Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century
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The practice of slavery still continues today in one form or another in every country around the world. From women forced into prostitution, children and adults forced to work in agriculture, domestic work, or factories and sweatshops producing goods for global supply chains, entire families forced to work for nothing to pay off generational debts, or girls forced to marry older men, the illegal practice still blights our contemporary world.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), an estimated 21 million men, women and children around the world are currently enduring some form of slavery.
There are many different characteristics that distinguish slavery from other human rights violations, however, only one needs to be present for slavery to exist.
Someone is in Slavery if They Are:
• forced to work – through mental or physical threat;
• owned or controlled by an ’employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or the threat of abuse;
• dehumanized, treated as a commodity, or bought and sold as ‘property’;
• physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his or her freedom of movement.
Contemporary slavery takes various forms and affects people of all ages, gender and races.
What Forms of Slavery Exist Today?
• Bonded labor
• Child slavery
• Early and/or forced marriage
• Forced labor
• Descent-based slavery
• Trafficking
Many forms of slavery involve more than one element or form listed above. For example, trafficking often involves an advance payment for the trip and organizing a promised job abroad which is borrowed from the traffickers. Once at the destination, the debt incurred serves as an element of controlling the victims as they are told they cannot leave the job until the debt is paid off.
Attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz discusses “sex slave” allegations
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Well-known U.S. criminal defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz has vowed to seek the disbarment of two lawyers representing a woman who has accused him of sexually abusing her when she was underage. But legal experts said he faces an uphill battle.
In a filing in Florida federal court last week, former federal judge Paul Cassell and Florida plaintiffs attorney Bradley Edwards said that their client was forced as a minor by financier Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with several people, including Dershowitz and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Dershowitz, a Harvard University professor emeritus, represented Epstein against sex crime charges, for which he served a 13-month sentence after pleading guilty in 2008.
The lawyers’ client is named in court papers as Jane Doe #3, but has been identified by Buckingham Palace as Virginia Roberts.
Dershowitz, 76, has denied that he ever had sex with Roberts – and said Cassell, a University of Utah law professor, and Edwards knew the charges were false when they filed them. He is currently not a target of the Roberts lawsuit. But Dershowitz is seeking to intervene in order to defend himself. Buckingham Palace officials have also denied the allegations against Prince Andrew.
Dershowitz told Reuters Monday that he would file a defamation lawsuit based on the lawyers’ public statements about the case. He also plans to file complaints with their respective states’ disciplinary boards asking that they be disbarred. The boards would then decide whether to open an investigation and whether to bring charges.
Edwards and Cassell said in a joint statement that they had carefully investigated all of the allegations in their pleadings before presenting them. They also said they had tried to depose Dershowitz and that he had refused, which Dershowitz called a “total lie.” He said he received only one deposition request from the two lawyers five years ago, asking about his relationship with Epstein – and that it said nothing about any of the new allegations.
Several law professors specializing in legal ethics said that even if Dershowitz could prove the allegations were false, that was unlikely to get the two attorneys disbarred.
The heart of the issue: attorneys are advocates for their clients, not arbiters of fact, they said, and they are generally entitled to believe their clients.
“The statement by the victim that it happened, without a strong reason to question it, would be sufficient,” said Amy Mashburn, a professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.
“Being false alone is not enough,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU School of Law. “What a disciplinary committee would have to show is that they either knew the allegations were false, or they were reckless in making the charge.”
Gillers said there was no firm standard for what it meant to be reckless. While attorneys have an obligation to investigate allegations before making them, such an investigation need not be as thorough as the fact-finding that later happens in court, he said.
Cassell and Edwards would be more likely to face punishment if a disciplinary board concluded that they knowingly lied. Mashburn said that would be a very serious fraud that would be a breach of several ethical rules. Even then, she said, they might only face suspension.
One obstacle for Dershowitz, according to Mashburn, is that lawyers are often disbarred for multiple offenses. Cassell, who served as a deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, has no record of public discipline since he was admitted to the bar in 1992, according to a spokeswoman for the Utah state bar. Edwards, who was admitted to the Florida bar in 2002, also has no public disciplinary history in the last 10 years. That’s as far back as the Florida state bar keeps such records.
In 2008, Edwards filed a petition in the Florida court on behalf of women who say they were sexually abused by Epstein. The women say federal prosecutors violated their rights when they entered into a plea agreement with Epstein that allowed him to serve jail time on state charges, but avoid federal prosecution. Edwards asked Cassell to join him early in the litigation.
