On Sunday last, police in Utah, USA rescued a 23-year-old New York woman who had been knocked unconscious, abducted and forced into prostitution by her abductors. The woman was kidnapped near the Port Authority, a usually busy area day and night, since it’s where many buses and trains travelling from different states to New York and vice versa, begin and end their journey. She was with her abductors for some three weeks and was moved from state to state where she was forced to prostitute herself despite having a swollen face and a wound/scar—the result of being hit when she was snatched.
Two people were arrested in connection with this case, one of them being a woman who had been charged with human trafficking before, and had applied to be part of a rehabilitation programme. Authorities in Utah, interviewed after the arrest, said that though arrests were made and persons prosecuted, the crime persisted because it was lucrative. In fact, Ms Tammie Garcia Atkin, the victim witness coordinator in that state, was quoted as saying that “human trafficking was second only to drug trafficking in profitability,” hence its lure for the criminal-minded.
The official was further quoted as saying that human trafficking was growing because it’s a low-risk, high-return criminal enterprise. It was further noted that many young women and girls who are forced into prostitution are often the vulnerable ones who have little or no resources and no caring family missing them.
While the modus operandi of human traffickers here has not been to knock victims unconscious and abduct them, they do prey on the vulnerable. They hit them instead with a ton of lies, promising them lucrative jobs through which they can get out of poverty or help their families. Instead, the lucre goes to the trafficker, who keeps the girls/women as slaves.
The Guyana Women Miners Organisation (GWMO) led by Ms Simona Broomes has been doing a remarkable job of rescuing human trafficking victims, advocating for them and has helped bring many cases of this modern day slavery to light. The GWMO members traipse through the interior, most times in very dangerous terrain and have often used their own funds to conduct these rescues. One shudders to imagine what the situation would have been like, were it not for Ms Broomes and her band of fearless women.
The GWMO’s activism has led to Ms Broomes and other members being vilified by those who stand to lose as a result of it. They have also been ignored and in some instances viewed as pests. And lest we forget, it was the US Government and not our own that honoured Ms Broomes for her anti-Trafficking in Persons (TIP) work.
There is a reason for that and that reason was made pellucid when Minister of Human Services and Social Security Jennifer Webster addressed the National Assembly recently during the budget debate. Assessments, Ms Webster said, have revealed that there is a “low prevalence” of TIP in Guyana. Needless to say, it is clear that those assessments have been undertaken by persons wearing the same prescription of rose-coloured glasses as Ms Webster. The Minister then went on to endorse what the Utah official had told reporters, basically admitting that TIP is the second largest criminal activity in the world.
She then lauded the strategies, programmes and initiatives developed here to combat this modern day slavery, being undertaken under the guidance of the ministerial task force. If Guyana has been so successful in clamping down on this low-risk, high-return criminal enterprise then it should be held up as a global model. Minister Webster et al should be taking the strategies and programmes implemented here around the world as best practices that should be copied.
In addition, perhaps these same strategies could be tweaked and used to tackle other criminal enterprises – the campaign against the drug transshipments/trade here which has been baffling the police could benefit. Otherwise, Ms Webster would do well to admit that TIP is yet another ball she has dropped and tripped over; at the same time coming to terms with the fact that her stewardship of that sensitive ministry has been abysmal.
