To continue on from Part One, here are some more truly horrendous stories from slaves around the world:

Italy: “A pimp forced a Romanian slave into freezing water on each night that she failed to earn enough.”

Romania: “One pimp told a slave girl that she was too ugly for prostitution and might have to be sold by the kilogram for her organs. Others languished in underground cages, some not seeing daylight for months on end.”

Albania: “Some networks paraded their merchandise in nude auctions, where buyers prodded the women like cattle. Some slaves were beheaded or buried alive, or mutilated beyond recognition. Victims were sometimes abducted, blackmailed with homemade pornography, and always coerced by violence. Pimps never allowed them to refuse a customer and many suffered gang rapes, forced abortions and HIV.”

Moldova: “Natasha, a graceful blonde whose skin was marred by razor scars, was left in an orphanage by her prostitute mother. At six, she was forced into unpaid domestic and agricultural labour and sexually abused by her adoptive father for seven years. To punish her for tempting her husband, Natasha’s mistress often beat her so severely that her face still bears the scars. At 16, she yielded to traffickers and became a prostitute where she was abused, tortured and raped before ending up drugged and starved in a Dubai prison.”

Moldova: “Survivors in a shelter in Moldova often exhibited the same characteristics of war veterans. They were numb when they should be compassionate, enraged when they should be reflective. Women slept soundly as their children cried, and any sudden move in a tense moment would spark a massive response. One woman stabbed a stranger simply because he raised his voice, another ate napkins compulsively. They endured insomnia, nightmares, and hallucinations. Many experienced blackouts and memory loss. Most suffered depression and some tried to kill themselves.

UAE: “Two Pakistani men bought tools from a hardware store and bought a Uzbek prostitute. They each raped her, then as she screamed for help, they used the tools they bought to silence her. Her cries became gargles as blood rushed into her windpipe when the men stabbed her seven times in the neck. Then they threw her into a dumpster.”

UAE: “In the 3 months following the stabbing, sex tourists [mongers] committed more murders. Another Uzbek was strangled, a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian was slashed, and a Bangladeshi was thrown from a third floor balcony. Another Bangladeshi maid was forced into prostitution only to die of AIDS within a year.”

UAE: “As many as 6,000 child camel jockeys – mainly from South Asia – languished in hidden slavery on ozbah farms where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down.”

Thailand: “When Lord was 14, her parents sold her to a trafficker in Laos. The trafficker sold her to an embroidery factory in Thailand, where she was forced to work 14 hours a day. When she resisted, the owner’s son held a gun to her face and pulled the trigger. The BB gun ripped through her cheek, then as she continued to resist, he proceeded to deform her face with caustic chemicals.”

Saudi Arabia: “Nour had worked as a maid to support her daughter in Indonesia, but her bosses forced her to work 18 hours a day with no pay. They beat her regularly, and confined her to a bathroom for one month, where they tied her hands and feet until gangrene set in. After being taken to the hospital, doctors removed several of her fingers and toes. She filed a report, but a Saudi court responded by sentencing her to seventy-nine lashes for “false accusations.”

India: “…I found brothels where pimps kept prostitutes confined to a four-by-six foot cell and forced them to have unprotected sex with hundreds of men.”

If you, like me, feel compelled to act, there are a few options for you:

Visit Call + Response and do a few things, (1) Watch the film (or screen it); (2) Learn about 18 ways you can respond; and (3) Visit Chain Store Reaction to keep the corporate world accountable.

Also, check out these great organizations doing important work with proven success in eradicating slavery:

International Justice Mission: http://www.ijm.org/
Free The Slaves: http://www.freetheslaves.net/

Slavery is a complicated and multifaceted problem with no simple solutions. What’s important though is taking holistic action towards the problem that includes: (a) Victim Relief; (b) Perpetrator Accountability; (c) Victim Aftercare; and (d) Structural Transformation. All of which are essential in combating the problem, and all of which are key concerns of the above organizations.

“There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.” – W.E.B. Du Bois

I just finished reading a book on modern day slavery called “A Crime So Monstrous” by E. Benjamin Skinner. Each page that I read was more agonising than the last. The book is an account of a journalist who travels undercover to slavery and sex trafficking hotspots around the world and reports what he finds. What I’m about to share with you are excerpts straight from the book about stories of cruelty inflicted upon slaves. I warn you, they are horrendous…

United States: “One little girl in Miami was rescued by police at 12 years old. Originally bought from Haiti, the family forced her to eat garbage and sleep on the floor. She was used for a sex toy, and when police rescued her, she was suffering from acute abdominal pain and a venereal disease: since nine, the family’s 20-year old son regularly raped her.”

Turkey: “…when two women [sex slaves] refused to perform certain “activities” for their clients, their pimp mangled their genitals with boiling oil.”

