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How was Sex Trafficking “Eradicated” in Israel?

In the 1990’s and 2000’s Israel was a destination country for sex worker migration and trafficking. Every year since the early 1990’s thousands of women entered Israel for the purpose of prostitution, many of whom were trafficked. Trafficking in women into Israel was first documented by a report of Israeli NGOs in 1997, yet it can be dated to the collapse of the Soviet Union, when transnational crime networks took advantage of the waves of migration of Soviet Jews to Israel, to smuggle mainly non-Jewish sex workers into the country. Trafficked women and migrant sex workers from the early 90’s arrived with false documentation, either as tourists or using falsified documents of Jewish immigrants. Due to tightening regulation, migration routes have changed. Since 2000 women were mostly smuggled/trafficked in through the Egyptian border, crossing the Sinai desert, in harsher conditions.

Given this grim backdrop it is surprising that today, and for the past several years (approximately since 2006), there is wide agreement among both the police and women’s groups that sex trafficking of non-Israeli women was successfully combated.  How did this happen? In a short and fascinating new essay, that was published earlier this year at the Swedish Magazine Neo, Israeli political scientist Gadi Taub explains why and how “it became increasingly difficult to employ trafficked women, or for foreigners to find employment in prostitution in Israel.” Taub’s main thesis is that the Israeli anti-trafficking policy was effective due to a combination of strict immigration policy and a tolerance of brothels.

The key to Israel’s effective policy, Taub argues, was slack enforcement of the criminal code’s formally abolitionist approach. Instead of closing brothels, police monitored them, and raided them on a regular basis, focusing its attention mostly on under-aged girls and on non-Israelis working at brothels. Police activity affected the economy of the Israeli sex industry. As Taub puts it

“forced labor and kidnapping require a complicated illegal organization – security, housing, enforced discipline, secret premises and probably bribery – and therefore finds it hard to compete economically with regular brothels. This is not to say that the regular brothels are entirely free of criminal elements, which often extort protection money. But they are not underground, and the regular police raids and relative visibility, have made them generally safe for the prostitutes themselves: they are free to enter or leave the profession, they can choose their shifts and clients, and many of these places have private security personnel. Not least, owners and prostitutes can call the police in case of emergency.”

Taub’s account suggests that while it is often argued that harsher enforcement and deeper criminalization is an effective method of combating trafficking, in fact, in the Israeli case, it was the opposite the brought about significant change. Some Israeli Sex workers suggest that an aspect missing from Taub’s story is the importance of their collaboration and trust relations with the police. They argue that in an attempt to improve working conditions in the sex industry (and fend off competition) Israeli sex workers used to call the police and disclose where undocumented migrants worked. They claim that their inside information was crucial in changing the Israeli sex industry.

It is interesting to note that the “eradication of sex trafficking” brought about a new emphasis on prostitution in policy discussions. As soon as trafficking and migration of migrant women into the sex industry subsided, Israeli NGOs moved to emphasize the perfectionist goal of eradicating the sex industry as a whole, suggesting that all prostitution is trafficking. This radical/dominance feminist position now provides steam to a Swedish style “end demand” bill that is being considered by the Israeli parliament. Moreover, the Parliamentary Committee on Human Trafficking operating since 2001 changed its name and is now titled “The Committee for the Combat Against Trafficking in Women and Prostitution.” Unfortunately, as the name suggests, the sole focus of Israeli anti-trafficking activity remains dedicated to exploitation within the sex industry, while trafficking into other industries is mostly ignored. Finally, in response to all this, Israeli sex workers are organizing for the first time. Earlier this year a group of sex workers established the “Association for the Regulation of Sex Work” that seeks to de-criminalize sex work. It remains to be seen whether the voices of sex workers themselves will be heard in a political arena over-crowded with feminist organizations who claim they speak on their behalf.

A Labor Paradigm for Human Trafficking?

