SHINING A LIGHT ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Displays, events on Civic Plaza address worldwide problem
Athick chain attached to red shoes at the foot of a toilet and coiled around the porcelain bowl told the story of a woman who tried to improve her economic situation and wound up in a rundown hotel in an American city, recruited to work in the sex trade.
As visitors passed through a curtain in this large tent on Civic Plaza on Friday, they confronted a replica of a Cambodian brothel and the actual tiny pajamas of a 6-year-old child who had been forced to please pedophiles.
Part another curtain and there was the story of a brick factory in India, where generations of families keep working in financial servitude as they attempt to pay off debt while overpaying for all their food and other essentials purchased from the factory.
More curtains, more stories: In Mexico girls recruited by drug cartels are turned into assassins; camouflaged encampments in Yemen and South Sudan house abducted children trained as soldiers; rich families in Haiti take in poor children, promising a better life, but turn them into indentured servants; in Jordan
people are forced to work in sweatshops making clothes for consumers around the world.
The tent exhibit, “SOLD: The Human Trafficking Experience,” was designed by Mirror Ministries, a faithbased organization from Richland, Wash., to show the many faces of human trafficking. It was part of the larger city-sponsored Human Trafficking Awareness Day and the United Nations World Day Against Trafficking in Persons.
The Civic Plaza events featured speakers and information tables from organizations and services that work to fight against human trafficking and violence against women, as well as support and treat victims, and prosecute offenders.
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, whose office is part of a task force that’s fighting human trafficking, told the crowd that more than 18,000 victims are trafficked into the U.S. annually, “and more than half of them are children.” New Mexico is a destination state for people involved in human trafficking, mostly because of our proximity to the border.
Because human traffickers operate in the shadows, it is difficult to find them, and these cases are underreported, he said.
Nevertheless, the task force is making progress. Anthony M. Maez, a commander in the AG’s Special Investigation Division and a co-chair of the New Mexico Human Trafficking Task Force, said that in 2015 the task force developed 28 cases of human trafficking, mostly in sex and labor, and in just the first six months of this year it has 26 cases.
“My guess is we’re going to double or triple the number over last year,” said Maez, who attributed the increase to education. “We’re training first responders and anyone who may come in contact with a victim.”
Lynn Sanchez, program director for the Anti-Human Trafficking Initiative, said regardless of the type of trafficking, all the victims “have been stripped of their dignity, their liberty and their self-worth and are under somebody else’s control.”
Because many victims are in the country illegally, she said, “they are fearful of reporting their situations to the authorities and don’t realize that their basic human rights are protected by law.”