Education Service Trust (RHEST) for fifteen years. The primary tool that RHEST has found to be effective in sustaining the freedom of the rescued women is to provide them with an education. This restores their self-respect and assures that literacy and marketable skills can sustain them and their families in the future.
The young women who met with us were relaxed and unrestrained as they recounted their experiences and their plans for productive lives in the future. There were outbursts of laughter as they described circumstances or events in their past, which helped to prevent any embarrassment as they discussed some of the intimate details. None had been enrolled in school at the time they were taken into captivity, and they all agreed that their current classrooms were the best places to prepare for the future. Some had not been reconciled with their family after their parents learned of their forced sexual activities, but they were either resigned to the familial estrangement or expressed the hope that their future would improve the relationship. Many of them had been helped to escape from bondage by friends who were familiar with SGT, and they told us that they looked for opportunities to help those who were still enslaved.
The SGT and RHEST leaders expected to have ten thousand women and girls in their program during the year 2013. This will include a large number who had been indentured servants, “rented” by wealthier families from among those people in Nepal who are dalits (untouchables). The rich family pays an agent about $50, of which the girl’s family gets about $14. Each year a new transaction is concluded. Some are treated well; others are beaten, denied any educational opportunities, and often attacked sexually by the men or boys in the house.
After we thanked the women for their testimonies and had a round of photographs, we heard from administrators of SGT about their efforts to address the root causes of slavery by working for more effective legislation, improving protection for girls in the poorest families, creating public education programs about this cancer in their midst, and offering educational opportunities to the younger girls in the most vulnerable families. There was special concern about the common practice of forced child marriage in Nepal. The interim constitution of 2006 set the legal marriage age of women at twenty, but the penalty for violation is only annulment of the marriage and a fine of $8. The consequence for the child bride is that she is disgraced and unfit for a more appropriate husband. The willing, usually poverty-stricken parents of the girls accede to opportunities to receive a small payment or to reduce the number of mouths they have to feed. A young bride is often not expected to serve as a wife and mother but as just another servant in her new home. When I asked some we met if they would rather be sold into slavery or sold as a child bride, all said that a forced marriage would be the worse of the two terrible choices.
It is important to note that forced prostitution is most prevalent in societies where “nice” girls are strictly protected until marriage. Young men and others turn to prostitutes for sexual gratification and are often able and willing to pay more for younger girls. There is a large bonus for the rare virgin.
Violence against women remains one of the greatest ills of our time. It is shameful that for many women and girls walking in the streets, relaxing in parks, going to work, or even staying at home can become a brutal experience. When women and girls feel unsafe, half of humanity is unsafe. Violence against women and girls is perpetuated by centuries of male dominance and gender-based discrimination. But the roles that have traditionally been assigned to men and women in society are a human construct—there is nothing divine about them. Religious leaders have a responsibility to address these historic injustices. Respect for human dignity should not be dependent on whether one is a male or a female.
MONA RISHMAWI, OFFICE OF THE UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
To address the worldwide problem of millions of people being enslaved, the U.S. State Department is required to file a Trafficking in Persons Report annually to indicate how other nations are combating slavery and to encourage them to be more aggressive in their efforts. The latest report, in 2013, included 188 countries and measured them in three categories, or tiers, according to how well they met eleven benchmarks. Tier 1 includes thirty countries that have met the minimum standards to combat slavery but acknowledge that they can make more progress; tier 2 comprises ninety-two countries that have made some tangible effort but do not meet the minimum standards; and there are twenty-one countries in tier 3 that have taken no affirmative steps to fight human trafficking. These are the eleven criteria:
1. Prohibit trafficking and punish acts of trafficking.
2. Prescribe punishment commensurate with that for other serious crimes.
3. Make serious and sustained efforts to eliminate trafficking.
4. Vigorously investigate and prosecute acts of trafficking.
5. Protect victims of trafficking; encourage victims’ assistance in investigation and prosecution.
6. Provide victims with legal alternatives to their removal to punitive countries and ensure that trafficked victims are not inappropriately penalized.