I recently published an article  in which I call for a paradigm shift from a human rights to a labor paradigm to human trafficking. In the article I argue that current efforts to combat trafficking, that view trafficking predominantly as a crime or as a human rights violation, end up helping an alarmingly small number of individuals out of the multitudes currently understood as falling under the category of trafficked persons, and even in these few cases, the assistance provided is of questionable value. I therefore suggest that a labor approach to trafficking is required to deal with the phenomenon’s underlying causes. I argue that because individual and collective labor and employment rights emerged in the attempt to bring about structural changes to labor markets that would strengthen workers’ bargaining positions and, eventually, lead to the redistribution of wealth between capital and labor, they are better suited than the traditional human rights tools for addressing the institutional aspects of the labor market exploitation on which trafficking is structured.

In the article I explore five factors that have led to the absence of a labor orientation in anti-trafficking efforts. One such factor, I propose, is that the traditional focus on sex trafficking makes the introduction of a labor discourse highly controversial because of deeply rooted disagreement over the nature of prostitution and its regulation as work. Another factor is the overall decline of the labor movement and its recent attempt to revive its legitimacy and currency by adopting human rights–like absolute and universal proclamations, akin to the human rights–based approach to trafficking. These trends have meant that the movement’s relevant bodies, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and trade unions, have not introduced or pushed for a Labor Paradigm for Human Trafficking labor-based framework in the global anti-trafficking campaign. This last factor is, hopefully, about to change.

The 2012 International Labor Conference (ILC) adopted conclusions requesting that the ILO conduct a “detailed analysis … to identify gaps in existing coverage of ILO standards with a view to determining whether there is a need for standard setting to: (i) complement the ILO’s forced labour Conventions to address prevention and victim protection, including compensation; and (ii) address human trafficking for labour exploitation.”

These conclusions provided the impetus for the Office’s development of a background report, and for the convention of a meeting of experts that took place in February 2013. One outcome of the meeting of experts was a decision to place a possible new forced labor instrument on the ILC agenda for 2014.

This is indeed an exciting development. The new instrument, if adopted, will hopefully be able to offer a more effective framework to combat trafficking – one that  seeks not only to assist victims of trafficking after they are removed from the exploitative environment but also to transform the structure of labor markets that are particularly susceptible to trafficking. Such an instrument has the potential to reach significantly more individuals vulnerable to trafficking by providing them with legal mechanisms for avoiding and resisting exploitation, and by shifting the focus away from individual harms to the power disparities between victims and traffickers and the economic and social conditions that make individuals vulnerable to trafficking.  The ILO will most likely turn to utilizing instruments of change such as strategies of collective action and bargaining, protective employment legislation, and contextual standard setting in labor sectors susceptible to trafficking.

It will be interesting to see whether the ILO stirs away from merely adopting the existing anti-trafficking framework as it appears in the Palermo Protocol and the TVPA and succeeds in drafting and adopting an instrument that develops a labor paradigm. This is not an easy task. There are an array of economic interests pushing against the adoption of a labor framework. On the one hand, national protectionist economic interests work to curb migration in order to protect local workers in certain sectors from competition. To this end, various anti-immigration policies are promoted that exacerbate migrant workers’ vulnerability to exploitation and trafficking. On the other hand, there are rent-seeking interests that benefit from flexible, deregulated labor markets. Such interests may be served by worker migration, but need labor to remain informal, thereby reducing the cost of labor and weakening workers’ protections and bargaining power while increasing their vulnerability to exploitation. These two sets of economic interests stack up against adopting a labor paradigm to trafficking. Moreover, even if this new instrument is adopted, and it succeeds in offering an alternative paradigm, the ILO’s relative marginality in the international arena, and the low rate of adoption of ILO Conventions may still suggest that much more work is required by stakeholders “on the ground” to effectively bring about change.

The Celebrification of Human Trafficking, Part III

Ricky Martin

Ricky Martin has been a recent favorite of both the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government. He has been the recipient of substantial US government anti-trafficking funding, and has been a frequent celebrity witness before Congress.

How does Martin’s work relate to human trafficking?  Martin is a Goodwill Ambassador to UNICEF, and through this humanitarian interest in children, created his own NGO, the Ricky Martin Foundation, which specifically works with child victims of human trafficking and those children he identifies as being at risk.  Among other efforts, the Foundation partnered with the International Organization for Migration to create “Llama y Vive,” a Spanish language campaign “aimed at the prevention of human trafficking, protection of the youngest victims of child trafficking, and prosecution of the traffickers.”

