Day 2

by moi on Nov 26th, 2010

Do you remember slavery? Traders from powerful Western countries would go buy men and women from weaker countries and ship them back home. There, the traders would sell all these people to ‘owners’. A nasty inhumane and exploitative practice that was outlawed by all civilized countries decades ago ……… ? Not.

Thousands, some say millions, of women are sold into slavery each year. This is big business and there’s a lot of money to be made, and lots of bargains to be found. But of course, the money is made by the slave traders (or traffickers, as they are called), the bargains are got by the buyers, and not much of either goes to the women who are the commodity.

As in days of yore, it is women in impoverished and powerless circumstances who are enslaved. As in days of yore, it is people in rich, powerful and civilized Western countries who are happy to become slave owners.

How do women become trapped into this form of abuse? Many different ways including, but not limited to, the following;

She may be imported into a country as a so-called ‘mail-order’ bride

She may be sold by her family to a trafficker

She may be tricked by a trafficker into thinking she is about to start a great new job in some country of opportunity

She may just be kidnapped and sold

When one of these women reaches the strange new country, she can most probably not even speak the language much less find her way around it. She is entirely at the mercy of whomever she discovers is her ‘owner’.

Perhaps she finds that her new husband wants nothing more than a young and exotic woman to have sex with him, clean his house and prepare his meals. She might have her travel and identification documents seized by an ‘owner’ who forces her into prostitution, pornography or crime – not the waitressing or hairdressing job she had expected.

Escape for a woman in this type of situation becomes almost impossible. She can’t speak the language, she has no papers, she may be raped, beaten or drugged to ensure her compliance. If she does manage to get to the police, she may well be deported back to her home country and into the hands, once again, of the people who captured her in the first place.

There’s not awfully much a poor girl can do. How about you?
http://www.trafficked-women.org/takeaction.html

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Follow the campaign:

Day 3: http://moirarichards.bookslive.co.za/blog/2010/11/27/day-3/
Shukumisa: http://www.shukumisa.org.za/
Damaria Senne’s Blog Party: http://damariasenne.blogspot.com/
Day 1: http://www.redroom.com/blog/moira-richards/day-1