7. Adopt measures, such as public education, to prevent trafficking.
8. Cooperate with other governments in investigating and prosecuting trafficking.
9. Extradite persons charged with trafficking as with other serious crimes.
10. Monitor immigration and emigration patterns for evidence of trafficking, and assure that law enforcement agencies respond to such evidence.
11.
Investigate and prosecute public officials who participate, facilitate, or condone trafficking.
U.S. government officials acknowledge that, although our country meets the minimum tier 1 standards, there are many challenges still to be met. In addition to the mostly female sexual slaves that are sold freely in America, there are those in our country who are held as prisoners and forced to work under duress because they have immigrated illegally. Often they owe a large sum of money to the person who transported them that is beyond their means to repay. There is continuing partisan debate in Congress about whether stronger legal protection should apply to Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, and transsexuals forced into prostitution or include counseling or contraceptives to victims of sexual abuse. Some conservative women’s organizations and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops oppose the legislation on these grounds.
On a few occasions abused people have taken legal action to protect themselves. For almost twenty years The Carter Center has been attempting to assist the tomato harvesters in Immokalee, Florida, to achieve justice in their working conditions, and we have observed with pride the additional efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to expose wealthy landowners who were holding their farmworkers in involuntary servitude. The CIW helped fight this crime by uncovering and assisting in the federal prosecution of slavery rings preying on hundreds of laborers. In such situations, captive workers were held against their will by their employers for many years through threats and beatings, shootings, and pistol-whippings. In 2010 the CIW followed up these exposés and convictions by developing a mobile Slavery Museum that they brought to Atlanta for us to see and then took it on a tour of the southeastern United States to demonstrate what was happening to poor and defenseless workers.
There needs to be much more vigorous investigation and prosecution of those who are engaged in modern-day slavery. Although seldom utilized, a stringent law exists, as stated in Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Sec. 1589 (“Forced Labor”):
Whoever knowingly provides or obtains the labor or services of a person
(1) by threats of serious harm to, or physical restraint against, that person or another person;
(2) by means of any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause the person to believe that, if the person did not perform such labor or services, that person or another person would suffer serious harm or physical restraint; or
(3) by means of the abuse or threatened abuse of law or the legal process,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If death results from the violation of this section, or if the violation includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or the attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, the defendant shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or life, or both.
This sounds good, but the law is essentially ignored. Although the U.S. Department of State has estimated that there are at least sixty thousand people being held against their will in the United States, only 138 traffickers were convicted in this country in 2012.
There is something powerful the U.S. government could do, right now, to stop gender-based violence globally. The International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA), which has awaited action in the U.S. Congress for six years, lies dormant because not enough voices have yet risen to demand its passage. IVAWA would make America a leader in ending violence against women and girls. It would be a new beacon of light for millions of women and children who cower under the hand of an abuser, who dare not attend school because they will be shot, and who remain in a corner of darkness because there is no one to receive them in the light. Let us help receive them. Let us pass IVAWA now.
RITU SHARMA, COFOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, WOMEN THRIVE WORLDWIDE
It is crucial for political leaders and all of us to understand the interrelationship among politics, the sex trade, and the general welfare. This can best be demonstrated in Africa, where the AIDS virus originated and where preventative and curative medicines have been introduced in tardy and inadequate ways. Containing only 15 percent of the world’s population, 70 percent of those who are HIV-infected and die with AIDS are Africans. Much of the infection, especially in South Africa, has been spread by truck drivers, miners, and other men who work away from home, patronize brothels, and then transmit the disease to their wives and families. I learned about this tragedy on a visit to the continent in 2002.