Martin has had a bit of a mixed career as an activist, and under the loose heading of his interest in “helping children,” he has engaged in some ill-advised faux diplomacy.  For example, in 2005, he traveled to Jordan where he met with teenagers to whom he vaguely offered to “become a spokesperson on your behalf.” He then posed for photos with Palestinian youth while wearing a keffiyeh bearing the inscription ‘Jerusalem is Ours’ in Arabic.

Despite acknowledging that he did not even know the issue of human trafficking existed five years earlier, in 2006, Martin was invited by Congress to testify before the House Committee on International Relations as an expert witness on human trafficking.  Describing his motivation to work on the issue, Martin told members of Congress that his ”commitment and passion for this issue was born from . . . [travel] to Calcutta, India,” where he “met three little girls that were living on the streets, maybe days away from being sold into prostitution, trembling beneath plastic bags.” He knew then that he had to “do something.”

Martin’s testimony before Congress exemplifies many of the problems with celebrity activism in the arena of human rights:

1) celebrities tend to overly focus attention on the stereotypes of human trafficking (“I heard amazing. . . I mean horrible. . . stories about this issue, like the story of a 12-year-old boy from El Salvador . . . [who was kept] in a small room for weeks and sexually exploited. . .”);

2) they make emotional appeals that arrest a more nuanced interrogation into how best to approach the problem (“When we listen to the story, I mean if we have a soul, we have to feel the pain but sometimes we also feel the hopelessness. But in the face of hopelessness action can bring hope [sic],”);

3) they oversimplify the ‘solutions’ to the problem.

For example, Martin advised Congress that the way to end human trafficking was as follows:

“First of all, we must prevent exploitation by educating children and families about the dangers of human trafficking. Step two, we must protect the victims by providing resources to reintegrate and rehabilitate. And number three, we must prosecute and punish those who make a living out of this illegal activity from traffickers to consumers.”

These are, of course, the same three steps already set forth in the Trafficking Victim Protection Act of 2000 and each of its subsequent Reauthorizations. But the larger problem jhere, which should not go unremarked, is that members of Congress asked him to state what he would do, were he a member of Congress, to eradicate human trafficking. This abdication of responsibility on the part of legislators continues to be troubling. When the persons to whom they abdicate responsibility are celebrities with whom they enjoy rubbing elbows, Congress’ mode of attending to this matter leaves much to be desired.

To his credit, Martin did use some of his time before the House Committee on International Relations to challenge it mildly, recommending, for example, that the US ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Martin is a good example of a celebrity with tremendous goodwill but a modicum of expertise on human trafficking, who has nevertheless been thrust into (but also willingly accepted) a policy role through repeated invitations to hold forth on the topic by both US lawmakers and UN policy makers.

Exploitation in the Global Fishing Industry: New Zealand Researchers and Advocates Secure a Rare and Important Victory

Exploitation in the Global Fishing Industry:
New Zealand Researchers and Advocates Secure a Rare and Important Victory
Anne T. Gallagher

The extent of exploitation within the world’s fishing fleets almost defies description. A recent report by the Nexus Institute and IOM documents the horrific situation of Ukrainian Seafarers “led through a calculated maze into a world of imprisonment at sea, backbreaking labour, sleep deprivation, crippling and untreated illness, and, for the least fortunate, death”. IOM has documented similar abuses of Cambodian and Myanmar migrants working on Thai fishing vessels, some of whom were casually murdered and thrown overboard when their capacity to work was diminished through starvation, overwork and disease. Researchers report that West African children as young as four are being lured away from their parents for a life of hardship and abuse fishing the inland lakes of Ghana.

Fishing is one of the world’s largest and most unregulated industries. Global demand for low-cost seafood, in a situation of fast-depleting fish stocks, is driving operators to look for savings wherever they can. Men and boys desperate for work are the perfect fodder for greedy and dishonest recruiters (often legal employment agencies) who make substantial commissions tricking them into signing false contracts. Once on board, victims typically find that they owe large debts, which can only be paid off through months or years of work. Resistance is almost always futile. The boats are very effective prisons. They are often at sea for months or years at a time, offloading fish onto larger vessels from which they also receive supplies. On those boats that do come into port, the confiscation of identity documents, threats of harm and withholding of wages are usually sufficient to make sure enslaved crew don’t run away.