Turkey: “When Maria was sixteen, the mother of a friend sold her to a trafficker who enslaved her in a basement brothel where a steady stream of men raped her without a condom.”

Haiti: “…some slaves are as young as 3 or 4 years old, but the average 15-year-old slave is 1.5 inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter than the average 15-year-old. They also have burns and scars from beatings (which is often in public with electrical cables or wood stiches).”

Haiti: “Studies show that every restavek [slave] is beaten daily, and most girls are sexually abused by their male masters. These girls are owned entirely by someone, and that person could rape them, kill them, chop them into pieces, or feed them to the pigs.”

Haiti: “His kidnappers cut out his tongue, tortured him, and left him for dead in his underwear in the middle of the street.”

UAE: “The severely malnourished boys [enslaved child camel jockeys in Dubai] had been beaten, and one seven year old displayed his bruised posterior, where his trainer had sodomised him.”

Sudan: “Some masters cut uncircumcised women to make them “clean,” then made them work the next morning. On occasion, masters even forced girl slaves to endure infibulations [sewing together of the vagina].”

Sudan: “There he [slave owner] beat Garang [slave] with the butt of his rifle until his eyes were swollen shut and he spewed blood.”

Sudan: “After being captured in violent raids, they became brutalised property, raped and often mutilated, by masters intent on obliterating their humanity.”

Sudan: “During salve raids, elderly men, unable to run but useless as slaves, were brained in front of their progeny. Captives hands were pierced and they were chained to each other to make escape virtually impossible. Once the captives were far from home, their owners beat them into submission. Captors occasionally gang raped young boys to erase their gender identities.”

Sudan: “A master amputated the nose of an eleven year old boy who lost his cow. Another cut off his slave’s arms when the boy attempted to run away. A herdsman nailed together the knees of one slave so that the boy would not try another escape. Some other young boys had their tendons cut so they could not run away, and using hot irons, masters branded slaves to identify them should they flee.”

Haiti: “It was not uncommon for slave owners to rid their homes of their male slaves as they came of age and began to pose a physical threat. Sometimes they could cast the young men out; other times, slaves awoke to find the masters had slashed male slaves’ throats.”

Romania: “Traffickers shot dead four Romanian girls when they refused to have sex with horses.”

‘The Project’ is officially back up and running again after a break over the holiday season—you’ll be seeing regular posts from here on in.

For most of us, this year has begun well. For others, it has been tainted by disaster. You have no doubt heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti. On Tuesday January 12, a catastrophic magnitude 7 quake struck approximately 25 kms west of Port-au-Prince (Haiti’s capital). According to some estimates, up to 200,000 people are tragically reported dead.

All of a sudden, this tiny Caribbean nation has been cast into the international spotlight. The nations of the world are lending their support and resources to respond to the disaster and aid agencies are appealing to the world for humanitarian aid all in an effort to lend a helping hand to Haitians. I personally gave to World Vision’s relief effort and I encourage you to do the same.

Now, here’s the thing. Why does everyone care so much about Haiti all of a sudden? On January 11, Haiti was just as desperate as it was on January 12. There is a strange phenomenon that occurs when a natural disaster strikes—we all of a sudden become sympathetic. Why? Is it because we feel that a natural disaster is the only justifiable reason to respond hastily to human tragedy in the third world?

Are not hunger, disease, dirty water, inadequate shelter, internal conflict etc good enough reasons to respond hastily? 30,000 children die each day from hunger alone. Where are the celebrity tele-fundraisers or charity sporting events for them? Is it because we feel that a natural disaster, unlike systematic poverty, isn’t their fault and they are therefore deserving of our help only in this situation?

The same thing happened with the 2004 Tsunami. Wow, what a response! But why did we care so much about death in Indonesia when it was by Tsunami as opposed to hunger? Haiti is a really interesting example, they have a complex past and a very complicated political and social situation today. A victim of European colonial enslavement, Haiti continues to struggle with external political influences.

Corruption, structural violence, disease, desperate poverty, slavery, despotism, conflict and environmental devastation are rife in Haiti. This tiny nation was often an object of critical engagement throughout my undergraduate political science degree, often cited as an archetype of systematic oppression. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the time, it flies under the radar.

If there was ever a country that needed help, a plight that ever needed to be broadcast to the world, a story that ever needed to be told—it was Haiti. But being a victim of structural violence, systematic rape and starvation is apparently not as newsworthy as being a victim of an earthquake.

As my friend Richard Fleming points out, Japan and California have had much stronger earthquakes in more densely populated areas than the one that hit Port-au-Prince, yet the death tolls have been relatively minor. The high death toll in Haiti is purely a product of its complete and utter vulnerability due to its poverty – an issue that clearly has never been worth a front page story.