Child Soldiers: The Hidden Form of Human Trafficking

In recent years so much attention has been directed toward international trafficking of women and children for the purpose of sexual exploitation and other forms of forced labor that additional forms of trafficking, although they do occur, have been overlooked. It is unclear whether they occur less frequently than other forms of trafficking, or whether they simply have received less attention. Exploitation of child trafficking in armed conflict is one of these forms of human trafficking that is often over looked.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) defines a “child solider” as “Any child – boy or girl – under 18 years of age, who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity … and anyone accompanying such group other than family members.” Kidnapping and forced or illicit recruitment of children for use in armed conflicts are estimated to affect around 300,000 children throughout the world. According to the United Nations, there are indications that cross-border trafficking of child soldiers is increasing in West and Central Africa as a result of an elaborate international organized criminal network.

The problem of trafficking child soldiers is most extreme in Africa, but countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America also uses child soldiers. The use of children in government, military, or rebel armies extend beyond the task of carrying weapons and fighting. Children serve not only as soldiers but also as spies, cooks, porters, sexual slaves, and human land mine detectors. Children have been reported to fight on the front lines, have been sent in to mine fields ahead of adult soldiers, and have been used for suicide missions. Young children, ages seven and eight are recruited or kidnapped to begin serving their military apprenticeships as messengers or carrying food, ammunition, and as porters. Most child soldiers are between the ages of 14 and 18; however, children as young as nine have been used in combat.

In Africa, it is estimated that there is 100,000 child soldiers currently active in Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, and Uganda. The 20-year war in Uganda between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) claimed more than 20,000 child soldiers, many whom were kidnapped. In 2007 the LRA forcibly recruited children from Southern Sudan. Up to 2,000 women and children are believed to remain in LRA camps. Moreover, thousands of young child refugees who have survived the war in Darfur are being abducted and sold as child soldiers to militias operating in the vicinity of the refugee camps. Boys between the ages of 9 and 15 have been taken forcefully from their families in refugee camps in Chad and been trafficked to militias.

In Asia, children are serving in armies in Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Some of the worst offenses involve the government of Myanmar whose army regularly uses children to fight ethnic armed groups and regularly recruits children ages 12 to 18. The United Nations also reported about the recruitment of children in Pakistan from religious schools (“madrassas”), by militant groups to carry out suicide bombings. The Taliban is reported to have used child soldiers in Afghanistan as suicide bombers. They have forcibly and voluntarily recruited children in southern provinces and parts of Pakistan.

In Latin America, in one of the longest-running battles between government and armed opposition forces, lasting 50 years, children in Colombia have been driven by rural poverty to voluntarily join and have been recruited and used by both the government army and rebel forces. The children were forced to lay mines, carry explosives, work as guides and messengers, and fight in combat. The children were also used by government forces to gather intelligence for opposition forces.

In the Middle East, child soldiers are reportedly deployed in Israel, Iraq, and the occupied Palestinian territories. The NGO War Child reports that “children in these areas are encouraged to commit suicide attacks or are used as a human shield,” (War Child, 2007).

While large numbers of children have been forcibly abducted in some countries, not all children have been kidnapped or fraudulently recruited. Some children join rebel forces voluntarily as a means of survival in a country or region affected by poverty and lack of education or jobs. A study of child soldiers carried out in Columbia by the NGO War Child identified a number of reasons why children voluntarily join militias, which include cultural, ideological socioeconomic, protection, and revenge. Children may voluntarily join armed groups because of social economic pressure, or in the belief that the group will provide them with security and/or food, or to avenge the death of their family members killed by armed groups or government forces.

Human Right Watch, which has interviewed child soldiers in Africa, Asia and the Middle East reports that children typically make obedient soldiers. They are physically vulnerable and easily intimidated. To prove their allegiance to the armed forces, children are sometimes forced to commit atrocities against their own family or neighbors. These practices help ensure that the child is stigmatized and unable to return to his or her home community.

Stories have surfaced of the manipulation of children by supplying them with drugs to make them fearless. The United Nations reports that others are given drugs and alcohol to agitate them, noting that this makes it easier to break down their psychological barriers to fighting or committing atrocities. At the same time, children are trained to obey orders to kill and maim. Failure to do so may result in their own death. One 16-year old child soldier described his experience “The first time I went into battle I was afraid. But after two or three days they forced us to start using cocaine, and then I lost my fear. When I was taking drugs, I never felt bad on the front.” In Uganda one 16-year-old girl testified to the cruelties she endured when a boy tried to escape:

“One boy tried to escape, but he was caught. They made him eat a mouthful of red pepper, and five people were beating him. His hands were tied, and then they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I felt sick. I knew this boy from before. We were from the same village. I refused to kill him, and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it… After we killed him, they made us smear blood on our arms. (U.N child soldiers stories).

Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, was 12 years old when rebels killed his family and most of the people of his village. He was forced to fight with the rebels as a child soldier until he was “rescued” by the government soldiers who fed him, protected him, and gave him AK47. Ishmael was told to fight for the army or be killed by the rebels. Ishmael and other child soldiers were given marijuana and a drug known as “brown-brown” a mixture of cocaine and gun powder to enhance the effect of marijuana. Under the influence of drugs Ishmael reports that he was “not afraid to kill or be killed” (Beah, 127).

Because child soldiers have often committed such atrocities, questions arise in their villages and countries concerning their degree of responsibility. They are often treated as criminals rather than victims of trafficking. Whether children join armies voluntarily or not, the U.N. Trafficking Protocol views this as trafficking regardless of the conditions under which the children were recruited, even where there is no use of fraud or deception. All children under the age of 18, regardless of why or how they joined the armed forces with which they worked or fought, are victims of trafficking.

SOURCES
Beach, I. (2007). “The Making and Unmaking of a Child Soldier.” International Herald Tribute. January, 13. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/world/americas/14ihtweb.0113soldier.nytMAG.4195623.html
Child Soldiers: Global Report may 2008. http://www.childsoldiersglobalreport.org/.
Cross-Cutting Report No. 1 “Children and Armed Conflict” April, 15 2009 Security Council Report. Retrieved from http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/site/c.glKWLeMTIsG/b.5099181/k.A91/CrossCutting_Report_No_1brChildren_and_Armed_Conflictbr15_April_2009.htm Human Rights Watch. “Facts about Child Soldiers.” Fact sheet retrieved from http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/12/03/facts-about-child-soldiers
http://watchlist.org/reports/pdf/PolicyPaper_09.pdf
http://www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/chilsold.htm
United Nation “Child Soldiers Stories” http://www.un.org/works/goingon/soldiers/stories.doc%20-%202005-11-11
United Nation Report. Retrieved from http://daccess-dds-ny,un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N07/656
UN Security Council Resolution 1612 and Beyond: Strengthening Protection for Children in Armed Conflict. May 2009
War Child. (2007). “Child Soldiers: The Shadow of Their Existence,” Retrieved from http://www.warchild.org/news/projects/ChildSoldiersReport_/childsoldierreport_.html.
Wessells, M. (2007). Child Soldiers: From Violence to Protection. Boston: Harvard University Press.

ORGAN TRAFFICKING

Organ trafficking is perhaps the least profiled form of human trafficking. There has been no empirical research, but individual stories and investigations of illegally harvested organs surface on a regular basis. With the improvement of health care, life expectancy has increased resulting in a large population of older people. Simultaneously, medical and technological developments have facilitated the transplantation of organs, which has become a rather routine procedure. This normally would not present a problem, except for the fact that demand far exceeds the supply, and the shortage is acute. Between 1990 and 2003, kidney donations in the United States increased by 33%, but people awaiting a kidney for transplant increased by 236%.

The shortage in organs donation is due, in part, to religious beliefs that the body should be buried intact. In addition, there is a fear of hospitals intentionally allowing patients to die to harvest their organs for paying patients. The waiting period for an organ form a cadaver, usually a kidney (Which accounts for the most sales of organs throughout the world), varies from one country to the next. In the U.S and Britain, the average wait is two to three years. In Asia the wait is eight years. In the Gulf States the wait is even longer. This long wait has led many in need of a kidney to try to obtain one from a live donor.

While organs harvested from deceased donors are packed in ice and transported around the world by plane, the harvesting of organs from a live person involves the travel of both donor and/or recipient to the place where the transplant will occur. The discussion around the phenomenon is not about the trafficking of organs, per se, but the trafficking of human beings for the purpose of organ removal. This is considered human trafficking even when the donors agree to voluntarily sell their organs. The trade of kidneys from live donors generally flows from poor, underdeveloped countries to rich, developed countries. China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, Moldova, and Romania are among the world's leading providers of trafficked organs. China is known for harvesting and selling organs from executed prisoners, the other countries have been dealing essentially with living donors, becoming stakeholders in the fast-growing human trafficking web.

Kidneys very according to their abundance and bring their donors different amounts, depending on where the donor is living. According to one expert an African or Indian kidney may bring the donor as little as $1000. A Filipino kidney is worth slightly more and could bring the donor $1,300; A Moldovan or Romanian kidney is worth $2700; Peruvian or a Turkish kidney donor can command up to $10,000. or more. Sellers in the United States can receive up to $30,000. This is just the offering price and the actual price paid to a donor can decrease dramatically depending upon supply of organ.

