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Alarming trends in Asia call for urgent measures because the region is home to the majority of trafficking victims
Thailand has long been a hub of sex trafficking in Southeast Asia. (Image: YouTube)
By Ben Joseph | Asia
For the Church of the poor that Pope Francis spearheads, one of the unseen challenges is the effect of modern-day slavery — human trafficking — which degenerates human dignity.
To tackle head-on the perpetrators of this mammoth hidden crime syndicate, the Catholic Church will have to walk the talk because the global ring has trapped 40 million people, making it a US$150 billion industry with Asia as its hub.
Trading in people, earlier known as slavery, is now called by its sobriquet human trafficking. In its modern avatar, there is no outright sale of people as possessions as in ancient times. But its market is global even though no wars are fought over slaves anymore.
Though there is a universal consensus against modern-day slavery, the task before the Church is arduous as almost everyone, directly or indirectly, partakes in the crime of trafficking. It is a myth that trafficked people are used only in the sex industry.
In agriculture and construction, electronics manufacturing, mining, fishing, forestry, hospitality, textile and apparel manufacturing, transportation and warehousing et al, trafficked people are trapped. No one can be definite about not benefiting from trafficked people.
That means the 1.2 billion Catholics, whom Pope Francis directly addresses almost daily, are abetting or partaking in a disgraceful sin against the creator and humanity. It is surprising that the pro-life movement that vehemently fights for dignity and value of life ignores the dignity of the grown-up millions.
Slaves churn out cocoa in West Africa, which ends up in chocolate, and they produce charcoal in Brazil used to run smelters to make steel for cars. Food products like tomatoes, tuna, shrimp and sugar, precious metals like gold, gems like diamonds and daily items like cotton are tainted as modern-day slaves are exploited to produce them.
Quite often it is difficult to identify the victims as the market also includes people willingly and legally performing the tasks of the enslaved. This crime against humanity has grown into a full-fledged industry because the victims have become all the more cheaper and many nations lack laws to curb the high-reward and low-risk crime syndicates.
Worse still, the current legal framework in many countries, even in European nations, treats the victims as criminals. The traffickers escape the law, while the trafficked, if they escape the clutches of the exploiters, are punished for not having work or travel documents.
There are more slaves today in the world than at any time in history, according to several studies. Estimates vary at between 20 and 40 million. For every 10 victims, about five are adult women and two are girls. One third of the overall detected victims are children.
The victims are wooed using fraud, coercion and violence to end up doing forced manual labor. Women and children are sexually exploited, often in foreign countries, day after day, for years on end.
Alarming trends in Asia call for urgent measures to deal with the social menace because the region is home to the majority of trafficking victims.
China, Japan, Malaysia and Thailand serve as the preferred destinations for traffickers from neighboring countries that are comparatively poorer. For example, victims from Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam flock to Muslim Malaysia.
More than 50 percent of victims in Asia are women, while children comprise nearly a third of those who end up as victims of domestic servitude, forced labor and child marriages.
A report in 2014 said some 16 million Indian females are trafficked each year, and 40 percent of them are adolescents and children. Most victims are trafficked within the country and more than 70 percent are illiterate poor, with 50 percent having a family income of less than $1 per day.
Forced labor in the fishing industry in Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand is well documented.
Military conflicts, territorial disputes, natural disasters, infectious diseases, transnational crimes and climate change prevalent in many Asian countries make it an ideal breeding ground for trafficking as people seek safety and protection from these ordeals.
The recent alarming rise in child trafficking in Asia is linked to the ever-increasing demand for online child pornography, including livestreaming of sexual abuse of children, enabling the simultaneous abuse of one victim by many perpetrators around the globe, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Trafficking and the Church
The Church has a long history of dealing with slavery since the apostolic days. However, the current size and the modus operandi of human trafficking suggest that the progress has been tardy.
The Second Vatican Council boldly came out against human slavery and termed it "a supreme dishonor to the Creator" along with prostitution, selling of women and children, and disgraceful working conditions.
The trade in human beings is taking place across the world without exception.
However, it has become a blot on the escutcheon of human dignity and individual freedom in poor nations in Asia, where the majority of trafficking cases are under-reported, under-detected and thus under-prosecuted.
The Church has always stood at the forefront to end this crime and two immediate predecessors of the current pope also took it up vehemently.
In an address in 2014, Pope Francis said after meeting four women, all former sex workers and victims of trafficking: "Human trafficking is an open wound on the body of contemporary society, a scourge upon the body of Christ. It is a crime against humanity."
The Holy Father instituted the annual day of prayer in 2015 which falls on the feast of St. Josephine Bakhita (1869-1947), patron saint of human trafficking survivors, on Feb. 8. This year's theme of the virtual prayer marathon is "An Economy without Human Trafficking."
An economy without human trafficking is an "economy of care," said the pontiff in a video message for the International Day of Prayer and Reflection against Trafficking in Persons.
A marathon prayer ceremony was organized by the International Committee of the World Day, coordinated by Talitha Kum, a network of consecrated life against trafficking in persons of the International Union of Superiors General.
To end this grave violation of human rights, the Church has sent its women religious as crusaders who are involved in the prevention, rescue, rehabilitation, reintegration and raising awareness, according to Cardinal Michael Czerny, undersecretary of the migrants and refugees section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Sister Gabriella Bottani, the coordinator of Talitha Kum, said they found themselves "perfectly in tune since the trafficking of people is an integral part of an economy of exclusion, where the rules of the market are destroying the fundamental values of human coexistence, based on respect for dignity but also on the protection of the environment."
The Vatican has also started many collaborative projects to end modern-day slavery known for its physical, psychological, social, spiritual and in some cases familial traumas.
These initiatives focus on different areas like identifying, supporting, counseling, seeking justice for victims of trafficking and piecing together laws to challenge the impunity of traffickers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has added salt to the wounds of trafficking victims. As the world is expected to be poorer in the post-pandemic economy, the traffickers are waiting in the wings to swoop on the hapless victims, whose number is expected to swell tremendously.
Pope Francis' church of the poor has to realize that its members are both victims and collaborators of the crime and work with more focus and vigor to save modern-day slaves.
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