Dear fellow bloggers and previous followers of my blog. I have missed you while I took one year off from blogging to work on a manuscript, and to work on a very inportant personl relationship in my life. However, I never forgot about my readership or my insistency that Global Human Rights really are for Everyone indeed!
Today, although brief I would like to point you to the link from a very recent September 30, 2010 US State Department release, regrading human trafficking and modern day slavery. As I have mentioned in my 2009 posts and you can review my archives, this is not a "new" phenomena. The US government has really stepped up due diligence with revitalized task forces and interagency involvement with the FBI and other agencies spearheding ever so important measures to shore up the 10 year old legislation entitled the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000.
According to the US State Departments official website, "Since the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 a decade ago, we have seen both appreciable progress and new trends. For instance, we have come to understand that men comprise a significant number of trafficking victims. Yet, we have also seen the feminization of modern slavery, with women making up a majority of those trapped in commercial sex as well as in forced labor situations.
We have found women held in modern slavery through deceit and force, picking cotton, mining conflict minerals, harvesting rice, toiling as domestic workers, dancing in nightclubs, exploited for pornography, and offered for commercial sex. We have come to understand the unique vulnerabilities of those who work in the home, with many countries not offering adequate legal protection to domestic workers. This feminization of modern slavery has been aided by growing numbers of women migrating for work and the increasingly unscrupulous and coercive nature of recruiting.
Such fraudulent recruitment practices affect both female and male workers. These practices include: work offers that misrepresent conditions, excessive recruitment fees, written contracts that workers cannot understand, and the switching of terms of employment after the original contract has been signed. In the so-called sex industry, recruiters do not merely make promises of a better life; they weave a tale of love and glamour that is quickly replaced by dependency and the abuse of what has been called “seasoning” – a term that is itself as offensive as the practice it describes. Traffickers are also changing their methods of control: they are using more female recruiters, more subtle forms of exploitation, and greater psychological abuse. And these techniques demonstrate how interconnected sex and labor trafficking are, as more and more cases are being brought around the world involving the sexual abuse – both in prostitution and by their bosses – of women who migrated on domestic worker visas. These migrant women have been raped and threatened with harm by supervisors who control their work environment."
These are extremely important findings........ Please be informed, the United States under the Obama administration, for you Democrats out there, is spearheading a serious campaign under Hillary Clintons Agency, to get to the bottom of this very difficult notion of modern day slavery.
My hat is off to the US State Department and I hope that they continue to keep up the good work as I will continue to, through my blog, keep as many people as I can informed of all there outstanding efforts to promote human rights on a global level.
Best
William:)