Cassell, who left his post as federal judge in 2007, describes himself as an advocate for crime victims. He has championed the death penalty – and unsuccessfully pushed to overturn the 1966 Supreme Court decision requiring police to read detainees their rights.
The case is Doe v. United States, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, No. 9:08-cv-80736.
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Sources: Newsweek, Catherine Phillips, Reuters, Andrew Innerarity
A woman who claims that an American investment banker loaned her to rich and powerful friends as an underage “sex slave” has alleged in a US court document that she was repeatedly forced to have sexual relations with Prince Andrew.
The accusation against the Duke of York is contained in a motion filed in a Florida court this week in connection with a long-running lawsuit brought by women who say they were exploited by Jeffrey Epstein, a multi-millionaire convicted of soliciting sex with an underage girl after a plea deal.
The woman, who filed the motion anonymously, alleges that between 1999 and 2002 she was repeatedly sexually abused by Epstein who, she also alleges, loaned her out to rich and influential men around the world.
The document – a motion to expand an ongoing lawsuit relating to prosecutors’ handling of Epstein’s case with two new plaintiffs – alleges that the woman “was forced to have sexual relations with this prince when she was a minor” in London, New York and on a private Caribbean island owned by Epstein.
The prince is not a named party to the legal claim, which is directed against federal prosecutors. He has not had any opportunity to respond to the allegations in the legal claim. The woman is said to have been 17 at the time, considered to be a minor in Florida.
In a 2011 Vanity Fair article, Prince Andrew denied any sexual contact with young women associated with Epstein.
Contacted on Thursday, Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the allegations contained in the court document. A palace spokesperson said the royal household would “never comment on an ongoing legal matter”.
However, another close associate of Epstein who is also accused in the lawsuit, Alan Dershowitz, told the Guardian that the woman’s accusations against himself were “totally false and made up”.
The Harvard law professor and esteemed criminal defense attorney who later advised Epstein on how to respond to the FBI’s investigation is accused in the court motion of having sexual relations with the woman when she was a minor and of witnessing the abuse of other minors.
On Thursday he told the Guardian: “There is no more strenuous denial than the one I am giving. I never met her. I don’t know her. I have never had sex with an underage person.”
He added: “This person has made this up out of cloth, maliciously and knowingly in order to extort money from Mr Epstein.”
Dershowitz, who has occasionally written op-ed articles for the Guardian, said he could not comment on the woman’s allegations against Prince Andrew or any other men, but he said her claims against him were demonstrably false and challenged her to file criminal charges against him.
“It is a totally fabricated charge in every possible way,” he said. “It just never happened.”
He said he was considering taking legal action to have Brad Edwards and Paul Cassell, the lawyers who filed the motion, disbarred for “knowingly filing … a false, malicious and defamatory statement in a lawsuit”.
Edwards said: “We have been informed of Mr Dershowitz’s threats of legal action and bar proceedings … we carefully investigate all of the allegations in our pleadings before presenting them.”
In a statement to the Guardian through her lawyers, the woman behind the allegations said she was being “unjustly victimised again”. The Guardian is aware of the identity of the plaintiff behind the allegations, but is respecting her wish to bring the case anonymously.
“These types of aggressive attacks on me are exactly the reason why sexual abuse victims typically remain silent and the reason why I did for a long time,” she said. “That trend should change. I’m not going to be bullied back into silence.”
Andrew’s close relationship with Epstein – he visited him in New York two years after the American’s release from prison in 2009 – has long been a source of controversy. The Daily Mail reported in 2011 that the prince had broken off contact with the banker.
The duke had previously been accused of meeting Epstein’s young victims and possibly being aware of their sexual exploitation. However, this is the first time he has been named in a court document as a participant in any sexual activity with one of the young women allegedly trafficked by Epstein.
As the claim has only just been lodged, and as the duke is not a named party to it, he has not had the opportunity to formally file a defence or denial to the claims.
In 2006, the FBI opened an investigation into allegations that Epstein had been paying for sex with underage girls at his Palm Beach mansion for years. By the following year federal prosecutors said they had identified 40 young women who may have been illegally procured by Epstein.
