IMAGINE this, a young girl somewhere in South America is offered a housekeeping job in the US, with the prospects of earning money that she would send home to family for its upkeep, while also saving a little to put herself through school.
This young girl is trafficked into the US and immediately realises she was sold a dummy.
Her passport is seized, and if she is lucky, she ends up a house slave; if she is unlucky she becomes a sex slave.
The house slave is confined to whatever home she is working in.
She works long hours with little rest and food.
She is intimidated and threatened while that pay she was promised never comes.
Life is worse for the sex slave; she is forced to service as many men as possible, with no protection.
In most cases, this slave is drugged to make her more pliant and also so that she consumes very little food.
It is all about cost cutting.
In 2004, Berkley University research revealed that slavery was still thriving in the US.
Slavery, as defined by the United Nations (UN) involves all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself voluntarily.
In the US this practice is dominant in the labour-driven sectors such as agriculture, textile/clothing and hospitality, but under the radar, criminal activities that include prostitution and sex services and domestic services are also major culprits.
One cannot talk of slavery without discussing its other thriving supplier, human traffickers.
Human trafficking has become big business with syndicates ‘exporting’ slaves anywhere across the globe.
When people talk of slavery, what comes to mind is the trans-Atlantic slave trade, without people realising that someone they know could be engaging slaves, or that they are in some way using goods made by slaves.
Modern day slavery defies stereotypes; the victims come from all races, backgrounds, economic classes and education levels.
What they have in common is their forced situation and the physical and psychological abuse.
The America Civil Liberties Union has been working to fight not just ‘illegal’ human trafficking, but also institutionalised human trafficking which the US Government has been ignoring as it is a beneficiary of these crimes.
Prakash Adhikari was a young man looking to provide a better life for his family.
He left his village in Nepal in 2004 after local labour recruiters falsely promised him work in five-star hotels and restaurants in Jordan.
Based on this promise, Adhikari borrowed heavily to pay the recruitment fees he had been charged.
After he arrived in Jordan, his passport was seized and he was transported against his will to Iraq to work for a US Government subcontractor, Daoud and Partners.
En route to the military base, the convoy in which he was travelling, along with dozens of men in the same predicament, was attacked by Iraqi insurgents.
He and 11 other similarly trafficked men in the convoy were later executed.
It is reported that thousands of foreign workers were hired to work on US Government contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, as cooks, janitors, cleaners and mechanics on US military bases and diplomatic missions.
In 2011, there were more than 60 000 such workers in Iraq and Afghanistan alone.
Many are trafficked into jobs that pay much less than the advertised and that are located in different countries than indicated on their contracts.
Closer home, Oxfam America produced a report titled Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture which exposed the gross human rights violations in the agriculture sector.
Nearly two million overworked farmworkers are living in ‘sub-poverty misery, without benefits, without the right to overtime’, a living wage and other job protections.
More than half of the jobs in the agricultural sector are concentrated in California, Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Washington.
Most farm workers are young (between 18 and 44 or younger), male (about 80 percent) and of Latino origin.
They have little education, and many are recent undocumented immigrants (mostly from Mexico.)
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) states that the average entry age into prostitution is between 12-14.
The internet is a frequent recruitment platform.
Other vulnerable victims are shelter and street youths, including runaways.
An estimated 2,8 million children live on city streets, a third of whom are lured into prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home.
Interestingly in all this, the US Government has not put much effort in combating challenges at home, but has chosen instead to pay close attention to push for international treaties that push for the severe punishment of those who employ child slaves under the guise of child soldiers.
This practice is of course prevalent in the developing world where warlords and other rebel groups capture and force-train young children into becoming ‘soldiers’.