One particular story of research and activism in this difficult area deserves to be told: not least because it provides an example of how persistence, backed up by reliable information, can force governments to implement real change.

Fishing is a major revenue earner for New Zealand and a number of regulatory innovations have been developed to optimize harvesting of fish stocks in that country’s richly endowed Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). One innovation is the foreign charter vessel (FCV): a system whereby foreign vessels, complete with foreign crew, are chartered by New Zealand companies to fish the EEZ on their behalf, with the catch being transferred onshore for processing. In addition to lowering production costs, the use of FCVs enables tariff free entry of the catch into flag state markets. Over the past decade compelling evidence has slowly emerged of forced and exploitative labour amounting to human trafficking onboard FCVs. While isolated cases dating back to the mid-1990s had previously been reported, the issue first came to international attention in August 2010 when the fishing vessel Oyang 70, flagged to the Republic of Korea sank in calm seas 700 km off the New Zealand coast. Five Indonesian fishermen and the Korean captain died. The rescue exposed horrific living and working conditions for the Indonesian crew. Less than a year later seven crew abandoned the Korean-flagged Shin Ji fishing vessel and 32 abandoned the Oyang 75, another Korean-flagged vessel. All 39 Indonesian alleged abuse and under payment or non-payment of wages. Some also alleged physical abuse and sexual harassment. These and other cases make abundantly clear that labor standards for foreign fishing crew, established through a voluntary code of practice adopted by the New Zealand Government in 2006 are being widely flouted.

From an international legal point of view, the jurisdictional complexities of this scenario are formidable: the harmful conduct is apparently taking place outside the territory of the state to which it is most directly linked; by nationals of a second state on vessels flagged to that state; and against nationals of a third state. Certainly any legal responsibility that is successfully established in respect of New Zealand is likely to be shared: (i) with the state of nationality of the vessels concerned, which may also be found to owe a duty under international law to prevent trafficking on its ‘territory’; to prosecute its nationals; and to protect victims and (ii) the state of origin of the victims which may be found to owe a similar range of obligations. There is also a question about involvement and potential responsibility of (or for) non-state actors whose conduct has contributed to the harm. This group could include the New Zealand entities to whom fishing permits are issued and who contract the services of FCVs; recruitment agencies in countries of origin; and even the seafood processing, export and retail corporations within and beyond New Zealand whose supply chain is tainted by forced or exploitative labor.

Little has been done to unravel these complexities and to allocate responsibility fairly among the various involved States. However, in the case of New Zealand, external pressure (in the form of the US TIP Reports) and internal activism, fueled by intense media attention and highly visible civil society groups, has begun to have a significant impact. After denying the existence of a problem for several years, the Government of New Zealand initiated a parliamentary inquiry into the operation of FCVs in 2011. On the basis of its findings  the Government recently announced that from 2016, all commercial fishing vessels operating in New Zealand waters will need to be registered as New Zealand ships and carry the New Zealand flag. The reflagging of these vessels is critical, as it will operate to bring foreign crew within New Zealand laws including those related to employment and maritime safety. NGOs are now working to supplement this change through measures such as the elaboration of certification standards that will support a strengthened compliance system.

These developments are significant and deserve to be applauded. They provide a rare and welcome example of strong research creating the basis for effective advocacy that in turn leads to real changes in laws and policies. However, we should not be under any illusion that reforms in New Zealand will result in a decrease of exploitation within the global fishing industry. Most likely, the foreign vessels engaged in slavery-like practices will move elsewhere if the costs of increased regulation justify such a move. In this area as in many others we are confronted with the limits of national action. International cooperation to end exploitation of human beings for profit is not a luxury but a necessary precondition of any truly effective response.

A Battle Half-Won: India’s New Anti-Trafficking Law

The Indian Parliament recently enacted the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 (CLA). Although primarily concerned with targeting rape and sexual assault, the Bill incorporates a range of other offences dealing with violence against women many of which the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC) did not envisage. Two such offences relate to trafficking, an area of considerable policy and legal reform internationally. (more…)

Congratulations to Florrie Burke!