In addition, there are organ brokers who recruit donors from bars, flea markets and slums areas in poor countries. This crime, unlike other forms of trafficking, cannot take place without the participation of professional medical staff operating in hospitals or private clinics. In India, police arrested middlemen, donors and several doctors including a transplant surgeon, as well as, the principal of the Government Medical College. Police estimated that between 1997 and 2002, 31.4 million dollars changed hands between the donors, middlemen and doctors. The organ seller, poor migrant laborers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states, were paid between $525 and $1,050, while the recipients were charges between $104,600 and $209,200 dollars.

Not all donors consent to sell their organs. Persons can be kidnapped, killed or sold for their organs. The United Nation reported that in regards to trafficking in children for the purpose of organ removal, although there is no conclusive evidence, a number of reports indicate that many abducted or missing children have subsequently been found dead, their bodies mutilated and certain organs removed. Another method of obtaining an organ is through deception or coercion. A person is told that he/she will be donating blood and is then coerced into selling a kidney. As was the case in the Philippines, police near Manila raided a house and freed nine men who were being held by a gang that lured them with the promise of good jobs. Instead they drugged or forced them, sometimes by gunpoint to agree to “donate” a kidney. In the state of Tamil Nadu, India, 71% of the 305 respondents in a study of kidney sellers were women. 60% of women and all of the men were street vendors. Some of the women reported that they were forced to sell their kidney by their husband. Other studies have found that many organ sellers in India are women, and in some cases the kidney may be sold to pay for the dowry for a daughter’s wedding.

The most common form of trafficking in organs involves cases in which the donor and recipient agree to the sale. While donors may initially consent to selling a kidney, buyers exploit their desperation, poverty, and ignorance. The organ trafficking expert, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, identified a case in Tel Aviv Israel where a mentally deficient criminal sold a kidney to his lawyer who then paid the man half of what was promised. In another case in Canada, a man received a kidney from his Filipino domestic worker. He justified this “donation” using the argument that “Filipinos are people who are anxious to please their bosses.”

Exploitation extends beyond the mere fact that the donors are not adequately advised of the risks or compensated for the loss of a kidney. Victims of organ trafficking may be promised complete post operation medical care, but this rarely happens. Organs Watch, which conducted research on organ trafficking in countries around the world, found that none of the donors interviewed had been treated by a doctor a year after the operation, despite frequent complaints of weakness and pain. Some had even been turned away from the same hospital that had performed the surgery. Police in Punjab India reported that donors were not provided proper postoperative care, were thrown out of the hospital one week after the surgery, and were threatened with imprisonment for participating in illegal organ transplant. As a result many poor organ donors suffer painful complications and infections without any medical help. In addition, many kidney sellers develop health problems, such as high blood pressure and urinary tract infections.

SOURCES
Fisanick, C. (Ed). (2010). Current Controversies: Human Trafficking, San Francisco: Gale Cengage Learning.
Gentleman, A. (2008). “Kidney thefts Shock India.” New York Times, January, 30. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/world/asia/30kidney.html.
Obi, N. I., Das, E., & Das, D. K. (Edts). (2008). Global Trafficking in Women and Children, New York: CRC Press.
Rother, L. (May 23, 2004). “The Organ Trade: A Global Black Market; Tracking the Sale of a Kidney On a
Path of Poverty and Hope. “The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/world/organ-trade-global-black-market-tracking-sale-kidney-path-poverty-hope.html.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2005). “Organs Without Borders.” Foreign Policy, 146, 26-27. Retrieved from http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2005/01/05/organs_without_borders.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2000). The Global in Human Organs. Current Anthropology, 41(2), 191-224.
Zhang, S., X. (2007). Smuggling and Trafficking in Human Beings, Connecticut: Praeger.

Sex Slaves Trafficking

The U.S 2010 Traffic In Person report (TIP) reported that 12.3 million adults and children are in forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution around the world; 56 percent of these victims are women and girls. According to the 2009 United Nations “Global Report on Trafficking in Person” 79 percent of persons trafficked are used for the sex industry.

When we hear of slave prostitution we think of girls who are abducted or sold by a member of their family; enslaved and trafficked to other countries, forced into prostitution. Some think of illegal immigrants who were smuggled to developed countries and forced into dept bondage prostitution to pay off their dept. Yes, these types of enslavement do exist, however, there are many women who enter countries legally looking for a better life and find themselves enslaved into prostitution. Lena’s story shows the other side of human trafficking and illustrates how many women are deceived and promised legal, good paying jobs. They leave their countries and families behind seeking a better life and find themselves enslaved and trafficked all over the world.

