Found myself making a long, ranty comment on a Facebook thread this morning and realized, hey, that could be a blog post. Those of us who write for food appreciate writing that lends itself to more than one application.
So here's the article that started everything, a Washington Post piece on the vast and profoundly misleading inflation of human-trafficking figures around the world, and why that has happened.
Posting it on Facebook brought out some interesting comments from people I don't usually interact with, but in the end I feel like we had the chance for a good conversation, each of us writing in our little boxes one after the other. Here's the thread if you want to take a look at how it went.
Talk of human trafficking has become something of a flash point for me in the last couple of years, as it was wrongly used and amply abused to justify the terrible injustice enacted against adult sex workers last year in Canada when their customers were criminalized for the first time in the country's history. I am all about rights for sex workers, and it has been devastating to see the number of otherwise thoughtful Canadians who can't get beyond the word "trafficked" to consider the actual impact of our poorly considered laws on the lives of tens of thousands of rational, informed and unvictimized Canadian adults earning a living in the sex industry.
Somewhere around the 4th-comment mark in the Facebook thread, I weighed back in with these comments below. Would love to keep this conversation going, so I hope you'll share your own thoughts on this.
Even when you look at what drives human
trafficking, it's largely the demands of the developed world for cheap goods
and services. You'll hear some people going on about the maquilas in Central
America, for instance, but who do we think those internationally owned clothing
factories are making clothes for?? In countries like Nicaragua and Honduras,
where there are loads of maquilas, people there are actually forbidden from
buying those clothes, made by them in their own country!
Nobody can get
snippety about issues like human trafficking without fully understanding that
our easy way of life totally depends on the labour of poor people. Like
everything else in this world, it's all about demand. As long as a market
exists for something, there will be people somewhere who will have to do the
work of that. We can't morally object to that fact while at the same time
happily enjoy the products of that labour.
And we are way beyond boycotts of
one product or another - the labour of poor people is completely integrated
into the lifestyle of North Americans, from the clothing we wear to the
vehicles we drive, food we eat, cost of our cellphone service. And that's not
even counting the labours of poor people from other lands in our own countries
- the farm workers, construction workers, nannies, etc, legal and illegal. The
people who we have decided should live by different rules than the rest of us
in the same country because we want to reap the benefits from cheaper labour
right here at home.
Meanwhile, poor people of the world would be completely
hooped if the developed world suddenly decided to quit exploiting them and
close down all the international operations and genuinely crack down on illegal
migration.
A fifth of the Honduran GDP is generated by migrant Hondurans
working in the U.S., a vast number illegally, and sending money back home. When
you leave home to do the long, hard and horribly dangerous scrabble from
Honduras to the US, and pay money for somebody to get you through that final
bit across the river, are you being trafficked or are you just trying to dig
you and your family out of poverty by doing what you see as your only option? I
mean, it is a COMPLEX subject.
But we do it a huge disservice when we try to
make it about good and evil, heroes and villains. A whole lot of money gets
thrown around on buzz about "human trafficking," and the fundamentals
go untouched as always.
