The hidden world of domestic servants

The email dropped into my inbox, but it was hard to believe the horrors it described. Often with our Business Travellers against Human Trafficking campaign we get reports about human trafficking, suspicions that a hotel in India, Dubai, Manila or elsewhere has been used to exploit, rape and destroy the lives of young women whose only mistake was to trust the wrong people with their dreams of a better life. Sometimes the traffickers are their own relatives, sometimes they are "agents" paid more than the victim can ever afford to get them to a job in the city or in another country. The debts they owe are used to keep them enslaved.
This email was different. It was from a hospital in Kuwait, where victims were being treated after horrendous abuse. The police were not interested, and their traffickers were still at large in the community outside the walls of the hospital.
One of the girls had been hired as a domestic servant in Kuwait and then drugged and raped. When she became pregnant, she was thrown out. She has suffered severe mental trauma and is confined to the hospital. She is married, with a two year old back in Indonesia, but cannot go back because of the shame she feels.
Another Indonesian girl, who was also working as a domestic servant, broke both arms and legs when she jumped from a window to escape. She won't say anything about what happened, other than that her employer was a bad man. She had been in Kuwait for one week.
Another domestic servant is missing both nipples. Her employer had invited a group of his friends over who had gang raped her and her nipples had been bitten off. Her body was covered in knife scars.
There were many other cases too. When we tried to get police action, we could make no progress. Even when we tried to get a journalist to cover the story, to put pressure on the police, there was no interest. The Indonesian press said they already knew of many such stories.
At Business Travellers against Human Trafficking we are usually able to get police action or NGOs to help. It seems that domestic workers are a special catagory though, one that no one cares about. One thing is certain, the more we bring the cases to light and don't give up until action is taken, the safer these women will be. The men who did these things are still at liberty, but we won't give up until the savagery that shows no respect to the dignity and rights of women is a thing of the past.
If you travel regularly, then please become part of Business Travellers against Human Trafficking. Our website is www.businesstravellers.org, and you can join the facebook group at http://tiny.cc/aY6la

A man dreaming of a quiet retirement.

I just got back from sitting with a man called Jeff, while he showed me pictures of the home he’d been building for his retirement. Jeff is grey, and thin, but there is an assurance in his manner, which somehow reflects the experience of a man used to being in control. He had his computer on an ordinary desk next to his kitchen. While he carefully made us tea, we watched the snow outside his window, and listened as he complained about the robberies that had happened at the café and sports club he runs, and about the amount of tax he has to pay.
On the wall are pictures of his family, his wife, stepsons and stepdaughters. He has been married for ten years, and is proud of it. He’s sixty now, and soon he’ll be able to move with her to the house he’s built and relax a little.
It would have been a cosy and comforting scene, if it wasn’t for the fact that the room next door was full of half naked Thai women and that we were sitting inside an erotic massage parlour. It was from the exploitation of these women that Jeff was building his retirement home in Thailand. Pimping young women had paid for the beautiful garden and the terrace. The only disruption to his plan so far has been raids by the police checking that his women have the right papers. So far he’s got away with it.
Quietly during the conversation, we found out more about how this secret world operates, but what was most striking was just how banal and ordinary this evil is in his mind. For him, it was no different from selling drinks, or hiring out a tennis court. In his own eyes he was just a hard-pressed businessman trying to make a living, so he could retire with his wife and pass his remaining days with her family in Thailand.
The human mind is very adept at rationalising the wrong that we do, seeing it as normal, or “the way the world works”. Although we might not do what Jeff does, to a certain extent we rationalize the life we live, not buying ethical products, not caring about the homeless person in the street, not visiting an elderly neighbour, just seeing ourselves as too busy, or finding an excuse as to why the way we live is fine. We are hard-pressed, just trying to make it through the day; it’s the way the world works. Just like Jeff.

Trust

She had invited us through the front of the Thai massage parlour, into the back area where the women wait, watch TV and get ready. We sat there listening as she poured out her anger and frustration.  It struck me once again how the normal face of exploitation is boredom and exhaustion, punctuated by violence and fear. It was an ordinary living room, sofas, chairs, cigarette smoke, a TV showing Thai programs and a security camera giving a view of the front door. They were on the lookout for police making checks or violent customers. Whichever came, they were afraid.
As we talked about what was happening, the woman opened up and told us about the trafficking routes, the debts imposed on the women and the forced prostitution that followed. She kept coming back to the same word "trust". Could she trust us? Could she trust the Belgian authorities? How could she trust anyone? After years in Belgium, she tried to look after the younger women in the massage parlours, but it was hard to help them. It was a picture of a life on a knife-edge.