In 2008, however, the federal inquiry was dropped after Epstein negotiated a deal with prosecutors in which he agreed to plead guilty to a relatively minor state charge relating to soliciting paid sex with a minor – a 14-year-old girl. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence and is now a registered sex offender.
Many of his alleged victims have since reached out-of-court settlements with Epstein, who was once considered among the wealthiest investment bankers in the world.
However two of Epstein’s alleged victims, referred to in court documents as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2, have brought a lawsuit arguing that federal prosecutors violated a victims’ rights statute by failing to consult them over Epstein’s secret deal.
The pair won a significant legal victory in July last year entitling them to see previously confidential documents from the plea bargain discussions between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors.
The court document filed this week containing allegations against Andrew is a motion to allow two more alleged Epstein victims, referred to as Jane Doe 3 and Jane Doe 4, to join the action.
Jane Doe 3 – the woman who made the accusations against Andrew – claims her contact with Epstein began when she was approached at the age of 15 by Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell and a close friend of Epstein.
The motion alleges that Maxwell “was one of the main women whom Epstein used to procure under-aged girls for sexual activities”. With Maxwell’s assistance, the document alleges, Epstein converted the girl into a “sex slave”, repeatedly abusing her in his private jet or his lavish residences in New York, New Mexico, Florida and the US Virgin Islands.
“Epstein also sexually trafficked the then-minor Jane Doe, making her available for sex to politically connected and financially powerful people,” the court document alleges. “Epstein’s purposes in ‘lending’ Jane Doe (along with other young girls) to such powerful people were to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information.”
The motion alleges Maxwell was “a primary co-conspirator in his sexual abuse and sex trafficking scheme” and alleges she also participated in the abuse.
The document goes on to allege: “Perhaps even more important to her role in Epstein’s sexual abuse ring, Maxwell had direct connections to other powerful individuals with whom she could connect Epstein. For instance, one such powerful individual Epstein forced Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with was a member of the British royal family, Prince Andrew (aka Duke of York).”
The document lists three locations where the woman alleges she was forced to have sexual relations with Andrew: Maxwell’s London apartment, Epstein’s private Caribbean island in what was allegedly “an orgy with numerous other under-aged girls”, and an undisclosed location in New York.
Requests made to representatives of Ghislaine Maxwell for comment had not been returned at the time of publication, but she has previously strenuously denied any involvement in procuring young girls for Epstein or any of his associates. In 2011 a spokesperson for Maxwell said she had never been contacted by any law enforcement agency in connection with the allegations.
The new motion alleges that Epstein instructed the girl “to give the prince whatever he demanded” and also instructed her to “report back on the details of the sexual abuse”.
The woman’s lawyers allege in their motion that, in addition to facilitating her alleged encounters with the prince and Dershowitz, Epstein trafficked her to “many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders”.
Emmy Award-winning film maker and veteran counter-trafficker Andy Blalock
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Human trafficking is now considered the fastest growing “continuing criminal enterprise” in the world, but while many of us have heard about the horror of selling human beings for sex, only a few dedicate their lives to stopping it. Marin County, California’s Andy Blalock of is one of those few. He is part of a team now rescuing child sex slaves in Cambodia.
Blalock grew up in Novato, California and graduated from the University of California at Davis. He began volunteering with Christian groups, helping street children around the world. He was in Uganda when he realized he wanted to do even more.
“It struck me that we were only working with boys,” Blalock said. “And so I asked one of the locals there: where are all the girls? How come we are not outreaching to them? And they said, ‘Oh they are all being trafficked.'”
Blalock eventually ended up in the notorious town of Svay Pak, Cambodia, where it is estimated 90 percent of girls under 13 years old were being sold for sex. “Men fly there from all over the world — from Europe, Australia, China, and America — to buy 5-year-old girls, 10-year-old girls for sex” says Blalock. The girls are routinely raped and often even tortured.
A Christian organization called Agape International Missions has been fighting human trafficking in Cambodia for more than a decade, with some impressive results. Blalock volunteered the filmmaking skills he learned in college to create videos for Agape to spread the word about the horrific sale of young girls and what’s being done to stop it.
One of Blalock’s videos features a young woman named Bella. She told him she was 12 when she was forced into prostitution. Bella said she was tricked by an older woman who promised her a good job. She was sexually abused by many men every day until she was finally rescued by Agape. Two men posed as customers and brought in the police.
