Modern-day slavery, human rights and the sex industry

This article explores the sex industry in Canada as modern-day slavery and an ongoing violation of basic human rights. Some argue that the sex industry is something that women or children choose to do as a legitimate profession, and others argue that they are exploited and manipulated by other people for indebtedness, for clothing, food, shelter or to support substance or alcohol addictions. How should the laws around sex trafficking and sexual exploitation be designed? The government could be in a position to legally ensure dignity and human rights protection for those engaged in selling sex. This paper highlights the perspectives of survivors of the sex industry as they describe heart-wrenching experiences that include torture, physical threats, psychological fear, and manipulation. As the public discourse grows around this ongoing scourge, momentum for change is also growing. There have been numerous efforts to address, disrupt, and end this social scourge. Our awareness of modern-day sex slavery atrocities seems to coincide with a greater sense of respect for fundamental human rights and a desire to protect them.

Human Trafficking: Empowering Healthcare Providers and Community Partners as Advocates for Victims

Human trafficking, also known as modern-day slavery, is a public health crisis and a growing worldwide crime exploiting approximately 40.3 million victims. A decade ago approximately 79% of human trafficking crimes were related to sexual exploitation and 18% were related to forced labor, but more recent reports show approximately 50% and 38%, respectively. Although sexual exploitation continues to make up the majority of human trafficking crimes, forced labor continues to grow at an alarming rate. The purpose of this paper is 2-fold. First, to empower healthcare providers and community volunteers serving potential victims of human trafficking in traditional and nontraditional settings with human trafficking identification training. This education should include the use of a validated human trafficking screening tool and the timely provision of resources. Second, to guide professional nurses in the holistic approach to caring for potential victims of human trafficking. The core values of holistic nursing practice and Watson's Theory of Human Caring are the pillars guiding mindful and authentic nursing care. Merging evidence-based practice with holistic care will boost victim identification and rescue.

Climate change and mental health: a commentary

Climate change represents a major global challenge. Some hallmarks of climate change that have been connected to human activity include an increase of 0.8–1.2 °C in global temperatures as well as the warming of upper ocean water. Importantly, approximately 500 million people worldwide face the consequences of desertification. Simultaneously, the world population has grown from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion today, greatly exacerbating the human toll of devastating environmental disasters, which result in increasingly larger and more common mass migrations that also fuel human trafficking and modern-day slavery. The mental health outcomes are staggering and include, in the context of chronic stress, addiction, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, major depression, and suicidality. Mental health practitioners, healthcare systems, and governments across the world need to be prepared to address the mental health sequelae of climate change.

Human Trafficking-Terrorism Nexus: When Violent Non-State Actors Engage in the Modern-Day Slavery

Why do some militant organizations participate in human trafficking? We investigate this question by introducing a new dataset that records insurgent organizations’ involvement in four types of human trafficking: sexual exploitation, forced recruitment, slavery, and kidnapping. Marrying our data to the BAAD2I population of insurgent organizations, we uncover the organizational attributes related to human trafficking. We find that groups with wide alliance networks and territorial control are more likely to commit human trafficking. Organizations that are losing command of the territory and suffering rank-and-file losses are also more likely to turn to human trafficking. Our study sheds theoretical light on insurgent groups’ involvement in crime. It also contributes to the empirical scholarship on sexual violence by violent groups by studying different forms of human trafficking in both conflict and non-conflict environments. Our paper presents an original dataset and empirical analysis of insurgent groups’ human trafficking patterns.

Anti-trafficking saviors: Celebrity, slavery, and branded activism

This article traces the development of popular forms of anti-trafficking activism in the United States through a social network and discourse analysis that focuses on NGO websites, celebrity advocacy, merchandising, social media campaigns, and policy interventions. This “branded activism,” as we describe it, plays an important role in legitimizing an emerging anti-trafficking consensus that increasingly shapes both US foreign policy and domestic policing, and is frequently driven by an anti-sex work politics. Popular anti-trafficking discourses, we find, build on melodramatic narratives of victims and (white) saviors, depoliticize the complex labor and migration issues at stake, reinforce capitalist logics, and enable policy interventions that produce harm for migrants, sex workers, and others ostensibly being “rescued.” Celebrity and marketing-driven branded activism relies especially strongly on parallels drawn between histories of chattel slavery and what anti-trafficking campaigns call “modern-day slavery.” We challenge these parallels, particularly as they encourage participants to see themselves as abolitionist saviors in ways that reinforce neo-liberal notions of empowerment rooted in communicative capitalist networks.

Chapter 9: Writing as Capital: The Emancipatory Act of Writing for Profit, Advocacy, and Charity

Context Writing is an agentive act. Despite drastic improvements over the past few decades in writing instruction and the push for sharing with authentic audiences, the majority of writing students do is still for the teacher. These practices are at odds with those who advocate for classrooms that are culturally relevant, culturally responsive, and culturally sustaining. When students write for the sole purpose of “doing school,” they are denied opportunities to use their writing voices to write about, for, and within their communities. Writing is used to empower—to pose problems and solve them. The distribution of that writing is equally important. Publication matters. It is in the distribution and response to writing that one can experience the power of written words to impact one's world. Purpose In this chapter, we outline authentic purposes for writing centered on culturally relevant, responsive, agentive, and sustaining pedagogies. We describe the writer's workshop, an instructional structure in which to embed these pedagogies. The writer's workshop is the setting in which these students were situated to write purposefully. We take the reader into three classrooms using descriptive vignettes. The three classroom vignettes presented frame emancipatory writing for (a) personal profit to reinforce the value—monetary and social—of using one's intellectual skills and written words for personal gain; (b) advocacy—through fostering critical consciousness that explores equitable and just familial structures and relationships and monetizing written words to directly impact a family through adoption; and (c) charity—through a service-learning project in which students used writing to influence others to financially support a charity that helps people who have been impacted by oppression in the forms of kidnapping, trafficking, and modern-day slavery. Research Design This is a narrative accounting of three teachers’ experience implementing this practice in their own classrooms. Conclusions In all three instances, children were agents who wrote for monetary motivation— seeking and acquiring capital for themselves, for others, or to effect desired social change. Moreover, the outcomes were achieved by students who used their skills and worked within their capacities to meaningfully effect change. Suggestions for implementation and generalization are offered.

Analyzing Trafficking in Person in Religious and Cultural Context: Pakistan Perspective

The modern world has declared trafficking in person as modern day slavery while Pakistan is considered as a major contributor to the rise of human trafficking in the South Asia. In this context, this research aims to evaluate the issue in the light of the Qur’an, Sunnah (pbuh) and sociocultural context of Pakistan. This study argues that Islam is the only religion which showed its greatest concerns towards the issues of trafficked persons. It also aims to recognize the efforts of the modern world to overcome the issue. This study, however, concludes that despite much legislation nationally and internationally, the issue could not be resolved and is going to worsen every day. All this, thus, demands an overhauling of the prevailing sociocultural and legal context. It recommends Renaissance of the ethics of Islam and the policies of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) and Hadrat Umar to overcome the evils of trafficking in person in Pakistan.