We offered help with visas, with alternatives to life in the massage parlours. We tried to show a way out. Again and again she asked “Can I trust you?” There was no way to prove that she could. All we can do is be consistent, keep going, keep showing up, keep trying to help. Eventually, perhaps, we will gain enough trust to really help. When you are isolated and abused you can close up to everything, even to those trying to help you. When she asked why we would try to help her and people like her, we pointed to the fact that as Christians we believe that everyone is of infinite worth. By the end of the conversation her eyes glistened with tears.
One of the many problems with a society that treats everything as a commodity is that there is a massive erosion of trust. Women find it hard to trust men, children are wary of adults. Parents look at strangers to find the danger that could be in them. Few people trust the advertising agents, and no one trusts a politician. Only when we recognise worth instead of looking for a bargain, and value people above products will we rebuild the trust that we all so desperately need. For many of the women we work with, it is the key to freedom.

An SMS for help, half way across the world.

An email landed in my inbox through our campaign "Business Travellers against Human Traffiking". It was from a man in Indonesia, begging for help. His friend had been in debt, which she couldn't pay off. As she couldn't pay, she was being forced to go with traffickers, who said they were taking her to Iraq. She had managed to sms her friend that she was being taken to the plane at 5pm that day. She needed to be rescued! I looked at the email, in which the man told this story, then I looked up the time difference from Belgium to Indonesia - there was only two hours to go before this woman was lost. There was no time to lose!

I had no idea which NGOs to contact in Indonesia, so I googled around and soon found a few, and before long, I was hanging on the phone, nervously waiting for someone to pick up, but when they did there was another problem - no one spoke any English. So, it was back to the drawing board and the time was ticking away. In the end I did the only thing I could, I phoned the only people I was sure would speak English, I phoned the British embassy. They were slightly surprised to be contacted about trafficking on their doorstep by a man in Belgium, but they sprang into action and contacted the local police. Before long I received the message that the woman had been rescued and was safe for the moment, although the threat of the traffickers to whom she owed money would never completely disappear. It was a strange, but amazing story of a rescue that started with an sms and spanned half the world. It also showed yet again that by reporting what we know, we can bring help to trafficking victims.

This week www.businesstravellers.org ran another story about Indonesia, this time about a recruitment agency promising young women domestic work in Malaysia, but now acused of actually trafficking them into prostitution. The problems of poverty, debt and the hope of a better life creating vulnerability to trafficking continue. The more it can be brought to light, the more we can work together to stop it.

From the street to the classroom

Behind the Gare du Nord in Brussels, there is long street of windows with women in prostitution posing all day. They try not to look bored, but they must be. It's an odd sight, shoppers with children hurrying along a street with women in the windows, and a steady stream of men from the railway station looking for quick sex. That street is the start of the Brussels red light district and we are often in that area working to find out if there has been trafficking.

We were looking around to see if there might be a youth centre we could work with, perhaps as a space where the women could come to learn skills and be out of the pressure of work for a while, when we came across a young woman sitting on the floor, with a toddler on her lap and a four-year-old dancing about next to her. We stopped to talk, and although her French wasn't good and she spoke no English or Dutch, we learned that she was Romanian like so many of the women begging with their children in Brussels (It is curious the segregation that occurs, Bulgarians in the windows by the station, Nigerians in the windows a few streets away, Romanians on the street, using children to attract donations, all depending on who the pimps and the traffickers are that control the turf.). She had been here a few years and although she had somewhere to stay, life was hard. She insisted the children were hers and knew their names without hestitating. Someone was controlling her, and but she seemed to be genuine enough.

As we finished talking with her, and started to walk away, another woman rushed up. Her story was much more dubious and disturbing. Brandishing a piece of paper in our faces, and pointing to a young child about seven years old who stood vacantly next to her, she told us in perfect French that she was a Bosnian refugee who had only been in Belgium for one month. Her daughter, she said, was blind and needed treatment. We looked at her, and indeed her eyes were clouded over with a white film. The doctor's bill she waved in front of us for hundreds of euros was, however, clearly faked. Other questions sprang to mind; how had she learn French so quickly? If she was illegal, how did she get a bank account for this bill to be paid through? How come the bill was faked? We looked again at the girl, and a darker question troubled us. If she could not see, and she was being used to beg, how did she get blinded? It was a very disturbing thought. We tried to direct the woman to local organisations who could help, but she became angry with us.
We saw it on the streets of India, now we are seeing it on the streets of Brussels; children being exploited for money. I pray that the girl was not blinded for the purpose, but certainly she was not receiving proper medical attention. You may have seen the film Slumdog Millionaire, which accurately shows how children are sometimes injured and blinded to get more money from their begging. I hope this is not happening in Brussels, but now I have my doubts.

Another woman who regularly begs alone in the station itself, has a different story. She is very poor, and she also stays in the country illegally and begs all day, but when I enquired about her children, she replied that they were in school. Despite the precarious nature of her existence and the probably control she is under from traffickers and other mafia figures, she has managed to get her children into education. At least when they are in school, they are safe, and out of the environment which seems to trap so many. They will also have the possiblity of a different future. Education for all those children we pass on the street, another goal in the fight to stop the traffik.