  A hearty congratulations to Florrie Burke on receiving the inaugural Presidential Award for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons “for her sustained dedication and unparalleled leadership in combating modern slavery through the development and delivery of comprehensive services, the empowerment of survivors to move from slavery to independence, and the transformation of policy to eradicate all forms of human trafficking.”  So well-deserved!

Comprehensive Immigration Reform Senate bill targets recruiter abuse

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Senate bill introduced in the Senate yesterday includes key protections against labor recruitment abuse.  (See page 577 of the bill:  Title III, Subpart F: Prevention of Trafficking in Persons and Abuses Involving Workers Recruited Abroad).  Let’s hope these provisions remain intact as the bill works its way through the House!

Celebrities in Human Trafficking, Part II

In Part II of this posting I begin to detail the involvement of particular celebrities in human trafficking activism, policy making and general influence.

1. Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie was recently promoted from Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, to Special Envoy. Inspired to become an “ardent, persistent and well-briefed humanitarian activist” after filming Tomb Raider in Cambodia, her humanitarian travels for UNHCR to places like Sudan, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Chad, and Pakistan, receive tremendous press coverage. Asked what she hoped to accomplish meeting with refugees and internally displaced persons in more than 20 countries, she stated, “Awareness of the plight of these people. I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon.”

Now considered a power player among celebrity humanitarians, she has morphed into a celebrity diplomat of sorts, speaking to world leaders at the Davos World Economic Forum, before Congress, and becoming a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jolie’s interest in and relationship to the issue of human trafficking comes through her work with refugees and displaced persons, a population very vulnerable to human trafficking. Jolie partnered with Microsoft to create Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), an NGO on a mission to provide pro bono legal counsel to unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States, ensuring that they are treated fairly and compassionately in the immigration system. KIND also specializes in assisting trafficked children in the U.S. in obtaining immigration status.

On the whole, Jolie’s involvement in human trafficking is measured and intelligent. She made an early misstep by hiring Trevor Nielson as her advisor, but she has since fired him and made better decisions.  Although she does not claim expertise on human trafficking, in creating and funding KIND, Jolie identified a need gap (legal assistance to unaccompanied minors, a group vulnerable to trafficking) and has attempted to apply a nuanced solution that builds capacity within the legal community. Furthermore, Jolie claims to cover her own travel expenses when doing humanitarian work, uses her wealth to support her causes, and does not appear to use her activism to sell movies or augment her celebrity status.

An Update on India’s Criminal Law Amendment

Anti-trafficking advocates often push for definitions of sexual exploitation to include  sex work.  In a victory for sex work advocates, the amended section 370 of the Indian Penal Code recognizes the difference between sexual exploitation and sex work.

Sex workers and women’s rights activists across India have welcomed the Government’s move to drop the word “prostitution” as exploitation from the amended Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code. The new formulation targets sexual exploitation and not adult consensual sex work.

To read the article in The Hindu click here.

The treatment of sex work as necessarily sexually exploitative can have a negative impact on public health programs for sex workers in India.

Daphna Hacker and Orna Cohen. “The Shelters in Israel for Survivors of Human Trafficking.” US Department of State (2012).

Shelters are an important part of the slim segment of the anti-trafficking industrial complex that can be deemed a human rights project.  They present the opportunity to give genuine aid to victims.  But what is genuine aid?

A recent report to the U.S. State Department by law professor Daphna Hacker and social work professor Orna Cohen provides a rich account of how difficult it can be to answer that question in theory and in practice.  Hacker and Cohen were commissioned to study the two shelters for trafficking victims in Israel – one, Ma’agan, for women and the other, Atlas, for men.  They interviewed shelter residents past and present and professionals involved in the system, from government officials to social workers in the shelters; met with shelter and hot line staff; and did comprehensive research into the history of anti-trafficking efforts in Israel generally and of the shelters in particular. The Report gives detailed assessments of the characteristics of the shelter populations over time; the degree to which the shelters meet the basic needs of trafficking victims; the shelters’ policies and practices on rehabilitation; the specific problems presented by victims with children; the challenges posed by the polyglot character of the shelters’ populations; the relationship between the service orientation of the shelter and legal proceedings, including criminal enforcement against traffickers, trafficked persons’ civil actions for damages, and the processes for granting and denying stay and work permits of Israeli immigration law; and the experiences and problems faced by shelter residents when they leave the shelter, whether for work in Israel or through repatriation. The Report concludes with a series of carefully crafted recommendations.   Among those, the discussion of rehabilitation is to my knowledge an absolute novelty in the massive literature on trafficking: anyone who thinks they know now what trafficking victims need would benefit from reading these daunting but hopeful pages.

