CNS STORY: USCCB expert urges more protections for human trafficking victims

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CNS Story:

TRAFFICKING Mar-10-2005 (800 words) xxxn

USCCB expert urges more protections for human trafficking victims

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Despite progress in identifying and assisting victims of human trafficking in the United States and worldwide, much more needs to be done to adequately protect those victims, a children's advocate from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Migration and Refugee Services told a House subcommittee.

Julianne Duncan, director of children's services for MRS, spoke March 9 before the House International Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations.

Calling human trafficking a "new international scourge," Duncan said the U.S. bishops and the church community throughout the country have made combating the problem "a top priority in their public advocacy, educational outreach and in providing service to trafficking victims."

"From the Catholic perspective, human trafficking represents a scourge on the earth which must be eradicated," she said. "It is indeed troubling that in the 21st century human beings are being sold into bondage as prostitutes, domestic workers, child laborers and child soldiers."

The U.S. government estimates that "600,000 to 800,000 women, children and men are bought and sold across international borders each year and exploited through forced labor or commercial sex exploitation, and potentially millions more are trafficked internally within the borders of countries," said Rep. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., subcommittee chairman. Eighty percent of the victims are women and children, he added.

Duncan said trafficking "is not a problem which exists merely on faraway shores and in less developed lands."

"It exists right here in the United States, where thousands of persons are trafficked each year for purposes of forced prostitution or forced labor," she said.

The MRS representative cited two cases in which U.S. Catholic agencies have helped groups of victims of human trafficking -- four girls in their midteens who had been lured from Mexico with promises of marriage and then enslaved and used as prostitutes and 69 Peruvians rescued last year from a forced labor situation on Long Island in New York.

The young women, referred to local Catholic agencies, are now in school and participated in the prosecution of their captors, she said, while Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Rockville Centre is continuing to assist the Peruvian victims.

But Duncan noted that of the estimated 17,500 trafficked persons -- one-third of them children -- arriving in this country yearly, only 63 child victims have been identified in the United States

"While efforts to find and assist victims of trafficking have been pursued with commendable commitment over the last several years, I fear that children, as a group, have fallen through the cracks of these enforcement efforts," she said.

"Knowledge of the nature of trafficking, the sexual exploitation of children, and statistics gathered by the State Department on worldwide numbers of trafficked kids leads one to conclude that many more children are being held involuntarily in trafficking situations in the United States than we have so far identified," Duncan added.

She said the bishops support passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, recently introduced in the House by Smith, as well as the Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act of 2005, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

The House legislation would extend and update a law, originally passed in 2000 and reauthorized in 2003, which set the U.S. framework for responding to human trafficking. The Senate proposal would reform U.S. practices in the care and placement of unaccompanied minors and implement steps aimed at protecting those children from smugglers, traffickers and unscrupulous attorneys.

The subcommittee also heard from a victim of trafficking, Beatrice Fernando, who said she was driven by desperation and her desire to give her son, then 3, a better life to leave her native Sri Lanka two decades ago for a job as a maid in Lebanon.

But when she arrived there, she was sold to a wealthy woman who forced her to work 20 hours a day without pay, made her pick through the trash for food and beat her nightly. Fernando was rescued only after surviving a jump from the fourth-floor balcony of the woman's condo.

"This is no suicide attempt," she recalled about the day she jumped. "I am desperate for freedom, not death."

Fernando called for more extensive public awareness campaigns about the dangers of trafficking, better monitoring by governments of the job agencies that send workers to the Middle East, increased efforts to help victims recover and tougher U.S. monitoring of foreign governments.

Although her experience was 20 years ago, the Sri Lankan woman said she recently read about an Indonesian maid enslaved in Bahrain who jumped off a fourth-floor balcony.

"It pains me to think that two decades after I had to dive off a balcony to save my life, women are still facing the same agonizing situation," she said.

END

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