Struggling to support herself and her daughter on meager earnings that were not enough to survive, Lena explained how she left her home in the Ukraine and become a sex slave. An acquaintance had told her there were restaurant jobs that paid $200 a month. To Lena, who was barely able to support herself and her young daughter on $15 or so a month, the job seemed too good to be true and it was. The acquaintance, she later discovered, was a recruiter for the sex trafficking industry. Lena left her daughter with her parents and along with a friend and a third woman drove with the recruiter to Yugoslavia. “We trusted her,” Lena stated “I was a little afraid, but the desire to have a good life was much stronger.” Upon their arrival, the recruiter took them to a rundown restaurant and introduced them to the owner who offered to take them to another town where there were jobs. He took them to a nearby town and moved them into a small apartment where ten other women were already living. Their seeming benefactor was actually a Yugoslavian human trafficker. The other women told Lena and her friend that they had been imprisoned in the apartment and raped and abused there. Lena and the other young women had been sold into enslaved prostitution. This was the first of dozen or so times Lena was sold and resold, moved by traffickers from Yugoslavia through Albania and eventually Italy.

Lena is one of the increasing numbers of women who are successfully lured by traffickers into a global sex trade. Lena was captured not just by an individual recruiter, but ultimately by a multibillion-dollar trafficking industry that relies on a large supply of women and girls for its considerable profits. Lena’s story describes an all too familiar scenario, whereby a person with lesser resources, usually from poor or unstable countries, are either taken by force or persuaded to migrate for jobs in new town, country, or region. They are frequently misled, for example, the job may not exist or maybe different from what they have been told. The job virtually always includes some kind of exploitation, usually prostitution, and almost always, terrible work and living conditions. While many men are trafficked for labor, the exploited in the sex trafficking industry are primarily women and children.
The Face of Slavery

Long Pross was beaten and tortured daily by her brothel owner who gouged out her right eye.

Sexual exploitation of women and children is not a social vice limited to third world or tourism dependent countries. Both developed and developing countries have this problem to some extent. It is even happening inside the U.S. mainland. On December 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the breakup of a large prostitution ring involving more than thirty children as young as twelve forced to have sex at truck stops, hotels and brothels. Multiple indictments were made against traffickers in states including New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan for bringing children across stateliness for prostitution.

In a recent expose, Dan Rather calls Portland, Oregon, “Pornland, Oregon” because of the prolific legal and illegal commercial sex industry there. Alongside the strip clubs, sex shops, and adult women in prostitution, girls as young as 10-years old are being bought and sold for sex. Traditionally these kids have come from the foster care system, runaways from abusive homes, or have been kicked out by negligent parents. The demographic of child sex trafficking victims in America is changing. More of the kids police are finding come from middle class homes in nice neighborhoods. They have concerned, involved parents. But still, they end up sucked into the world of forced prostitution.

How does it happen? Take the story of Sue and Ron, Sue and Ron learned about child sex trafficking the hard way, when their 16-year-old daughter got sucked into the industry. At first, she came home from school with a boyfriend, a little older than her, but polite enough. He'd eat meals with her family and hang out at her house, like any normal teen relationship. But Sue was uneasy and one day she warned him that if he ever hurt her daughter, he'd have to pay. After that, the teens moved in together and he convinced Sue's young daughter that the only way for them to be able to live together and survive, was for her to sell herself.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this story is the ease with which you could substitute Portland for any other U.S. city. Pimps pick up teen girls in shopping malls. They meet teens on Facebook and lure them from their homes. They recruit through schools and movie theaters all over the country. These pimps recruit girls as young as 10 years old into prostitution because there is a long, long line of men willing to pay a premium to have sex with them.

A Western man negotiating for a young Thai girl (far right), who clutches the arm of her trafficker. After settling on a price, the man left with the girl, and the trafficker left with her payment. Photo courtesy of the U.S. State Department.

The women and girls who are sucked into enslaved prostitution are trafficked nationally. They are abused, tortured, and are kept isolated, imprisoned and sometimes killed. Also, most of them end up HIV positive. This is happening everywhere in the world, and no country, city or family is immune to this growing problem.

To report an instance of suspected trafficking, please call the HOTLINE: 1.888.3737.888

Sources
Associated press, “Major Child Prostitution Ring Broken: 31 Indicted,” San Diego Union Tribute, December 17, 2007.
Hughes, Donna. The Natasha Trade: Transnational sex Trafficking, NAT’L INST. OF Just. J. January 2001, at 9, available at www.ncjrs.gov/
http://www.fbi.gov/page2/may08/humantrafficking_050908.html
http://www.humantrafficking.org/uploads/publications/2007_agreporthumantrafficing2006.pdf
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-rather/pornland-oregon-child-pro_b_580035.html
Lee, Maggy. Human Trafficking. Portland: Willan Publishing, 2007.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr4xnWa1R2MPhoto from www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04kristof.html?_r=2&ref=human_trafficking