What can we do? Human Trafficking

While Half the Sky does a great job of portraying the conditions of prostitution and making the topic personal for the reader, to me, it seemed to lack a clear plan-of-action, a what-you-can-do statement. This sort of missing solution comes from the cyclical nature of human trafficking and the real challenges people face to get out of this cycle. One of the scariest moments was when Momm was slipping into a manager-like role, beating the girls herself (“the slave was becoming the overseer”). When the chapter subtitle reads that “Rescuing girls is the easy part,” I wonder if a grassroots vs. treetops solution would be effective.

To bring countries other than India into the solution discussion, I found this fact on humantrafficking.org: “Thailand is the first country in the region to pass laws that impose greater penalties on customers than on sellers for involvement in commercial sex with underage partners. Application of the law has been light, but it is the basis for future enforcement." Though the laws are well-intentioned, I don’t know that a law, if not enforced in its beginning, can later provide a basis for its enforcement.

Half the Sky did mention that the way to eradicate human trafficking was to make it no longer profitable for the pimps. In order for that to happen, the consequences, or bribes, so named in the chapter, must become too expensive of a risk or payment to make. The practical question for me is: What will make police enforce those laws? If those laws exist and are still not enforced, it seems like they won’t be effective.

While state.gov provides encouraging stastics about the increasing convictions of pimps in all parts of the world, reports like the NY Times article “Slow War on Human Trafficking” counters those successful numbers.  Mead writes that “more than a year after the Long Island Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force was organized, not one trafficker operating on Long Island has been arrested, and just one victim, a Chinese woman forced to work in a Wantagh brothel that was disguised as a massage parlor, has been freed from traffickers.” This lack of success may explained by the slow and complex nature of trafficking, but it may also suggest that something isn’t working. What can we do?