Bella joined what Agape calls its After Care program which helped her slowly rebuild her life. After Care is just one of a wave of programs launched by Agape to change a culture that made it socially acceptable to sell children.
Back at Blalock’s home church, Good Shepherd Lutheran in Novato, the congregation has been raising money to support Agape’s work for several years. About a dozen church members are going to Svay Pak to volunteer with Agape this fall, and several have already been there to see what’s happening for themselves.
One of them is Karen Marks, who reported: “Agape has transformed that little village. They have restored some buildings that were brothels, they created a school, a medical clinic, a factory for local parents to have employment, and a training center for the rescued girls.”
Agape says the number of girls being sold in Svay Pak is down significantly, and children are no longer trafficked out in the open. But the fight is not over — many girls are still sold in secret. Blalock is now operations manager for Agape’s investigative team that finds the hidden children and works with police to rescue them.
On a recent visit to Novato, Blalock told church members about raiding a brothel. The Cambodian police go in with their AK47 assault rifles drawn, then Blalock and his team get the girls to safety and on their way to better lives.
The team also helps gather evidence to prosecute traffickers and the pedophiles who come to Cambodia to abuse children. Blalock says the work takes sacrifice, but it’s all worth it. He says, “Even if you work for years just to help one person, it’s all worth it.”
Blalock also worked on an Emmy Award-winning documentary called The Pink Room about sex trafficking in Cambodia. It features Agape and other groups on the front lines of the battle against the sale of human beings.
The downfall of Somaly Mam has led some to question the extent of trafficking
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Phnom Penh, Cambodia – In early 2011, Srey Mao, 28, and two friends were “rescued” and taken to a shelter run by AFESIP, a Cambodian organization that prides itself on helping sex-trafficking victims recover from trauma while learning new trades such as sewing and hairdressing.
There was just one problem: the women claim they hadn’t actually been trafficked.
Instead, the women said they were willing sex workers who had been rounded up off the street during a police raid and sent to AFESIP, headed by the internationally renowned anti-sex-slavery crusader Somaly Mam with funding from the foundation that bears her name.
They said they were confined there for months as purported victims of sex trafficking. Srey Mao claimed that she, her friends and a number of other sex workers in the center were instructed by a woman to tell foreign visitors they had been trafficked.
“I was confined against my will,” Srey Mao said. The person she said ordered her and others to lie was Somaly Mam.
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Falling Star
For the better part of a decade, Mam has been the celebrated face of anti-human trafficking efforts in Cambodia. With her undeniable charisma and tragic back-story as a former child sex slave, she has rubbed shoulders and traded hugs with Hollywood stars such as Susan Sarandon and Meg Ryan. CNN dubbed her a “hero” in 2007. Glamour Magazine made her a “woman of the year” honoree in 2006.
In 2010, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited an AFESIP shelter in Cambodia and later spoke about her moving encounter with Long Pros, a former sex slave who said her eye was gouged out by a brothel-keeper. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, one of Mam’s strongest supporters, wrote about Pros and his “hero” Mam.
Mam’s star-studded image abruptly lost its sheen on May 28, when she was forced to resign from the Somaly Mam Foundation following a Newsweek cover story reporting that she had lied about her past.
Not only had Mam not been an orphaned trafficking victim – reporter Simon Marks revealed in Newsweek that she grew up with both parents and graduated from high school – but she reportedly encouraged and coached girls to lie as well.
One of these girls was Pros, who, according to Newsweek, actually lost her eye to a tumor and was sent to AFESIP for vocational training. The same was reportedly true of Meas Ratha, a teenager allegedly coached by Mam to say she had been trafficked when in fact she was sent to Afesip by an impoverished farming family, desperate to give their daughter a better start in life.
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“Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”
Although the stories of Mam, Pros and Ratha have now been widely scrutinized in the media, less examined have been Mam’s frequent embellished statements about the scale and nature of sex trafficking in Cambodia.
The term “trafficking” has become trendy among donors in the Western world for the pure horror it evokes — a horror that Pros embodied for many — but it leaves out a whole spectrum of complex choices and negotiations, and often erases women’s agency entirely.
Sebastien Marot, founder of the nongovernmental organization Friends International, which works with street children and other vulnerable populations, has lived in Cambodia since 1994. In all his years in the country, he said he has encountered only a handful of what he considers clear-cut cases of sex slavery, despite the lavish funding and massive attention from celebrities that the cause attracts.
