Trafficking
Each year, between 600,000 and 800,000 people—mostly women and children—are recruited by force, fraud or coercion into modern-day slavery (labor or sexual exploitation) and trafficked across national borders. Millions more are trafficked within their own countries.1 Trafficking victims often find themselves in dangerous, abusive, or exploitative situations such as forced prostitution, slavery-like conditions, sweatshop labor, or around-the-clock domestic servitude (as maids or nannies for no or token pay). While some women and children are sold by their families, others are coerced into trafficking situations or misled by false promises of better economic and educational opportunities abroad and steady work that pays a living wage.
Jane’s Story
Jane*, a native of Ghana, became a domestic servant for Betty*, a distant cousin and a member of parliament, because she needed work to support her family. Betty employed Jane for two years before asking her to go to the United States to help care for Betty’s granddaughter. Although Jane would leave behind her husband and four children, she agreed to take the job because she desperately needed the income. Betty arranged all the paperwork for the passport and visa and accompanied Jane to the United States.
From the moment Jane arrived, however, she was treated like a domestic slave. In addition to watching over the granddaughter, Jane was forced to care for nine other children as part of an illegal day-care her employers had arranged, clean the family home, do all the yard work, and cook all the family’s meals. Jane worked seven days a week, often until well past midnight. Each time Jane complained about her conditions or asked for her pay, her employers would remind Jane of Betty’s political power and threaten Jane with deportation from the United States and jail in Ghana. On several occasions, Jane’s family members in Ghana were threatened with death.
When Jane reported her forced labor conditions to the authorities, Betty and her family beat Jane’s son in Ghana and had her family banished from their homes. Jane’s traffickers were subsequently convicted of multiple criminal violations in federal court. Tahirih successfully represented Jane’s case and on December 24, 2003, she received asylum and has been reunited with her husband and four children.
1US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, Fact Sheet: Facts about Human Trafficking, http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/fs/2005/60840.htm, last visited December 23, 2008.
*Client’s name has been changed to protect privacy