Isolated, excluded and illegal, what would you do?

When we heard they had her in the detention cells, Rach and I set out to see what we could do. Jane (not her real name) was a part of the church we were leading at the time in south London. A tiny, fine boned, but wonderfully self-reliant African lady from Ghana, we couldn't imagine what the police could want to keep her locked up for. She was being kept at a police station in north London, so off we went.
For some reason, entering a police station is always a bit of a trauma, its like when you see a police car when you are driving, you always slow down (or I do!) even if you are obeying the speed limit. If that's what it's like for me, a white, middle class Brit, imagine what it's like for an African on foreign soil. The police were perfectly civil and we went through to see Jane, huddled with three others in a cell that seemed only small enough for two. It was winter and she was cold. She had no blanket, no change of clothes, no tooth brush or other toiletaries. We applied to the police to be able to be able to bring her those things and they laughed at us. "Oh, they can ask us for those things any time they like" guffawed the seargent "they obviously don't need them". "Did you tell them they could ask for those things" I shot back. He paused and looked round at the women. They had no idea of their rights in a British police station. The policeman went off to get a blanket.
Jane's story soon emerged. She was, like many in our congregation, in the UK illegally. She came in on a student visa and stayed to work. She had been working quietly in a small factory in north London for a pittance of a wage. When the factory owner wanted to get rid of them, he just called the police and declared that he had found out that the workers hadn't got the right papers. The police then came and arrested them. The factory owner had the best of both worlds, cheap labour when he wanted it, and a good relationship with the police when he had enough. Whatever you think about illegal immigrants, what is obvious is that exploitation is never very far away.
This was brought to mind recently by the story we heard from one of the women in a Thai massage parlour. She had come into the country legally, and worked in a factory, but when she couldn't get her visa renewed, she lost her job. It was then that the pimp approached her to start working in the massage parlour. Isolated, excluded and illegal, she didn't see any alternative. Now she doesn't know how to get out of that kind of work.
Jane's story ends more happily, we were able to work with her to help her regularise her stay. The fact is that illegal immigrants, sans papier or whatever they are called in your country, are people too and are vulnerable to exploitation. It is impossible to hate and exclude immigrants and to also say you are against human trafficking. It's a sensitive subject, but it's also the elephant in the room. No one should be bought and sold and we should care for the vulnerable, no matter whether they are legal or not in the eyes of the state.

Politicians who love blood chocolate

A few years ago, at the start of the Stop the Traffik chocolate campaign, we were excited to be invited to the UK parliament to discuss the fact that thousands of children were (and are) being trafficked and exploited on the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast. We were invited to a meeting of the Cross Party Committee on Chocolate and Confectionary, no less. With jobs like that, it's a wonder that MPs even need to over-claim their expenses. We were excited though, because it was the first political interest in the UK.
We spent hours preparing the case, re-reading all the research, in the knowledge that the chocolate industry would also be represented and would be arguing to the MPs that they were doing all they could to stop the exploitation of children. They had even managed to find a sympathetic charity to attack us.
I was on holiday in Wales on the day of the hearing, so I got up at 4am and caught a train from a windswept, dark station, winding my way through to Birmingham, changing trains, and finally arriving, bleary eyed in London, more than five hours later (unbeknowns to me, my boss Steve Chalke had managed to get a lift from a friend with a helicopter and arrived from the north of England in less time than it had taken me to get out of Wales. Oh to have friends with helicopters!)
We went through security into Portcullis House, and were shown into the meeting room by a friendly assistant. Slowly the industry representatives were shown in, and lastly the MPs arrived. As we predicted, the argument between us and the industry was sharp, but what struck me most was the behaviour of some of the MPs. They were not really that interested in the plight of the children of Ivory Coast, but rather their attention was fixed on the large bowls of free chocolate that Nestlé, Mars and others had provided for them. Brian Woods showed the famous and moving film he had made in the Ivory Coast of children who had been trafficked and held as slaves, showing their wounds and talking of the pain they had suffered. All through this the MPs happily munched away at their chocolate, as if it was a trip out to the local cinema.
At the end of it all, one MP went over to a side table and picked up some of the gift bags that the chocolate industry had provided "Time to take my blood chocolate" he sniggered to us, and left. We were astonished.
Well, that was almost two and a half years ago, and much has changed. Industry has started to make steps forward, although there is still a long way to go. It isn't politicians who have made this happen, it is ordinary people who have bought fairtrade, written letters, held chocolate fondue parties, protested and petitioned. I can imagine that a meeting of the Cross Party Committee on Chocolate and Confectionary would be very different today, as everyone knows that voters want to see this terrible abuse end. That's why Stop the Traffik is a grass roots movement. We know that change starts in our own communities and the politicians will catch up with what we are doing. Perhaps, on some issues, that's the way it should be.