“There’s definitely fashions in the donor world,” he said. “The big thing now is trafficking – people say, ‘Oh my God, trafficking’ – but how do we define that?”
Mam and her foundation have interpreted the term liberally, claiming repeatedly, along with AFESIP, that sex slaves in Cambodia number in the tens of thousands.
In 2011, Mam told an interviewer that there were 80,000 to 100,000 prostitutes in Cambodia, 58 percent of whom were trafficked. In a 2010 Somaly Mam Foundation video, Hollywood actress Lucy Liu solemnly intoned in a voiceover that “the low-end estimate for the number of sex slaves in Cambodia alone is over 40,000”. Mam has also claimed that it is commonplace for children as young as 3 to be sold into sex slavery in Cambodia.
The source for these numbers is unclear, and according to some, wrong.
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A study published in 2011 by the UN Inter-Agency Project on Trafficking based on data collected in 2008 stated that the number of sex trafficking victims in Cambodia is 1,058 at most, including 127 children, six of whom were under the age of 13. The majority of these cases involved women who had fallen into debt to their brothels, or prostitutes under the age of 18. These are both abhorrent and illegal, but they are a far cry from the extreme scenarios Mam often invoked – girls put in cages, tortured with electricity, having their eyes gouged out by pimps.
“We never encountered any such thing, and we certainly looked for it,” the study’s author, Thomas Steinfatt, said this week. “We couldn’t find any instances of that … In terms of people tortured, I think they’ve been watching too many movies.”
Steinfatt, a professor at the University of Miami, said the figure of 1,058 is still an accurate estimate of the number of sex trafficking victims in the country. Although he has been criticized by some anti-sex-slavery activists for producing such a low figure, he is the only researcher to have systematically canvassed Cambodia seeking out brothels and collecting data on the women and girls inside.
“Sex trafficking is actually one of the smaller portions of trafficking,” he said. “Much more [trafficking] goes on in labor or domestic work. It’s quite literally the ‘sexiest’ topic, and it’s something that really bothers people — which it should, but it’s not the largest.”
Helen Sworn, the founder of anti-trafficking coalition Chab Dai, noted that other researchers have disputed Steinfatt’s findings and methodology, though added that Steinfatt’s estimate “was the best available number” before laws introduced in 2008 and 2009 that caused “a significant shift underground of incidents, which was not addressed in the previous research”. However, Sworn said Mam’s resignation should be an impetus for soul-searching from NGOs on how to proceed in the future.
“Of course this will have repercussions on the sector, which is why we need to be intentional and professional in the way we implement programs,” she said. “Funding has always been a challenge for those who don’t exploit the dignity of others, so maybe this just makes for a more democratic platform where it will be equally challenging.”
Mam’s embellishments have also distracted attention from the very serious problems Cambodia still faces, including the structural reasons why 1,058 women and girls might be forced into prostitution and why sex work is often seen as the best job available.
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“Victim”, or “Prostitute”?
“Abolitionist” NGOs such as AFESIP take the position that sex work is by definition coercive, and that it is impossible to choose to be a prostitute. In a 2008 interview with the Phnom Penh Post, Mam noted that she preferred to use the term “victim” rather than “prostitute”, and that women who thought they were voluntary sex workers could actually be sex slaves.
In 2006, in response to complaints by sex workers that they did not like being sent to NGO-run shelters after police raids, AFESIP advisor Aarti Kapoor told The Cambodia Daily, “We don’t believe prostitution is a legitimate form of work”. This led AFESIP to support a draconian anti-human trafficking law, which was passed by Cambodia’s parliament in 2008 and, some advocates claim, ramped-up police abuses against sex workers like Srey Mao.
Srey Mao said she became a prostitute because she believed it was the best option to support her aging parents and young daughter. Months in the AFESIP shelter did not change her mind. She claims that after she arrived at the shelter, she was not given access to anti-retroviral drugs for five days or allowed to see her family. Instead, she was enrolled in a year-long sewing course, entailing eight hours a day of study or garment work.
“I was not happy to be there … Very often, during our short break for lunch, AFESIP staff and sometimes Somaly Mam came to us and told us to tell donors and foreigners who would come to visit shelters that we were victims of human trafficking.”
Seven months into her stay at the shelter, Srey Mao ran away and returned to life as a prostitute.
Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century
