SLAVERY

The new face of an old evil
09/30/05, Martin Luther King

Long after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished, many Africans are being subjected to a new form of the evil practice.

Slavery is not dead; at least not in Africa. Hundreds of years after the obnoxious trans-Atlantic trade was abolished, many Africans are still traded as slaves by their fellow Africans. A US State Department report has indicted Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, for not doing enough to combat human trafficking, a scourge which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice describes as "nothing less than a modern form of slavery."

In its annual Trafficking in Persons Report, the State Department listed Nigeria as one of the Tier 2 countries, defined as nations "whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards" set by American law but "are making significant efforts to do so." The report identifies the countries as destinations for trafficking victims for sexual exploitation and forced labour. It appears to cast a doubt on the efforts of the Titi Abubakar, wife of Nigeria's vice president, whose WOTCLEF (Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation) has been battling the phenomenon of human trafficking in Nigeria.

Togo, another west African nation, similarly attracts a negative assessment from the report. It was categorised as a Tier 3country, which groups those nations that are not making significant efforts to stop the practice. Other countries in this category are Bolivia, Cambodia, Cuba, Ecuador, Jamaica, Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan and Venezuela.

Looking at 150 countries, the report focuses on the growing problem of trafficking in women and children for sexual exploitation, sex tourism and prostitution. It finds that human trafficking is endemic throughout the west African sub-region. From Sierra Leone to Liberia and Ivory Coast; and from Nigeria to Togo and Ghana, the sub-region literally groans under the burden of this new form of slavery.

Still recovering from years of civil war, Sierra Leone is currently trying to come to grips with the problem as aid organisations battle to save children from prostitution or forced labour. A decade of conflict has made poverty in that country so bad that many families cannot afford to take care of their children. Over 1,500 children live on the streets in the capital city of Freetown, making a living doing odd jobs. They are the children most in danger of violence and sexual abuse, experts say. A counsellor, John B. Koroma, says some street kids have been kidnapped and trafficked out of Sierra Leone as prostitutes or into forced labour. Exact numbers are difficult to confirm.

"It is a kind of enterprise that has just developed recently, it is a very quick way of making money," he says. "So people come out, and meet some of these children in the street because they will not have people that take care of them. They give them promises that 'I will pay school fees for you,' 'I will do this and do that.' So they collect these children. At the end of the day, they move them out of the country, to use them as child labour and other things."

Often girls as young as 10 years old, who are not trafficked, are willing to sell themselves for sex anyway, simply to get enough to eat. Although boys do not generally become involved in commercial sex work, they are exposed to drugs and alcohol, which provide some relief from the hardship of their lives.

Donald Robert Shaw, who works with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), says that the number of street kids will not decrease until the underlying causes that make children leave home in the first place are addressed.

"Our partners' anecdotal information suggests that the number is increasing as the levels of poverty and vulnerability are significant," says Shaw. "That either pushes children onto the streets or children end up leaving homes to find better economic livelihoods out of impoverished families."

UNICEF is working with the Sierra Leonean government to bring children back into the educational system, so as to prevent them from being exposed to dangers on the streets. Most importantly, it is mounting campaigns against physical and sexual abuse of children. But attitudes are difficult to change.

"The issues that need to be addressed," according to Shaw, "are the prevention aspects and some of the specific prevention aspects relate to physical and sexual abuse within the home setting. And we are also working with police and social welfare to give parents and care-givers information so that they understand how to better parent their children so they are not in fact pushing them out of the home."

Aid workers, however, say that until the real issues of poverty and abuse in homes are tackled, the number of street kids in the country will increase and so will the risk of them being trafficked, abused, and sexually exploited.

Leaving Sierra Leone, the pattern is basically the same in west Africa's other war-ravaged economies of Liberia and Ivory Coast. In these countries, one industry that thrives is prostitution. Young girls, some as young as 10, become victims of the sex trade, facing the dangers of drugs, AIDS and trafficking.

On the streets in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital, prostitutes are known as serpents because of the hissing sound they make to hail down men, driving or walking by. Here, girls decked out in tight-fitting bell bottom pants and see-through tops stop sports cars, driven by soldiers or UN employees, and ask for $30 (the equivalent of a monthly salary for most in Abidjan) to share the rest of the night. Similarly, in Monrovia, Liberia's capital city, there are so many prostitutes that the UN and Liberian police do nothing to stop them.

"Prostitution? It's not that I don't care but if a woman is free to sell her body and if she has a passport and she can go whenever she wants I don't care," says one disgruntled UN employee.

Celhia de Lavarene, head of the small UN's five-member anti-trafficking team in Monrovia, says she understands why prostitutes are in the practice. It's because they are so poor, she argues.

The French UN worker started her job by rescuing 30 white eastern European girls who had been brought to Liberia for foreigners who wanted prostitutes but refused to sleep with African women. Her job is to make sure prostitutes aren't taken into criminal networks and trafficked across borders. She says being a trafficked prostitute is even worse, because these girls have their papers taken and owe traffickers huge sums of money.

But despite her efforts, trafficking in and out of Liberia is still taking place. "We have noticed trafficking from Liberia to London because I had someone in London calling me and explaining to me that Liberian girls were trafficked. And we had some Sierra Leonean girls being trafficked from Sierra Leone to Liberia," says de Lavarene.

She fears that trafficking will resume at a much higher level soon when she quits at the end of her contract. She says it's a question of offer, demand and impunity, adding that there are so many men willing to pay for sex and so few people really committed to cracking down on the growing trade, to the detriment of all the girls.

"I'm not going to tell you that we're successful," she states. "It's just now it's on hold, it did not stop. So my fear is that as soon as I leave the traffickers will know I left."

Elsewhere in the sub-region, Gambian child protection agencies are trying to sensitise children on the risks of commercial sexual exploitation in the tourist-friendly but impoverished country. Hundreds of schoolchildren attended a recent UN-funded camp where they were asked to go back to their schools, homes, and neighbourhoods to explain to others the problems of the abuses they face.

Camp coordinator, Famara Darboe, says European tourists and Gambians use children for sex and/or pornography because it is cheap and they can get away with it. He adds that criminals who organise the transactions make money, while the children have little to show for it, but the scars that remain with them for life.

"The children," Darboe says, "are being used as commodities for perpetrators for their financial gains. So the children protection alliance took it as its responsibility to sensitise people about what this is and the impact on children."

He describes the European perpetrators as paedophiles and those who use children for sordid reasons. One of the reasons: "It is believed that most people have the concept that once you have sex with children it can prevent you from contracting HIV/AIDS or having sex with children can cure you if you are HIV-positive. This is why many people are going for it."

There are no accurate statistics on the scope of the problem, but in tourist areas, many foreigners and Gambians can be seen negotiating with criminals known for offering sex with children.

Jalamang Camara, head of Gambia's main child protection association, says the government has passed laws to prevent tourism sex-abuse and to punish Gambian offenders. But too often, he notes, police are part of the criminal networks.

"Government should ensure that they train law enforcement officials so that they are not corrupt. They have to work very hard so that laws are implemented. It's not only beautifying books. Because if not we are compromising our future," Camara says.

However, Trafficking in Persons reports that more than a million children are annually exploited in the global commercial trade. The US State Department estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the US each year.

The report notes that "hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers" from south Asia and Africa who arrive in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries fall into either forced begging or "involuntary servitude, suffering from physical and sexual abuse, non-payment of wages, withholding of travel documents and restriction of movement."

"We believe that the modern-day slavery plagues every country," says John R. Miller, a senior adviser to the US Secretary of State and director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. For Africa, the continent most ravaged by this scourge, that is no consolation.