This Report provides a crucial empirically grounded basis for thinking about anti-trafficking in terms of the geopolitics of labor migration; the economics of low-wage work; the psychology of human suffering and recovery; the contradictions between the criminal enforcement and human rights elements of the trafficking system; and much more.  It is so comprehensive that it could be the centerpiece of a short course at the undergraduate or professional school level on anti-trafficking.  In this post, however, I’m going to focus on the ways in which the Report’s findings and analysis illuminate the many problems raised by the gradual realization that the international definition of trafficking is not limited to sex trafficking; that prostitution itself is not trafficking; that men can be trafficked; and that trafficking occurs in all labor sectors.  The Report is, approached from this angle, a superrich account of the gendered aspects of the anti-trafficking regime that has burst into existence globally in the last thirteen years.

The names alone tell a story: Ma’agan in English means  “harbor” or “dock”; Atlas was the mythological figure so terrifically strong that he could hold the entire world on his shoulders.  And indeed, the Report’s history of the two shelters shows how each of them is deeply and problematically gendered.  Ma’agan was established when the Israeli anti-trafficking effort was entirely focused what Hacker and Cohen carefully describe as women trafficked for prostitution – what I would call trafficked sex workers — and was modeled originally on shelters for battered women.  It maintains restrictions on the women’s movements designed to protect them but also patronizing and un-freeing them; an emphasis on psychological rehabilitation and attitudinal empowerment; and a certain resignation to the fact that the women will not be getting work visas but instead will be repatriated.  Hacker and Cohen show in painstaking detail how many of these orientations became increasingly inappropriate when the population in the shelter plummeted following the huge crackdown on foreign prostitutes in the mid-oughts (my own sources in Israel tell me that sex work in Israel has effectively been reclaimed by Israeli sex workers) and when the trickle of trafficking victims became, increasingly, legal migrants into service work and desperate refugees from Africa via the Sinai.  Meanwhile the men’s shelter facilitates the men’s eager desire to return as soon as possible to the agricultural work for which they entered Israel, even back into the employment of their traffickers (none of whom have been sanctioned by the Israeli state).  Far from attempting to be psychological counselors, Atlas staff act as employment brokers.

The basic attitude of Ma’agan seems to be that the women need fixing; while that of Atlas is that the men need work.   Hacker and Cohen’s carefully reasoned plea for a new theory of rehabilitation is at least in part, in my view, a response to these strongly gendered differences and a sense that the women might not be so different from the men as the original anti-prostitution emphasis of Israeli anti-trafficking assumed.  The Report thus offers an opportunity to rethink the victim orientation to which anti-prostitution feminists and evangelicals seek to limit anti-trafficking policy and practice.

Meanwhile, the Report makes clear that the priors of the system are ill-prepared for the needs of the intensely trafficked refugees entering Israel from the Sinai.  These are the hyper-victims in this story, and Israeli anti-trafficking can barely touch them in deference to border control policies.  Anyone concerned about the potentially bad fit between anti-trafficking criminal enforcement and refugee protection should read these sections.     And finally, though unmentioned in the report, the closure of Israel to Palestinian workers now trapped in Gaza and the West Bank provides the grim geopolitical context for the labor migration/border control/security state complex in which Israeli anti-trafficking uneasily sits.

Hacker and Cohen’s report is painstaking and nearly exhaustive but never dull: for anyone concerned about trafficking and anti-trafficking, it is as gripping reading as War and Peace.   An amazing accomplishment.  Highly recommended.