Most of you know me as Martha Bourke, friend, daughter, sister, wife, teacher or Indie author. There are a very select few of you that know me as a human rights advocate, specifically for the rights of women and children. It's not really a part my life I planned on sharing on this blog. I wasn't interested in discussing my service work here. But then something happened that changed my mind. The KONY 2012 campaign video appeared on YouTube six days ago.
I'm sure you've all heard about it, seen it on TV, read a friend's post on Facebook or seen the #KONY2012 hashtag on Twitter. The idea was to raise enough noise to get their campaign to go viral. Which it has done and then some. But I'm not going to write about the group that created the video, Invisible Children. The truth is, I know as little about the group as most people. They've been in existence for about eight years, but they have never partnered with any of the organizations I've worked with.
What I want to write about today is human trafficking. What exactly is it? The United Nations defines human trafficking as, "an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the use of exploiting them." Basically, it's a fancy name for something that has existed as long as humankind has - slavery. It's been 143 years since the 13th Amendment and 60 years since the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the truth is, 300 international treaties later, slavery hasn't gone away. And few of its perpetrators are as easy to pinpoint as Joseph Kony in Uganda or Bosco Ntaganda in the DRC.
In fact, the greatest challenge for the human trafficking movement has been awareness. Modern slavery is insidious. When I was teaching, I had a conversation a few years ago with a mother who was angry with me for mentioning, during Black History Month, that slavery still existed. But she wasn't angry because of when I'd mentioned it, she was angry because she believed that what I had said was untrue. She wasn't a mean person. She was just a concerned mom. But that's the degree to which human trafficking has hidden itself.
If there's one thing the KONY 2012 campaign has succeeded in, it's raising awareness. There have been other events in recent history that have brought human trafficking to the nightly news. There were numerous reports of attempted child abductions in the aftermath of the 2006 Tsunami in Indonesia. They told of how strange men would show up at the hospital and attempt to pass themselves off as relatives of "Baby Wave," the youngest survivor of the disaster at merely to weeks old. Who were these men who wanted a two week old baby? They were sex traffickers.
Similar media coverage took place after the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti two years ago. There was much concern about the thousands of new orphans the quake created. But there were already 300,000 Haitian victims of human trafficking prior to the event. It has long been the hub of human trafficking in our hemisphere. It's completely mind-boggling and so are the other statistics.
The United Nations reports that there are some 2.5 million people in forced labor at any given time. It affects 161 countries in the world, including the United States, where someone is taken into the trafficking system every 30 minutes. An estimated 1.2 million are children. 95% of victims experience physical or sexual violence and women and girls form the largest percentage of those taken. It's the second largest criminal industry in the world and generates $31 billion a year.
So, what can one do in the face of all this? Join "Cover the Night" if you want to. Eat less chocolate (I'll let you Google that one), find your "slavery footprint" below, watch over your own children like hawks. Just be AWARE. It's the first step to helping us shine the light on this abomination that hides in the dark places of our world.
Links to check out!
http://bit.ly/xMadtf - What's your slavery footprint?
http://www.polarisproject.org - general information
http://www.humantrafficking.org - general information
http://bit.ly/AeZKIq - UN report