Bill Gates Sr. was in charge of the enormous foundation established by his son, and he was planning his first visit to Africa in 2002 to meet some of the top leaders and get acquainted with the region and issues in which they planned to invest. He asked Rosalynn and me to accompany him and his wife, Mimi, on a trip around the periphery of the continent so he could learn as much as possible about the devastating AIDS epidemic. At the time, there were two key features of an effective anti-AIDS program: antiretroviral medicines for those who were known to be infected and a public awareness campaign that emphasized the gravity of the epidemic.
We met Bill and Mimi in Johannesburg, South Africa, where about 25 percent of the citizens were suffering from HIV/AIDS, greatly exacerbated by the claim of President Thabo Mbeki that the value of antiretroviral treatments was unproven and they were likely to be toxic and were being foisted on innocent black people by white leaders from Western nations. He had condemned the use of any of these drugs, including the well-proven nevirapine, which can protect babies of HIV mothers from the infection. Our expert on the trip was Dr. Helene Gayle, who had recently left the Centers for Disease Control to head the Gates Foundation’s global crusade against HIV/AIDS. She emphasized that nevirapine given to prospective mothers would reduce by half the sixty thousand annual infant AIDS deaths.
We were informed that there would be a meeting in Soweto to publicize the issue, and I decided to invite former president Nelson Mandela to join us. Bill told me that Mandela had expressed doubts about “Western” drugs at a meeting with the Gates Foundation officials in Seattle, Washington, when he was president of South Africa, so I was pleasantly surprised when he accepted my invitation.
The meeting was in a large tent. Bill, Mandela, and I were asked to sit on the stage and make brief comments. Conveners of the session had asked us not to defy or criticize President Mbeki’s policies but simply to express our hope that the raging epidemic might be controlled. The event was well publicized. Television stations broadcast our remarks and newspapers carried a photograph of the three of us holding babies and their mothers, who had AIDS, sitting in the front row. Bill was feeding his crying baby with a bottle.
That night and the next morning the publicity was enormous in South Africa, because it was the first time Mandela had expressed approval for the treatment of AIDS with Western medicines; Mbeki had not even acknowledged the need for an aggressive response to the devastating impact of AIDS in their country, where the rate of infection had grown in the previous twelve years from less than 1 percent to more than 20 percent of all adults, with an estimated 1,800 new people being infected each day. There were predictions that 7 million already infected people would die in the next eight years. Some leaders of minor political groups had been attacking the African National Congress leaders for their refusal to confront the problem.
Bill and I met with groups of sex workers in brothels who volunteered to discuss how they became prostitutes, their special problems, family affairs when not “on duty,” and awareness of their possible role in the spreading of AIDS to transient workers and others who would carry the infection to their wives and families back home. The women said there were about five thousand sex workers in the community but they were acquainted with only a small number of them. Even those who had been introduced to the trade involuntarily by being sold by their parents or others let us know that they now continued their work on their own volition. We found small groups of women who told us that they insisted on their customers using condoms, but this restraint commanded lower fees and wa
s not appreciated by the brothel’s supervisors. All of them denied having any symptoms of AIDS and seemed to have a fatalistic attitude toward their chances in the future. It was obvious that their customers were aware of the threat of AIDS and often expressed a preference for younger girls, who they believed were more likely to be free of the infection. Unlike in most other African countries, Rosalynn and I never saw an anti-AIDS poster or billboard in South Africa.
We flew to Capetown to meet with President Mbeki and found him waiting for us with his minister of health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. As Bill and I began to explain the purpose of our visit, the president interrupted and insisted that there was no scientific connection between HIV infection and AIDS and that the antiretroviral medicines we were promoting were toxic. The discussion became heated, and he and I rose from our chairs and faced each other in an angry confrontation. Mbeki accused us of attempting to introduce Western medicines into Africa to interfere with the progress being made by black people in eliminating the last vestiges of colonialism, and he claimed that President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was also aware of our plot. We left South Africa without reconciling our differences, but since then I have worked harmoniously with President Mbeki in trying to bring peace to the people of Sudan.