Young girls sold as child brides, kidnapped for prostitution, or held as indentured servants. Adolescent males kidnapped for their organs, to work in mines, or as prostitutes. These were some of the stories of women and children victimized by modern human trafficking worldwide told by the Rev. Dr. Maylin Biggadike, featured speaker at the annual Women’s Commission breakfast held Jan. 30 at Diocesan Convention.
Biggadike, who attended the Anglican Consultation on Human Trafficking in Hong Kong in November 2009 under the sponsorship of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said that the archbishop “charges us all to do the necessary work to end human trafficking.” Biggadike said that the church can be silent about human trafficking, but that silence and inaction is tantamount to collusion with the perpetrators. There are some 12.5 million individuals in enforced labor, bonded labor and sexual servitude at any given time, said Biggadike, an economist and Episcopal priest. Yet, there is very little attention being given to the business of human trafficking worldwide, the profits for which are estimated at $217 billion per year or $23,000 per victim, according to Biggadike. In Thailand, for instance, human trafficking is more lucrative than the drug trade, she said.
“We need to acknowledge that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper,” she said.
Later that day, convention passed resolution 2010-01, The Evil of Trafficking, urging all congregations to address, during Lent, the evil of human trafficking by using the recourses available at the Bishop Anand Resource Center.
Some of Biggadike’s suggestions for what individuals and congregations can do to combat human trafficking included:
- Become familiar with the issues; e.g., read Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WeDunn.
- Support gender equality in your homes and congregations.
- Support causes that eradicate poverty.
- Promote legislation in New Jersey that decriminalizes prostitution for the enslaved prostitutes, with tougher penalties for the “Johns” and traffickers, as is the case in New York state, according to Laura Russell, a Legal Aid Society attorney, who also spoke at the Women’s Commission breakfast.
- Promote strong legislation to prosecute those who promote or engage in sex tourism.
According to a leaflet supplied by the Women’s Commission, the Hong Kong conference hosted 35 experts from 18 nations and regions who are active in ministries on behalf of victims of human trafficking, as well as from the United Nations agencies UNICEF and ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking). Such ministries include rescue projects, safe houses, shelters, hospitals, and orphanages for children of trafficked women who died of AIDS.
“We have come to believe – alongside many experts – that trafficking is the compelling issue of the 21st century – as slavery faced Christians of the 19th century,” the leaflet said. “People should never be sold like property, used or abused, in any way, and it is for us to say: no more.”
Definitions:
Human trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjugation to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt or slavery.
Sex trafficking is the recruitment by force, fraud or coercion of a person for commercial sex or in which the person who is induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age.
Carole Ann King is a member of St. Peter’s, Morristown.
